How Long to Reach 10th Level

[vagabundo]

My group and I are the mythical 2 hour weekly group. Obviously we don't always get to play every week, but we hit a good average.

We've been playing together for a long time now and there is a lot of OT chat and messing, and warm up. Still we manage to get a fair bit done and have fun. I picked 12 months for 10 levels; about once a month in real time I find is best.

At this pacel I find Star Wars Saga has a perfect level of complexity to allow us to do more during that time and still allow for some satisfying crunch.

Anyway I think to phrase the question they had to choose a base that people could use to calculate a decent answer.

Obviously play time is probably all over the map, but I thought I remembered a poll with 2 hours being the average play time. Maybe I'm just hallucinating.

 

[Ranes]

I like the idea that it takes a long time to reach high level. I would prefer that the investment of time required to scale the dizzy heights of character advancement, coupled with the chance of character death, made high-level play something most of us aspire to or, perhaps, occasionally glimpse.

A game of D&D should be fun at all levels. A campaign should be fun if it only runs from levels 1-3 or 10-10.1.

What's the rush?

Where are my pipe and slippers?

 

[Ahnehnois]

Now this I disagree with. Pace of advancement is a huge consideration. If you pace the game that expectations say that it will take X hours of game play to cover the range of options in the game, then how far or close that is to how people usually play is going to have a very large effect.

High level magic in AD&D for example, rarely saw play because most groups didn't play long enough to get to those levels. Leveling a character to 18th level in AD&D takes a LOT of play time. ((although I find 1-10 generally doesn't vary all that much between editions)) So, whether the high level spells were broken or not rarely came into play.

3e speeded things up considerably with the expectation that you would actually use all the rules in the PHB. Then it was discovered that a number of higher level spells really weren't a good thing (Harm being a prime example).

This is a very important consideration IMO.

I think the issue with high-level spells (like harm, which is basically the same in 2e and 3.0) is not that people were using them more, but that there was a change in culture. The more codified and consistent rules encouraged a sense of "fairness" and suddenly people began to feel entitled to a type of balance and a level of survivability that was not previously expected. I do not think it is simply because more people were playing at high levels (though I have no way to be sure and relatively limited 2e experience).

I do not know what 2e's rate of advancement assumptions were, but even if 3e speeded them up, that affected only people who used them. Given some of the polls and posts on this forum, I doubt most people ever used XP/CR as written; most DM's are perfectly comfortable determining their own rate of advancement. I would hope that 5e would take the PF approach (giving three different XP tables for three different speeds of advancement) and make it even more customizable. They've also said that their leveling system will be easy to opt out of (as all of them are).

From a design perspective, I think the only thing WotC needs to do here is give people the tools to determine how they want to play things. They may suggest a style, but I certainly hope they don't assume one.

Given WotC's history I'd watch out here, for their designers tend to design to a specific goal and put the blinkers on regarding all else. Example: 3e was based on their (extremely flawed) market research showing the game was supposedly played by 4 players running 1 PC each and a DM over a campaign length of 1-2 years, and that dictated large parts of the design...even though it wasn't accurate.

If they get it in their heads that a 2-hour session is the norm the game will be designed around that and damn the torpedoes. I'm not sure that's something many of us want to see.

So what would you suggest as being the default design assumption that all of us should bend to (or do you agree with my contention that there is wide variability in these sorts of things)?

 

[Aeolius]

Granted, my weekly game is online. We meet in a chat room. We've been at it for over four years, now, and the current level of play is Level 10. To be honest, I hope it take another four years to reach Level 20.

Many moons ago I played a human cleric in a 1e AD&D campaign. We were all teens, at the time. We played several times a week. We played all day, at times. My cleric retired at Level 19 after nearly five years of playing him.

 

[Ratskinner]

Well, if the game is played according to that design but in 4 (or more) hour sessions two obvious problems arise:

1. What do you do for the other two (or more) hours; or
2. How long will it take to run out of adventures, if you're running 2 (or more) per session?

So, really, you have one problem, because the second indicates the solution to the first.

I would expect that a published Adventure Path or similar would involve multiple 2h component adventures. For a "bigger" feel, you tie several of the 2h's together with a larger plot, perhaps even running two or three simultaneously as plot threads. Either that or they'll have to be like those "Dollar Dungeons" that came out immediately after 3e was released, but I don't see that as a profitable model for WOTC.

As far as running out....hard to say. I would expect that writing smaller units of adventure would mean that its easier to crank out more of them faster, either for the DM or WOTC.

However, not having seen the rules....and not knowing how they intend to approach publishing adventures with the modular thing. That's why I italicized "expect" up there. You never can tell what insanity may grip game publishers.

As an aside, I'm kinda assuming this 2h adventure is using the Basic rules. My guess would be that tacking on a few rules modules could drastically slow play down. Which, I feel is another good reason to keep this strategy. Sure, my basic group can get through it in 2h, but when I run it for my other group using the "grid tactical" and "advanced exploration" modules, it suddenly takes 3.5 hours.

 

[Hussar]

I would point out something else.

Even if play presumes that you play 2 hour sessions, why would you produce a module that is meant to be played in one session? I mean, you could, and that's fine, but, AFAIK, modules are never sold based on how much play time it will take to complete the module.

Well, I suppose things like Encounters modules and other organized play stuff is based on stringent playtime restrictions, but, I'm talking about modules meant for home play.

So, you have your basic dungeon crawl module. It has X encounters in it. Completing those encounters will net you enough xp to go from levels Y to Z. But, nothing in that equation has anything to do with how many hours you need to sit at the table.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In the PAX talk, Mearls mentioned how they were going to train people to be DM's: step-by-step, with plenty of examples and perhaps some random tables for spontaneous geneation.

So if you "run out" of adventures (which seems like a bit of an absurd proposition to me in the first place), I think the next one will be just a die roll and a quick table lookup away. It might not be greatly sophisticated, but it will be plenty of fun regardless.

 

[Stormonu]

Y'know, as I get thinking about it, I don't care much about reaching X level, what I care about is "can we finish a major campaign arc in about a year" - and be happy to either continue playing or retiring the group at that point.

If you do hit that end-of-current-story point, I don't want to be left with the feeling, "well the characters are too powerful now, this is going to get out of control, we need to stop playing here". If I want to, I'd like to be able to send the grop on new adventures and not worry the story will be ruined by the level of power they bring to the table. Fix that, and D&D will be golden.

 

[Stormonu]

I would point out something else.

Even if play presumes that you play 2 hour sessions, why would you produce a module that is meant to be played in one session? I mean, you could, and that's fine, but, AFAIK, modules are never sold based on how much play time it will take to complete the module.
.

I don't know about others, but when I design modules professionally, there is a good bit of cosideration put into how long it will take to complete - whether it might be finished in a couple hours or span over a few weeks.

I see it like buying video games - if you put out $50 for a game and you've finished it in 4 hours, you're going to be bit put out if you could have got the same quality game that would have taken 20-40 hours to finish. There's also the consideration do you want a bunch of $10 games you can finish up in a few hours of furious button-pushing, or do you want something in the $50 range whose immersiveness is going to take a few weeks to get through. In other words, what's your audience?

 

[Sunseeker]

The correct answer is: as long as needed.

Th though, playing once a week for 3 to 6 hours, I think that six months is about appropriate.