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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 8623865" data-attributes="member: 1465">It's complicated <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> and my preferences are far from the norm.It seems common to have an adventure cover multiple levels, to the point that such adventures are designed in a way that almost requires the party to level up before certain encounters. And then to run adventures in a series, one after each other.My ideal campaign is a more sandboxy style where multiple adventures continue in parallel, branch out, intersect, some botched/abandoned instead of successfully completed. Then unfortunately I don't normally have the luxury to run that kind of ideal campaign, but instead I have to settle for one-shots and 2-4 sessions games that cover only one single adventure at a time. If we are lucky, the same group gets to play another adventure next time, but it is not planned beforehand. The only ongoing long-term campaign I have in 5e is with the family, but because most players are still children, I still go with a series of quests instead of an "adventures grove" so that they don't have multiple plots to hold together all the time.In all cases, I tend to manage levelling up in a way that is more paced for the players than to match the difficulty between the PCs and the challenges. Meaning, I want the players to focus on what they can do currently with their PCs (instead of keep thinking about next level-up), and learn to use efficiently what they have. Then when they're good enough at the current level and have used most if not all their available abilities, and maybe they are getting a bit tired of their current tactics, it is time to move on and level up. I do not like when the PCs level up and acquire new capabilities before the players had time to even try the previous ones out. I still generally grant XP to give the impression of progress and reward, but I am not afraid to let the players know they won't level up before their quest is done.So in practice my typical way is to try and keep the PC to stay at the current level for the whole adventure (but then keep in mind that I rarely have the option for LONG adventures). If the adventure we want to play is designed to span multiple levels (likely not more than 2-3 levels anyway), I start it when the PCs are already at the end level or one below, and then I expect the earlier parts of the quest to be a bit easy and the latter to be tougher (which narratively makes most sense to me). I can keep running many adventures at the same level before deciding it's time for the players to increase complexity and level up. It's also possible I just have my eye on a higher-level adventure, and decide to bump them sooner so that we can play it.</blockquote>

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