How Quick Will Level Advancement Be?

[JoeGKushner]

Here's one I think the answer to will be interesting.

With all the talk of everyone and their moma having a seat at the table, how does that work when the basic fundamentals of player advancement are vastly different? Prior to 3rd edition, xp was not necessarily gained through just slaughter alone and, and this is important, once your hit 9th level, outside of say druid and thief, you really weren't going anywhere. It allowed such characters a lot more time to explore the setting and interact with the world while at the same exact time, because level advancement came to a crawl, prevented a lot of the higher level issues that, in my opinion, almost every edition of D&D has.

I could've put a poll up, but I'm more interested in discussion than flat out numbers.

I think that 3rd and 4th allowed a lot of people who never got to those higher levels as players 'legally' that option and that the steady advancement worked well when you're publishing things like an adventure path.

Since WOTC has failed on that front however, I don't think its really necessary that we see such rapid level advancement in whatever form the new edition takes.

What do others want to see? Faster? Different type of advancement altogether? Piecemal?

 

[Mircoles]

Honestly, I don't care about what will be the "official" method for dealing with xp. I'm just going to have all the players level up at the same time when it feels like it's time for it to happen. Likely every or every other month.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Honestly, I don't care about what will be the "official" method for dealing with xp. I'm just going to have all the players level up at the same time when it feels like it's time for it to happen. Likely every or every other month.

For that to work, and this is just my opinion mind you, the base assumption is that the xp tables will be equal among the classes and that classes will be balanced.

In older editions, that might not have been... wise.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

You're modeling the power development of the characters via the advancement scheme, so this looks very much like a rule which can be implemented via a dial.

The rules could give different alternative sets of advancement tables (zero to demigod as standard, leveling off at upper heroic, etc.). One could even go farther and implement different scales for different classes. In conjunction with power shifting (wizard's powers level 1-5 are gained 1 level later, 6-10 two levels later, ore some such thing, perhaps coupled with an increase in power), one could even implement the strategic balance from the old editions.

 

[Lanefan]

This can't be discussed without also asking the obvious corollary question - which also hasn't been brought up in here yet:

How long is a typical 5e campaign intended to last?

Me, I want 5e designed such that a campaign can last as long as people are willing to play it. 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, a lifetime. And that to me screams for an advancement rate that by today's (i.e. 3e-4e-PF) standards would be considered glacial...no more than a level per adventure, sometimes less. Put another way, about 2-3 levels per year for a consistently-played character.

That said, this is something that's easy to put on a dial. From experience, I can say it is much easier to start with a slow system and speed it up than it is to start with fast and slow it down - I played in a very-slow-advance 3e game and while it was fun, the wealth-by-level guide and some other design-level considerations kinda went out the window.

I don't play the game just to level up. I see it as a pleasant side-effect of play rather than the goal. Also, if 5e level-up ends up as bureaucratic as it was in 3e I'll want to do it as infrequently as possible!

Lanefan

 

[Li Shenron]

(Preliminary point)

While it is probably preferred by nearly everyone that different classes advance at the same rate, this means only that characters who have spent the same time in the game should have advanced to a status in their class which is reasonably balanced with each other. This doesn't necessarily mean that "level" is the same, but only that if both have spent the same time in the game (and played more or less equally well) and e.g. the Rogue is now lv10 and Wizard is lv5 according to the current ruleset, then being a lv10 Rogue should be on par with being a lv5 Wizard. However... since ultimately it doesn't matter to have identical level progressions but only being balanced, I say just make identical level progressions. It looks more immediately understandable and simplifies other issues in the game.

(End of preliminary point)

I think JoeGKushner hits a very important issue of the game.

My typical issue with this is that a lot of gamers want adventures which are a continuous series of encounters, so that every single day their PCs will have at least some fight, and better to have 2-4 fights one after the other. Their adventure model is perhaps taken from some action movies, where there are "big fights sequences" that last easily 1/3rd of the movie.

That's ok, but then 3e and 4e adventures are designed so that the PCs must level up (and often more than 1 level) during such adventure.

To exacerbate the problem, most players prefer their PCs to be engaged by the next adventure pretty soon after the previous, and think downtime is mostly for shopping-in-a-day and heal completely (see how often people come up with house rules to heal overnight), while at the same time for a DM it feels more rewarding to write a campaign which includes long or intertwined adventures, which means that pauses are going to be few.

All these things together cause my problem: that advancement is so fast compared to time passing in the PC's world, that if you start the PCs at level 1 and 18 years old, they top the level progression when they are still too young. What are they going to do the rest of their lives?

This could be the flavor side of the problem, but there is also a more substantial issue here: when advancement is too fast, players get to their next level before they've actually even tried to used new abilities gained at the previous one.

It's hard to handle these issues... everybody loves levelling up, so the DM can't be too stingy with xp.

Maybe some improvement could come from making the xp rules such that levelling up at low levels is once again faster than levelling up at high levels. I think in 3e the speed was constant, and 3-5 gaming sessions always got you up one level. This is not actually how it works in other games (e.g. MMORPG) where level advancement slows down.

 

[Hassassin]

The number of levels matters. Are people expected to play through 10, 20 or 30?

Default XP matters little, unless they come up with something new and cool.