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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 5782142" data-attributes="member: 1465">(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.</blockquote>

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