Is advancement in 3.X D&D too SLOW?

[orangefruitbat]

Don't forget character death and ADD players!

From my own campaigns (which typically run 50-80 sessions), two things account for high turnover:
*character death - even with easy raise dead access, character mortality takes it toll (especially if you play RAW, and allow for intelligent opponents). Touch of Deaths, Fingers of Death, poisons, critical hits, etc. can chew up parties over time. (Look at Contact's TOEE storyhour!). By the end of the campaign, it's rare to have more than one original party member.

*"Oooh, shiny new book of prestige classes!". Some players always want to try something new that comes out with the funky new powers. They simply get bored of their original characters.

 

[jodyjohnson]

Nearly 60 months of 3.x and about 120 sessions for our group. 6 campaigns with the last running 14 months. Average is 20. We've been gaming together about 7 years.


The latest campaign has been yet another attempt to go from 1st to epic. After ~28 sessions we're up to 12th. And the campaign nearly died from players wanting to change up the campaign.

So after a break we're starting version 2 of the campaign where the previous ended with some changes to the house rules. Still hoping to make it to epic, but we'll see.


In retrospect I think the best way to go for us is start just 2-3 levels short of our preferred level and end the campaign maybe 3-4 levels after hitting our target level. But then advance slower and focus more on the character rather than racing through the levels.

This is an option I'm really glad 3.x officially opened the door for: 1. You don't have to start the campaign at 1st, 2. Replacement/New characters don't have to start at 1st.

 

[diaglo]

there's a EGG article in The Strategic Review (go hunt it down in the Dragon Mag Archive) where he talks about how slow XP gain should be. His preference was that it be very slow indeed, much like Diaglo's example.

with the right group and referee things can be slowed down with the newer editions too.

read the story hour in my sig.

coming up on three years (aug 12) gaming in that story.

just reached lvl 13.

still too fast for me. but it is better than anything else i've encountered playing the 2000ed or newer.

 

[KenSeg]

Our core gaming group of two couples have been playing together for almost 20 years. We have played everything from 1E to 3.5E along the way. Generally we play once a week for approximately 5 hours a session. We have rarely taken characters higher than 9th or 10th level as our long-time DM dislikes running high level games. On average, our campaigns last between 8 and 12 months or between 32 and 48 sessions under the old rules. I have found that we are reaching our target levels much faster under 3.0 and 3.5 to the detriment of character development.

Don, our DM, has started our new campaign and has drastically reduced experience and treasure. I have put in an order for C&C and we may just finally ditch AD&D for good and try a more reasonable system. I don't want to play a statistical superman. I prefer to solve my problems through intelligent combination of player abilities and the more limited magic items and spells we have available. We do a lot of roleplaying and many times manage to avoid having to fight the opponent totally, foiling him through exposure.

-KenSeg
Gaming since 1978.

 

[Zerakon]

In games where I played, we played very gritty games, and TPKs cause a lot of restarts, so those numbers look about right to me.

 

[DaveMage]

Because you'd never find a GM to run such games. Preppring for high level is a nightmare. Leveling once every few sessions allows a GM to learn the characters and slowly build up challenges. Otherwise, a GM would be faced with a host of new abilities every session, would be kept off-balance, and would have zero time to design anything other than encounters.

Heck, even players cannot get used to their characters that fast!

Finally, you're ignoring the fact that MOST gamers tend to prefer low to mid-levels. Most of the people I know who game feel that the best experience happens between 1-12.

I should tell my current DM that he doesn't exist then.

We're playing a gestalt campaign right now and we level once a session, two sessions at the most. We're now 22nd level and having a blast. We've never played in a campaign that has moved this quickly, but I have to say I'm really enjoying it.

As to "getting used to my character", what's to get used to? I know who he is at his core, and I know what he can accomplish and what he wants to accomplish. We've begun plane-hopping and doing things I've never gotten to do in any of the dozens of campaigns I've played in.

 

[JamesDJarvis]

OD&D (1974)

3-4hrs / session; 5 sessions/ week; 50 weeks/ year; for 10 + years. 1 real time year to gain 1 level. on avg the it took ~900 hrs of roleplaying in the campaign i refereed.

to me. the current edition levels way too fast.

Those Sessions where you RPed the trip to the privvy must have been awesome.

That really seems terribly slow to me and my old games seldom breached 12th level or so a couple of years into the camapign.

 

[Desdichado]

Based on some of the things I've read on this forum, I have a hunch the decreased number of sessions before restart may be exactly tied to the swifter leveling. I have noticed several users in several threads comment that they prefer lower level games and the avoid higher level games. It is thus possible that now they hit their restart point sooner due to swifter levelling. If this were the case further tinkering with that scale would change little but to abbreviate the restart point further.

I agree. But our solution is generally just to slow down levelling. And we often restart for other reasons entirely

 

[JamesDJarvis]

My most recent campaign recently wrapped up with something like 190 sessions.
The highest level character was 14th level.
We had folks in that campaign with no game experience to 25 years of experience (well by the end). Only one character made it from the 1st session to the last - Craddoc a human fighter.

My 7 to 8 years long campaign had about 180 sessions.

 

[MonsterMash]

Personally I prefer to play a few sessions at least at each level to get a feel for it, because otherwise I find myself not really understanding what I can do with a character. So I do feel that 3e levelling is a bit too fast for me.