D&D 5E "Labels" and D&D Gaming
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
It can be done in 3e - I played in one - but it requires a bit of system mashing to accomplish. The same principles might work in 4e and more likely would work in 5e.
First - and everything else hinges on this - slow down the level advance rate! Either reduce each encounter's xp by a factor of 4 or 5, or multiply all the bump points by 4 or 5. Even if you do nothing else at all, this alone will give you headroom to run much longer.
Having done this, you need to know that any sense of wealth-by-level will almost immediately go bye-bye unless you also become extremely Scrooge-ish with found treasure (which ain't no fun at all!), and you'\ll find you're constantly having to adjust CRs and-or ELs to account for the extra wealth they'll likely accumulate.
You'll probably also find that some published adventures are one or both of too easy at the start and too hard at the end, as the module expects mid-adventure level bumps which in this case won't happen.
It doesn't stop it, but it sure slows it down.
Allow me to give a hypothetical example that very vaguely mirrors the start of my current campaign (I'll ignore PC deaths, but see below). I'll s-block it because it's kinda long...
Campaign start.
Adventure 1: 4 players, each running two PCs. PCs are still 1st level after this.
Party splits in half, each player putting one PC in each half A and B. Now you've got two parties.
Each player rolls up two more PCs and adds one to each party. Now they each have 4 active PCs.
OR, more players come in; now maybe you've got 6 total players, two unique to each party and two who overlap (this last only works if you're able to run two games a week; for these purposes let's say there's no new players)
Party B gets put on hold.
Adventure 2 (Party A): 4 players, each running two PCs. PCs are 1st-2nd level after this (they don't all bump in unison here as xp are done individually).
Adventure 3 (Party A): continues from Adv 2, PCs all 2nd level after this, maybe one or two 3rds.
Party A gets put on hold during between-adventure downtime (very important that downtime is required for treasury division and training, in part because it's an easy way for you to fudge time a bit). Switch to Party B.
Adventure 4 (Party B): just like Adv 2 except with a different crew of PCs.
Adventure 5 (Party B): just like Adv 3.
Now, provided you-as-DM have been on top of your careful manipulation of time, Party B get to town while Party A is there. Now the real fun begins: there's people in each party who know and remember each other from running together back in Adv 1, thus there's a built-in in-game reason why these two parties would meet and be introduced to each other.
And now you're set. You've got a large pool of characters who all know each other and who, in some way, have a common root and who can form into parties however they players desire. All you need to do is keep feeding them adventures, and - importantly! - more than one at a time so there's incentive to send multiple parties into the field.
Then, you just run those parties one at a time, bouncing back and forth until another mass-meeting opportunity arises; lather, rinse, repeat.
Players who don't want to run two PCs side-along can now drop down to one, retiring their other(s) who may then form into other parties later, and so forth. Players will also probably cycle their PCs in and out over time, depending what they want to play and-or what a particular party might need in its lineup.
PC deaths slow this all down even more, as replacement PCs come in at lower level (probably raw 1st in these adventures) and thus provide another form of anchor on the overall advance rate. The only real headache can be if all the veterans from Adv 1 in either of Party A or B die off before the two groups can meet again later, after (in this example) Adv 5.
From a real-world timing perspective, you've now run 5 adventures. At low levels and including downtime our norm is that an adventure usually takes between 6-10 sessions, with an occasional extreme outlier that gets well into the 20s. (in my current campaign this was the equivalent of Adv 1 here, 22 sessions of nibbling at Keep on the Borderlands when they weren't fighting each other)
So, assuming all follow the norm 5 adventures means you're 30-50 sessions in; if you meet weekly and - like most of us - have about 1 session in 6 that for some reason doesn't or can't sail, you're approaching if not already at the one-year point in real time. And best of all, even after this long your PCs are mostly still just 2nd level!
Adventure 1: 4 players, each running two PCs. PCs are still 1st level after this.
Party splits in half, each player putting one PC in each half A and B. Now you've got two parties.
Each player rolls up two more PCs and adds one to each party. Now they each have 4 active PCs.
OR, more players come in; now maybe you've got 6 total players, two unique to each party and two who overlap (this last only works if you're able to run two games a week; for these purposes let's say there's no new players)
Party B gets put on hold.
Adventure 2 (Party A): 4 players, each running two PCs. PCs are 1st-2nd level after this (they don't all bump in unison here as xp are done individually).
Adventure 3 (Party A): continues from Adv 2, PCs all 2nd level after this, maybe one or two 3rds.
Party A gets put on hold during between-adventure downtime (very important that downtime is required for treasury division and training, in part because it's an easy way for you to fudge time a bit). Switch to Party B.
Adventure 4 (Party B): just like Adv 2 except with a different crew of PCs.
Adventure 5 (Party B): just like Adv 3.
Now, provided you-as-DM have been on top of your careful manipulation of time, Party B get to town while Party A is there. Now the real fun begins: there's people in each party who know and remember each other from running together back in Adv 1, thus there's a built-in in-game reason why these two parties would meet and be introduced to each other.
And now you're set. You've got a large pool of characters who all know each other and who, in some way, have a common root and who can form into parties however they players desire. All you need to do is keep feeding them adventures, and - importantly! - more than one at a time so there's incentive to send multiple parties into the field.
Then, you just run those parties one at a time, bouncing back and forth until another mass-meeting opportunity arises; lather, rinse, repeat.Players who don't want to run two PCs side-along can now drop down to one, retiring their other(s) who may then form into other parties later, and so forth. Players will also probably cycle their PCs in and out over time, depending what they want to play and-or what a particular party might need in its lineup.
PC deaths slow this all down even more, as replacement PCs come in at lower level (probably raw 1st in these adventures) and thus provide another form of anchor on the overall advance rate. The only real headache can be if all the veterans from Adv 1 in either of Party A or B die off before the two groups can meet again later, after (in this example) Adv 5.
From a real-world timing perspective, you've now run 5 adventures. At low levels and including downtime our norm is that an adventure usually takes between 6-10 sessions, with an occasional extreme outlier that gets well into the 20s. (in my current campaign this was the equivalent of Adv 1 here, 22 sessions of nibbling at Keep on the Borderlands when they weren't fighting each other)
So, assuming all follow the norm 5 adventures means you're 30-50 sessions in; if you meet weekly and - like most of us - have about 1 session in 6 that for some reason doesn't or can't sail, you're approaching if not already at the one-year point in real time. And best of all, even after this long your PCs are mostly still just 2nd level!
The one very important - nay, essential - buy-in this requires of the players is that they come to see level advance as nothing more than an occasional pleasant side-effect of ongoing play, rather than the reason for it. With some players who are used to rapid level advancement, I won't sugar-coat that getting this buy-in can present a severe challenge.
fearsomepirate
Hero
I just use the AD&D Thief advancement table and change nothing else. Took 2 years to hit 9th level. You really need to slow it down to avoid the Skinner Box effect, where people are always thinking about the new powers that come online in another session or two, and allow the current level of conflict to breathe a bit.
MoonSong
Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
Was I a good industry?
fearsomepirate
Hero
My grandpa said you were in his day. Please don't ask about anything since the Death of Superman. Let's not spoil the moment.
MoonSong
Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
I think it is misblamed for creating a bubble, but from what I can read the bubble that burst was there all along (With the intense competition that happened in the late eighties, many new and poorly planed comic shops popped up and ended up over-ordering). The immediate effects of that event were actually more on the benign side, as the magnitude of the media coverage got many new people into the hobby.
And in my country, it had a deep effect that still lasts to this day. Late eighties weren't kind to my country's native comic industry, with paper shortages and heavy censorship. (The ministry of education was convinced that handwritten text was bad for eyesight and every comic had to be captioned with ugly typewriter letters)
By the early nineties, there was only two active comic book companies, one of them thrived on eternally reprinting the same content over and over -and every moth or so would publish small trade-paperback-like reprints from American comics- the other one produced Tijuana bibles.
By the early nineties, people who wanted comics had to go to certain coffee-shops that also served as libraries -to date these shops are still around and remain the go to place for any and all editorial novelties -. Over time fans had started to form small groups around these coffee shops, the thing is that every group believed it was the only group. Then Lois & Clark became a thing. Yes, it is Lois & Clark the only reason we had a Death of Superman to begin with.
Death of Superman was a game changer, national media just knew they had to cover it, but were deeply ignorant about it. They had no experts at hand to have it explained to them or to interview, so they went to the next big thing, the comic fans at the coffee shops. All of the media coverage increased demand for comics -and floppies invaded the news stands and supermarket- and it made fan groups aware of each other, and they began to organize comic conventions, and to create their own comics, and to celebrate being a fan. By the time anime entered the country, there was a lot of infrastructure already in place and it got refocused towards manga, but it was only there because the Death of Superman created the perfect storm.
That’s how I learned to play, and basically how everyone I knew ran it - murder hobos in the land of NPC’s with no name - in the 1980’s.
I started adding more setting when I began DMing around 1986, with Oriental Adventures so as to not mess with the “regular“ campaign as we knew it.
I only really deeply started getting into setting when I got into Greyhawk in the mid-1990’s. It really changed when I ran John D. Rateliff’s “Return to the Keep on the Borderlands in 1999.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
Return to Keep on the Borderlands deserves accolades for showing how the B2 module can be interesting and dynamic. I really enjoyed that one.
Weiley31
Legend
I had one idea for a game where the "prologue" or Session 0 involved a fairly leveled up/almost lvl 20 party, then the game flash forwards to the present for regular sessions and the group makes their legit characters. The plot twist of the campaign would reveal that the BBEGs are actually the corrupted versions of the heroic party from the prologue/session 0.
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