Let's Not Save The World...Again

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It used to take a lot less to make us feel heroic. Guns and ships and criminals used to be good enough, as in the stories of Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and even James Bond as written by Ian Fleming, not as he's known from movies. In pulps, it was enough to defeat a gang or an unusual villain. The "science fiction" adventure of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne is surprisingly tame by contemporary standards. Now we want everything in movies to be flashy and completely unrealistic, approaching the ridiculous, as in most comic book movies and other action movies (Indiana Jones IV, anyone?).
Jaded: "tired, bored, or lacking enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something;"
"feeling or showing a lack of interest and excitement caused by having done or experienced too much of something"

We see it in video games: "save the world (or galaxy)" is a pretty common, almost mundane, motivation. It's not enough any more to rescue the kidnapped person or prevent a dastardly deed.

"Saving the world" creates a cheap sense of grandeur. It's the Age of Inflation, everything has to be "stunning" or "awesome," everybody is "saving the world." I call that jaded.

I played in a campaign where, invariably, we faced such waves of monsters that few of us (sometimes only my character) were left standing. The GM evidently manipulated numbers so that this would happen. But it became almost tedious rather than exciting.

We lose impact when it's always "save the world", or always any particular outcome/objective. Pacing is vital both in games and on the screen, and good pacing requires alternate tension and relaxation. If every story is “epic”, epic becomes normal, not extraordinary. If we always save the world, that becomes mundane. Games (like life) benefit from variation in tension/relaxation. The contrast makes them both more intense and more enjoyable. Good pacing would mean alternating the Save the World objectives with others at a lesser scale. (For an under-3-minutes explanation of pacing see https://youtu.be/QAPkcr4b0EE.)

What can a GM do? Set expectations from the campaign beginning. Choose players (and adventures) wisely. Make "Great Objectives" the purpose of an entire campaign, not of each adventure. The threat of death, or of losing all their stuff, should be enough to thrill adventurers without resort to saving the world.

In my campaigns, stretching back more than 40 years, we've never saved the world; an entire campaign might be about saving a city or country, but that didn't happen in every adventure (nor any particular adventure, really). Saving the world calls for really experienced (high-level) characters, and few get that high.

If it isn't enough to risk death, regardless of objective, then there may not be much you can do about jaded players. Or maybe there's no risk of death in your campaign? That could lead to boredom: no extreme lows.

References:
Extra Credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LScL4CWe5E
Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4032/beyond_pacing_games_arent_.php

contributed by Lewis Pulispher

 

[S'mon]

It's quite possible to raise a level every single game session, and generally speaking no more than every 3 game sessions at the most.

Only ever seen "1 level per session"

1. Playing 3e/Pathfinder Adventure Path where they pretty much power level the PCs, or else
2. 5e at 1st & 2nd level

I guess if you were playing 8-12 hour sessions, maybe.

In my Sunday 5e game highest level PC (and the only PC to play up from 1st) is 14th level after 51 sessions, with 4 hours or so actual play time in a typical session. Discounting the very start she had around 12 level-ups in 48 sessions, or 1 per 4 sessions. I've seen the same sort of rates in my other 5e games. Same rate in my 4e games, and really in my Classic D&D games too - I aim for the recommended 1 in 5, but in practice there are the occasional big sessions with the big XP & treasure hauls.

In practice, about 1.5 years of weekly play to go 1-20 looks typical, about 75 typical 4-hour sessions.

 

[S'mon]

Since 5e is designed to level out at 20th level, you're reducing the amount of play with those particular characters with the rapid advancement.

But 1e is only designed to be workable up to about 12th. 5e to 20th or 1e to 12th both take about 1.5 years of weekly play (1 year with a very intense campaign, maybe). At that point you have exhausted the standard content. You can continue with 5e using Epic Boons, and 1e you can still level up (if you're Human or Thief!), but the games are not really designed to handle those levels.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I've found that the speed of level progression, in any edition, really is up to the individual group. There's always been enough flexibility and DM judgment involved in the XP system, that any group can make it work however they want. I don't know if you can really ever accurately compare XP across editions and gaming groups.

For example, my group pretty much abandoned the XP system in favor of a more milestone approach way before D&D started recommending milestone leveling. Probably in the 2E days. We just found it tedious to track and award, and we had adopted a more story-oriented approach at that point, so deciding when the PCs leveled allowed a level of control that fit the story expectations.

I think that 5E as designed has a much quicker progression overall, but I've slowed it down quite a bit. For instance, we played through the entirety of Curse of Strahd and my PCs only leveled once, from level 6 to 7. This suits the long term plans for my campaign, for which I have quite a bit planned, and I don't want the PCs to get too high level too quickly.