Level Advancement and In-Campaign Time

[Irda Ranger]

That bugged me a bit too. I sorta explained the fast leveling for PCs in my world by saying my players have 'hero's blood'. It's kinda like being a superhero in my world. They can heal fast, live long healthy lives, and quickly learn and gain power. The hero's blood (or villians blood) is rare in my world, and if a group of heroes get together you can be sure something bad is about to happen.

The players are much like the WoT Ta'veren in my world. Trouble will find them even if they try to avoid it and they have incredible potential.

Yeah, that's a valid approach as the "hero blood" explanation exists within the shared fiction. It's not my preferred approach, but it "works".

 

[5ekyu]

"On an unrelated matter, I never understood the complaints about overpowered PCs. The DM has literally infinite power. PCs can steal spotlight from each other if you allow one PC to have an artifact weapon and everyone else has to make do with potions and a +1 dagger, but PCs can never be overpowered relative to the DM. "Just add monsters.""

The context of these complaints tend to follow two lines...

Most often its overpowered in relation to the adversaries presented by the official sources for their level - be it AP published or encounters design using CR formulas shown in DMG.

Since to some degree AL events are more restricted in GM options, some see that as important to.

The second angle is usually an OP character in a group outshining the others.

But in homebrew, all bets are off and so, as i have said many times, its the needs and challenges the gm presents thru setting, story etc that really shows power vs over power - be it by just add monsyers or add clever or add more odd.

 

[Oofta]

The question though remains whether your players could remain invested in a game like that? When they didn't "get" anything over the months of play other than just the experiences in the story. Is that enough for them? If so, great! But I tend to doubt most tables will have that luxury.

You seem to assume that in-game time somehow correlates to real world play time. There doesn't have to be any correlation between the two. Years can pass in game between sessions.

I also use more-or-less milestone advancement, but the time spent gaming is about the same as if we tracked XP in most campaigns. I do discuss how quickly we want to level in a session 0, some people enjoy slower advancement, some faster.

 

[Uller]

But the in-game time doesn't really line up with real-world time, right? Like you can hand-waive away a month-long ship journey, but then spend four sessions in a haunted castle that's only 48 hours of game time. How do you reconcile those?

Adventures that last multiple sessions pass time normally. They have to because our game sessions are only 2-3 hours long so even short adventures take 2 or 3 sessions...We almost always break at a short or long rest if we can. But if an adventure takes 3 sessions, then it is a given that the next adventure won't start for at least three weeks...for reasons the players fill in with their own imaginations.

So after the game where an adventure is completed, I send out a synopsis of what happened, current available hooks, available DT activities and tell them how much time will pass until they are able to set off for the next adventure and options for what they can do with their loot.

Yes....a player might say something like "But we should go after <so and so> now because the <macguffin> will probably <trigger something terrible> before we get to it!" It is up to me as a DM to set those expectations and a part of the social contract the players make by joining my game that they understand that all the interesting adventure stuff happens during the game session and all the boring day to day minutiae gets handled between and that for whatever in-game reasons they wish to insert in their imagination, nothing amounting to an adventure happens during downtime.

As an example, one of my players spent a week "exploring" the area around their camp. I did a skill challenge with 5 checks using various skills. He had 3 successes so he found the ruins of an underground vault or tomb 2 days away from their camp. He played along that his PC returned to the camp to let his friends know rather than try to explore it himself. If they decide to go explore it, they'll prep and set out for it via e-mail and the next game will start with them either dealing with any dangerous random encounter on the way or (more likely) standing before the rusty locked blocking the tunnel down into the dungeon. Or...maybe they'll never go explore it. Up to them. But DT gave this PC (a ranger) something meaningful to do in-game that affected him and the party by giving them an adventure option.

 

[MrHotter]

I love the WoT, but that part actually bothered me. It was sort of hand-waived away that the protagonists were all Ta'veren / chosen by the Light / agents of the Pattern, or whatever. But people progressed in skill in weird ways. Like Matt went from unassuming farmboy to quarterstaff super-ninja overnight with just a throwaway line about how he used to win the village staff-fighting contests as a boy. Um, okay, I guess practicing against farmboys lets you take on the two best warder students at the same time while you're sick. <hand jerk motion>

Everyone in Wot who wasn't one of the half-dozen main young protagonists advanced more like the way I'm describing. Lan took decades to become the best swordsman in the world. The non-protagonist Aes Sedai studied at the Tower for decades or even over a century. Etc.

When Mat beat Galad and Gawyn he was already speaking the old tongue, so he was already drawing on the talents of the dead tacticians that were in his head. He also had a wager on the fight, so his unatural luck also played a part in the fight. This was a preview of his special talents.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Ooooooorrrrrr ... you could use the rules I posted in the OP. They bring the game part of the game and the story part of the game back into alignment.

To be honest... I was just talking in generalities to the topic in hand because I found it to be an interesting discussion point, but I wasn't really thinking about your original post's rules or solutions you came up with at all. Sorry about that!

 

[DEFCON 1]

You seem to assume that in-game time somehow correlates to real world play time. There doesn't have to be any correlation between the two. Years can pass in game between sessions.

No, not really. My point was that the reason the game makes level advancement relatively quick is to keep the players interested in their characters by giving them bennies every couple of sessions by leveling up. If the game withheld level up to a much longer number of encounters (and thus real-world sessions because you can usually only get through a certain number of encounters each time you sit down to play)... it runs the risk of making the game boring to a larger number of players in the middle of the populace. Because they've all been kind of taught over the years to expect more character leveling as a reward system. Even when that leveling doesn't particularly match the "reality" of how the game world evolves.

All the World of Warcraft players out there know exactly what I'm talking about-- how for some ridiculous reason you have 110th level bears. The same bears that are level 10 in one part of Azeroth are 110 on another, not because the in-game world's "reality" has a reason for there to be some uber-powerful bears out there... but just merely because it used character advancement as a way to keep players interested in continually playing the game and thus they needed to make level 110 bears to give those characters something to fight in the game.

And D&D is the same way in terms of not having the default game experience necessarily match the "reality" a particular game world might be set up as. Where a character could gain 20 levels of power in the matter of "in-game" weeks, in order to keep the out-of-game player interested in continuing to play over however many weeks, months, years the game goes on for. And you either just accept that as a fait accompli for how the games themselves work... or you make any number of revisions to how the default game is run to try and better equalize the out-of-game player experience to the in-game character experience and evolution to the world around them.

 

[Emerikol]

Some ideas for those wanting to fix the issue.

1. Training time. Lengthy training time. X.P. is just the way you measure a breakthrough. I think at minimum a little of this could help verisimilitude.

2. Downtime activities. These can all take a lot of time and can be very fulfilling. For old schoolers this one comes easy as there was emphasis on it in the early editions. This also makes long time gaps between adventures more interesting. Your PCs figure out what they were doing during that time. It also makes living expenses a bit more of a concern which for me is good.

3. "The PCs are different from all others" is an okay trope but you have to make them world savers in that case. I don't prefer this approach but it is a workable one. If you are really into making the world spotlight shine on your characters this is a good way.

4. Increase the X.P. to level dramatically. This is again an old school approach but many of my PC's spent years in levels nine to twelve. Gygax even said at the time he was writing the 1e PHB that his campaign was one of the longest running (only 5 years) and no one had gotten to 18th level. Now if you love playing high levels this is a bummer. Because nowadays a lot of campaigns don't make it that far. Still for me it has some appeal though maybe not to Gygax's degree. I think getting to 7th level in the first 52 4 hour sessions is fine. You acquire the early skill quicker. Then after that 3 levels per additional 52 4 hour sessions. So you hit 20th in the fifth year of a campaign. I think 5 years is a nice campaign arc if you want to go all the way. During that time though I'd want 20 years minimum to pass.

 

[Irda Ranger]

To be honest... I was just talking in generalities to the topic in hand because I found it to be an interesting discussion point, but I wasn't really thinking about your original post's rules or solutions you came up with at all. Sorry about that!

Okay, sorry if my Reply seemed snarky too then.

 

[Oofta]

No, not really. My point was that the reason the game makes level advancement relatively quick is to keep the players interested in their characters by giving them bennies every couple of sessions by leveling up. If the game withheld level up to a much longer number of encounters (and thus real-world sessions because you can usually only get through a certain number of encounters each time you sit down to play)... it runs the risk of making the game boring to a larger number of players in the middle of the populace. Because they've all been kind of taught over the years to expect more character leveling as a reward system. Even when that leveling doesn't particularly match the "reality" of how the game world evolves.

All the World of Warcraft players out there know exactly what I'm talking about-- how for some ridiculous reason you have 110th level bears. The same bears that are level 10 in one part of Azeroth are 110 on another, not because the in-game world's "reality" has a reason for there to be some uber-powerful bears out there... but just merely because it used character advancement as a way to keep players interested in continually playing the game and thus they needed to make level 110 bears to give those characters something to fight in the game.

And D&D is the same way in terms of not having the default game experience necessarily match the "reality" a particular game world might be set up as. Where a character could gain 20 levels of power in the matter of "in-game" weeks, in order to keep the out-of-game player interested in continuing to play over however many weeks, months, years the game goes on for. And you either just accept that as a fait accompli for how the games themselves work... or you make any number of revisions to how the default game is run to try and better equalize the out-of-game player experience to the in-game character experience and evolution to the world around them.

The number of sessions between levels has nothing to do with in-game time. Years may pass in my campaigns, PCs still level every few sessions.

Same thing with why I changed to the rest rules - from a game mechanic point of view it makes no difference. People have exactly the same number of short and long rests per encounter but because I rarely do traditional dungeon crawls having resting take longer fits the narrative flow better.