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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kerrick" data-source="post: 4759815" data-attributes="member: 4722">Thanks for the replies, all. I've played in all editions from OD&D to 3.5, so I know full well how fast d20 levelling is - I remember in 2E, we had a campaign where we played weekends - Friday and Saturday nights, though not regularly; it took the better part of a year to hit L11, and that was with a generous DM.That sounds like an idea... except how long are the sessions? I think WotC's market research found that people play for 4-6 hours at a time. I could easily make up some guidelines for levelling by hours played instead of encounters...Yeah. I've alleviated the "can't do much at lower levels" thing a bit - more class abilities, spellcasters have unlimited cantrips, etc. In our vanilla 3.5 game, we've been quite creative in our gameplay; my wizard has grappled a couple times, and we've used tactical movement in fights. The character development thing is part of the reason I want to slow advancement slightly at the lower levels - it gives the players more time to "get to know" their PCs and develop them. If you burn through L1-5, you have to concentrate more on class abilities and build than character background. I realize some people like mechanics over RP; I just happen to go the other way. Yeah, that's kind of a tough thing to handle, and really depends on the group - you can't write a rule for that.Well, let's see... we play at the FLGS, so our time is limited to when they close, but we usually get 4-5 hours. Our sessions are a little light on RP and moderately heavy on combat; we seem to be averaging about 4-5 encounters per session, though I'm sure that will slow down as the combats get more complicated.Hmm, levels/hour... Like I said, we're playing around 5 hours per session, and we've played 5(?) sessions, so about 25 hours. That would put our advancement at about every 10 hours (we're halfway to L3). It's kind of hard to recall, because we're supposed to play every other weekend, but things come up - we've had a couple sessions postponed, and a couple more cancelled outright due to RL taking charge. I know we hit L2 midway through the third session - we were 60 XP shy and about to head into an old tower, and I asked the DM if we could level up before going in. We'd done some RP leading up to that point, so he gave us the 60 XP. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Right now a couple of us (the ones who have been there most) are sitting at 1900 XP.So, every 12 hours. Sounds about right - 12-15 hours would be pretty good.Since our current campaign is only L2, I can't realy say. I don't recall enough of the last campaign (different group) to say, since that was a few years ago.I'm a player, not the DM, so I can't say how he's doing XP. I think he's dumping in some ad hoc stuff - RP, goals, etc., but as I said, we're also a little heavy on combat. As an aside, that's another reason I want to increase the XP values: d20 seems to be based solely around "kill the monsters, take their gold"; it's an encounter-based system, where you get XP by overcoming challenges. There's no built-in buffer for RP, good ideas, and story awards. Back in 2E, our DM let us call out for extra awards that we thought deserved XP; he would approve (or not) and award us appropriately.Amen. Yugh, yeah. I've alleviated that somewhat with the revised classes, so they're more fun to play.That seems like a good goal.Just wanted to chime in here - high-level combats are VERY slow. When we did an epic campaign (~L30), a single combat took upwards of two hours. That's why many groups don't go much beyond 15th-20th level.</blockquote>

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