D&D 5E Musing on Levels and Campaign Pacing.

[Sword of Spirit]

The impression I get is that if you follow the built in design assumptions, playing one four-hour session a week, you should hit level 20 in less than a year.

...which I why I completely redo the XP table, since I like time to savor and become familiar with your abilities at each level. Hate it when people haven't even used an ability they got three levels earlier. You should be just shy of bored with your character and craving the next level when you get it.

 

[Ath'kethin]

The impression I get is that if you follow the built in design assumptions, playing one four-hour session a week, you should hit level 20 in less than a year.

...which I why I completely redo the XP table, since I like time to savor and become familiar with your abilities at each level. Hate it when people haven't even used an ability they got three levels earlier. You should be just shy of bored with your character and craving the next level when you get it.

Yeah, the XP design works if you're following the official "book of the six month club," and using the published adventures. It is a good business decision for WotC and definitely appeals to those who like to burn through a character and try something new every so often. Nothing wrong with that.

But a huge part of the reason I jettisoned experience was because the leveling just felt way too fast to me.

 

[SwivSnapshot]

I just want to point out here that not every experience point necessarily has to be earned on-screen. After the climax and denouement of a huge adventure, it's okay to say, "And then you spend five years hunting down kobolds and the remants of the giant army, have many adventures, and earn 150,000 XP in the process. Then one day this happens... [adventure hook + session break]" and then have a higher-level adventure. This is essentially how milestone levelling works, but without the math.

Not every day of an adventurer's life needs to be the riskiest, deadliest, worst day of his life. But those are the days that players like to experience, so we skip straight to them when necessary.

I use milestones because I prefer a more intuitive style of play and to discourage players from being murder hobos. Many times, I have let the players level for completing a challenge with innovative role play or creative problem solving.

 

[knasser]

It's hard to get where you're coming from when you say that an entire adventure only has five encounters in it, unless you're using that as short-hand for adventuring day.

I most definitely wasn't. I meant exactly as written that an adventure, i.e. get involved, unravel the plot, resolve the situation and go home. I have been envisaging that as having maybe four or five combat encounters in it. Clearly that's very different for you so I guess a new question that arises is how many encounters do people typically have in their adventures? Am I way off the typical amount for people here?

For the purposes of contributing, I'll assume that's the case, and tell you how many adventuring days it took for the party to gain each level in my last campaign.

1/2/2/3/3/2/2/3/2/1/2/2/1/2/2/0.3/0.3/0.3/1

That would be extremely problematic for me. It would mean after a few adventures they would already be at the Significant Adventure level. I hold to the notion that low level PCs means low level stakes. I am well aware it doesn't need to, but I like the traditional path of slowly rising to becoming greater and greater heros in the land. The above progression rate means I have a very narrow window to do the world-building low-level adventures that I feel help make the setting real and characters immersive. Do other people here have the same sort of progression? The above is WAY faster than the DMG numbers lead to.

Past level ten or so, the rate of gaining levels increased significantly, as they could handle both more powerful enemies and more encounters in the same day.

Again, it should be the other way around if encounter budgets scaling with XP-per-level requirements rise like the DMG guidelines. This is why I posted the thread - to see if they're accurate for people or not.

After they got to level 16, they had a very long day that involved fighting multiple dragons, dragon turtles, liches, titans, and krakens; that gave them enough XP to skip straight to level 19 (although they still needed to actually train for six weeks). Getting to level 20, after that, only took one more encounter (nine purple worms).

That's downright horrifying to me. Taking people from 16 to 20 inside of a couple of days play both shatters versimilitude for the group and swallows whole an entire range of play I would like to spend time exploring.

 

[knasser]

I use milestones because I prefer a more intuitive style of play and to discourage players from being murder hobos. Many times, I have let the players level for completing a challenge with innovative role play or creative problem solving.

I've solved the murder-hobo thing (or expect to) by just telling my players that if their character starts going murder-hobo, I'm going to kill their character with very great prejudice.

As to milestones, it does have an appeal, but I also worry that it would take away from the achievement-mentality that the players enjoy if they feel that it's just being doled out by the DM as a reward for playing. I want them to feel that a level has been earned. To achieve that with milestones I think I would have to be a lot more involved in defining criteria with each player for their character goals. Which could be cool, but I'm not sure I'm willing to go that route as it would be difficult to integrate with a game that isn't solely driven by character goals.

 

[knasser]

@knasser I've only been DMing 5th edition at low-levels (1st - 4th), but here are the XP tallies for my group of 6 players in our home Underdark game.

Level 1

Miscellaneous Quests
South Bridge: Find and return Wildon’s Sow (25)
South Bridge: Provide the Waverly family reassurance they will be safe (25)
Fish Market: Communicate with the flumph (50)

Fighting the Monsters in the Hollow
5x skum (100 each) = 500
carrion crawler = 450
Fish Market: Save most of the villagers and their catch from skum (100)

Cultist Hideout/Ambush
3x homonculi = 30
8 cultists (25) = 200
Guardhouse interrogation: variable, depending on information gained from captive cultists (85)

Goblin Fight
6x goblins (50) = 300
goblin boss = 200
Stables: Saved all horses and most of the stables from fire (100)

Level 2

Random Encounter
4x skum (100 each) = 400

Spiders in the Lumber Yard
5x giant wolf spiders (50) = 250
Lumber Yard: Using Tallywacker’s traps to great effect against monsters (50)

Mother of the Hollow: Spider Lair
Negotiate peace with spiders and dig the Mother a way back into Underdark (400)

Troglodytes/Crawlers in the Cairns
6x troglodytes, in sunlight (25 each) = 150
3x carrion crawlers (450 each) = 1,350

Random Encounter
5x cockatrices, with NPC support (45 each) = 270

Fight at the Greengage
17x tribal warriors/horsemen
2x mastiffs
1x veteran = altogether 1,175

Thanks. I really appreciate that level of detail - very helpful. Can I ask how the "Fight at the Greengage" went? You seem to have 5 PCs and I'm rather wary of throwing 20 enemies at them! I would have thought that number of anything would flatten a 2nd Level party of 5. Were there mitigating circumstances / staggered appearances? Or am I badly underestimating 2nd level characters?

The impression I get is that if you follow the built in design assumptions, playing one four-hour session a week, you should hit level 20 in less than a year.

...which I why I completely redo the XP table, since I like time to savor and become familiar with your abilities at each level. Hate it when people haven't even used an ability they got three levels earlier. You should be just shy of bored with your character and craving the next level when you get it.

Yeah, you really get where I'm coming from. I want to ensure there's enough time to savour each level range of play. I don't mind levelling up almost instantly on the first level and then getting to levels 3 and 4 pretty quickly - that's actually going to make my job much easier as I'll be less worried about killing a PC with one lucky roll. But I don't want it to be Fight Kobold -> Fight Orc -> Fight Lich -> Fight Arch-devil -> Fin.

Yeah, the XP design works if you're following the official "book of the six month club," and using the published adventures. It is a good business decision for WotC and definitely appeals to those who like to burn through a character and try something new every so often. Nothing wrong with that.

But a huge part of the reason I jettisoned experience was because the leveling just felt way too fast to me.

Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by "bood the six month club". Are you saying that WotC are releasing around the idea that they release a hard-backed module book every six months and it takes you through the lifespan of a character? Urgh if so! (I haven't looked at any of the published adventures so that's why I'm ignorant on that if so).

 

[SwivSnapshot]

I've solved the murder-hobo thing (or expect to) by just telling my players that if their character starts going murder-hobo, I'm going to kill their character with very great prejudice.

As to milestones, it does have an appeal, but I also worry that it would take away from the achievement-mentality that the players enjoy if they feel that it's just being doled out by the DM as a reward for playing. I want them to feel that a level has been earned. To achieve that with milestones I think I would have to be a lot more involved in defining criteria with each player for their character goals. Which could be cool, but I'm not sure I'm willing to go that route as it would be difficult to integrate with a game that isn't solely driven by character goals.

I’m running COS now and wound up killing two PC’s last week because they didn’t listen when an npc told them, repeatedly, they weren’t welcome in his home. I’m hoping it will be an object lesson for them….

Milestones also work well for me because I have limited prep time and mostly run published campaigns. Using milestones allows me to focus on story elements rather than spend time calculating how much XP the PC’s need to reach an appropriate level to survive future zones.

Also, I find the pacing of published campaigns don’t work with XP as well as they do with milestones. The party isn’t going to spend 12 months in game time traveling around Barovia in order to reach a high enough level to confront Strahd.

If I get the chance to design my own campaigns, I will probably switch to the XP model, but until then I’m going with milestones.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I most definitely wasn't. I meant exactly as written that an adventure, i.e. get involved, unravel the plot, resolve the situation and go home. I have been envisaging that as having maybe four or five combat encounters in it. Clearly that's very different for you so I guess a new question that arises is how many encounters do people typically have in their adventures? Am I way off the typical amount for people here?

I've done the occasional adventure that was specifically contrived to be broken up into multiple encounters (e.g. you have to rescue kidnapping victims held in six different locations), but your approach is more typical for my table. I tend to have gigantic encounters like "you encounter a neogi deathspider" which, if approached in a straightforward hack-and-slash fashion, would be 10x Deadly or worse. (And yet, the players in that case did it anyway. They rammed and boarded the neogi deathspider, and lived to tell the tale!) Then I rely on the players, plus a little bit of DM assistance, to deal with those encounters in a reasonable and manageable way. ("Every turn, 1d4 umber hulks emerge from the doors over there." Because obviously not all the two dozen umber hulks on the whole ship were ready to emerge and attack in the six seconds after ramming--it takes some time for their various neogi masters to realize what's happening and send them off to fight, and rolling a d4 was a convenient way of representing that without requiring me to spend a lot of time modelling offscreen activities.)

The one thing, though, is that I think it's best if there's at least two situations going on simultaneously if you can arrange it without straining plausibility. They don't have to both be combat-oriented situations--it could be "hags kidnapping children and turning them into plush toys" + "Count Rugen is suing you in court to try to take possession of your factory"--but they could be, and if so you might have twice as many conflicts that turn into life-and-death combat. But I've learned from writers like Steven Brust and Jim Butcher that stories are more interesting when protagonists have to deal with multiple problems simultaneously--and from a gamist perspective, giving the players multiple problems to engage with both increases their freedom to choose which content to engage with, and increases the challenge of any solution they come up with. ("Now we have to rescue the children without Olaf, because he's stuck testifying in court." Naturally Olaf will be attacked by lawyers who turn out to be ghouls while the other PCs are away, because we wouldn't want him to miss out on the fun.)

 

[pdzoch]

I use a blend of XP, milestone, and storytelling to manage to campaign design and progression. I also strive for four hour long sessions. With usually three session to finish a plot element. That all said, I like the structure found in the DM's guide when it comes to determining levels of play.

LEVELS 1- 4: LOCAL HEROES
LEVELS 5-10: HEROES OF THE REALM
LEVELS 11-16: MASTERS OF THE REALM
LEVELS 17-20: MASTERS OF THE WORLD

I tend to design my campaign with the tiers of heroism above. I tend to use XP to manage my combat encounters, and milestones to manage plot lines. But the progression in the early level is quick, and that is o.k. Players want to get to the meat of their character soon anyway. So an campaign arc that starts at local level in the first game can finish as a kingdom/realm impact event by fifth level.

The tricky part is how long do you want to stretch a story? Trilogies are often a benchmark, and in three adventures the party could achieve fourth level. Adding a hidden boss controlling the event from afar easily stretches the story long enough to add another adventure or two and progress the party to fifth level and to become heroes of the realm.

I really like @knasser 's campaign pacing chart. It really lays out how many adventures are expected between levels. Once the advancement slows down, and more adventures are required to advance a level, the pacing of stories will not automatically carry them to the next tier of play. While the first campaign arc may have carried the characters from local heroes to heroes of the realm. They are going to have to address several different problems/villains in the realm before advancing to masters of the realm. Then afterwards, they will have to defend the realm against other realms, possible defending others also, before becoming master of the world.

When I lay out a story, I am typically planning six adventures at a time. The first two being "mini bosses" and obvious/direct issues the party needs to confront, that leads to the major boss in the third adventure. Clues that lead to driving forces or behind the scenes manipulators come from the first three adventures to set up the next three adventures that culminate in the confrontation to the primary villain.

In my experience, three adventures makes for a satisfying arc, and six is an acceptable length for complex story arcs (revealed through a twist), but anything longer and the players tend to get bored with the story. Usually, during the 3-6 adventures, there are other campaign events happening that I described to the players. By the conclusion (and festival/celebration) of the one campaign arc, several new adventure options (campaign stories) present themselves, often as a result of the actions the players took in the first series of adventures.

While I scope the adventure to match the tiers of the heroes (the example Kobold War would be more complex in the 2nd heroic tier over the 1st tier, being a kingdom sized problem instead of a localized problem), I would still limit the story arcs to 3-6 adventures.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

One reason I personally favor XP (and it's just a preference--I've played in games without it and was relatively fine with it), is because it strains credibility for me for characters to increase their class abilities...for doing stuff that doesn't involve practicing those abilities. Finishing a bunch of role-playing challenges, accomplishing goals that don't involve using your class abilities, etc, just doesn't scream, "Now I know how to fight better!" to me.

Instead, I prefer a "you get what you pay for" approach. You get XP for using your class abilities, including stuff regular people aren't trained to do. Combat is the biggest way to do that, but overcoming traps, using skill Expertise, non-combat spell usage, etc, also involve class abilities and should advance you in that.

Now, I don't split it up into individual XP awards--way too much granularity that way. I just hand out XP for combat, and then an arbitrary amount based on how much I feel like they used their class abilities in other ways. When they get enough XP from doing these things, their class abilities improve and they gain a level.

If they want money, they do the things that get them money. If they want social influence they do the things that would produce that. If they want magic items they can go look for them.

As role-playing rewards, I've allowed Inspiration to overflow into something I call "Impact", which they can spend to anchor their character to the setting and gain benefits. If you role-play your character, you get role-playing rewards. Ie, you get what you pay for.

As I said, it's purely a matter of preference, but it works for me in encouraging players to have their characters search for what they want, rather than getting the same sorts of rewards just for playing.