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

[marcelvdpol]

The level 1 to 4 part will go quite quickly. This is good because at that level the party are at the Local Hero level; they can solve local issues with goblins, kobolts, missing npc, small groups of bandits etc. Expect about 3 or so encounters of "hard" difficulty per level; this is enough to get some small story line come to a close and establish the characters as the "Go to" adventuring problem solvers in the local town. A reasonably small dungeon can easily be inserted here (average difficulty for skill rolls: 10-12).

Levels 5 - 10 will take longer; note that many classes get a huge jump in combat effectiveness (martial classes will get Extra Attack while spellcasters will gain access to level 3 spells which are a lot more powerfull compared to level 2 spells). It will take more effort to build challenging encounters at this level as the party will have a wider range of features and abilities available. Building a challenging "hard" encounter will require targeting the party where they have weaknesses; Simply throwing more monsters at the party in a single encounter will probably not cut it.

Level 11-16 i personally have no experience with. At this level, characters could have multiple ability scores of 20 or multiple feats that create good combos with class features. I have never played at this level nor had to dm at this level.

 

[guachi]

One way to make combat encounters harder while giving the PCs less XP is to have more monsters of a lower CR. Unfortunately, it will make combat longer. But it's generally a tougher combat to fight 4 CR1/4 monsters (50xp each) than one CR1 monster (200xp).

 

[Quickleaf]

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?

It was definitely a long deadly fight, and one PC died.

In short. PC party of 6 PCs was split half and half. Half were on road en route to investigate something nearby, and other half were at a halfling cidery called the Greengage. Horsemen led by an NPC seeking vengeance came thundering down the road, so 3 enroute PCs hid then sprinted after them.

PCs at the Greengage fortified the cidery to make it more defensible and held their ground with good use of an old watchtower and a long bow as well as chokepoints once the fighting was melee.

2nd level PCs at full health/power were indeed very potent.

By the end of that fight, they'd brought ALL their resources to bear to win, not just spells/abilities, but also clever player thinking.

 

[doodlidoo]

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).

How can 9 Purple Worms give enough XP to level from 19 to 20? Nine CR15 creatures grant 117,000 XP (9 x 13,000). It takes 50,000 XP to level from 19 TO 20. So unless the party counts only 2 PCs (117,000 / 2 = 58,500 XP each), that would be insufficient.

My guess is that you award the budgeted XP, which is your prerogative, but not what's intended by the game designers (DMG, p. 82 : "This adjusted value is not what the monsters are worth in terms of XP; the adjusted value's only purpose is to help you accurately assess the encounter's diffficulty.")

That would explain how fast your party is leveling, overall.

At my table, past the first 3 levels, gaining a level takes 4-5 adventure days (6-8 medium to hard encounters a day) to a party of 4 PC. This is a much smoother pace.

 

[knasser]

How can 9 Purple Worms give enough XP to level from 19 to 20? Nine CR15 creatures grant 117,000 XP (9 x 13,000). It takes 50,000 XP to level from 19 TO 20. So unless the party counts only 2 PCs (117,000 / 2 = 58,500 XP each), that would be insufficient.

My guess is that you award the budgeted XP, which is your prerogative, but not what's intended my the game designers (DMG, p. 82 : "This adjusted value is not what the monsters are worth in terms of XP; the adjusted value's only purpose is to help you accurately assess the encounter's diffficulty.")

That would explain how fast your party is leveling, overall.

At my table, past the first 3 levels, gaining a level takes 4-5 adventure days (6-8 medium to hard encounters a day) to a party of 4 PC. This is a much smoother pace.

Near as I can figure it, one of four things is happening:
1) The party was already part-way through the 19-20 progression from the previous and the nine purple worms were enough to tip them over.
2) It is as you say and they've awarded 292,000XP to the PCs rather than the correct 117,000 XP (and this would still require < a 2 PC party even then)
3) They are doing something really crazy and not dividing the XP reward between PCs but awarding it to each of them.
4) They are Dire Purple Worms and worth more than we think.

 

[pdzoch]

It was definitely a long deadly fight, and one PC died.

In short. PC party of 6 PCs was split half and half. Half were on road en route to investigate something nearby, and other half were at a halfling cidery called the Greengage. Horsemen led by an NPC seeking vengeance came thundering down the road, so 3 enroute PCs hid then sprinted after them.

PCs at the Greengage fortified the cidery to make it more defensible and held their ground with good use of an old watchtower and a long bow as well as chokepoints once the fighting was melee.

2nd level PCs at full health/power were indeed very potent.

By the end of that fight, they'd brought ALL their resources to bear to win, not just spells/abilities, but also clever player thinking.

Splitting the party! Did you expect them to do that and do you think that is why it was so long (not to mention the death of one of the PCs)?

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Another area where I find my preferences seeming to diverge more and more from what is becoming the standard, is that I think 5e characters are already pretty powerful by 3rd level, and no slouches even at 2nd level(1). I mean, when you can wipe out twice your number in bandits or town guards, or take down an ogre or two...that's pretty powerful to me. It's also more of the sorts of adventures that make sense in the world. Once you get above 4th level, you start fighting crazy stuff that should be pretty darn rare.

So for me, the default one session each to get to 2nd and then 3rd level is basically skipping past a huge amount of fun in the game. There goes your chance to find a single werewolf a challenge (2), or actually be concerned about entering a goblin tribe's lair, or run from an ogre, etc.

I mean, as often as they get knocked down to 0 hp (without dying), even 1st level characters in 5e (like in most D&D editions) are already more dangerous characters than a typical NPC soldier.

This doesn't mean that is always the experience I go for. I start plenty of campaigns at higher levels--anything from 5th to 20th based on the goal. But I'm still not sure when the default assumption became that a beginning PC should be an action star, wiping the blood of a couple of ogres off of his blade in the background of the first scene of the campaign.

Maybe I haven't played enough modern video games. Back in my day we fought puddles of slime! until we got enough xp and money to buy weapons that weren't made of wood and survive a goblin! And we liked it! Why in my day...


(1) - Our 2nd level party just took out a SPOILER shambling mound in Curse of Strahd /SPOILER. One of the party died, but we also started the party down some hit points and spell slots.
(2) - At 1st level our party defeated one pretty easily, and didn't have much problem with the second one that showed up immediately thereafter (now, if I had had them fight both at once, it would have been too much).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

How can 9 Purple Worms give enough XP to level from 19 to 20?

They were already mostly there, and that's just what tipped them over.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

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?

The problem is that the default assumption for 5E is that a standard adventuring day will have between two and ten encounters. If you only have one encounter in a day, then the party gets to go all-out and they can punch way higher than their level for that fight (which can result in a ton of experience gained). If you had an adventure to go somewhere and do a thing, with maybe one encounter on the way there and three while you're there and one on the way back, then two of those encounters would be trivial and you're left with trying to challenge the vast resources of the party on only three encounters, which would have to be devastatingly powerful if they were to be any threat at all.

You can kind of address that by saying that you only get a long rest between adventures, so all five of those encounters are part of the same "adventuring day" even though that day is spread out over a week or two, but that raises other complications. And in the end, for the purposes of analysis, they still had five encounters in one "day" increment.

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.

I didn't really stick to the encounter budgets, or the XP-per-day budgets. Trying to stick to those limits - in addition to requiring more heavy-handed meta-game intervention than I'm comfortable with - would have meant that the party was never challenged in combat, so that they would end up seeking out far greater numbers of encounters in a day. If they cleared out a camp full of orcs, but they still had three quarters of a tank left and haven't even broken a sweat, then they'll just head over to the next camp of orcs. And if they've already cleared the surrounding countryside of anything remotely dangerous, then they'll go to bed disappointed and be back up to full for the next day.

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.

Hence why I instituted some of the optional rules about training time before you can gain a level. It may have only taken them about a month worth of adventuring days to go from 1-20, but those days were spread out over the course of fifteen months in-game, so that the big climactic battle with the Tarrasque (after six lesser encounters, to soften them up) took place almost exactly one in-game year after the campaign started.

From what I understand, it's not too far off from how things were supposed to work in the 3E days, with their recommended four encounters per day and twelve encounters per level. Going from 1-20 would take less than two months, or much less if you had other sources of XP (like quest rewards), and you were expected to make that sound more reasonable by filling huge blocks of in-game time with travel or castle management or whatever.

 

[Quickleaf]

Splitting the party! Did you expect them to do that and do you think that is why it was so long (not to mention the death of one of the PCs)?

I definitely didn't expect that, but from their perspective splitting made sense to do. It was going to be a deadly battle either way.

Definitely the delayed arrival of the rest of the PCs (I think they ended up 2 rounds behind horse riders thanks to a shortcut) contributed to the death of the dwarven cleric.

But mainly it was me being a rat bastard DM, playing the opposition intelligently, and a bit of morbid curiosity to see just how much I could push the DMG guidelines for a fresh party. As it turned out, a lot.