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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6898218" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Along similar lines to the OP, it is an irritant that the game is pretty much only designed for a certain type of campaign and level advancement. I've always wanted to play one of those 1st-20th+ level campaigns that lasts for 30 years of real life (and perhaps more in-world). Sort of a second life with your character as your avatar. The kind of campaign where you take the same character and experience everything (or close) that D&D has to offer with them.The fast leveling rate makes that completely infeasible without significant house ruling. You aren't making a D&D character you can play in several different adventure modules, plenty of wilderness exploration and pursuit of personal interests (found a kingdom, whatever). You are playing a Tyranny of Dragons characters, or an Elemental Evil character. (As an aside, this current marketing strategy really means people should choose their characters together and to fit the campaign, rather than just playing whatever they want to play most at that time, but it seems a lot of people ignore that and create characters as if they were playing a more open campaign). And then to add insult to injury, the campaigns only take about a year--and they don't even do the highest levels.So the intended playstyle is to make a disposable character, run a campaign from 1st-3rd level to 10th-15th level in a year, and then do the same thing over again.I hate that. When I want to just explore a particular concept or character, I run theme adventures that last 8-15 sessions, and then are done. Those aren't campaigns, they are just adventures.The fast leveling at early levels makes it even worse, because early levels give some of the more interesting experiences! Characters are powerful in 5e. If you want to have a mystery where you have to find and then confront the werewolf hiding in the village--well that only works at 1st-level unless you arbitrarily inflate stuff (which I despise). I actually ran that adventure (at 1st-level). They were even trying to capture and cure the werewolf (especially since some of them couldn't damage it), so they ended up grappling and such, and still took it down with ease. Right afterwards the second werewolf they weren't expecting came out of the door, and they took it down too. Now, had I sent both at the same time it might have gone very badly for the party, but one right after another? No problem. If the party had been even 2nd level it would have been painfully easy. I'd have to send a clan at them to make it a challenge.We all know of ways to inflate it. Give the werewolf more hit points, or class levels, or give it 6 pet wolves, or have them hold the villagers hostage, or make heavy use of terrain, whatever. But the point is, those all require changing a scenario that is perfectly reasonable and shouldn't need to be changed. You find the werewolf, confront them, they go ballistic and you have a really tough challenge taking them out should be a standard thing you can do in D&D by the book. When you get to higher levels it gets even worse. You have to send unbelievable quantities of higher level critters (or like tribes of low-level ones, which is more believable in my book) to significantly threaten the characters. Which just feeds into the quick campaign thing, because it would be absurd to have a campaign go on for a long time with that many powerful threats. You'd have cleared your world of monsters, possibly a couple levels of the Abyss, and have to move on to new worlds just to keep a tiny sense of believability.The personal fixes I use are to drastically increase the XP needed to level, and cut down the treasure handed out to avoid Monty Haul situations. But that wasn't nearly as simple as it sounds. Because of the wonky way the XP chart is, I couldn't just multiply everything by 5. No, I had to put together a spreadsheet and spend hours upon hours playing around with it until I came up with the numbers that got the job done. Now, the treasure was significantly easier--I just cut everything in half (and when using pre-5e adventures, I prune out all of the +1 items before even doing that), under the assumption that some of it will get used up, and it's okay to end up with a bit more treasure than expected.So I've kept the party at 1st level for over 6 months so they can get a reasonable feel for what it's like to be a 1st level character, and face a variety of different challenges, and now they are 2nd level, and starting to realize how huge a jump in power that is. As much as bounded accuracy does allow you to keep certain monsters viable for a lot longer in your campaign (and I really appreciate that), it still doesn't allow you to keep certain experiences viable beyond the first couple of levels.</blockquote>

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