Rate of Advancement: A Level per Day?!

[Sunseeker]

My concern is more for the amount of table time it take to level, rather than the amount of game time. If 6 easy combats or 2 tough ones nets you a level gain, given how quickly combat moves thus far, you'll probably level every game session. Again, I know this can be altered at whim by the DM-- it's just a strange baseline.

This is one reason I've generally felt that class benefits should come as "packages" every say, 3 levels, instead of every single level. Updating your character sheet with another +1 to hit or +1 defense in the middle of a session isn't too hard. Choosing new feats, spells, abilities, and that sort of stuff can be. Also, some people gain more than others, some people take more time to level up than others. Having it come in "blocks" every 3 or so levels would mean it would be easier to plan out a "level up night".

Regarding your interesting examples of an expansive reading of "adventuring day"-- Gandalf taking three days of travel in a paragraph, e.g.-- there is a gamist twist. Three days of travel technically gets you three extended rests, i.e. complete resource recharges. The "adventuring day" as defined in the playtest has to do with how many resources a party can expend before needing to completely recharge, which maps to a solar day because sleeping overnight is the trigger to recharge all that stuff.

But those resource recharges don't matter if you're not expending them, they don't get saved up until you do(which would be an interesting feature).

Regarding XP-for-killing, I'm definitely with you in being a bit concerned about that focus and the effect it can have on gameplay. They do include some vague guidelines about giving XP for achieving goals, though. Hopefully those rules (along with other variants such as XP-for-GP and so on) will get full treatment as options in the DMG. I try not to advertise for myself, but rather than copy-pasting a long thing I'll link to this: Megadungeon XP for D&D Next | Megadungeons.com which suggests two alternate systems I cooked up for awarding XP at the same rate as the playtest guidelines, but for different achievements other than killing.

Indeed, while it is more difficult to plot out how much a skill challenge should be worth, it is one thing I liked about encounter-based XP numbering, as I feel that rewards should go for successfully overcoming the challenge, by ANY means. Cleverly avoiding the carefully laid Goblin traps can be just as challenging and therefore rewarding as running head-first into the Goblin War-Camp and wholesale slaughtering them.

 

[Li Shenron]

This is one reason I've generally felt that class benefits should come as "packages" every say, 3 levels, instead of every single level. Updating your character sheet with another +1 to hit or +1 defense in the middle of a session isn't too hard. Choosing new feats, spells, abilities, and that sort of stuff can be. Also, some people gain more than others, some people take more time to level up than others. Having it come in "blocks" every 3 or so levels would mean it would be easier to plan out a "level up night".

I find this to be a little counter-intuitive... if you get 3 levels worth of package, then updating that in the middle of a session is much harder even if less frequent, if updating on the fly is what you want to do.

But then I dislike updating on the fly completely. A favourite house rule of mine is that if the player is ready with the level-up (meaning that he/she has already planned it and has a complete new character sheet ready to use) then fine. Otherwise I don't like stopping the game in the middle of a session to level everyone up, I prefer players to do that as a homework before next session. I'm not usually ready with XP calculations anyway, so usually my players get XP only at the end of the session or even later by email.

With that in mind, it's much better for me that advancement is as evenly spread across levels as possible, which among other things makes multiclassing more fair and doesn't cause much oddities when different PCs are currently at different levels.

 

[KesselZero]

I thought the advancement rate was an artificial one for playtesting purposes, but now I'm not sure. The designers haven't mentioned this, and the progression looks exponential. Surely an artificial rate would've been linear.

What I suspect is that they want to see how the game works when surviving your first few fights bumps you up to the next level. Given 1st-level PCs low hit points, a boost after roughly a session of gaming would be very timely and help with survival rates. Whether it still "feels like D&D" is something that only road-testing the rules will decide.

I don't have the docs in front of me at the moment, but I think the XP awards increase at roughly the same rate as the XP needed to level. I got the impression that that fast rate of leveling would hold for all five levels. It's possible that it slows down after level five, though...

 

[KesselZero]

But those resource recharges don't matter if you're not expending them, they don't get saved up until you do(which would be an interesting feature).

Sorry, I don't think I made my point very clearly. What I mean is that if you consider an "adventuring day" to be one solar day, which I think is what the playtest means, then it's all about how many combats the party can get through before they're totally out of resources. If you use a more expansive definition of "adventuring day," then you could still have the same number of combats in one game session, but you wouldn't be wearing down the party's resources, since those recharge with the solar day. Compare 6 easy encounters in one solar day to six easy encounters with a long rest in between each: basically what I mean to say is that according to the RAW, at least, a more expansive "adventuring day" would be much easier for the PCs to survive and conquer.

Indeed, while it is more difficult to plot out how much a skill challenge should be worth, it is one thing I liked about encounter-based XP numbering, as I feel that rewards should go for successfully overcoming the challenge, by ANY means. Cleverly avoiding the carefully laid Goblin traps can be just as challenging and therefore rewarding as running head-first into the Goblin War-Camp and wholesale slaughtering them.

This I completely agree with.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I don't have the docs in front of me at the moment, but I think the XP awards increase at roughly the same rate as the XP needed to level. I got the impression that that fast rate of leveling would hold for all five levels. It's possible that it slows down after level five, though...

I ran the numbers last night. It takes four average encounters of equivalent level to reach levels 2, 3, and 4, but eight to go from level 4 to level 5.

 

[Sunseeker]

I find this to be a little counter-intuitive... if you get 3 levels worth of package, then updating that in the middle of a session is much harder even if less frequent, if updating on the fly is what you want to do.

As I wrote, if everyone does a "big level up" every 3 levels, then it can be planned out and we can help each other, get inspiration, so on. Not all my players are as familiar with the system as I or others at the table are. Some "get it" quicker than others.

But then I dislike updating on the fly completely. A favourite house rule of mine is that if the player is ready with the level-up (meaning that he/she has already planned it and has a complete new character sheet ready to use) then fine. Otherwise I don't like stopping the game in the middle of a session to level everyone up, I prefer players to do that as a homework before next session. I'm not usually ready with XP calculations anyway, so usually my players get XP only at the end of the session or even later by email.

I like to help my players in person, its easier for them, it's easier for me.

With that in mind, it's much better for me that advancement is as evenly spread across levels as possible, which among other things makes multiclassing more fair and doesn't cause much oddities when different PCs are currently at different levels.

Given that I don't feel having PCs at different levels should exist AT ALL in DDN, the latter isn't a problem. I also feel that "classic" multiclassing, ie: class dipping, was about as far from fair as you could get since some classes granted great bonuses for picking up one level and others didn't.

 

[Thac0 the Barbarian]

Although others have alluded to this, it is also important to consider the rate of advancement in light of this being a playtest situation. They may have artificially increased the rate of advancement in order to receive feedback across many different levels in an effort to get a sense of how the mechanics scale. The around ENWorld is that there is going to be an adventure released next week. I wouldn't be surprised if this rate of advancement correlates well to the encounters availible in the adventure. Or, at the very least, to do so would be a good idea.

I don't think WOTC expects that people are going to throw over their long-standing campaigns in favor of running D&D next, so if they want to test a span of levels advancement will have to be much quicker that the few weeks or months of play it may take to advance a level in a typical game.

Or it's possible they got feedback that everyone likes to make it from level 1-20 in about a month's worth of play, in which case I will vociferously join in the complaints about the math as written