Rate of Advancement and how often people play

[MerricB]

G'day!

These days, I see people playing D&D once a week, fortnight or month. There are a few people who play more often than that, but I believe they are in the minority. Weekly is probably most common, but the people who can only play once a fortnight or once a month are gaining in their numbers.

When I read about the development of D&D, it seems that Gygax and his friends were playing on a daily basis.

So, did this have a distorting effect on the rate of advancement in o/AD&D? Were the XP tables and rewards set up so that they were _too slow_, because of this more frequent play?

We know that Wizards assumed (based on their surveys) that most campaigns lasted about a year and that most people played once a week - and adjusted their XP tables and rewards accordingly in 3E, causing a rate of advancement that some of the older players feel is too fast.

Interestingly, when recently looking through the old Companion set, I came across the following text:

"After reaching 'Name' level, characters should gain a new level of experience for every 3 to 8 successful adventures... If you play twice or more each week, 6 to 8 adventures per level gained is recommended. If your games are once a week or less often, 3 to 5 adventures per level are recommended."

Now, in these books I generally read "adventures" to mean "sessions" - any published adventure from TSR would normally give you several levels of experience when you played it!

What are your thoughts on this matter?

Cheers!

 

[Crothian]

Its more then just how often you play, it also matters with how many hours per session and how many PCs you have. The more players, the slower things go and level gains also slows. And with few PCs things can move more smoothly and fast and level gain is usually faster.

Obviously same is true if the sessions are 4 hours verse 8 hours.

Isn't it formulated so that a 4 PC group has 13 or 14 encounters of appropriate challenge for a level? Then it would matter how many encounters one has per adventure.

 

[Henry]

Without Gygax, Arneson, Mornard, et. al. answering the question, I'd have to assume you are spot on with your assessment. When D&D was being developed, and when it first burst on the scene, Gygax was literally running packed rooms full of players. He couldn't get work done for the playing, according to him.

Nowadays, we who play have pretty much settled into a set pattern of play, and anywhere from once a week to once a month is common. With the change in play patterns by the majority of players as they get older, the rules change. In truth, I'd halfway expect future versions of the game to do away with XP entirely, or at least downplay its role in favor of solid guidelines about speed of advancement.

 

[DragonLancer]

G'day!

These days, I see people playing D&D once a week, fortnight or month. There are a few people who play more often than that, but I believe they are in the minority. Weekly is probably most common, but the people who can only play once a fortnight or once a month are gaining in their numbers.

Aye, we play weekly. Always have done, and probably always will do.

Interestingly, when recently looking through the old Companion set, I came across the following text:

"After reaching 'Name' level, characters should gain a new level of experience for every 3 to 8 successful adventures... If you play twice or more each week, 6 to 8 adventures per level gained is recommended. If your games are once a week or less often, 3 to 5 adventures per level are recommended."

Now, in these books I generally read "adventures" to mean "sessions" - any published adventure from TSR would normally give you several levels of experience when you played it!

What are your thoughts on this matter?

Cheers!

At low levels (say 1st through 5th) I think that four adventures (not sessions) is about right for a party to level. After that, I think that about 5 or 6 is about right to level.

I get a little confused sometimes when I see modules (RttToEE or Key of Destiny, as examples) where the author figured that the adventure would allow characters to level up 3 or 4 times during its run. Even the WotC adventure path series is meant to run 1st through 20th if I'm not mistaken and thats only about 7 modules.

I'm guessing from that, that the authors expected the DM to hand out XP after each session.

Personally, I think the XP rate as shown in 3rd edition is way too fast, but I've yet to find a slower method that feels comfortable.

 

[Laman Stahros]

The group that I am running has played thru the first three Adventure path modules (The Sunless Citadel, The Forge of Fury, The Speaker in Dreams) and have started the Hall of the Rainbow Mage. They started with four characters and are now up to six, the average class level is 7th. We play once a week. Is this too fast? Well, its certainly faster than I was used to in 1st or 2nd Ed. Is this bad? My players are enjoying themselves, how can that be bad?

 

[drothgery]

At low levels (say 1st through 5th) I think that four adventures (not sessions) is about right for a party to level. After that, I think that about 5 or 6 is about right to level.

Yikes. Figuring that an adventure covers at least 3 sessions, gaining a level no more than once every three months? Eek. That happens with the glacially slow pace of PBP games, but pre-3e, every DM I ever played under threw out the official XP awards and went with much faster advancement... roughly equivalent to standard 3e rates.

 

[Kalendraf]

My current "weekly" campaign (actually we meet 3 weeks out of 4 on avg), has been running since right before 3.5 rules hit the market, so just over a year. We play for about 3 to 4 hours per game session. The characters are currently 9th level.

My previous weekly campaign lasted slightly over a year, and we actually met almost every week for 3 to 4 hours per session. There the characters reached anywhere from 10th to 12th level (lower levels due to level loss via character deaths).

Looks like we average about 5 sessions to gain a level. It goes a bit faster at the lowest levels, but then slows slightly.

Added info:
It's very difficult to judge the pace per adventure since they can widely vary in size. For example, my group finished "The Magic Dump" in less than 2 sessions, but has spent over a dozen sessions in the current adventure, "Aberrations". Certainly page count has something to do with it, but that alone doesn't determine everything. Number and strength of encounters affects it, but a huge amount of time can be spent on roleplaying or investigative ventures where the exp/time ratio might be significantly smaller than what is earned in combat. IMHO, there is no such thing as a truly typical adventure since each group will behave differently in any given setting.

 

[DragonLancer]

Yikes. Figuring that an adventure covers at least 3 sessions, gaining a level no more than once every three months? Eek. That happens with the glacially slow pace of PBP games, but pre-3e, every DM I ever played under threw out the official XP awards and went with much faster advancement... roughly equivalent to standard 3e rates.

I prefer campaigns to run longer than most I guess. Currently, they have run for roughly 18 months from 1st through to 20th, but even that seems a little fast for me.

Just different styles for different folks.

 

[Chimera]

In the days of OD&D, playing for 4-6 hours every week it wasn't bad to go up a level every 2 months or so. But then, the power level was quite different then, wasn't it.

Now I'm in a group playing about every 2-3 weeks for 6 hours a shot. We're not interested in staying 1st level for 3-4 months. ESPECIALLY when you consider the average life of a campaign to be 1.5 to 2 years. We'd like a chance to play at higher levels.

So far we've gone from 2nd to 4th level in three sessions. I expect it will probably slow as we get higher level, but I personally am looking forward to being able to play a 15th to 20th level V3.5 character that I have spent time playing and developing to that level.

Bottom line: Yes, it's much faster than previous editions. Yes, you can slow the progression down if you like. But right now, for this version and this game/campaign, I'm quite happy with the faster progression.

 

[jodyjohnson]

We average a level every 2-3 sessions and play twice a month (5-8 hour session). Our current campaign I'm going to slow down XP from 5th to 10th (we raced by this sweet spot last campaign) and then speed back up headed into the high level range.