Rate of Advancement and how often people play

[reanjr]

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.

Why not just double the XP numbers on the table?

 

[reanjr]

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?

Yeah, that's too fast. For one thing, play really breaks down after about 15th level. It just isn't so much fun anymore in the long haul. Advancing that fast means characters get retired fast and players don't grow attachment to them. How can that be good?

 

[reanjr]

I often see people level every other session (8 hour+ sessions) till they hit level 4. Then it gets slowed down to 3-5 sessions, but seems to stay consistent with that. I think this has to do with me throwing higher level encounters at them at first through 4th level...

The experience table is designed so that 1st and 2nd level characters advance quickly (they're listed on the same line as 3rd level). That probably makes a big difference at those really low levels. 1st level should go by approximately 3 times faster than 3rd, while 2nd should be about twice that long.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think it was said in the DMG that the level advancement rate was designed with a group of people who play on a weekly basis in mind.

IIRC the idea was:

- 4 character per party
- average encounter close to the party level
- 3-4 encounters per evening
- 1 evening per week

and the target was to level up once a month, which leads to about 12-16 encounters per level. The final 13 and 1/3 results from the easy math chosen to mostly give Xp in multiples of 100.

What IMXP doesn't happen is the second point... published adventures always have average EL higher that the party level by 1 or 2!

 

[Turanil]

What are your thoughts on this matter?

The last campaign I did run, I distributed the XP quite arbitrarily, and thus the level advancement was quite (too) fast. But we were playing only once every three weeks, so it compensated. The truth is that I didn't want to bother myself with XP calculations, and players were happy to increase in levels quickly.

Next campaign I am waiting for a supplement about adventures from 1 to 20 levels. Frankly I hope it is really a campaign beginning at 1st and ending at 20th, not just a scalable adventure. I am curious to know the rate of advancement there = 20 gaming sessions? More? I expect XP values are already given to spare me any effort to figure them myself.

 

[reanjr]

We ideally play once a week (although so sporadically that it's really only two or three times a month averaging it out for the year). We level up at a fairly uniform rate in every campaign we run, very quickly, probably better than once every other session. This is with ad hoc DM XP, but considering the high power level and the challenges we tend to face, by the book it would come out that way.

Extremely fast, but how else can anyone ever even experience the high levels? We've never had one campaign run so much as a year, so if we want to get somewhere fast advancement is the only way.

I personally think fast advancement is one of the things CAUSING campaigns to crumble in short time (6 to 9 months)

 

[CalicoDave]

The group I play in levels about every 4 sessions, or about 20 to 25 hours of play. This seems to be a good advancement rate for us. Anything slower and we start to feel like the characters is stagnating, anything faster and we don't get used to the character's current abilities.

D.

 

[diaglo]

in the case of the OD&D campaign i ran:

3-4hr per session; 5 sessions per week; 50 weeks per year; for 10+ years.

the PCs avg. ~900hrs of roleplaying for 1 lvl gained.. roughly 1 real time year.

currently after 2 sessions... playing one 6hr session a fortnight... my current group has gained on avg 400 xps. which means it looks like it will take them 9 sessions to gain enough xps to advance. and probably 2 or 3 more sessions to find the gold/resources/mentors to train...

so say it takes 12 six hour sessions ... that is 24 weeks to gain 1 lvl. with the double amount of time that is 48 weeks in comparison to 50.

a bit faster than the old days. but not much.

 

[MerricB]

I personally think fast advancement is one of the things CAUSING campaigns to crumble in short time (6 to 9 months)

Speaking as a veteran of crumbling campaigns, I know that fast advancement has little to do with it, and Real Life (tm) has a huge effect on it.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

With regard to the fast advancement of 3E, I do think that there is an interesting factor that might be distorting 3E's advancement rate: the effectiveness of players at min/maxing.

I believe 3E's advancement is designed around a non-min/maxed party: Tordek, Lidda, Mialee and Jozan, the iconic characters which are used to playtest many of the creatures' challenge ratings.

When you get a group of Prestige Classed and Feat-ed characters from the Greate Schoole of Min/Maxing, then they can take on challenges slightly higher in level than those that the Iconic party can handle easily. Thus, instead of a CR 4 encounter being challenging for the 4th level party, it's a CR 5 encounter they handle with ease.

That's a little simplistic, actually, for it's not that clear-cut, but is something worth considering.

One thing I think would be worth attempting is to shift the XP rewards down one column - thus, a successfully overcome CR 4 creature only awards per the CR 3 value.

Cheers!