Slowing Advancement and Other Arbitrary Restrictions

[RFisher]

Thirded...If my players need a numerical carrot, then they are at the wrong house. The thrill of gaming should be its own reward.

I wouldn't go quite that far. I'm happy with gaming being its own reward, but I'm also happy with XP being a reward in D&D. I'm just saying that I don't know a gamer who would choose to miss a session for a reason trivial enough to be swayed by whether his PC will miss out on some XP or not.

Anyway, I mean the point is that one can slow down a game by adding challenges which the players may not win, but which they will simply survive. That's my preference anyway...

Yeah. Personally, though, I'd rather change the progression & give full (or closer to full) XP for partial victories or even mere survival.

 

[wildstarsreach]

I was talking with one our DM's, we use RPtools to do an online game. It's just him and I, I'm playing a gesalt character. We had 6 encounters and leveled. In this case, leveling sooner may be more necessary. So it comes back that how fast is completely dependent on the situation.

 

[MerricB]

Sigh. You keep missing the point. I'm not saying that leveling is faster or slower in any edition. I'm saying that IN MY EXPERIENCE, leveling is exactly the same speed. What I'm not doing is making grand sweeping generalizations about how the game is/was played, unlike some of the posters in this thread.

I'd also be very, very surprised if someone can play through the AP's in 1 adventure/month. 4 sessions to get through a single module? That's some screaming fast play. It took us almost three months just to get through the first Shackled City adventure.

37 sessions to complete the entire Age of Worms - so about 3 sessions/adventure. And the sessions were 3-4 hours long. It took about 19 months due to 1 session/fortnight being the regular frequency; though we'd miss some times due to other commitments.

My AD&D games tended to level fairly fast as well.

Cheers!

 

[Hussar]

Wow. We are really, really slow.