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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Avalin" data-source="post: 1269470" data-attributes="member: 10760">Our group's new experiment...My current group recently came off a long story arc with average party attendance of 9 - 12 players per session.  3.0 XP did not really give us any difficulty, but then with that many players my story arc was probably different from most.  By the time XP was divided among so many, plus attendant flunkies and NPCs about a years worth of gaming completed the 1st part of that setting's trillogy with the players ranging from 6th to 9th level.  We met once a month and gamed for 12 to 14 hours.  For our current game we're now on 3.5 with a small subset of core players that had requested a challenging world setting with a great deal if IC discovery.  Part of facilitating this was that we decided on slowing down the rate of level gain.  At first there were no hard rules for doing this, we decided to experiment.  Here's what we have come to at this point.  As has already been proposed we double the number of necessary XP, however this will likely change as we have also been experimenting with ways to speed combat so we can have several decent battles and lots of pure role play in the same session (where that much combat is appropriate).  One of the players keeps track of kills and I run a tally behind the scenes.  In our case the players themselves have some control over their ability to level.  This is a pretty mature bunch of people to begin with, and so I trust their judgement.  If the players decide that they have done enough adventuring that a level up is deserved and if they are unanimous in that they will suggest it to me.  I will then look over their exploits and yea/nea it depending.  Recently they gained about 3x the XP needed to level up, but one of the players (the main warrior) did not feel that the group was wholly deserving so they have decided to wait another session.  I really respected that because one of the reasons that they had so many extra XP was that the group fought some creatures of equivalent CR which should have been quite challenging, but were particularly susceptible to a strategy that they devised to deal with them.  For my own part I may also begin applying increasing fractional penalties to non-lethal level encounters with lower CR.  Say .75 for 1 CR lower, .5 for 2, etc...I'm also looking over the Immortal's Handbook CR calculation method, and while it looks great it also looks like a lot of work which I really don't have time for.</blockquote>

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