Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 8334481" data-attributes="member: 6796468">"Most Stories" was the term I used, not all. Not only. But even in the case of the "Emergent Storyline" that similarly tends to get resolved around levels 9-13 unless you're just flinging new antagonistic options at your players every other level like it's Dragon Ball Z or something.Yeah, it's possible to release a storyline piecemeal so that it takes 20 levels. You can also drop an adventure from day one that gets the character from level 1 to 20. In neither of those cases is the storyline "Emergent". It's all pre-written and you just don't know it all, yet, as player or DM. The writer still knows that story. A True emergent story is one where you just faff around for a few weeks and then go "Wait, what? Isn't X the thing we did last month?" and the DM has to develop a reason for X last month and Z this month and a plot forms out of it.But. Time is still a massive factor. Possibly the single largest factor.6-8 encounters per day with 2-3 days of encounters between levels by the rulebook. Split the difference and it's 7x2.5=17.5 easy peasy.How long does a typical encounter take in D&D? 3-5 round? Let's call it 4 rounds. 5 players, plus NPCs, being nice let's say it only takes about 2 minutes to resolve a turn. We'll go for 8 npcs on average (Some fights are big, some fights are small, most are in the middle) and to be charitable let's say the DM takes only 1/4 the time to resolve a given NPC's actions, so 30 seconds. 4 minutes for the DM, 2 minutes for each player that's 14 minutes per round... Let's round it up to 15 and call it 4 rounds for 1 hour.How long do most people play? 3-4 hours maybe? And a goodly chunk of that is RP/Exploration/Description rather than actual combat. So let's call it 2 combats per session on average.To get from level 1-20 on the 6-8 encounters per day, with 2-3 days of encounters between levels, 17.5, we can multiply by 19 to find out how many actual encounters it takes to get to 20 since level 1 is "Free": around 332.5.Each encounter takes 1 hour ish, and people get 2 encounters in a session. So that's 332.5 hours and 166.25 sessions.Assuming you get together once a week for 3 hours and spend 2 hours of it resolving combat or other noncombat encounters: 1,163.75 days have passed from Session 0 to level 20. 3.19 years.And during that time people are going to move, have kids, have crises, lose people, change jobs, change shifts, get new schedules from work, school, family, etc, find new games they're interested in, want to be a Player rather than a DM, etc etc etc.It. Takes. Too. Long. When we were kids and teens three years was FOREVER but who cared 'cause we were spending it with our friends. We could play D&D six nights a week or have sleepovers and play 5-10 hour marathon sessions. When you're consuming D&D and Jolt Cola at that rate those 166.25 sessions can vanish into a long summer before school starts.And even back THEN we rarely took characters to 20 because it was SUCH AN INVESTMENT of time into a single story, a single character. Especially with everything else SUMMER offered.</blockquote>

Verification