Variant 5e XP system: making higher levels take longer

[Stormhound]

As usual, I'm not perfectly happy with the RAW (Rules As Written) XP table provided; I rather like having later levels take longer to acquire, which makes them more meaningful (and somewhat rarer). This stems largely from my more old-school notion that a campaign is an open-ended affair, rather than being like a book series where you're trying to work your way through the plot to reach the end and go on to the next set of books. This is admittedly a radical (or rather, reactionary) concept in modern gaming, but it's what spurred my thinking.

For those who want to see all the fiddly numbers I went through, I've attached an image of the spreadsheet...but here's the basic table along with a column which shows the number of "Adventuring Days" required to reach a level using the RAW XP guidelines.

Level	XP Required	Adv. Days
1	0	0
2	500	1.67
3	2,000	2.50
4	5,000	2.50
5	10,000	2.94
6	20,000	2.86
7	35,000	3.75
8	55,000	4.00
9	80,000	4.17
10	115,000	4.67
11	160,000	5.00
12	215,000	5.24
13	280,000	5.65
14	360,000	5.93
15	455,000	6.33
16	585,000	6.50
17	755,000	6.80
18	970,000	7.96
19	1,235,000	8.83
20	1,600,000	9.13

This table satisfies my number-loving side in several ways: Not only does each level require more XP than the previous one to attain, but the rate of increase of the amount required does not decrease as level goes up (the "level 11 glitch" in the RAW table). This also means that adventuring days required tend to move upward as level does (I attribute the one exception to the quirkiness of WoTC's numbers). While the XP required at the high end is substantially higher than the RAW, much of that actually is loaded at the high end...except for level 3, the total XP required is less than double the RAW all the way up to level 11, so it should take only twice as long in player terms to level.

While I can already hear players screaming foul, I'll point at columns T-U of my spreadsheet image:



The total Adventuring Days required are 57.5 under the RAW; with my table, they are 96.4, which isn't even double. If a campaign is actually fun, playing it twice as long hardly seems like much of a burden...and if it isn't, what's the point?

Okay, there's the tinderbox, who's going to light the first match?

 

[Paraxis]

Easy way to control how fast level advancement is in your campaign is to just remove XP from the game. I like a pretty steady pace so about every 2 or 3 game sessions I give everyone a level. If you want it to be a slow crawl as you get into the higher levels just say you need 1 session for each level going to, so to get to second level after 2 sessions and the characters go from 11th to 12th after 12 sessions.

Removing XP also means the players don't go after XP, they don't go looking for fights they try and avoid them, they don't want to grind they want to roleplay.