D&D 5E Wandering Monsters 01/29/2014:Level Advancement...

[pemerton]

Role-playing gave out negligible xp in 4e. An hour of combat gave you 10% of the experience needed to level-up. An hour of role-playing gave you 2%.

I'm not sure what rule you're referring to. But in 4e, a complexity five skill challenge, which in my experience takes time comparable to an on-level combat encounter, or maybe less, gives the same amount of XP.

And per DMG 2 p 25 (under the heading "Drama Rewards"),

Award the characters experience as if they had defeated one monster of their level for every 15 minutes they spend in signficant, focused roleplaying that advances the story of your campaign.​

That's 4/5 of the XP from an on-level combat encounter per hour of "focuse roleplaying" - not the 1/5 ratio you mentioned. So I'm not sure where your 2% is coming from.

 

[howandwhy99]

Could human aging be the default time length for a full class level progression?
10 levels of Fighter or Magic-User = old age? 20 in D&D Next.
AD&D starts at 14-20 young adults. 61-90 Old Age
So 40 years roughly of Adventuring before retirement?

I'm guessing 1st level takes a few months or so. But the highest levels take several years.
If only because gaining a level is game changing. Certain actions are easier and new ways of living open up that typically take longer to master. Not just play time, but game time.

 

[DMZ2112]

That's one wall-of-text post in a multi-page thread, and one that's unlinked to any of the posts that it is in reply to. Is it really so surprising people missed it?

It's not about /me/, delericho, or people "hanging off my every word;" it's /forum etiquette/. Post in the thread, read the thread.

And actually, it's three reasonably-sized paragraphs at the very top of page 3 -- the later post is just detail.

The problem WotC have is that they cannot just ignore the second half of you equation, because setting a baseline according only to that first half renders it utterly meaningless.

Steeldragons summarized my position on this well enough that I don't feel the need to reiterate personally:

One can play a four or six hour session one week with minimal killing/treasure accumulation/accomplish little. A two hour session a month later might include a massive combat with the BBEG!

(snip)

The only thing saying "level at X many sessions", placed in the books even mentioned as a guideline/option, does is instill and encourage player entitlement.

The only thing I would add is that I think linking advancement to number of hours or sessions also inflicts stress upon dungeon masters whose schedules don't closely resemble the "average." Unwarranted stress, of course, because it doesn't actually make them work harder in any real way -- because real-time-based XP guidelines /do not matter/.

Your equation is probably not too far from being right. And you're also right that the differences between groups increases along with the terms. But that doesn't actually matter - WotC don't need to provide the perfect system for all groups. All they need to do is give me the equation and I'll plug in the numbers for my group.

The equation doesn't /exist/ without the numbers for your group -- if it contains any constants at all, it contains only one: levels/hour (levels/XP * XP/encounter * encounters/hour), and that is being /extremely/ generous in interpretation.

You can't calculate the length of the third side of a right triangle without knowing the length of both of the other two sides. The triangle is different for everybody. Everybody will get a different -- and more importantly, unrelated -- answer.

LOL. What's the problem, man? Is this as bad as when I told S'mon I don't police my players for cheating? Cuz he blew a gasket when I said that.

PS

I can see that you are a regular rabblerouser. I don't police my players for cheating either -- it's no skin off my nose if they want to rob themselves of the full fruits of my genius. I leave the policing to the other players, who tend to be more upset about losing advantage. When they fight amongst themselves they are easier to demoralize.

But man, the eckspee is the seat of all our leverage! First you get the eckspee, then you get the power, then you get the lamentations of their women. Or men, we don't discriminate. Equal opportunity crushing and driving.

I honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make. In order to determine how much XP a character needs to level up, they have to make some assumptions about all those things. It sounds like you're saying they... don't?

The theoretical equation I posted is here.

My point is essentially this:

- Wizards can set a quantity of XP required to level.
- They can set a quantity of XP (really a challenge-based ratio) awarded per encounter.
- They can even make the risky assumption that their system enforces a reliable ratio of encounters to hours played.

What they cannot do -- and I want to be clear, here, I'm not saying they won't do it, or they shouldn't do it, but that they absolutely mathematically CANNOT do it, because it is an impossibility -- is present any kind of meaningful guideline for advancement that considers hours per session or sessions per arbitrary period of time. Even the arbitrary period of time is arbitrary!

 

[delericho]

Could human aging be the default time length for a full class level progression?
10 levels of Fighter or Magic-User = old age? 20 in D&D Next.
AD&D starts at 14-20 young adults. 61-90 Old Age
So 40 years roughly of Adventuring before retirement?

I don't see any reason why not, but I'd be surprised if WotC did something like that. Even as an explicitly-supported option would surprise me.

I'm guessing 1st level takes a few months or so. But the highest levels take several years.
If only because gaining a level is game changing. Certain actions are easier and new ways of living open up that typically take longer to master. Not just play time, but game time.

One thing to bear in mind is that a great many, perhaps most, people don't actually advance in their careers like that. Sports stars, media stars... even scientists tend to make their mark early, or not at all.

So "level 1 to X" in a year may actually be less unrealistic than "each level takes Y years".

 

[howandwhy99]

One thing to bear in mind is that a great many, perhaps most, people don't actually advance in their careers like that. Sports stars, media stars... even scientists tend to make their mark early, or not at all.

So "level 1 to X" in a year may actually be less unrealistic than "each level takes Y years".

I was just thinking it might help in balancing XP distribution. I agree it isn't exactly realistic in all cases. Fighters definitely need their physical attributes to be successful, even if a boxing instructor may technically be the better boxer. I think D&D definitely leans more towards the mental game end of the spectrum. (He says remembering the physiques of all the players he's gamed with)

 

[Desdichado]

Yeah, the wandering monster question bugged me as well. The Shire? Once a day, if that often. Angband? Just keep rolling, we'll tell you when to stop.

I dislike the concept of wandering monsters completely. One of the biggest problems with monsters in D&D is that rather than being monstrous, monsters are in fact quite routine. Monsters should be the centerpieces of entire adventures. Not just a footnote while your little red line that maps the party's location moves from one spot on the map to another.

Let me reiterate that -- experience points are not a reward. They're the whole point of the game. You fight things, you get experience. The reward comes in when players go above and beyond the call, and when they go above and beyond the call they should not find that their advancement is "on track." Yuck!

D&D and other RPGs are games in which the experience of playing them is its own reward. XP is a clunky way to allow for character evolution over time and a poor model to express the arc of an adventurer's career. They're certainly not the point of the game. It's an extra reward that supplements the point of the game for those who need further incentive to play other than the fun that playing is in its own right.

Honestly, I'd rather play with E6 or something like that, though. That way you can have continuous character evolution without wandering into the weirdness that levels inevitably produce.

Likewise. If we adopt 5e, we'll be doing what we do with 3e and 4e now - PCs level roughly every 3 sessions, regardless of the content of the session.

I've been doing that for years--before 3e, even. It's the only method that actually makes any sense to me.

I feel that moving relatively quickly through the first two or three levels is good, slowing way down for the next 5-8 or so, and then either capping off or simply ending the game before it gets too high in level is the only way I can play. I've never liked high level (much above 10th) in any edition of D&D, because how much fun you have vs. how much clunkiness and book-keeping it takes is a bad ratio. I doubt I'll play 5e, but if I do, I'm going to be highly suspicious of higher level play, and I have no reason to believe that 5e will fix all of the problems with high level play that every other edition of the game has not managed to.

 

[Storminator]

I can see that you are a regular rabblerouser.
But man, the eckspee is the seat of all our leverage! First you get the eckspee, then you get the power, then you get the lamentations of their women. Or men, we don't discriminate. Equal opportunity crushing and driving.

Heh. I first gave up the power, and that means I don't need the eckspee!

PS

 

[Desdichado]

I am not really interested in discussing this point, because it is obviously grotesquely contentious and we will find no common ground. But my position on this matter is that Dungeons & Dragons, at is core, is about exploring dungeons, bypassing traps, dealing with dragons, and gathering treasure. It is /great/ that the system can be stretched to do other things, and I often stretch it myself, but all of those things are icing.

As icing, they should not influence the core rules of the game. Before D&D can be anything else, it must first be a dungeon crawler. Then we can start talking about elven politics in the Gnarley or extended trade missions to Zakhara.

This is largely true, much of the time. However, the Zeb Cook Expert Set would beg to differ.

 

[Desdichado]

Hmmm... does the rise of "Level when the DM says" correspond to the prevalence of MMORPGs? It occurs to me that the reason one would want the PCs to be, say, 7th level is when they've finished all the prepared content for 5th-6th level characters. If you finish the adventure and still need to kill boars to be ready for the next adventure, that's "grinding" and not fun.

Could be, but I thought of it long before anyone had ever heard of MMOs--like back in the 80s long ago.

I think rather the cues for that type of leveling arise from disatisfaction with the skilled play paradigm, which gamers who joined D&D in the early 80s because they were fans of fantasy, or were riding the fad wave, or whatever (in other words, they didn't come out of the hobby-store wargaming environment) didn't seem to have embraced much.

This same influx of new players with a completely new paradigm are what I believe led to the so-called Hickman Revolution. I think it explains what happened a lot better than the notion of some new TSR employee coming up with something new and revolutionary that just happened to be really popular with gamers.

 

[Desdichado]

I was referring to the bolded portion of the equation. Which you'd know, if you'd been reading my posts. Pet. Peeve.

My very strong suspicion is that players have a strong desire to level up in a way that can be counted by session. I agree that both session length and session productivity can be highly variable from group to group, or even from night to night.

But I strongly suspect that's what gamers want anyway, spite of all the headaches that causes for poor game designers stuffed in their cubicles at WotC sweating bullets about these kinds of details. If so, then yeah--WotC does need to calculate some kind of baseline that produces a result most of the time that coincides with gamers' desires for leveling speed.