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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 6285784" data-attributes="member: 9053">It seems like this topic comes up fairly often and there's the same divide between playstyles, so the answer starts as being "because different tables like different playstyles and it's as simple as that.But that's not a terribly helpful answer so let me try and actually be useful.I would say it all depends on what the point of the campaign is, and what the GM does with it. The best campaign of 3X that I ever played in had glacially slow advancement and it would have been a horrible game if the point was leveling and powering up.What made the game amazing was that it was a huge mystery that we were gradually introduced to and explored. Each session had us both following a plot (we were assassins with a guild that gave us missions) but also had us trying to figure out what was really going on, who was responsible, and even who we were. The game was fantastic without the D&D advancement mechanics at all... we would have kept playing if we never leveled at all. The GM had about as much campaign information as George RR Martin does. Thousands and thousands of pages.Most games aren't like that. I have played in a lot of games over the decades and the sense of wonder of figuring out all of the intricacies of the world and who was doing what to whom is not something you usually care about in a game.When you don't play in a game like that, where does the excitement come from? Playing your character and watching them develop over time. Now playing your character is where all of the issues of the "20 minutes of fun in four hours" comes from: when you're playing the game, how interesting is it, and what do you get out of it?I recently have the pleasure of gaming with Ernie Gygax. Ernie ran us through a fantastic and exciting session with traps, monsters, exploration and discovery. The game was great as a session in and of itself. I'd happily sign up for: figuring out the devious traps and encounters Ernie placed in front of us would be a fantastic session, and I wouldn't even think of leveling.The thing was, we did a lot in that game, and we definitely did not spend it going room-by-room with 10' poles and spending hours checking for traps or secret doors and such. We went from one interesting encounter to the next with minimal downtime so as to avoid wandering monsters who were there when we started wasting time.And that's where the "all advancement all the time" can come from, because most dungeon crawls are not run by a DM as good as Ernie. If a lot of your session is spent avoiding and managing danger where you spend a long time going over what I would can the mundane details of dungeon exploration, you start to think about how long it will be before the next "ding!" when something new and interesting will happen.So I guess the point of this is, as I'm playing the game, what am I thinking about? Is it about the devious "wheels within wheels" machinations of the GM? Is it "holy crap! That carrion crawler is in my face now and if I don't do something I'm dead!" or is it, "my next three levels should let me do this... oh, wait? Is something happening? Are we still searching the room for traps?"I would say if players are wanting more leveling more often it's because they're not into the other parts of the game that they may find more interesting.</blockquote>

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