What's your "Leveling Up" Sweet spot?

[TerraDave]

There's a bit of a hint here that this idea that leveling up is important comes from new/younger gamers.

I don't agree with that at all.

As I have gotten older, I have less time to spend on gaming, don't want campaigns to go as long and know they won't, and hence want, on a per hour played basis, faster leveling.

IIRC, Gygax's own expectations in the 1e DMG were about 1 year of game = 10 levels. Or something to that effect. So, it's not really something new.

Moving through a sequence of old school mods basically required a good pace of leveling, and we know that they had the treasure for it.

Though, I will concede that with a narrower sweet spot (you want to play in levels 3-9 or so), charecter turnover, henchmen turnover, and the importance of magic items as a reward, slower leveling in an "old school" game is fine.

 

[Piratecat]

These guys weren't that type.

You misunderstand. Slow advancement or not, I love cinematic games; I'd go nuts waiting for all the minutiae to be finished. I'm thrilled to pieces that they found their perfect game, but it sure isn't mine. It's weird to me that we both count as "slow advancement" games.

 

[ggroy]

You misunderstand. Slow advancement or not, I love cinematic games; I'd go nuts waiting for all the minutiae to be finished. I'm thrilled to pieces that they found their perfect game, but it sure isn't mine. It's weird to me that we both count as "slow advancement" games.

It wasn't my type of game either.

The minutiae these guys were going into great detail over, was more like mundane stuff than anything "cinematic". Stuff like:

- how a night camp was set up
- when and what they were eating
- weather patterns
- how exactly they were searching (ie. digging holes in the ground, looking up through trees, looking at each brick individually, etc ...)

A lot of the highly detailed minutiae was outside of combat, which typically stretched out the number of sessions to level up. The DM didn't give any XP for non-combat stuff, and rarely ever gave out any treasure or gold.

For combat, the DM distributed XP based on the proportion of damage each player did to each monster. The magic user in that game must have taken around 4 or 5 years to reach to level 2, playing every week. Just getting enough gold to pay for training to level up, was another long stretch of sessions lasting several months. When a player had enough XP to theoretically level up, their XP score stayed at that number until they have formally went through training and formally leveled up.

 

[Lanefan]

But when the makeup of the party is in flux, that wrecks havoc with the plot. What's the use of spending 10 sessions establishing a PC's connection to an important NPC group if the PC then vanishes?

The trick, I've learned through much trial and error, is to as far as possible build the plot around the party as a whole instead of any specific member of it. Characters come, characters go; but it's rare that a whole party disappears.

Saving the world at first level is pointless, because the players don't know the world. They need a chance to explore the world, to gain a connection to it, before saving the world has any meaning.

Not necessarily; and this is giving me ideas for a future campaign (if I ever start another).

They save the world very early on, possibly without even realizing it. Most of the rest of the campaign consists, in the background to whatever other story is going on, of a slow discovery of the deeper meanings behind what they already did.

Lanefan

 

[Zinovia]

Unless I make plans to play via webcam, our goal is to finish the campaign before my son goes to college in 2 and a half years. I'm not confident that we'll make it, but perhaps I could tighten the story up a bit. After all, what college kid wants to take time out of their weekend to game with their parents? Mine *might*, but it's best to try and finish it sooner. Unless he goes to school in-state.

Following an adventure path does necessitate a certain rate of leveling, although I am tweaking the recommennded levels a bit in 4e WotBS. I think it is a bit too easy for my group if they were at the recommended levels because I am dealing with a well balanced, moderately tactical, 6 character party. I am therefore going into each module at lower than recommended level, rather than reworking all the combat encounters.

Play frequency should relate to leveling frequency as well, although I haven't taken a close look at the survey results yet to see if that holds true. We play every 2-6 weeks, depending on how crazy everyone's schedules are, averaging about 3-4 weeks between sessions. Leveling every 3-5 sessions gives us a few months between levels. It feels a little fast to me given the slower pace of many of our older games, but if I want them to be the right level for future modules in the AP, we need to level about that often. I do like the increasing options that the characters have, and the variety of challenges they can handle as they level up.

The more I consider it, the more sure I am that we won't finish the campaign in time. I need to go think about what to do. Hrmm.