D&D 5E When to leveling up? Noob question

[GlassJaw]

Personally, I only let the PCs level up after they have enough experience and spend a week training.

So what do you call what the PCs were doing to get that experience?

 

[bedir than]

The main thing is that the DM should tell everyone what he plans to use for leveling and under what conditions so everyone knows what to expect before hand.

There is no wrong answer here. Just so all the players know when level ups will happen.

This, right here.

At my table I hand out XP at the end of a session. If you level, even if we stop for real life reasons and you're in middle of a dungeon, you level. We just consider the new abilities discovered rather than taught. Players LOVE leveling up. My only 1st time RPGer was downright giddy he gets a new feat and HP for his Fighter:Scout. Plus, it will help him survive the next wave of monsters.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So what do you call what the PCs were doing to get that experience?

Real-world experience. You need both real-world experience and personal practice time in order to really improve, at least in my world.

It's like playing a new fighting game. You need to practice all of the moves and combos by yourself, but that's worthless unless you have a thinking opponent to put everything into context. You need both in order to raise your over-all game.

 

[GlassJaw]

Real-world experience. You need both real-world experience and personal practice time in order to really improve, at least in my world.

So adventurers don't constantly spar with each other during downtime in your world? Back in town, traveling, in camp, etc. A week for training is arbitrary, especially when it's completely justifiable to hand-wave.

And what happens in that week? Does the player have to take his character out of the action? Or do you hand-wave the passage of the week? If the week of training has no implications during actual play, then what are you trying to solve with it?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So adventurers don't constantly spar with each other during downtime in your world? Back in town, traveling, in camp, etc. A week for training is arbitrary, especially when it's completely justifiable to hand-wave.

And what happens in that week? Does the player have to take his character out of the action? Or do you hand-wave the passage of the week? If the week of training has no implications during actual play, then what are you trying to solve with it?

In my particular case, the rule was a reaction to a recent Pathfinder campaign which saw people gaining multiple levels within a single dungeon. The rule I came up with is just that you need a week of downtime, at least eight hours per day, in order to gain the next level. You can split that up before you gain the required experience, between adventuring days, or after you get the experience; but there must be at least one week of in-game time between each level gained. You could consider it to be a maximum rate at which skill can be accrued, if you want.

It mostly isn't a big deal, because there's a lot of encounter-free travel time in this campaign - two weeks to get from the the wind spire to skull island, three weeks to get from Innesmouth to Stonehearth, etc. Nobody has to sit out, because everyone gains experience at the same time, so everyone needs to train at the same point. It's only there for verisimilitude, and as a final sanity check to prevent someone from going 1 to 20 over the course of one month.