I have been giving some thought recently to the issue of advancement for the D&D game in light of the plan to play through all three tiers of play. Three options come to mind:
1. Play the damn game as written you compulsive tinkering noob!
As written it takes 10 encounters to go from one level to the next. This remains the same throughout the entirety of the level spread. Encounters can include both combat and non combat and you also get xp for completing quests.
This is fine until you factor in that our games tend to be rather light on the combat side. Of course I expect the social, political and investigative side to be fairly significant and I will certainly be awarding xp for them but it does raise an issue of speed of advancement.
Bear in mind that across 18 months or so of Crescent Sea we managed to hit the heady heights of level 8.
2. You finished the session, have a level, welcome to Monty Haul!
Super fast advancement at one level per session gives me a definate timescale for the game, three Seasons of 10 episodes each. Making that match the actual pace of the game might be trickier and it isnt a particularly elegant solution.
3. Xp, we dont need no fricken xp.
Just give you level ups as and when it seems appropriate. This could be at the end of an adventure, on resolution of some big character issue or for any other reason really. When you finish the Heroic tier game arc just advance you to the Paragon level and move on from there. Repeat for Epic tier.
On the face of it this is really quite tempting but it is a bit of a jump away from the rules and I know how some of you like to play using the rules (at least initially). It also removes any obvious method of tracking your own progress.
So, any views, opinions, alternate suggestions, preferences?
4 comments:
I prefer option 3 - far less crunchy, can occur at dramatic moments, you have better control of when it happens (remembering the 'I just need one more level to get teleport' so here is a silly dungeon to do so moment).
I'm happy with any of them. Oh my spelk-ridden arse.
1. is fine by me
2. could actually be quite good as it paces the campaign
3. is how I did Crescent Sea (with the veneer of xp added on top...)
I think I might like to try (2) so that we could be assured that we would see the spread of the game.
Neil
Well, there may not be that much difference between 2 / 3. If you go for 2 then you have 10 sessions period, while this might be interesting it could also be restrictive.
In practice 3 might be only slightly different in that it may end up very close to 2 but gives you the flexibility to have level 5 span 3 sessions if you want to tweak the pacing.
So, the answer is maybe 3, but keep the pacing of 2 in mind. That way we get to see the spread of the game (as in heroic isn't going to go for 30 sessions, but it may expand to 12 or 14).
It also allows you to go 1 pers session until level 3-4 if you see a certain plateau.
Ian.
Yeah that was generally my thinking but I wanted to canvass opinions first before donning the Viking Hat.
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