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View Full Version : How long to lvl 20? (3.5)



Adamaro
2010-11-08, 07:21 AM
How much time do you think a character needs IN GAME to reach lvl 20? For melee classes, I think maybe 15 years to make an excellent swordsman like Miyamoto Musashi.
But for a caster, I think this time should be much much longer. IMO it should take immortality to reach certain far pre-epic lvls.

What's your estimate?

faceroll
2010-11-08, 07:44 AM
A well built endurance party who can find a CR appropriate encounter whenever they felt like could hit level 20 in a matter of days. A caster could likely more reliably do it, but would take longer cause they have a downtime of one day to get spells back.

dsmiles
2010-11-08, 07:56 AM
How much time do you think a character needs IN GAME to reach lvl 20? For melee classes, I think maybe 15 years to make an excellent swordsman like Miyamoto Musashi.
But for a caster, I think this time should be much much longer. IMO it should take immortality to reach certain far pre-epic lvls.

What's your estimate?

Years. There are things you do in between adventures. Travelling, R&R, etc. These things take time. Sure, you could handwave all of that, but it takes away from development of the world around the PCs.
The world is not static, it does not revolve around the PCs. Sometimes there are weeks or months between 'adventures.' Not everybody has a problem that only the PCs can handle.

Mastikator
2010-11-08, 07:59 AM
Days if you powergame, years if you roleplay.
Basically.

SensFan
2010-11-08, 08:17 AM
I find it usually averages about one year per level over the course of a long campaign; shorter for the earlier levels, and more for the later ones. It averages out to about a couple decades to go from 1-20 in my experience. Which leads to wierd aging issues when Elves travel with Half-Orcs.

Ernir
2010-11-08, 08:40 AM
One of the parties I DM for has gone from 1 to 15 in about half an in-game year.

This feels fast to me, but given the choice of having them get good at what they do really fast and having their enemies look like idiots that don't do anything three days out of four, I'm making them level.

Psyx
2010-11-08, 09:28 AM
Expedition to Castle Greyhawk got us to 14th level from 6th in about 4 weeks!

Myth
2010-11-08, 09:39 AM
IRL becoming a master swordsman takes at a minimum, 10 or so years of training and then at least a few years of battlefield or duel experience or another decade of more training. IRL magic... Hmm... OK let's not get into that.

For DND It could be possible for a party to just hack and slash it's way to lvl 20 in 3 months. But for classes who get innate power and get stronger or rediscover themselves or whatever.

3 months is not enough for the Wizard to scribe all the spells he wants in his spellbook, let alone adventure.

awa
2010-11-08, 10:00 AM
Days if you powergame, years if you roleplay.
Basically.

I strongly disagree with that comment it depends on the type of campaign many campaigns have very little down time moving from one threat to the next particularly if the game has an overriding narrative and not just one shot adventures.

that said i think it would take weeks bare minimum for a normal party because you need to stop to heal/recharge spells, longer if the party has to travel or look for shops.

DarkEternal
2010-11-08, 10:23 AM
Out of game time, the party I DM for took about a year to get from level 3 to level 16.

In game time, it went to about a year and a half of their adventuring.

For fighting classes it could be rather easier to obtain a level of mastery, depending on the amount of danger they find themselves in. The old "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger" is especially important here, and I do think that such classes walk off with far more experience under their belt from each skirmish they partake in, meaning if they are on a time schedule and basically go from campaign to campaign it is not too silly to think that they grew in power fairly fast due to the dangers of their every day life.

With casters it's a bit more iffy. I tend to think that most casters already have the knowledge under their belt after finishing the wizard academy or wherever they came from and then just collect further knowledge and expand their powers through meeting new people and learning about new stuff which makes them make their powers that much more potent.

Duke of URL
2010-11-08, 10:37 AM
It really depends on the tone and tenor of your specific game. A high-intensity campaign may see relatively rapid leveling (from an in-game viewpoint), while a more normal pace of related (or unrelated) adventures will take much, much longer.

In the former case, realism can be somewhat salvaged by saying that the bulk of the training occurs prior to adventuring -- that over the course of adventuring, the character crystallizes what he/she has learned through actual application and the stress of the "crucible" of battle. The fighter had been studying that specific technique for years, but has just now really "gotten it" to the point that he trusts it in battle. The sorcerer taps into innate power she always had but now has the practical experience and confidence to use use it. The wizard has been studying these spells for years, and through the practical application of magic grows to understand them well enough to put them to use. And so on.

The latter model is more of the mode of gaining practical experience, and then take downtime to reflect on it and learn something from it. The fighter has spotted a pattern in battle that allows him to train and perfect a new technique. The sorcerer discovers new ways of tapping her potential and practices to control it. The wizard learns more about the nature of magic, making his study of more complicated spells easier.

Both are equally valid ways of approaching a campaign. I think "old school D&D" generally presumes the latter method, but the videogame era lends itself to the former model.

hiryuu
2010-11-08, 12:25 PM
According to the game rules and the 4 encounter/day model, about ~13 in-game weeks.

dsmiles
2010-11-08, 12:30 PM
According to the game rules and the 4 encounter/day model, about ~13 in-game weeks.

IF every day is spent adventuring.

lesser_minion
2010-11-08, 12:34 PM
IIRC, the rules seem to put it at around 391 + (19 * int modifier) weeks for a rogue, if you apply every single training requirement you can find. You're not expected to use them all, however, and I've probably omitted some of the factors, so assuming power levelling and training requirements, it would generally be faster in actual play.

If you go by no-training-required, four guaranteed CR-appropriate encounters a day, then you'll be levelling up nearly twice a week, but that completely rapes any sense in the campaign, so we'll assume that's not how it works.

391 weeks -- or 7.5 years -- is still incredibly fast, compared with what we'd expect in the real world.

PersonMan
2010-11-08, 02:17 PM
I think it depends on how you want to view levels.

I, for example, enjoy playing fairly young, very high-level characters-including one that's essentially fresh out of an academy yet is level 22.

If you want levels to always be from experience, or if you feel like they can represent a sort of inner power, they'll be different. The difference between "Ah-HA! [Vague message] makes so much sense now!" and "After a pillar of light surrounded me, I can cast more spells" is, essentially, fluff.

When I DM I either say "level up when I say so" and have them do so right after a major battle or other important event, or I do it by the book rules with XP, which is usually far faster. Yes, you just gained the ability to cast new spells in the middle of the desert. Why? You're the heroes(or villains, or whatever), that's why.

Since my concepts are usually the same no matter what level it is(although at very high/low levels I feel less and more restricted with the character's awesomeness, respectively), I usually add or subtract little things from the background depending on the DM.

big teej
2010-11-08, 03:46 PM
in my group, our current 'in game' time matches out real life time (sorta)

for instance, we're running a 'teaching module' that I have decided that (in game) roughly a week takes place in game between each adventure (just like in real life as we meet once a week)

so lets say we've had 8 sessions (I may be off by 1 or 2)
that means the characters have been adventuring (and chilling in the tavern) for roughly 2 months (really closer to 2 months and maybe half a week due to travel times built into some of the adventures)

and the party is level 2 (Soon to be 3)

now that said, so far the party has had ALOT of down time (a week between adventures, discounting time it takes to travel to the site of the adventure)

so to make it to level 20 at our current rate... (warning, my math is bad)

if 7 sessions = level 2, assuming one 'adventure' per week
it should take....
7*20=140 weeks to reach level 20.... assumming CR appropriate challenges, no creation costs, and an adventure an IC week....

I think..
double check my math please, I"m terrible at it

Sleepingbear
2010-11-08, 04:16 PM
Assuming 4 encounters of a CR equal to a party per day and 13.5 encounters to level and assuming that the party adventures every day, then 20th level could be achieved in as little as 65 days (13.5/4=3.375 3.375X19 levels=64.125).

I can't see this ever happening in practice.

In an actual game that lasted four real life years, our characters went from first to 21st level in a little less than three years game time. There were two six month 'breaks' in game where the party was not adventuring. The campaign was such that there was constant adventuring.

John Campbell
2010-11-08, 05:04 PM
IME, uh... actually, never. We tend to bail out somewhere in the mid-teens, when it becomes impossible to ignore any longer how terribly broken the game is.

But based on progression rates up to that point, something like a year and a half to two years of in-game time.

grimbold
2010-11-10, 01:23 PM
well it depends.
If you have an action packed couple of months (Ex Eragon Books) you can level up really, really fast.
if you have a slower type of adventure you might take longer
really it just depends on adventure pace

Aotrs Commander
2010-11-10, 06:20 PM
Most of the games I run tend to be fast-paced with little downtime save between campaigns. So levelling up tends to happen fast during "action" times and very little to none at all during "quiet" periods.

Our Orbslayers party - currently level 18, about to hit 19, the highest we've ever had - has gone from 1st to there in about three in-game years; the bulk of that time being a two-year hiatus in the space between the end of their first campaign and the start of the next, with "some months" kicking around in Sigil after that one before the current one. The actual campaigns took place in the space of only a few weeks each (and again, even much of that was travel time.)

I look at it this way. If you are a PC, you are basically the protagonist in some story. Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies, so in that by the very act of observing the characters, they are automatically elevated above the normal hum-drum status of the world around them and thus are "special." Non PCs may spend years attaining high level. But the PCs will reach there in a rapid time simply because they are PCs and, like a black hole, distort reality around them, so that those that cross their path - for good or evil - will often be dragged into that self-same "special" status. Thus, the PCs are like the protagonists in, well, nearly anything, where they go from green to elite to tackle the Big Bad (or the Big Good) in fractions of the time others do not, and are able to stand on even ground to face beings who are much older and have advanced much more slowly. Because they are simply being observed.

It's all a bit meta.

AslanCross
2010-11-10, 06:26 PM
How much time do you think a character needs IN GAME to reach lvl 20? For melee classes, I think maybe 15 years to make an excellent swordsman like Miyamoto Musashi.
But for a caster, I think this time should be much much longer. IMO it should take immortality to reach certain far pre-epic lvls.

What's your estimate?

Your assumption is that Musashi was indeed Lv 20. While he was excellent, I doubt any real life person would translate as a Lv 20 character.

That said, in my experience, it has taken 2 months (in-game; I was tracking the calendar) of intense, non-stop adventuring for characters to get from Lv 5 to 12. This means that depending on their adventures, it can take as little as half a year to get all the way to 20. It really depends on the events in the gaming world and how prolific the adventurers are. As has been said above posts, the gaming world is dynamic and can vary a lot.

WitchSlayer
2010-11-10, 07:26 PM
Miyamoto Musashi is totally a rogue and not a fighter.

Just sayin'

Tvtyrant
2010-11-11, 03:08 AM
Level 10 in real life is far, far beyond possible. We are talking about killing hundreds of people by your self. Seriously, a level 10 Fighter or Ranger can kill 100 level 1 archers without needing to heal. Especially with Great Cleave for the fighter or full attack archery for the ranger.

Mastikator
2010-11-11, 03:15 AM
I strongly disagree with that comment it depends on the type of campaign many campaigns have very little down time moving from one threat to the next particularly if the game has an overriding narrative and not just one shot adventures.

that said i think it would take weeks bare minimum for a normal party because you need to stop to heal/recharge spells, longer if the party has to travel or look for shops.

Either the threats aren't really that threatening (and should be low exp), or the characters will be often dying. Dying should be at least one level loss (which should slow the leveling process) (though, I am personally a fan of perma-death).

Leveling fast only occurs when the DM is handing out exp like candy, or if the players powergame and has zero interest in roleplaying.
Which is totally fine. There are no right and wrong playstyles.

Alleran
2010-11-11, 03:40 AM
I, for example, enjoy playing fairly young, very high-level characters-including one that's essentially fresh out of an academy yet is level 22.

If you want levels to always be from experience, or if you feel like they can represent a sort of inner power, they'll be different. The difference between "Ah-HA! [Vague message] makes so much sense now!" and "After a pillar of light surrounded me, I can cast more spells" is, essentially, fluff.
I've sort of had characters (NPCs) comment on it. One wizard had lived a very scholarly life, and did slowly gain power as a result, but after he was thrown into the adventures of the party, he found himself gaining power very rapidly, and recognised the difference in gain.

A bit like fitness training, maybe. Sure, if you go for an hour or two hour walk every day, you'll maintain a level of fitness, even get slightly fitter, but if you start adventuring like most PC groups do, it's like training from hell by comparison.

FelixG
2010-11-11, 05:54 AM
I honestly have no idea how long it normally takes, one thing though, the "adventures every day" model rather annoys me as people need to rest and recoup every now and then especially in life threatening situations!

Plus the time between adventures is the crafters best friend :D