Leveling Up Time (In Months and Years.)

[Otherworld Odd]

I'm planning on taking my play group through a temporary "time-jump" where they'll become their future selfs. (From level 4 to 15). It's not permanent or anything but I came here to ask you guys how long it would take in game for a standard 3.P adventurer to level up from level 4 to level 15. A couple years? Ten years? Assume there's only an extremely standard rate of adventure and dungeons.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Unfortunately there is no easy answer to your question. In a dungeon crawl a party could conceivably gain the xp to level every few days assuming they could get in one level appropriate encounter after another. As silly as in seems all that leveling could be done in a month or so.

In other games there could be weeks or months of downtime or travel between periods with sufficient challenges to gain xp. I’ve considered instituting rules for training time of a level to be gained in weeks. That would require 122 weeks; about 2 years 4 months of just training to go from 4 to 15. How long xp would take to accumulate is again purely based on the speed of your campaign.

[tiercel]

Yikes... that's a tough one. Obviously it will depend on whether you have training time to go up a level, but more especially if there are stretches of time where the PCs are undertaking activities not directly to adventuring (long-distance travel time without teleport, crafting/commissioning magic item creation, RP activities like setting up a guild or stronghold).

Your guesstimate will have to take into consideration these factors... how much of each you think likely / are planning in the long term. Of course, you don't have to get it all right -- if it turns out you're off, you can always claim that your players have "changed the timeline" due to their choices (after all, you probably aren't going to lock your players into playing their "future self" character builds as they earn their way back up).

[Zaq]

Well, if you want to oversimplify things, the DMG says on page 41 that roughly 13.33 encounters of party-appropriate CR/EL are necessary to gain a level. It also says that the party should face about four encounters a day. There are 11 levels between 4 and 15. 11 * 13.33 = 146.667, and 146.667 / 4 = 36.667. So, it'll take about a month and a week, assuming that encounters with above-party ELs and encounters with below-party ELs average each other out, and that the party doesn't take weekends off.

If you enforce (or encourage) downtime between adventures, you can pad that out a bit, but realistically, if anyone's adventuring consistently enough to his level 15, they're probably not taking years and years off between dungeons.

You may find this to be incredibly silly, but it's a useful starting point.

[Otherworld Odd]

Oh heavens no. One of the ideas was to show how they have altered the timeline when they do go back and get to level 15 in their own time period. (Such as giving them scars in their future the first time and when they get there the second time they don't have them because they actually killed the monster before suffering the wound.)

I'd have to say that between each dungeon we do, there's probably 2 to 3 weeks of training time and off-adventure time for them to do whatever they like. The three modules we've completed so far have had them traveling for about a week round-trip not including the few days of dungeon time (my party takes it reeeeal slow in dungeons, often resting up multiple times which isn't necessarily a bad thing.)

I guess I'll go ahead and ballpark it somewhere between two to three years since I don't require extensive training time to level up (as long as they have time of course. It just doesn't go ping in the middle of the dungeon.)

[Hand_of_Vecna]

It seems like you have a pretty reasonable base to go on. You might want to consider that in many games downtime gets longer as the campaign stretches on as there is simply more "stuff" for mid-high level characters to do; politics, business, item creation, advancing in or forming guilds/churches/orders.

[Otherworld Odd]

One of the characters is a weaponsmith or armorsmith by trade (forgot which one) so there's definitely going to be time down between adventures for that sort of thing once they started uncovering more resources. And most of the other players have jobs that any normal commoner in the actual town would have that htey kept when they became adventurers. Of course once they leave the town, some of them would have to quit their jobs but the armor/weaponsmith and the animal trainer can take their jobs with them to other cities since it only relies on their skills. So yeah, I think 2 to 3 years sounds reasonable and of course if they do it faster once they actually progress I can just say they changed the future with their actions as you said.


Much thanks guys, I'll come back if they start throwing books and death threats at me. >_>.