Milestone Leveling: How long is too long?

[Nagog]

Howdy folks!

So I'm currently running a very long winded campaign, and we use Milestone Leveling. We've been running for about a year and a half now, and the party has progressed from level 1 to level 6 (almost to the 7 mark by now), and they are almost halfway through the storyline. Everybody seems to be having fun despite slow level progression, as I've been able to appeal to each player's interests and backstory hooks in a sort of revolving cycle.
In contrast, my first game (while Pathfinder instead of 5e) was also milestone leveling (supposedly), and while I was a part of that group for 2 years, I came in at level 11 and when it all fell apart everybody was still level 11, and we had mid to deadly combat encounters encompassing every session. Many people I spoke to that were involved in that campaign left due to lack of level or plot progression, so it's got me thinking about how frequently most DMs hand out level ups with Milestone leveling? What other factors go into whether something feels like a grind vs. real play and progression?

[Man_Over_Game]

Howdy folks!

So I'm currently running a very long winded campaign, and we use Milestone Leveling. We've been running for about a year and a half now, and the party has progressed from level 1 to level 6 (almost to the 7 mark by now), and they are almost halfway through the storyline. Everybody seems to be having fun despite slow level progression, as I've been able to appeal to each player's interests and backstory hooks in a sort of revolving cycle.
In contrast, my first game (while Pathfinder instead of 5e) was also milestone leveling (supposedly), and while I was a part of that group for 2 years, I came in at level 11 and when it all fell apart everybody was still level 11, and we had mid to deadly combat encounters encompassing every session. Many people I spoke to that were involved in that campaign left due to lack of level or plot progression, so it's got me thinking about how frequently most DMs hand out level ups with Milestone leveling? What other factors go into whether something feels like a grind vs. real play and progression?

I've actually been having this same concern now, albeit much earlier than you are as we're talking level 2 characters on their 5th session.

I started asking myself, I said "Self, when exactly should my players level up?" I wasn't sure what the answer was, considering things have been so easy, so I looked at what would be the definition of "too hard" would be for them. I looked at their resources, and realized that they haven't really ever ran themselves dry, haven't used most of their class features, haven't used up all of their HP...

I think that's the solution. When a group has been pushed to the limits of their current capabilities, it's time to extend those limits. When my players find themselves in a situation they're about to lose, that's when they deserve to level up. Otherwise, you're just giving a kid a piece of candy they didn't deserve. Once they understand what kind of situation causes them to lose, they'll know what they'll want in order to be better, and it puts real value into their level up.

[Zevox]

Your current campaign seems to be going at almost the exact same pace as mine for leveling (though story-wise we've gone through one campaign and are into a second), which seems to work well for our group. Everybody's been quite happy with the pacing of the story, and no one's had any complaints about how long leveling takes. I know from other threads that we'd be considered slow on leveling pace, but nobody minds, so, all good.

The second example you cite just sounds like it probably had serious pacing problems all around. I mean, not leveling once in two years is extremely odd, sure, but I can imagine being okay with it myself if I were otherwise having fun. The fact that players were complaining about a lack of plot progression over such a long period of time, though, is a big red flag in my mind. Unless you're only meeting like, once every two or three months, that amount of time should be long enough to get at least most of the way through even an extremely long campaign. If you were trying to meet weekly (which is what my group does), not finishing the campaign in that long would be very concerning in and of itself, to my mind, nevermind anything to do with when you level up.

[Pex]

From a player perspective it depends on how often the game is played. Personal bias I want levels 1 and 2 over with quickly. If we start at level 3 great, but if we must start at 1 I want level 2 by at most the end of Session 2 and level 3 Session 5 presuming you play once per week. The rough pattern might be a good rule of thumb. You gain a level after playing a number of sessions equal to your current level. Maybe it caps at 10.

Campaign circumstances of course come into play. The idea is to level after a major achievement. A set pattern is a framework not a template. It can happen that some sessions are all roleplay. Don't hold that against the players presuming they're not earning virtual XP despite using milestone. The climactic battle might happen one session later than you planned because of it. Maybe the all roleplay session happens after the climactic battle as the party resolves the situational circumstances. It's a meta-game rest. The recuperation allows for the moment of leveling.

If the game meets less than once a week that skewers things. Real time passing makes leveling seem longer even if you keep the same game session ratio. In the long run I suppose a set pattern per session sounds good on paper but not in practice. Don't worry about time and go by game events. You're using milestones by achievements so focus on the achievements. Perhaps a better rule of thumb is to have two or three adventure plot resolutions happen then level. (Personal bias remains I want levels 1 and 2 over with quickly, so one resolution each.) However many sessions it takes, it takes.

[heavyfuel]

I go by playtime.

Leveling up every 12 hours of play is a decent rule of thumb, but I don't get too attached to it.

I also try to keep story """chapters""" roughly this long as well.

When my friends and I play, it's usually 4 hour sessions, and we play almost every week, so it's a nice "once per month"

[FabulousFizban]

I use hours played for leveling. 2 hours for level 1 to level 2, 4 hours for levels 3-5, 8 hours for levels 6-10, 12 hours for 11-15, 16 hours a level the rest of the way. Missed a session? Then you don't get your hours. works pretty well.

[KOLE]

The DMG recommends 1 session each to advance to level 2 and 3, 2 sessions for level 4, and 2-3 sessions for every level after that. According the DMG, this "mirror the standard of advancement, assuming sessions are 4 hours long."

I don't know what they're smoking, because if you assume the XP budget provided by the DMG per adventuring day is roughly the equivalent of the XP that should be handed out each session, it's a lot more than that. I did the math once when I decided to shift away from fiat milestone and kind of combine it with pseudo-XP tracking, and while I don't remember the specifics it was between 5-9 sessions per level. That seems excessive to me. If you're trying to keep them grounded in terms of power for story reasons, they really start getting super human about level 6-7, so after that I'd stop worrying about keeping them from getting too high. Personally, my campaign stalls out so much because we're all busy adults, so I shoot for about 4 sessions per level up, buuut if they haven't accomplished much in those four sessions, I might throw them a bone or a high CR sidequest encounter on the 5th session to prove their worth and earn a level up. Honestly, I see no reason not to be generous with level ups. Yes, they should earn them, they shouldn't become trivial and you want them to feel like they earned them, but so many campaigns end before tier 3, and it's so rarely reached, and there's so many cool high CR creatures that I want to use, I err more towards giving it to them than not. So I'd say bout 4-7 productive sessions with some nailbiter encounters in there. More than that and I think you're dragging it out. Once you hit tier 4 though, it may be more appropriate to go 6-10 sessions, and if I remember correctly, that's about what it came out to according to the DMG numbers.

EDIT: I'm also a bit biased towards more rapid advancement because my group is lucky to play twice per month, and is usually closer to once a month. I finally got them to level 5 after roughly a year and a half. I really feel like that was too slow, but to be fair, every level up was after they completed a significant part of the story, whether they knew it or not. I blame myself for improper pacing, but scheduling has also been a nightmare.

[MrConsideration]

I'm most of a year through a campaign using milestone levelling and the players just levelled to 6 before the last sessions.

I level the players up after a significant story arc is completed. I occasionally do it out of guilt when I feel I've left it too long. I think they'd like to level faster but this way they appreciate the levels they get :).

[Contrast]

Many people I spoke to that were involved in that campaign left due to lack of level or plot progression

I'm playing in a game thats going on its third year (albeit played every other week with a couple of month long gaps) and we've gone from level 1 to 7 (with levels 1-3 bing the first 6 weeks and levels 4-7 being the next few years).

There have been periods where it felt like it was dragging a little but that was primarily when it didn't feel like we were achieving much plot wise either. Different people feel awarded by different things but my experience at least is that as long as stuff is happening and it feels like the world is reacting to the players choices in substantial ways then a game can function perfectly well with little/no levelling taking place.

Edit - I should say, I'm in another game where we've levelled probably every other session or every third session on average. That has also been a nice change of pace. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here to a certain extent. Choose the experience you want for the game and level appropriately to how you want to achieve it.

[MaxWilson]

The DMG recommends 1 session each to advance to level 2 and 3, 2 sessions for level 4, and 2-3 sessions for every level after that. According the DMG, this "mirror the standard of advancement, assuming sessions are 4 hours long."

I don't know what they're smoking, because if you assume the XP budget provided by the DMG per adventuring day is roughly the equivalent of the XP that should be handed out each session, it's a lot more than that.

That's not generally a valid assumption though--it would happen only if the DM spent the whole budget on solo encounters. The actual XP awarded will likely be somewhere around half of the "adjusted XP" used only for computing difficulty and pacing.

Of course the real variable here is how fast you play. Some groups can burn an hour just debating which door to go through.

[Yora]

As a rule of thumb, I've always considered gaining a new level roughly every 4 to 5 play sessions is a good thing to aim at, at least for the lower levels. I'd say after 10th level or so, it could even be up to double that.
In my current campaign, characters have just reached 5th level after having played 11-13 sessions, which I think is pretty fast, but this campaign is going to be shorter than originally expected, and why not have fun with bigger action in the final chapter?

But even with several days spend out at sea, the campaign is still spanning only 28 days, which is still silly fast as character growth is concerned.

[Tanarii]

The DMG recommends 1 session each to advance to level 2 and 3, 2 sessions for level 4, and 2-3 sessions for every level after that. According the DMG, this "mirror the standard of advancement, assuming sessions are 4 hours long."

I don't know what they're smoking, because if you assume the XP budget provided by the DMG per adventuring day is roughly the equivalent of the XP that should be handed out each session, it's a lot more than that.
If you award by difficulty of encounter (including non-combat), it works out to about:
1 each to 3
1.5 to 4
~2 to 5
2.4 each to 11
1.5 each to 17
2 each to 20

But the recommendation is to award by creature CR for combat, not by non-combat by difficulty. So unless all your combats are solos, you earn less than an adventuring days worth of XP from an adventuring day.

[Lunali]

We generally do it based on completing significant quests/story arcs. This both increases the desire to change the world and encourages avoiding combat when it isn't necessary. A downside showed up on one occasion when we weren't "supposed" to do certain things on the same trip, ending up with three significant quests being completed at the same time. The DM managed to spread the levels out when he realized what was going to happen, but it still ended up with us going up 3 levels with a total of 4 fights and a bit of story in between.

[HappyDaze]

Before answering the title question, the following questions need answers:

What is the expected duration of the campaign?
What is the level range that the DM will allow for the campaign?
Is everyone comfortable with both of the previous answers?

Following the above, if everyone agrees that a campaign will go from level 5-10 and last 1 year, it might be reasonable to level up every two months of real time. If they want to do the same in a shorter campaign, then increase the rate of leveling. It's really just that simple in my eyes.

[BardicDuelist]

So I told my group that up to level 5, they could expect a number of sessions equal to their level at each level (presuming that they actually did stuff each session). So 1 at 1, 2 at 2, 3 at 3, and so fourth. Tier 1 was basically a prologue, establishing who the characters were in the world and making themselves known to important NPCs. It roughly correlated to a number of fights per level.

After level 5 it became about story beats, pacing, and feel. I told them that they had to have at least 6 encounters that expended resources, and had to feel spent at least once if not more. Playing it safe (with lots of rests, and avoiding danger) would result in much slower leveling. I showed them the number of encounters worth of XP that the game assumes to explain that this wasn't me being stingy.

[EggKookoo]

FWIW I had been using milestone for my current campaign, but I ran into the same questions. I got them to 2nd at a point that felt a tad too late, and to 3rd at a point that definitely felt too late, and started wondering how long it should be before they hit 4th. So to work it out, I went back and figured out where they would be if I had been calculating XP all along. Turns out I had them hit 2nd at exactly the right point but they should have hit 3rd two sessions sooner than they did, and they're now about 40% the way toward 4th.

This made me wonder why I'm even doing milestone if the result is the same or slower, so I think moving forward I'm going to just calculate XP in the traditional way.

[HappyDaze]

I find that milestones also work better with downtime training requirements (but only if you plan ahead). Training times never seem to work out so well with XP-based advancement.

[ThatoneGuy84]

As a DM using milestones, I present enough "hooks" and quests to allow them to advance roughly like this.
1-5 ( 2 sessions per level )
5-11 ( 4 sessions per level )
11-20 ( 7 sessions per level )
We play 1session a week, 6 hours usually
For longer campaigns this works pretty well.

Sometimes the players figure out how to get more milestones in a single game, and it speeds up the progress for them at that time, which I'm 100% alright with.

1-5 takes 8-10 weeks
5-11 takes twice that
11-20 almost twice that again

[Cybren]

So I told my group that up to level 5, they could expect a number of sessions equal to their level at each level (presuming that they actually did stuff each session). So 1 at 1, 2 at 2, 3 at 3, and so fourth. Tier 1 was basically a prologue, establishing who the characters were in the world and making themselves known to important NPCs. It roughly correlated to a number of fights per level.

After level 5 it became about story beats, pacing, and feel. I told them that they had to have at least 6 encounters that expended resources, and had to feel spent at least once if not more. Playing it safe (with lots of rests, and avoiding danger) would result in much slower leveling. I showed them the number of encounters worth of XP that the game assumes to explain that this wasn't me being stingy.

At the point where you're creating multiple criteria that must be met, via combat encounters, why not just... use XP

[Pex]

At the point where you're creating multiple criteria that must be met, via combat encounters, why not just... use XP

Laziness, not wanting to calculate the math?

[da newt]

In my opinion 1 session (4-6 hrs) per level for levels 1-3, then ~ 4 sessions per level for everything else is about right.

I do find that if the story and players aren't really keeping me engaged, then more than 4 sessions per level starts to feel stagnant to me. The new toys that come with new levels helps keep me interested.

But I'm someone who wants to play many different PCs, and have little experience above lvl 12 ...

I also play some AL where you lvl up every session usually, sometimes a module lasts 2 sessions, and that is way too fast to feel earned, or even let you get to really know your PC.

[timesparrow]

I disagree with longer times between levels resulting in more appreciation of the new level. I've played in a game where, due to homebrew mixed milestone/xp system based off the video game the plot idea came from, the party went real-life months, bordering on a year, without leveling up. When the levels finally came, it was less joy and more of a "finally", the long wait pulled all the excitement out of the leveling up, although this is an extreme example.

On the other hand, getting levels too fast can also result in less excitement from leveling up. The aforementioned system resulted in multiple level ups at once, 3-5 levels, when we finally leveled, which also made the levels less special.

[Sindeloke]

What qualifies as a "milestone" is vague enough that it's hard to make a definitive all-purpose rule. If your team was hired to rescue the prince, is the milestone the moment when you rescue the prince? Is it several moments, including the bit where you actually find out where he's being held, the bit where you defeat the dragon guarding him, and the bit where you escort him home through the dangerous Fields Of Endless Exploding? Are you getting a milestone done per session, or two, or only one per four or so?

Our rule of thumb is "to level up, achieve milestones equal to your current proficiency bonus," and we play milestones entirely by ear. If something feels like an accomplishment they fought pretty hard for, that's a milestone, which is sometimes several sessions of putting dominoes into place and then finally knocking them over in a glorious moment of triumph, and is sometimes one really wild night of gaming where they walk face-first into a beholder lair six levels early by accident and just manage to flail their way out alive. It feels about right, but if you were more generous with milestones than we are, "milestones equal to current level" might make for a better pace.

[Tanarii]

Nitpick: Milestones in 5e involves awarding XP. What's being referred to is properly called "Level Advancement Without XP".