How long does it take to reach level 20?

[dededo11]

For those of you who have reached level 20, how long did it take you to get there (in real life time and in game time)?

[nickl_2000]

Played 5e for 5+ years in different campaigns and have never made it to level 20. So, my data so far says infinite time. Made it to level 17 in on campaign that took 2 years real time (playing every 2 weeks) and only about 6 months game time.

In theory we should get to 20 since we have a Mad Mage Campaign going though.

[DeTess]

About 2 real world years in a weekly game that over those two years can't have missed more than 5-6 or so sessions. In-game I think it took us several months, I'm not entirely sure.

[Shabbazar]

It has never happened in my experience in 5E. I ran an AD&D campaign in the early 1980s when I was in high school and we played fanatically. It took the players about 2 years real time. But that was playing about 20 hours a week during the school year and maybe 40 hours a week over Christmas and summer vacation.

Like I said, we were kind of fanatical. :smallwink: But in our defense we didn't have video games or cable TV.

The experience and progression system in AD&D is vastly different than 5E.

In world time? Maybe a couple years. But that was distorted because they went on a big circuitous overland journey to explore the entire World of Greyhawk. So that ate up a lot of time.

It does seem odd though. Both people's new experience in 5E and my old experience, literally 40 years ago, in AD&D were similar in the short amount of in-game time that it takes to rise to exalted levels. Kind of like graduating high school and being a multi-millionaire Senator 6 months later. It's just odd the way that seems to play out.

[Darth Credence]

In the campaign I am currently running, I have it planned out for when they will reach level 20, and I fully expect them to do so. In real time, I think it may take 2 years. In game time, it is going to take 17 years. I have no idea how they could possibly reach level 20 in anything less than a decade in world time.

[Gtdead]

It's been quite a while since I did the calculation so I'm not sure I remember correctly, but it takes about 120 days of 3-4 deadly encounters per day to reach level 20 from lvl 1. So if you are playing once per week, it's going to be 2-2.5 years to reach it.
Of course the DM can use a different XP system if he wants to reach max level faster.

[firelistener]

In the campaign I am currently running, I have it planned out for when they will reach level 20, and I fully expect them to do so. In real time, I think it may take 2 years. In game time, it is going to take 17 years. I have no idea how they could possibly reach level 20 in anything less than a decade in world time.

If you're using combat XP, it's suprisingly easy. Even taking several months for downtime between quests, it's pretty normal to rake in enough to max out at 20 in that time frame. The DMG suggests enough XP in an adventuring day for each party member to level up in 1 or 2 days, regardless of level. It works out to be around 5 to 10 encounters if you stick around medium CR. So if you're just non-stop fighting level-appropriate monsters every day until you need to rest, you could easily hit 20 within a single month.

Most games seem to have tons of role play and exploration surrounding combat though, in practice, so it's fair that the above model doesn't reflect most players' experience. I often see people complaining on here how unbalanced the game feels when they only have 1 encounter per day, so it seems like most games just have way less combat than the DMG suggests.

I can't really speak for milestone XP since that's ultimately just DM arbitration.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

Real life in the last game I am running is 8-10 months(I am not sure when we started).

In game time 8-10 months.

[Kane0]

About a dozen rounds of pizza and beers

[Kyutaru]

For normal people? About three years.

For mass-murdering psychopathic murder hobos? About three cities.

[Darth Credence]

If you're using combat XP, it's suprisingly easy. Even taking several months for downtime between quests, it's pretty normal to rake in enough to max out at 20 in that time frame. The DMG suggests enough XP in an adventuring day for each party member to level up in 1 or 2 days, regardless of level. It works out to be around 5 to 10 encounters if you stick around medium CR. So if you're just non-stop fighting level-appropriate monsters every day until you need to rest, you could easily hit 20 within a single month.

Most games seem to have tons of role play and exploration surrounding combat though, in practice, so it's fair that the above model doesn't reflect most players' experience. I often see people complaining on here how unbalanced the game feels when they only have 1 encounter per day, so it seems like most games just have way less combat than the DMG suggests.

I can't really speak for milestone XP since that's ultimately just DM arbitration.

I should have been clearer - I can see how they can get there if they just go on a giant dungeon slog, acquiring XP as they go. What I don't see is how I can possibly justify from a narrative perspective that they will ascend that quickly. If the players can level up that quickly, then so can NPCs, which means to me that every fifth person you meet is going to be level 20. I guess I could run that world, but I don't want to do so. Normally, when there is combat, there are several encounters per day, but a lot of days go by without any combat.
It's going to be seventeen years. I know this, because the convergence where all three moons will be dark at the same time is just over 17 years away in game time, and they will need to hit level 20 to deal with it.

[ThatoneGuy84]

Massive dungeon crawl when we did 2-20
Was about 3-4 sessions a Level (20 level dungeon)
Levels where setup for roughly enough Exp to level for each level of the dungeon for clearing.
Sometimes a level took 5 weeks.
I'd say it took roughly 2years

[Shabbazar]

So I kind of roughed out and averaged our sessions, and based on my previous post, if we had been playing weekly sessions of 5 hours per session, it would have taken us over 10 years real time to reach 20th level.

The thing is, once you get to a certain level you "should" be evolving into another style of play beyond hack and slash in a dungeon. As you get more involved in politics, etc. the rewards that the characters get are in-game political and social power, not necessarily conventional adventuring experience. Level climb slows down even beyond the increased amount needed for each level.

But that's a play style thing. I put "should" in quotes because a lot of people don't play that way. It just seems that after a point the whole murder-hobo thing gets old.

[diplomancer]

In my experience, 2.5 years

[Wizard_Lizard]

Currently haven't got past like 7, and that was milestone, and I gave the levels way too quickly. Otherwise I've never got past 5.

[NecessaryWeevil]

I should have been clearer - I can see how they can get there if they just go on a giant dungeon slog, acquiring XP as they go. What I don't see is how I can possibly justify from a narrative perspective that they will ascend that quickly. If the players can level up that quickly, then so can NPCs, which means to me that every fifth person you meet is going to be level 20.

Possibly. If you assume the PCs are typical members of their society, in terms of motivation, capability, opportunity, and survival rate. You don't have to do so.

[sithlordnergal]

I wanna say less then a year...about 7 months at most. That said, I play a bunch of AL, so getting from level 1-5 takes a week tops, then its just a matter of finding the right tiers.

[ProsecutorGodot]

Our campaign will have gone for 2 years in just 4 weeks from now. We're level 18, I'd wager we've still got at least 3 or 4 months left in the campaign.

In world time? Not even 8 months. It's not unusual that our growth would be rapid though, it's Dungeon of the Mad Mage, the fact that we've survived near daily trips into Undermountain for this long has clued most bystanders in on how exceptional we are. That and they think we're insane to keep going down there when we've gained enough wealth and renown to retire into wealthy business owners and/or nobility.

[Keravath]

This is absolutely dependent on the DM and campaign.

Some folks who have been playing for a long time likely have a very slow leveling rate.

If you run homebrew material you likely have a different rate from published modules.

If you use milestones instead of XP then you likely have a very different rate of advancement.

Some examples:

1) Adventurers League - season 9 rules - playing a hardcover

Level 1-4 - takes 4 hours of hardcover play/level - so 4x 4 is 16 hours of play to level 5.
Level 5-20 - takes 8 hours of hardcover play/level - so 15 x 8 is 120 more hours of play to level 20
Total time is 136 hours - which is 34 hardcover sessions. If you play once a week for four hours each then you are looking at 8-9 months.

However, if you are playing AL modules, the current rules allow you to level up after every module if you want to take the level up. It reduces the amount of gold and magic item options you can earn but reduces the play time to 19 x 4 hours = 78 hours or about 5 months.

If you really wanted to power level in AL (there really isn't any point in doing this to be honest) but you could substitute 2 hour modules for 4 hour ones and finish in 1/2 the time if you can get someone to run 2 x 2 hour modules every session.

This is probably the fastest advancement and typically faster than many table play.

However,

2) I am currently running Curse of Strahd, in which (by the book) advancement occurs for milestones for acquiring the prophecy related items and for completing the different encounters available at different locations on the map. At the moment, I am running it with slightly delayed progression since otherwise they could be level 8 or 9 now instead of just advancing to level 7. The advancement that is included in the module would, for my table, result in a rate of advancement comparable to AL. The death house encounter at the beginning for example takes the characters from level 1->3 and runs typically 2 sessions.

I expect the characters to finish this between levels 10 and 13 at a rate comparable to AL based on the milestones set out in the module.

If COS used XP, I am dubious that the characters would be past level 5 and might only reach level 7 unless the DM added a lot of random encounters. The hardcover has quite a bit of role play and exploration with generally single difficult encounters. Total XP is pretty limited.


I am also currently running a campaign using Saltmarsh and Tales from the Yawning Portal. In it I have been leveling the characters slower than recommended by the content so that they are an appropriate level to play the low level adventures from both books consecutively. Sunless Citadel ran about 12 to 16 hours. The characters leveled up to 2 about 6 hours into the adventure. I didn't level them to 3 at the end since they will be doing the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh next. This game will likely take much longer to reach level 20 but the players involved all started with AD&D and are used to a much longer leveling cycle than 5e. (In this case, the players are getting used to the idea of full healing on long rests and what they gain back on short rests .. if anything they likely think the advancement feels a bit fast). If this campaign continues it could take a couple of years to level 20.




3) What does the DMG say?

"SESSION-BASED ADVANCEMENT
A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long."

So ... based on this rate of advancement - 2 sessions to level 3, 4 sessions to level 4 and then 2-3 sessions/level after that. This is about 52 sessions to level 20 assuming 3 sessions/level past level 4. In this case, with 4 hour sessions it would take about a year. The DMG also mentions that this mirrors the "standard" rate based on XP.

4) XP vs Milestones

If you are leveling based on XP then there tends to be a bias towards combat and killing things for XP. In my general experience (and I know there are exceptions) ... many modules and DMs might reward reduced or no XP for role playing encounters rather than combat ones. The XP for a combat encounter is spelled out in the book - but if the characters stealth past the encounter - does the DM reward them full XP as if they had killed all of the creatures in the encounter? Typically not. It's a DM call.

The other way to look at it is from the idea of how many encounters would be required/level if you only used typical combat encounters?

The following link has a table with numbers.

https://rpgbot.net/dnd5/dungeonmasters/campaign_planning/

In that table, it takes about 200 typical encounters to reach level 20 using XP. I don't know how many combat encounters your table gets through in a single 4 hour session ... but in my case, if actually playing the game and role playing and not just jumping from combat to combat, then I'll probably manage 2 to 3 at most. In some cases, with a huge encounter, there might be only 1. At this rate it will take closer to 100 sessions to reach level 20 or in other words more like 2 years of playing 1/week.

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So how long does it take to reach level 20? Anywhere from a minimum of about 6 months to any time over 2 years with one 4 hour session/week.

[tatsuyashiba]

2.5 years. And we only made it to lvl 19, retired our characters, as started a new campaign at lvl 1.

[Dark.Revenant]

When using pure combat XP alone to level up, the leveling rate slows down exponentially as you increase in level. This is because you tend to fight larger, more complicated battles. This is a double-whammy. First, it takes longer to get through, meaning you'll earn comparatively less XP per hour. Second, large battles have higher adjusted XP multipliers, meaning you'll earn comparatively less XP per fight appropriate for your party.

For example, a party of four level-11 characters up against a single iron golem is technically a deadly encounter, but it's a boring (and likely trivialized) one that the DM is unlikely to give a tier 3 party. It's going to grant 15,000 XP too, making defeating it a hefty XP reward.

Instead, let's suppose the same party faces a mage, the mage's earth elemental, two knights, two archers, and a bard. This is a much tougher (and longer) fight with an adjusted XP total of 18,375, but when victorious the players are only awarded 7,350 XP for their trouble.

This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that most of the Tier 3 levels have reduced XP thresholds compared to the general trend.

[Kyutaru]

Just a reminder that 44 commoners fit under one fireball. During mass panics, like say a deranged party is on a killing spree, you'll be getting up to 440 xp per cast.

AOE farming is common in lots of games and weaker things bring in faster XP than stronger things when killed en masse.