Fun fact: Number of adventuring days per level

[MoiMagnus]

Looking through the DMG, I've found a table I've never really read before, the "Adventuring Day XP". Following this table, how many adventuring days are required to level up? Here are the results:


Next level in 1 day
Next level in 1 day, total 2 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 4 days
Next level in 2.2 days, total 6 days
Next level in 2.1 days, total 8 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 11 days
Next level in 2.2 days, total 13 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 15 days
Next level in 2.1 days, total 17 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 20 days
Next level in 1.4 days, total 21 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 23 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 24 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 26 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 28 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 29 days
Next level in 1.6 days, total 31 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 32 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 34 days
Level 20 has been reached in slightly less than 34 days


I'd also note that an adventuring day is roughly 3 deadly encounters in term of XP.

[EggKookoo]

I'm running a 5e campaign now and the party is about 3/4 through 6th level. Your numbers actually line up pretty well with how it's going. In-fiction it's been about three weeks since they started at 1st, and they haven't had a ton of downtime. I also did hold them at 1st level a little too long (a mistake on my part).

[Chronos]

I really would have expected to see some rhyme or reason to those numbers... but darned if I can find any.

[JackPhoenix]

I really would have expected to see some rhyme or reason to those numbers... but darned if I can find any.

You're supposed to get to level 4 very quick, to get through tutorial levels. Then you're supposed to level slower through mid-level up to 11, because that's the most popular range, and the game isn't too broken by high-level spellcasters yet. After that, you level up quickly again, to get to 20 in reasonable time.

[sambojin]

"Well, firstly I went to the tavern for a drink, and met some weirdos there. We got pretty drunk, and decided to investigate some old ruins just outside town. It sorta escalated from there. Now I'm an almost immortal Archdruid, the head of my Circle, praised by kings and peasants alike. It's been a crazy month man......"

[MoiMagnus]

I really would have expected to see some rhyme or reason to those numbers... but darned if I can find any.

The rough approximation is somewhat regular:
Level 1 & 2 are 1 day per level, and act as tutorial levels.
Level 3 is at 1.5 day per level, and acts as a transition between level 2 and level 4.
Level 4-10 are 2.2 days per level, and are the core of the game.
Level 11-19 are 1.6 days per level, probably to account for the fact that a lot of the playing time is most likely no longer made of regular adventuring days.

Then, the rounding up of both the XP per level and the XP per day probably gave those weird results, added to that some designer eyeballing some slight changes because they felt like it matched better their need during their playtest.

[meandean]

This just illustrates how the devs couldn't have had any worse foresight about how things would turn out. They (somehow... why?) expected this simplified, friendlier version of the game to result in people playing punishing dungeon crawls with 5-7 encounters per day.

I'd bet small money that, in actual play, most parties who get to level 20 require at least a year of in-game time to get there. I'd bet big money that it's at least a few months.

[EggKookoo]

Keep in mind these are adventuring days (i.e. days with an average amount of XP-generating encounters), not just in-fiction days. So if you spend a week in town partying it up, that time doesn't count. So the in-fiction calendar time between 1st and 20th could be years, but it's not years' worth of adventuring days.

Running from 1st to 20th in one in-fiction month would be quite aggressive. It would mean basically a solid month of every day filled with ~7 encounters.

[nickl_2000]

Looking through the DMG, I've found a table I've never really read before, the "Adventuring Day XP". Following this table, how many adventuring days are required to level up? Here are the results:


Next level in 1 day
Next level in 1 day, total 2 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 4 days
Next level in 2.2 days, total 6 days
Next level in 2.1 days, total 8 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 11 days
Next level in 2.2 days, total 13 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 15 days
Next level in 2.1 days, total 17 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 20 days
Next level in 1.4 days, total 21 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 23 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 24 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 26 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 28 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 29 days
Next level in 1.6 days, total 31 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 32 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 34 days
Level 20 has been reached in slightly less than 34 days


I'd also note that an adventuring day is roughly 3 deadly encounters in term of XP.

34 adventuring days. 3+ years of bi-weekly playing though :smallbiggrin:

[Zalabim]

Keep in mind these are adventuring days (i.e. days with an average amount of XP-generating encounters), not just in-fiction days. So if you spend a week in town partying it up, that time doesn't count. So the in-fiction calendar time between 1st and 20th could be years, but it's not years' worth of adventuring days.

Running from 1st to 20th in one in-fiction month would be quite aggressive. It would mean basically a solid month of every day filled with ~7 encounters.

If you use all your Hit Dice, then it actually takes 2 or 3 long rests to get back to full hit dice. 34 straight days full of adventure really will wear you down. I'd estimate 50 extra downtime days could be needed just for recovery.

[arnin77]

These have seemed a little odd to me. Levels 1-4 are considered to be apprentice; while level 5 is “journeyman” I guess. Most trades have 4/5 year apprenticeships so I’ve always assumed a level = a year of game time for a character, but in game time is very hard to keep “fantasy realistic”. I’ve always figured that the game session played is the 1-3 days that were highlighted over the year while the character was doing other things over that time to level up.

[Imbalance]

Yeah, "adventuring days" are specific. If the whole session is planning out your house construction, that was a few days in-game with zero adventuring going on (not that house-building isn't its own adventure, but unless the architect turns out to be an evil fey creature who insists that building safety codes are for simpletons, this is pretty mundane, non-xp downtime). I don't think players should look at this chart and expect to be granted the xp to accelerate from zero to deity in less than four tendays.

[Vegan Squirrel]

Also keep in mind that the "adventuring day" is an estimate of how much adventuring a party could reliably handle, not an expectation for every day spent adventuring. I'd say a typical adventure involves several days of travel with only a fraction of an adventuring day's challenge*, a couple days of figuring out what's going on where you might get an adventuring day spread out over that time, and then the climactic portion of the adventure where you might actually play a whole adventuring day, or more, in a single in-game day. Add to that that there's not going to be any time pressure during at least some of the adventures, so even those climax days can often be broken up into multiple in-game days if the party chooses.

*Of course there's the potential for a more serious challenge during travel, although if it's serious enough that might become a separate adventure in its own right.

Each such adventure is likely to provide roughly a level's worth of XP (sometimes more, sometimes less), taking course over about a week of in-game time. So I'd expect a typical party to take at least a few months if not most of a year to reach 20th level, not counting down time between adventures. There's going to be wide variance around that typical example, of course.

None of that takes into account XP awarded for milestones—for example, I usually award 10–20% of a level's XP for completing the primary goal of an adventure, with smaller awards for lesser goals or accomplishments. That can speed up the pace of leveling somewhat.

[Tanarii]

I've crunched those same numbers and use them for various discussions on the boards, but you're missing something.

That assumes you're fighting all solos. That's the only time that 1 adventuring day of difficulty = 1 adventuring day of XP awarded.

Against any other number of foes, to get actual XP awarded, you divide by the adjustment for number of enemies.

So if on average you assume PCs will be fighting 3-6 enemies, with 2 and 7-12 being (equally) occasional, and 1 and 12+ being (equally) very rare, they'd take about twice that amount of adventuring days.

Also PCs that do back to back adventuring days are always operating at 1/2 HD and more likely to TPK.

[EggKookoo]

I've crunched those same numbers and use them for various discussions on the boards, but you're missing something.

That assumes you're fighting all solos. That's the only time that 1 adventuring day of difficulty = 1 adventuring day of XP awarded.

Against any other number of foes, to get actual XP awarded, you divide by the adjustment for number of enemies.

I believe you're supposed to award full XP for all foes involved.

Fighting one CR 4 enemy = 1,100 XP divided among the party. Fighting four CR 1 enemies in one encounter = 1,100 XP divided among the party. Fighting eight CR 1/2 enemies in one encounter = 1,100 XP divided among the party.

Or am I misunderstanding?

Sorry, put the wrong CRs in there...

[MaxWilson]

"Well, firstly I went to the tavern for a drink, and met some weirdos there. We got pretty drunk, and decided to investigate some old ruins just outside town. It sorta escalated from there. Now I'm an almost immortal Archdruid, the head of my Circle, praised by kings and peasants alike. It's been a crazy month man......"

This is why I like to run deadly games where victory in any given adventure is not a given, so that almost all of these stories end with either the silence of the grave or "I took my bags off gold home to enjoy them so that I wouldn't get dead", or at LEAST a vacation to enjoy and acclimate to new success before starting a new adventure.

I also impose minimum times to level on NPCs (have to stay at level N for N+1 weeks before advancing), so the guy in the above story would have to be a PC and a fairly lucky one attached to a savvy player who also never got bored with him. In my head when I do adventure design I imagine PCs as having similar limitations, I just don't make players do the actual bookkeeping of weeks. Even with intense training (e.g. warlock trainer with Summon Greater Demon who makes you fight a dozen demons a day) it takes about four years to reach 20th level, which I think is reasonable.

[Chronos]

The XP you award is the sum of the XP for all of the monsters. But for constructing appropriate encounters, there's a fudge factor to account for the fact that it's harder to fight things all at once than one at a time. So for instance, a single monster of equal CR is what the book calls a "medium difficulty encounter", and an "adventuring day" might feature six of those. But if you throw all six of those at the party at once, it's likely to be a TPK. If your adventuring day consists of fights against six monsters at once, they have to be much weaker monsters to avoid overwhelming the party.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I believe you're supposed to award full XP for all foes involved.

Fighting one CR 4 enemy = 1,100 XP divided among the party. Fighting four CR 1 enemies in one encounter = 1,100 XP divided among the party. Fighting eight CR 1/2 enemies in one encounter = 1,100 XP divided among the party.

Or am I misunderstanding?

Sorry, put the wrong CRs in there...

The issue is that the table is talking adjusted XP (ie with a multiplier for number of creatures), not awardable XP (the raw total). Only solos have a multiplier of 1.

I will note that my current game uses a fixed pattern of sessions for leveling up: 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, .... So far the party is level 13 and the in-game clock has moved forward 9 months (32 days each) or so. Because one session =/= 1 day. Some sessions have covered months, others have covered 15 minutes. I think in the future I'm going to step it back to 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, ..., just because it felt a bit fast. I don't police the adventuring day at all, other than making varied locations with varying enemies. Their last fight (1 in a day) was something like 1.5x the adventuring day budget (they were level 12, fighting 2 CR 14s, a CR 11, and two CR 9s). And was something of a cakewalk (mainly because I couldn't roll saves worth crap and one of the CR 14s stayed CC'd the entire time, plus the party was rolling really hot (darn paladin crit smites).

Edit: not only that, XP by CR is not linear. So a CR 4 (1100 XP) is not 4 CR 1s (200 each, 800 total) is not 8 CR 1/2 (100 each, 800 total). A single CR 4 earns the party 1100 XP. 4 CR 1s only gives the raw value (800 total). Etc.

[MaxWilson]

I believe you're supposed to award full XP for all foes involved.

Fighting one CR 4 enemy = 1,100 XP divided among the party. Fighting four CR 1 enemies in one encounter = 1,100 XP divided among the party. Fighting eight CR 1/2 enemies in one encounter = 1,100 XP divided among the party.

Or am I misunderstanding?

Sorry, put the wrong CRs in there...

Four CR 1s is only 800 XP, but it "costs" 1600 XP of the DM's adventuring day budget. One CR 4 is 1100 XP and costs 1100 XP of the difficulty budget. That's Tanar'ri's point--most of the time you will only earn maybe half to 2/3 of the difficulty budget in actual XP, which means you'll level slower than the OP.

Of course, the DM may exceed the difficulty budget too, in which case you can level faster. And if players take things into their own hands, such as by casting Summon Greater Demon + telling the demon to "go stand over there and look at that paladin" until the demon becomes uncontrolled and attacks, they can gain XP even faster.

[EggKookoo]

Edit: not only that, XP by CR is not linear. So a CR 4 (1100 XP) is not 4 CR 1s (200 each, 800 total) is not 8 CR 1/2 (100 each, 800 total). A single CR 4 earns the party 1100 XP. 4 CR 1s only gives the raw value (800 total). Etc.

Interesting. My understanding all along is you determine the CR for the encounter as a whole. So 4 CR 1s in a single encounter is a CR 4 encounter, which awards 1,100.

Wait, never mind, I've lost my mind. I don't actually do that. I don't know why I thought I did...


Four CR 1s is only 800 XP, but it "costs" 1600 XP of the DM's adventuring day budget. One CR 4 is 1100 XP and costs 1100 XP of the difficulty budget. That's Tanar'ri's point--most of the time you will only earn maybe half to 2/3 of the difficulty budget in actual XP, which means you'll level slower than the OP.

Gotcha, I was misunderstanding...

[Tanarii]

Gotcha, I was misunderstanding...
Thats okay, I misunderstood the DMG rules too for a huge chunk of my campaign, and awarded XP for encounter difficulty, not creatures within.

Then I continued to do that because it makes sense, and the DMG way doesn't. Plus I always calculate the difficulty XP total for any encounter, so there's no extra steps for me.

The downside is your PCs will level almost twice as fast as they are supposed to, if you use 3-6 as your average number of creatures and you're a heavily combat focused game.

[EggKookoo]

Thats okay, I misunderstood the DMG rules too for a huge chunk of my campaign, and awarded XP for encounter difficulty, not creatures within.

Then I continued to do that because it makes sense, and the DMG way doesn't. Plus I always calculate the difficulty XP total for any encounter, so there's no extra steps for me.

The downside is your PCs will level almost twice as fast as they are supposed to, if you use 3-6 as your average number of creatures and you're a heavily combat focused game.

Despite my incoherent posts above, I don't actually combine the CRs of the individual creatures to determine the CR of the encounter as a whole. I just brain-farted while posting about it. I award the amount per creature in terms of XP. So four CR 1s will result in 800 XP, but one CR 4 is 1,100. All good there.

That said, I don't budget XP at all. I build encounters based on how appropriate and fun they are, and select creatures by CR based on what seems reasonable at a gut level. I couldn't tell you how many encounters my players see in a single day. It probably varies a lot. I let them determine when they're beat up enough to take a rest.

[MaxWilson]

Despite my incoherent posts above, I don't actually combine the CRs of the individual creatures to determine the CR of the encounter as a whole. I just brain-farted while posting about it. I award the amount per creature in terms of XP. So four CR 1s will result in 800 XP, but one CR 4 is 1,100. All good there.

That said, I don't budget XP at all. I build encounters based on how appropriate and fun they are, and select creatures by CR based on what seems reasonable at a gut level. I couldn't tell you how many encounters my players see in a single day. It probably varies a lot. I let them determine when they're beat up enough to take a rest.

That is awesome and a great way to do things.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That is awesome and a great way to do things.

I agree.

And, contrary to many on the forums, this is the intended path. The "Adventuring Day Budget" is not a design goal--it's a post hoc "here's what our playtest parties could get through comfortably (making allowances for bad luck, non-optimal tactics, etc)" signpost. There is no design intent that you always hit that budget (or that you stay within the budget). Same with the difficulty measures--they're there to judge what you've put together against what you intend the difficulty curve to be; they're not constraints on what it should be.

Personally, I've found that the best results come from variation, not particular numbers of encounters.

[TyGuy]

Looking through the DMG, I've found a table I've never really read before, the "Adventuring Day XP". Following this table, how many adventuring days are required to level up? Here are the results:


Next level in 1 day
Next level in 1 day, total 2 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 4 days
Next level in 2.2 days, total 6 days
Next level in 2.1 days, total 8 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 11 days
Next level in 2.2 days, total 13 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 15 days
Next level in 2.1 days, total 17 days
Next level in 2.3 days, total 20 days
Next level in 1.4 days, total 21 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 23 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 24 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 26 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 28 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 29 days
Next level in 1.6 days, total 31 days
Next level in 1.5 days, total 32 days
Next level in 1.7 days, total 34 days
Level 20 has been reached in slightly less than 34 days


I'd also note that an adventuring day is roughly 3 deadly encounters in term of XP.


"Well, firstly I went to the tavern for a drink, and met some weirdos there. We got pretty drunk, and decided to investigate some old ruins just outside town. It sorta escalated from there. Now I'm an almost immortal Archdruid, the head of my Circle, praised by kings and peasants alike. It's been a crazy month man......"

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely why I run homebrew rest rules and durations to extend the time scale.

[Pex]

Keep in mind these are adventuring days (i.e. days with an average amount of XP-generating encounters), not just in-fiction days. So if you spend a week in town partying it up, that time doesn't count. So the in-fiction calendar time between 1st and 20th could be years, but it's not years' worth of adventuring days.

Running from 1st to 20th in one in-fiction month would be quite aggressive. It would mean basically a solid month of every day filled with ~7 encounters.

Also not counted is traveling. "A week later you arrive at (destination)".


34 adventuring days. 3+ years of bi-weekly playing though :smallbiggrin:

Where it's also an hour to play a combat that takes 5 30 seconds. It looks silly to go from zero to superhero in 30 days in gameworld time, but you feel the journey in real world time.

This is good for a laugh, but it's not a problem of the game. "Comic book logic" is a thing. This is "RPG logic".

[Sparky McDibben]

I tend to run highly unbalanced encounters and I award XP for defeating those monsters (whatever form that defeat takes), as well as a bunch of other stuff. So it's happened a few times that my PC's gain one level per session. And there was one time that I jumped them from level 4 straight to level 6 after an unpleasant experience with a bunch of vampires.

[Dork_Forge]

I could never (well, I suppose I'm capable, just unwilling) run a game with XP, I suppose there's a few reasons for this. The crux of it though comes down to: my encounters are way 'over CR'd' usually with hot tweaked monsters, the end result would be stupid fast levelling just to set an appropriate difficulty, and secondly I don't want that cognitive load as a DM. I throw together encounters based on what fits the story at the time and what feels right difficulty wise, having to calculate XP is something I don't want to spend time on and announcing it and making sure everyone is tracking XP is something none of my players want.

Though I also stray away from traditional leveling, for example one group hit 8th level when they achieved a story beat, but when they actually defeated the arc boss, they got a set of homebrew boons and loot instead.

As for how long leveling lasts, I don't do levels 1 and 2, but if I did they'd last one session each at most, so likely 1 adventuring day or, since it's so early, even less as I might just shoe horn the level up on a SR instead of LR.

Real world time, one group started in September at level 3 and hit level 8 6 weeks ago? Weekly game, I believe two sessions missed.

My other group started at level 8 in May or June last year, one level bump for losing a player, and now over a year later they're level 13. Weekly game with probably around 8-11 sessions missed total.

[Dark.Revenant]

Real world time, one group started in September at level 3 and hit level 8 6 weeks ago? Weekly game, I believe two sessions missed.
That's roughly 7 sessions per level, assuming weekly.


My other group started at level 8 in May or June last year, one level bump for losing a player, and now over a year later they're level 13. Weekly game with probably around 8-11 sessions missed total.
That's roughly 11–12 sessions per level, not including the artificial +1 bump.

For a point of comparison, Critical Role keeps a fairly consistent pace of 11 sessions per level, though the earliest levels are a little swifter and the later levels a little longer, as one might expect. I have no idea how many adventuring days that is, though.

My own campaign 3–20 campaign averaged 5–6 sessions per level. I haven't gone and counted all the "adventuring days", but I'd estimate that the group goes through a full adventuring day in 4–5 sessions. Note that this is likely slower than the average, because the campaign style is text, so let's say that a typically-paced campaign involving people playing in person for 3–4 hours go through adventuring days each 3–4 sessions.

Either way, that means my group has gone through about 22 adventuring days to reach 20th level, about 10 days short of how long the table says it should have taken. And that's not even considering what Tanarii pointed out, which would indicate that I've (or, rather, the module I'm running) essentially power-leveled the group! On the other hand, my group eats Deadly encounters for breakfast and I need to go into multiples of Deadly for it to even start to become a challenge. I always crank the encounters way up in difficulty, usually by adding more creatures to fight, so maybe my pace is actually on-track as far as XP goes.

To conclude, let's suppose that the difficulty of the encounters is increased from the DMG guidelines, such that the effect Tanarii discussed is cancelled-out. If we suppose 3–4 sessions occur per adventuring day, that gives us a total of 116 sessions to get to level 20 (6 sessions per level). For a weekly game that takes eight break weeks throughout the year, that's a little over two and a half years of play. Seeing as the range of speeds is like 2 per level to 12 per level, an average of 6 per level seems pretty much correct. Say what you will about the DMG, that table apparently does have some truth to it.

[EggKookoo]

I also play short sessions, 3 hours tops. So "sessions per level" is hard to pin down.


That is awesome and a great way to do things.

It's just the emergent property of years of playing under some good DMs. I did eventually read an article by Angry about how letting the players choose when to rest creates a built-in safety valve that guards against TPKs. I already leaned that way but it was interesting to see someone break it down.


Also not counted is traveling. "A week later you arrive at (destination)".

Another reason my players level quickly with regard to in-fiction time is that I'm running a mostly-urban setting. There's very little week-long travel. Getting from a home base (e.g. a nearby watering hole) to the dungeon (e.g. a warehouse overrun by cultists) is a matter of hours.

Plus, I think 5e underestimates PC power with regard to levels and published stuff. I tend to use published material for the set pieces, wrapped in a new context based on my setting, and the PCs can regularly handle stuff aimed two levels higher than they are. I could also be a bit of a softie...

[Tanarii]

, so let's say that a typically-paced campaign involving people playing in person for 3–4 hours go through adventuring days each 3–4 sessions.
That seems insanely slow to me, considering my players had no problems going through (on average) 1.5 adventuring days in a 4 hour session. If they chose to go on that long. That was typically about 2/3-3/4 combat encounters.

Edit: okay if you're running multiple times Deadly combats that might be it. How long does it take you to run one of those combats? What's the time to finish one round of combat? Especially if it's on a battle mat and players are allowed bullet time to think and to confer amongst themselves for decision making, I can see one of those combats eating up most of a session. But even without all that, running a multiple times deadly combat at high (10+) levels is outside my experience.

[Dork_Forge]

That seems insanely slow to me, considering my players had no problems going through (on average) 1.5 adventuring days in a 4 hour session. If they chose to go on that long. That was typically about 2/3-3/4 combat encounters.

It really depends on the players, if players are indecisive or frequently indulge in roleplay they can, well not really achieve anything in an entire session.

[Dark.Revenant]

That seems insanely slow to me, considering my players had no problems going through (on average) 1.5 adventuring days in a 4 hour session. If they chose to go on that long. That was typically about 2/3-3/4 combat encounters.

Edit: okay if you're running multiple times Deadly combats that might be it. How long does it take you to run one of those combats? What's the time to finish one round of combat? Especially if it's on a battle mat and players are allowed bullet time to think and to confer amongst themselves for decision making, I can see one of those combats eating up most of a session. But even without all that, running a multiple times deadly combat at high (10+) levels is outside my experience.

In my experience, if an entire 5-PC group is on point and going through at max speed (and playing with voice etc.), we can knock out an adventuring day's worth of Tier 2 combat encounters in about one three-hour session. That's a break-neck pace and involves bare minimum roleplay/description/exploration, however. In more realistic campaign scenarios, there is often a lot of downtime (for the players) in between combat encounters. When the levels start to get up there and/or the players are more casual, or the DM is slow for whatever medical reason, and especially when combat isn't the only focus of the day, those hours can stretch out pretty significantly.

Defining "session" as 3–4 hours. Longer sessions are re-scaled to match the definition. These are recent examples from personal experience:
Example 1: Aforementioned Roll20+text campaign at 20th level. Party of 5 + on average 6 NPCs (familiars, simulacrum, DM NPC, steed, summon). 5–6 sessions per adventuring day, on average. Difficulty level is high and adventuring days have a much higher (1.5–2x) XP budget. Mix of combat and roleplay. The DM/players respond and act moderately slowly on average, mostly due to the text format.
Example 2: Roll20+text mini-campaign at 11th level. Party of 5 + on average ??? NPCs (necromancer shenanigans). 3–4 sessions per adventuring day, estimated. Difficulty level is high. Mix of combat and roleplay. The DM/players respond and act at a moderate pace.
Example 3: Roll20+voice campaign at 18th level. Party of 4 (3 players, one doubling up on PCs) + on average 1 NPC (DM NPC). 6 sessions per adventuring day, on average. Difficulty level is average. Mix of combat, exploration, and roleplay. The DM and players respond and act slowly on average.
Example 4: Roll20+voice campaign at 9th level. Party of 5 + on average 2 NPCs (DM NPC, summon). 3–4 sessions per adventuring day, on average. Difficulty level is average. Mix of combat, exploration, and roleplay. The DM and players respond and act fairly quickly on average.
Example 5: Roll20+voice one-shot at 9th level. Party of 6 + on average 2 NPCs (familiar, steed). 1 session per adventuring day. Difficulty level is high. Combat only. The DM and players respond and act very quickly on average.

[KorvinStarmast]

Looking through the DMG, I've found a table I've never really read before, the "Adventuring Day XP".

I'd also note that an adventuring day is roughly 3 deadly encounters in term of XP. Yep. I've not seen many groups get through one adventuring day in a session on roll20. Mostly due to players being indecisive. Seen this as DM and as fellow player as well. There was one campaign where we usually got an adv day after two sessions; experienced DM, and three of the five players were focused, two were laggards in decision making.


Personally, I've found that the best results come from variation, not particular numbers of encounters.
Likewise.

[Man_Over_Game]

34 adventuring days. 3+ years of bi-weekly playing though :smallbiggrin:

I think that's closer to 1.5 years, unless we are talking about experiencing less than one adventuring day per session.

[Asisreo1]

Letting players have months, years, or decades of downtime can really help them be grounded into the world and make the pacing of their in-game strength less ridiculous.

After an adventure that got the party from level 8-12, giving them 2 years of downtime lets them:

Make about 3 magic items

Construct a personal keep/castle

Build and run a business

Train a new skill or tool

These things also dry up their gold and lets them actually do stuff.

[Tanarii]

In my experience, if an entire 5-PC group is on point and going through at max speed (and playing with voice etc.), we can knock out an adventuring day's worth of Tier 2 combat encounters in about one three-hour session. That's a break-neck pace and involves bare minimum roleplay/description/exploration, however.

Maybe it's a Roll20 thing then.

Because three Deadly encounters or 6 Medium Ones should only take about 90-120 minutes to resolve.

[Dork_Forge]

Maybe it's a Roll20 thing then.

Because three Deadly encounters or 6 Medium Ones should only take about 90-120 minutes to resolve.

I think Roll20 actually speeds up combat significantly, I ran a deadly combat last week for a 3 person party at 13th level and it took most of the session.

People often umm and ahh about what to do and what they decide to do can take longer (animate objects for example), to be honest I'm impressed that you can get 3 deadly encounters into one session.

Is that just in combat time, or does it include the time to string them together, looting etc.?

[MaxWilson]

Letting players have months, years, or decades of downtime can really help them be grounded into the world and make the pacing of their in-game strength less ridiculous.

After an adventure that got the party from level 8-12, giving them 2 years of downtime lets them:

Make about 3 magic items

Construct a personal keep/castle

Build and run a business

Train a new skill or tool

These things also dry up their gold and lets them actually do stuff.

Planar Bind oodles of elemental minions.

[MoiMagnus]

People often umm and ahh about what to do and what they decide to do can take longer

Yeah, pretty much my experience too.

This plus a lot of time each round dedicated to "wait, how many HP to you have?" or "which enemy plays just after me?" and players making mistakes of some kind (either forgetting bonuses, or forgetting that they already used their reaction, etc) or being advised / reminded of some info during their turn by some other players. On a battlemap, time lost with peoples trying to see if they can reach the places they want to reach without taking some attacks of opportunity, or move so that the enemy don't get cover against their ranged attacks (and some are slower at pathfinding than others), and without battlemaps, time is lost asking the GM stuff like "is this in reach of me?" or "can I get 3 enemies but no allies with a fireball?".

On some tables, a lot of time can be lost on spells too, if neither the PCs nor the GM care enough about the spells to remember their details. The PC might need to say, "I cast this spell on this creature (open the book to check the spell), so you need to do a save against X. Failed? so... (read the details of the effect)" (possibly followed by the PC checking what are the exact effects of the condition he just put on the monster, while the round continue its resolution).

[Dark.Revenant]

Because three Deadly encounters or 6 Medium Ones should only take about 90-120 minutes to resolve.

"Should" as in "theoretically possible?" Yeah, I can see that.

"Should" as in "a goal to strive for?" Yeah, I could agree.

"Should" as in "the expected standard?" Nope. Evidence says most groups are much slower than an adventuring day per session. There's the other posts in the thread, for one, but personally I've never played in a group that could consistently do more than one of those in a session, and I've been playing for eleven years.

[Tanarii]

There's the other posts in the thread, for one, but personally I've never played in a group that could consistently do more than one of those in a session, and I've been playing for eleven years.
5e has only been out for seven years so that's quite the trick.

In six of those years, I've rarely played in a game that didn't. That includes a year or two of AL, followed by running my own campaign in three different stores with many different players until everything shut down.

The slowest I've run were all 100% battlemat solo games outside that campaign, for people that had never played before. And even then they were up to speed by the third or fourth session.

That's why I'm consistently surprised when people say they can't fit in an adventuring day into a single 3-4 hour session. My experience is that it takes about half that, barring exceptionally tricky puzzles or extended exploration/negotiations. For example, I haven't run Tomb of Annihilation, I can see large chunks of that being less than an adventuring day per session.



People often umm and ahh about what to do and what they decide to do can take longer (animate objects for example), to be honest I'm impressed that you can get 3 deadly encounters into one session.Its incumbent on the DM to maintain pacing. If players aren't ready, skip their turn and come back to them when they are.


Is that just in combat time, or does it include the time to string them together, looting etc.?Combat time for combat encounters. Not after effects or in between exploration. And non-combat encounters can definitely take longer.

[Dork_Forge]

Its incumbent on the DM to maintain pacing. If players aren't ready, skip their turn and come back to them when they are.

Combat time for combat encounters. Not after effects or in between exploration. And non-combat encounters can definitely take longer.

Agree to an extent and different strokes, I've found more success by just encouraging players and giving them a bit of breathing room to make the decision rather than jumling up the initiative order. I mostly enforce pacing outside of combat, prodding the group for what they're doing or emphasising whatever time crunch they're under, but other times I'll just let them go at it. As long as they're having fun that's all I really care about, and with my groups I can see some negativity coming out of pressuring for faster combats.

[Asisreo1]

Planar Bind oodles of elemental minions.
Would certainly be nice, though maybe a bit too difficult for a level 12 character. Each casting is 1,000gp and, with a maximum of a 6th-level slot, you'll only have the minions for 10 days. That means you'll be spending 7 million gp over the course of the downtime for 10 minions you cycle through, assuming they don't make the save Planar Binding and not including the cost of Magic Circle or any means you use to obtain the creature with a cost.

Now, elementals are a good choice for binding since they basically have 0 defenses (negative mods) to prevent the binding, but a 12th level caster only has a maximum DC 17 for their spell saves. Meaning that even earth elementals have a 5% chance of breaking out and possibly causing havoc.

So while it a possible use for downtime, its mighty expensive to keep up and they could cause unintended consequences.

[MoiMagnus]

Its incumbent on the DM to maintain pacing. If players aren't ready, skip their turn and come back to them when they are.

It's the kind of table convention that is definitely not universal and require to be talk about beforehand.
I've only ever seen it happen once, during a game of Paranoia, so I would even call it unusual, but I don't know that many peoples playing RPGs.
(And I doubt any self-learning GM would have such rule, as the DMG's writers elected to have a small paragraph about snacks and drinks being important, rather than talking about pacing. The thing which is the nearest from a pacing advice is "avoid distractions like TVs or young childs around". Though I might have missed a paragraph, I can't Ctrl+F my physical book.)

Same for adding a timer during boardgame, I heard that some peoples do it, but outside of online gaming, I've never seen it done (excluding games where it's explicitly part of the rules).

[KorvinStarmast]

It's the kind of table convention that is definitely not universal and require to be talk about beforehand.
I've only ever seen it happen once, during a game of Paranoia, so I would even call it unusual, but I don't know that many peoples playing RPGs.
(And I doubt any self-learning GM would have such rule, as the DMG's writers elected to have a small paragraph about snacks and drinks being important, rather than talking about pacing. The thing which is the nearest from a pacing advice is "avoid distractions like TVs or young childs around". Though I might have missed a paragraph, I can't Ctrl+F my physical book.)

Same for adding a timer during boardgame, I heard that some peoples do it, but outside of online gaming, I've never seen it done (excluding games where it's explicitly part of the rules). I have, on a number of occasions, as the DM told a player who is hemming and hawing "make a decision, or you dodge and it's the next player's turn." I tell people this up front. Once combat starts, it needs to feel fast and furious. "The mentally slow soon are the physically dead" is how one of my players once phrased it. :smallyuk: Any player who is consistently slow I have an after action conversation with about "how can we help you make decisions in combat?" It's usually a brainstorming session kind of thing (DM as coach is a thing I believe it) and sometimes results in 3x5 cards with keywords, tokens, and I always offer to discuss "how does this spell work" outside of game time via email or discord.
I have a druid player who is awesome (not a waffler) about pre arranging with me his preferred summons for conjure fey and conjure animals. We work together on a short list so that he knows what to expect and I know what to expect.
I have an artificer player who is still able to drag the pace of play to a crawl while he makes up his mind on occasion. But other times he's johnny-on-the-spot.

[Dark.Revenant]

5e has only been out for seven years so that's quite the trick.

Before 5e it was 3.5 and Pathfinder, and various related systems.


In six of those years, I've rarely played in a game that didn't. That includes a year or two of AL, followed by running my own campaign in three different stores with many different players until everything shut down.

That's why I'm consistently surprised when people say they can't fit in an adventuring day into a single 3-4 hour session. My experience is that it takes about half that, barring exceptionally tricky puzzles or extended exploration/negotiations. For example, I haven't run Tomb of Annihilation, I can see large chunks of that being less than an adventuring day per session.

That tracks to about 1 minute of transition, decision, and resolution per turn (per character / creature in combat). For many characters/turns that's easily doable, although if you're casting something like Slow, rolling all those saves will likely push the time over the 1 minute average. Occasionally a player might just have tons of stuff they want to do on one turn (e.g. Action Surge, Haste) and it takes longer. Sometimes complicated interactions arise or there is some kind of question that comes up that needs a DM ruling. Oftentimes this will make a 1-minute turn instead take 5 minutes. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it means that the next eight turns would need to be twice as fast in order to make up for the lost time.

I'm not sure if you do some kind of modified initiative method—probably not if you're including AL experience—but the bottleneck in my experience has always been resolving actions, not extracting decisions from people. As a DM, I can't just skip a turn on the basis of indecision if they've already made the decision, but the turn nevertheless takes ages to finish because, for instance, I have to go through a bunch of targets and roll saves for them, occasionally double-checking to see if I've forgotten if they have something like Magic Resistance or a pertinent immunity. It's a VTT, so checking and rolling takes like 3–4 seconds, but every little bit adds up. Players can also have annoying habits like quickly deciding to Fireball but then painstakingly positioning the blast on the map to maximize coverage, such that I'm stuck just waiting for them to stop moving the ****ing thing so I know which monsters to roll saves for. I also can't (or rather won't) just say "you have 6 seconds to place the template" because being a tactical artillery cannon is essentially the fantasy that player is playing for; taking some of that away would make the game less fun for them.

It's little things like that which all add up to make something that, theoretically, could have finished in 90 minutes, instead take 2–3 hours. I suppose I could have been a speed nazi and rigorously enforced turn times with a stopwatch, but I think the bother of that would have annoyed me most of all. Barring extreme measures that might be taken, some players are just slower than others, for a wide variety of reasons. At the end of the day, you can make them uncomfortable, kick them out, or live with the pace.

[ad_hoc]

Our group averages 1 adventuring day per 2 3-4 hour sessions.

We spend a lot of time chatting about non-game related things though.

If we actually just played the game we'd probably get an adventuring day done in 1 session.