PC Wizard learns in 5 months what took NPC wizard 60 years to learn.

[MonkeySage]

Have you guys ever thought about this sort of thing? PCs learn more in a short period of time than an NPC could learn in a lifetime. They grow stronger at a rate far exceeding what most npcs could accomplish, you can even have a 17 year old sorcerer flinging around 9th level spells. I'm referencing d&d specifically but I think it applies to all rpgs. From a gameplay standpoint it makes sense, but how does one rationalize it from in game perspective? :)

Do you guys waive this off by saying that even PCs have to study for years? Or do your PCs actually gain mastery over their chosen fields within months of their first adventure?

Perhaps the simple fact that they're learning/growing in action, rather than from an arena/library?

[The_Werebear]

I'm paraphrasing from a friend, who is quoting from someone else.

"A day where someone tries to kill you is the worst day of most people's lives. A day where a dozen people try to kill you is Die Hard, and makes you John McClane. The PC's who have Die Hard days every day for six months become physical gods."

This makes sense to me.

[Pex]

Because contrary to some DMs' beliefs, PCs are special snowflakes. The multiverse actually does revolve around them. They insanely go into the Dungeon of Doom to save the world. It's why they're not the tavern owner, the Duke, the Wizards' Guild Headmaster, the Infamous Assassin, or the feared Dragon of the Mountain.

[Kaervaslol]

Because contrary to some DMs' beliefs, PCs are special snowflakes. The multiverse actually does revolve around them. They insanely go into the Dungeon of Doom to save the world. It's why they're not the tavern owner, the Duke, the Wizards' Guild Headmaster, the Infamous Assassin, or the feared Dragon of the Mountain.

Funny you say that. My last group was composed mostly of stable cleaners/poop shovelers. They got inside the Dungeon of Doom not to save the world, but to score some dosh. Those who survived the devious traps got to fight the duke's men when they exited the dungeon, but a few managed to scape with the loot.

Not everyone plays by forgotten realms/dragonlance tropes.

[Rhynn]

Stop running games with ridiculous pacing (using a system with ridiculously fast leveling). D&D campaigns can and have taken years and years of in-game time for PCs to reach high mid levels.

Alternatively, play mechanically deeper / better games (and I say that as an OSR D&D fan) that don't use levels and have skill-based systems; see RuneQuest (especially 2E & 3E), HârnMaster, etc.

Kaervaslol: Were you, by chance, playing Dungeon Crawl Classics? If not, you should check it out. The game starts with every player creating a bunch of characters who are just chandlers, butchers, stableboys, beggars, and the like; they venture into a dungeon, and the ones who come out (a minority) get to first level and become "proper" characters.

[Thrudd]

Have you guys ever thought about this sort of thing? PCs learn more in a short period of time than an NPC could learn in a lifetime. They grow stronger at a rate far exceeding what most npcs could accomplish, you can even have a 17 year old sorcerer flinging around 9th level spells. I'm referencing d&d specifically but I think it applies to all rpgs. From a gameplay standpoint it makes sense, but how does one rationalize it from in game perspective? :)

Do you guys waive this off by saying that even PCs have to study for years? Or do your PCs actually gain mastery over their chosen fields within months of their first adventure?

Perhaps the simple fact that they're learning/growing in action, rather than from an arena/library?

In 1e AD&D, leveling up required a period of weeks, a mentor of the appropriate class and level, and thousands of gold in expenses. If you didn't have a mentor, you couldn't level up until you found one. Once you hit name level, a mentor was no longer required, but you still need the thousands of gold and weeks of in-game time. Procuring henchmen and having items and equipment crafted in between adventures also takes weeks or months of in-game time. Healing can also take weeks of time.
Once you start building strongholds and towers and putting together your domains, the in-game time really adds up, as it takes months to get buildings constructed, to gather and equip troops, create thieves guilds and do magical research and craft magic items.
Also, experience tables in 1e required exponentially more XP to gain higher levels. A single location or adventure is not guaranteed to produce enough XP to level up. Yes, an adventuring PC will gain levels faster than someone who is a guard captain or a sedentary magic-user who stays in a tower all the time. That's ok. But I do like a game to impose some type of logical process for how characters gain new abilities implying world which operates by logical rules. This is missing in 3e and later.

[INDYSTAR188]

In 1e AD&D, leveling up required a period of weeks, a mentor of the appropriate class and level, and thousands of gold in expenses. If you didn't have a mentor, you couldn't level up until you found one. Once you hit name level, a mentor was no longer required, but you still need the thousands of gold and weeks of in-game time. Procuring henchmen and having items and equipment crafted in between adventures also takes weeks or months of in-game time. Healing can also take weeks of time.
Once you start building strongholds and towers and putting together your domains, the in-game time really adds up, as it takes months to get buildings constructed, to gather and equip troops, create thieves guilds and do magical research and craft magic items.
Also, experience tables in 1e required exponentially more XP to gain higher levels. A single location or adventure is not guaranteed to produce enough XP to level up. Yes, an adventuring PC will gain levels faster than someone who is a guard captain or a sedentary magic-user who stays in a tower all the time. That's ok. But I do like a game to impose some type of logical process for how characters gain new abilities implying world which operates by logical rules. This is missing in 3e and later.

Does your group play 1E? Is there anyway to speed those timeframes up in-game? I ask because, while I agree with you about the silliness of the general logic here, I think that they phased those stringent requirement out for (most) gamers enjoyment. Also, I would love to play in a early D&D campaign, the first couple of levels would probably be brutal and I'm sure that's a large part of the fun!

[JusticeZero]

Honestly, all the GMs I dealt with addressed the training time issue by making adventures episodic, with "After the incident with the wraiths, nothing much happens. The rest of the winter and spring pass without incident. What are you doing in the meantime?"

[Rhynn]

Also, I would love to play in a early D&D campaign, the first couple of levels would probably be brutal and I'm sure that's a large part of the fun!

They are and it is.

I started out our ACKS campaign with B4, The Lost City, a module for levels 1-3. The party was 3 1st-level PCs, 1 1st-level henchman, and 4 0-level henchmen. 2 PCs and 2 henchmen died in the first room (despite the fact 0 hp doesn't mean death in ACKS, but a roll on the Mortal Wounds table; several of the dead were actually "put out of their misery" because there was no way to help them and they would have been too great of a burden).

It evens out fast, though; as early as 3rd level, the PCs are much tougher and able to "absorb" mistakes and bad luck both, to a degree. No one has died since the PCs all leveled up. The further you level up, the less likely you are to die (because the dangers you face don't increase in proportion to your level, like they do in 3E and 4E).

But that first dungeon crawl is always going to be brutal.

[Thrudd]

Does your group play 1E? Is there anyway to speed those timeframes up in-game? I ask because, while I agree with you about the silliness of the general logic here, I think that they phased those stringent requirement out for (most) gamers enjoyment. Also, I would love to play in a early D&D campaign, the first couple of levels would probably be brutal and I'm sure that's a large part of the fun!

Yes, I played/ran 1e from the late 80's pretty much until 3e came out. It doesn't take all that much real-time for these requirements. You just say "Everyone spends 2 weeks training for their next level. What else do you all want to do while you are in town?" The DM keeps track of how much time passes and marks off what day it is in their notes. Would that hurt players' enjoyment? I never thought so.
Technically, by the book (DMG), the DM is supposed to rate each player's performance after each adventure. The better you perform, the less time it will take to train for level up. If you played your character perfectly according to the DM's opinion, it might only take 1 week. If you did poorly, as in purposefully played counter to what your character is supposed to be doing (a fighter who always runs away from fights, a thief who only fights and never sneaks or steals anything, ignoring your alignment, etc), it will take 4 weeks to level up. If you received an excellent rating on your playing, you could level up without a mentor in double the normal time. I always ignored the player rating system and just said it took everyone 2 weeks to level up, or 4 weeks without a mentor.

I know they phased out those rules because most people probably ignored them anyway. I think this wasn't because it hurt enjoyment, but because the game itself was changing. As the game became more about playing scripted, encounter-based adventures rather than open-ended location based, keeping strict track of in-game time was something that became unnecessary and ignored.

[INDYSTAR188]

Yes, I played/ran 1e from the late 80's pretty much until 3e came out. It doesn't take all that much real-time for these requirements. You just say "Everyone spends 2 weeks training for their next level. What else do you all want to do while you are in town?" The DM keeps track of how much time passes and marks off what day it is in their notes. Would that hurt players' enjoyment? I never thought so.

That sounds about like how I deal with downtime in my 4E game except there might be a skill challenge. Usually just a hand wave and a skip to the next adventure hook or whatever prep we're doing.

I know they phased out those rules because most people probably ignored them anyway. I think this wasn't because it hurt enjoyment, but because the game itself was changing. As the game became more about playing scripted, encounter-based adventures rather than open-ended location based, keeping strict track of in-game time was something that became unnecessary and ignored.

Fair enough. Seems like a reasonable explaination to me.

[MonkeySage]

So far, about a month of ingame time has passed, give or take a couple days. They've gone from first to third level, and I'm thinking of slowing the pacing a little bit(I think switching to pathfinder might also help mechanically). The idea that you learn more by doing than reading appeals to me, though; strike at a dummy that doesn't fight back, or a friend who has no intent to kill you all you want, maybe deal with the occasional orc raid... but nothing will teach you how to fight like storming a bugbear camp. Same might apply to a wizard or sorcerer- given the chance to experiment with their magic, they learn more than they would just studying in a library.

[Urpriest]

The flipside is that you don't need to have NPC power correlate with age. It's fine to have a world where young people can be at the top of their field powerwise, and where power correlates more to the sort of straights you're in and what you've been exposed to than to how long you've been studying. The whole archetype of the rising star in a field can apply to PCs and NPCs equally.

[Pex]

Real world situations also matter. If you are playing 8 hours a game, one game a week, PCs leveling after a comfortable X in-game months or even an in-game year every comfortable Y game sessions works fine to keep the verisimilitude. If you are playing one game a month, taking 9 game sessions to level is 9 real world months. The game could feel stagnated for some people. Leveling every month would be too fast. Some comfortable margin needs to be found within that metagame, in-game however long it takes be darned.

[NichG]

I've had a few campaigns where over the course of the game, 3-4 years passed. Its still ridiculously fast growth, but basically I think what it comes down to is that people have a hard time wrapping their head around long periods of time, and furthermore have a hard time wrapping their head around the idea that its okay for things to take a long time. It can be like pulling teeth to convince a group of players that its okay to take 3 months to travel across an ocean or something like that - they'll refuse to actually go in those directions for fear of that wasted time, or they'll go to extreme lengths to try to make that travel instantaneous, even if those 3 months are just '3 months pass, and you arrive in a new city'. It's also hard to maintain PC-driven inertia while also having things where waiting long periods of time without having life or death adventures makes sense in character - either you're driven or you're not, and spending a few years to do day to day jobs at the local Mage Guild doesn't tend to work.

What can help extend the timescales is to make there be things which the PCs want but which just inherently take a long time to process through. Make selling loot take a week per thousand gp if they want to get better rates. Enforce crafting times and make crafting very lucrative. Encourage spell research and make it take a long time. Give explicit benefits for establishing long-term business connections and other sorts of 'day-job' things which don't have to be played out, but which PCs can 'spend' downtime on. Make it clear that the players will not get punished for spending a lot of downtime doing crafting and such - maybe even institute a meta-game rule that, say, every time levels are gained automatically advances the calendar by a year worth of mandatory downtime, and whatever adventure happens next will happen after that year (but characters can spend that year crafting, earning gold with Profession checks, making contacts, etc).

For example, you could have something like the following set of options:

Spoiler

Show

Every level gain 12 months of downtime to spend. Downtime can be used:

- Crafting, as per normal rules
- Spell/martial research. 2 months per spell/maneuver level, cantrips count as level 0.5.
- Special training: gain an extra skill point per 2 months dedicated to this. Gain an extra feat per 36 months dedicated to this.
- Business: Increase your business' monthly income in gp by the result of a Profession check for every month you dedicate to this (so it builds up into regular income).
- Affiliation: Gain +1 affiliation score for every 3 months you spend making contacts within a given organization. Also gain 1 new contact in the group for every 8 months spent this way.
- Leads: Gain a +1 bonus on all d100 treasure rolls in the next adventure per month dedicated towards finding leads for treasures.
- Relaxation/Personal development: Gain an action point to be used on the next quest for every 3 months spent relaxing or in personal development
- Bolthole: For every 6 months spent on this, gain the ability to declare a safehouse or allied location at some point during your subsequent adventures - a supplier in prison, a tavern allied with your side in an enemy city, a friend's house your party can use as HQ, etc.
- Reputation: For every month spent on this, you can gain/lose a point of positive/negative reputation - lay low after a crime, etc.
- Local Development: Build up local businesses and services. For every 12 months collectively spent on this by the party, a particular local business/merchant/organization has services as if they were a level higher (so you can upgrade the clerics of your local temple, upgrade the level of the town militia, etc), to a maximum of the party's new level.

Basically, reward players for letting things stretch out over long times. Consistency is also key - if you can make it generally true that gaining levels takes time, then you won't have to distort your plot every time to conveniently make it so that things take a long time for the PCs in this particular story, but someone who just went to a dungeon and farmed rats could hit Lv20 in a month. Also, if you telegraph when things will be time sensitive very clearly, then eventually players can learn to trust that and not feel like every single thing needs to be incredibly rushed.

[The Oni]

I respectfully disagree, and I don't think it's weird or problematic at all that the PCs are more naturally talented than other people and learn faster. The PCs are better and cooler and more heroic (or villainous) and that's why you're playing them and not other, less heroic/villainous people.

[icefractal]

Nothing wrong with downtime (and that list of options sounds interesting), so it's definitely possible to have things go at a slower pace.

You do have to factor it into adventure/plot design though. If the PCs are trying to deal with any kind of urgent situation, like a looming war or a curse on their home, or whatever, then taking months or years off in the middle of that generally doesn't fly. And if that situation runs long enough that several levels are delayed, you get bad real-time pacing even if your in-game pace is correct.

To expand on that, you want each level to occupy about an equivalent period of real-world time (maybe a bit faster on the first few). If the players spend 4 RL months dealing with a particularly troublesome ruin, with no leveling (because it was all only a week or two in-game), and then level three times in the next couple sessions (several years in-game), that's not ideal.

[Rhynn]

To expand on that, you want each level to occupy about an equivalent period of real-world time

Why? It seems to me like going from "Awesome" to "The Best" (whether the system is level-based or skill-based) should take longer than going from "Decent" to "Fair." Most RPGs have this sort of approach (but not D&D 3E and 4E, where all the numbers just keep increasing on both sides of most equations; attacks & ACs, hit points & damage, XP gained & XP needed, save bonuses & DCs).

[NichG]

A simple way to do it is to say 'the party levels once after every distinct scenario' and use several of the alternative systems to XP to handle crafting/material component corner cases. That way, you don't get a sudden 'okay, you have to take 3 years off now' sort of situation. Then its basically the same matter of pacing that the DM needs to handle anyhow without the in-game downtime as far as XP gain rates and things like that. Alternately, you shrug and say 'okay, so you jump three levels over the next three years until the cult of the Boar raises its head again' or whatever - its not really that big of a deal if you're already playing a game where you could gain three levels in a single scenario. Whether XP gain/advancement should take place during an adventure or at the end is a matter of taste, so you can figure out the particular pattern that works for you and your group.

[jedipotter]

From a gameplay standpoint it makes sense, but how does one rationalize it from in game perspective? :)

This only comes up in fast games. Fast gamers want to go form 1st to 20th level fast. They expect to level up every single game night, maybe more then once. Maybe after every fight. They want each levle to be little more then a blurr.

Slower paced games can have the characters at the same level for months of once a week games. Maybe even something like one level every six months.

So in a year the slow paced game the characters go up maybe two levels. In the fast paced game they go up 25 levels.

And D&D mostly only gives XP for combat. The non-combat XP is vague and is only a couple lines, but combat XP has a whole system.

So take two wizards, both 1st level and 18 years old. Adam goes of to adventure, Zeno get a tower and studies magic. Zeno spends most of his time in research, spell creation, expermination, reading and so on. He learns tons about magic.....but gets no XP. Adam runs around and kills monsters. Every time he kills or helps kill a monster he gets XP. So a year later Adam is at least 6th level or more, while Adam will still be 1st. There is nothing in the game where Adam can ''solve or help slove a magic math problem'' in a classroom and get XP.

[Rhynn]

This only comes up in fast games. Fast gamers want to go form 1st to 20th level fast. They expect to level up every single game night, maybe more then once. Maybe after every fight. They want each levle to be little more then a blurr.

It doesn't need to be leveling every session. A single session may easily be only one day of in-game time, especially in 3E (where few things take a lot of time, unless you make magic items). Even if you take 3 sessions to level up, and each session is 1 week, a party would go from 1st to 20th level in a year of game-time. (At 57 sessions, that wouldn't have even been more than 3-6 months of real time for my group when we were in junior high and high school.)

I think 20th level in a year of adventuring still meets the OP's idea of super fast advancement...

[Telok]

So take two wizards, both 1st level and 18 years old. Adam goes of to adventure, Zeno get a tower and studies magic. Zeno spends most of his time in research, spell creation, expermination, reading and so on. He learns tons about magic.....but gets no XP. Adam runs around and kills monsters. Every time he kills or helps kill a monster he gets XP. So a year later Adam is at least 6th level or more, while Adam will still be 1st. There is nothing in the game where Adam can ''solve or help slove a magic math problem'' in a classroom and get XP.

The rate of advancement and what tasks you do to advance vary between game systems and even the editions of the game.

In AD&D a mage doing research or making magic items did get xp, perhaps not as much as a fighting mage but also without the daily risk of death. Also interesting was that something like a basic orc was only worth 15 xp in comparison to the 1500 to 2500 xp needed for the character to advance from first to second level, meaning that it could easily take 15+ encounters (with a real risk of death each time) to advance through the fastest level in the game. Between healing time, training time, and travel time gaining levels was slower in terms of game time.

In D&D 3.~ experience was restructured to be about 13 encounters per level. But those encounters were supposed to be dangerous with only a low risk of death for each encounter. Reliably threatening the party now required 'over leveled' encounters and reduced the number of encounters and the downtime between them. Combined with the expectation of easy magical healing, easy magical travel, and no training needed led to much faster in game level gains. In addition the non-combat things like magic item creation or a thief's heist no longer gave xp, indeed some of them started consuming xp. This deemphasized the traditional time and money sinks and made the game more focused on the D&D = combat paradigm.

In D&D 4e things got even faster. The target number was 10 encounters per level with no real risk of death unless you healing surges, which was scheduled to occur at the fourth encounter. Unfortunately the math was off and parties normally fought the over leveled encounters because the normal encounters were too easy. In addition no form of injury or crafting took more than eight hours and rapid travel became even more prevalent (although there were fewer long distance flying and teleportation spells than in 3.5 it was replaced with portals or buying flying mounts and flying ships). Additionally the only methods of gaining xp, money, or magic became combat and 'quest rewards', relegating everything else to unproductive time wasting.

What we're really seeing an a cultural shift in the game design towards a more combat oriented system with immediate mechanical gratification. D&D has become a system less capable of supporting political, intrigue, exploration, or mystery style campaigns and with no support for long term character goals or development beyond 'moar fighty powah'.

[PersonMan]

maybe even institute a meta-game rule that, say, every time levels are gained automatically advances the calendar by a year worth of mandatory downtime, and whatever adventure happens next will happen after that year (but characters can spend that year crafting, earning gold with Profession checks, making contacts, etc).

I'd personally be against this, just because I feel like, in a roleplaying-heavy game, you'd either have to put all character development on pause for an entire year so you can continue to play it all out, or deal with these massive jumps in your character's personality whenever they level.

For example, I played a character a while ago who was essentially a sociopath who cared only for two people, viewing everyone else as potential threats to their safety and killing without remorse. One potential plotline for her development was that the party cleric worked with one of the two people she cared about to try to get her to be less uncaring about others. If there was a year of downtime at every level up, then such a slow development plotline would be impossible unless it was decided that it took over a year for each small change to be made.

In a more combat/plot focused game, where intraparty interactions take a back seat, it can work fine, but I wouldn't recommend it in a game where the PC-to-PC interactions played a large role. Too much happens in a year, people can change too much, to make skipping them with "and you do X for a year" a viable option, in my opinion.

[NichG]

I'd personally be against this, just because I feel like, in a roleplaying-heavy game, you'd either have to put all character development on pause for an entire year so you can continue to play it all out, or deal with these massive jumps in your character's personality whenever they level.

For example, I played a character a while ago who was essentially a sociopath who cared only for two people, viewing everyone else as potential threats to their safety and killing without remorse. One potential plotline for her development was that the party cleric worked with one of the two people she cared about to try to get her to be less uncaring about others. If there was a year of downtime at every level up, then such a slow development plotline would be impossible unless it was decided that it took over a year for each small change to be made.

In a more combat/plot focused game, where intraparty interactions take a back seat, it can work fine, but I wouldn't recommend it in a game where the PC-to-PC interactions played a large role. Too much happens in a year, people can change too much, to make skipping them with "and you do X for a year" a viable option, in my opinion.

I'd actually say its completely the opposite. The point of doing something like this is to allow growth and change to happen over slower, more natural timescales. This means that a given character can undergo a wider array of life experiences than a 3 month adventure to the Dungeons of Desolation would provide. In something with a year gap between 'life threatening adventures' characters can very naturally settle down, make long term relationships, build a family, create a business from the ground up and have it become successful and then established, grow older, etc.

Taking a year to have significant changes to one's personality is actually fairly realistic pacing, compared to having, say, twenty significant changes in the course of a month (thats almost one significant character realization or profound moment per day, after all).

Also, just because its downtime doesn't mean that it isn't something to be played out. Character-defining events don't all have to occur during 18 second battles to the death.

In a combat-focused campaign on the other hand, the actual timeline is totally irrelevant so there's no point in doing something like this. If you want to explore character development as a consequence of a rich and full life, setting development in the form of what happens to a world over the course of a century, etc, that's why you bring in something like this.

[Tyrrell]

Ars Magica ties advancement to study, practice, and so on. In the game characters choose one source of xp for every season (i.e. four times per year). Adventure experience is typically not always great (equal to practice on your own for a small adventure , perhaps equal to being trained by a good teacher for the grandest and most trying adventures).

This means that PC's are not special snowflakes at least in regards to their acquisition of new skills and powers. It also tends to influence the flow of the stories. Games unfold over the course of decades not weeks. Being realistic in this way does have huge rewards but it also influences the feelings of the stores told.

You're not coming back in two months with a party that's four levels higher and ready kick but. You might come back three months later with a new spell or enchanted device specifically designed to deal with an issue, but you can only do this if you've spent the intervening time developing said spell/ device (meaning your experience gain was paltry-exposure experience rather than the richer rewards of studying a book, or really anything else). You could come back in fifteen years with a party that's much tougher but by then your villain has retired and the original princess that you hoped to save had instead escaped, started a profitable shipping business with the villains nephew, and breeds championship bloodhounds in her spare time.

[LibraryOgre]

Have you guys ever thought about this sort of thing? PCs learn more in a short period of time than an NPC could learn in a lifetime. They grow stronger at a rate far exceeding what most npcs could accomplish, you can even have a 17 year old sorcerer flinging around 9th level spells. I'm referencing d&d specifically but I think it applies to all rpgs. From a gameplay standpoint it makes sense, but how does one rationalize it from in game perspective? :)

Do you guys waive this off by saying that even PCs have to study for years? Or do your PCs actually gain mastery over their chosen fields within months of their first adventure?

Perhaps the simple fact that they're learning/growing in action, rather than from an arena/library?

It's partially the nature of some of the new systems. Since recovery time from adventure is insignificant (healing spells and easy memorization), and there is no built-in training time to level, you wind up with big disconnects between the world-as-written and the world-as-experienced. You can go from 1st to 40th in a few months, while others plod along for decades and get only a handful of levels.

Because contrary to some DMs' beliefs, PCs are special snowflakes. The multiverse actually does revolve around them. They insanely go into the Dungeon of Doom to save the world. It's why they're not the tavern owner, the Duke, the Wizards' Guild Headmaster, the Infamous Assassin, or the feared Dragon of the Mountain.

In some systems, yes.

In AD&D, the PCs were special snowflakes because they were not NPCs, but they weren't terribly special otherwise... they still had to work and train, and the world only revolved around them if the DM made it that way. Chances are, the world revolved around other people for a good long while, unless the players stopped the world and made it fall into their orbit.

[NichG]

You bring up healing rate, which is a good point. In 1ed D&D, it might take a month to regain your hitpoints non-magically.

so if you want to pace things out, it might make sense to use an 'Adventure Fatigue' system. For example, lets say that each character has a fatigue tracker that goes up to 100, and every encounter increases the fatigue tracker by some amount, lets say 10; furthermore, things like being KO'd, killed, energy drained, or diseased will also add a lot of fatigue. No ill effects are suffered until, say, 50 points of fatigue, at which point rolls begin to see minor penalties and slightly reduced XP gain (-10-20%). At 75 fatigue, it starts to become stat penalties and only 50% XP gain. At 98 fatigue, the character is adventuring on fumes and desperation alone - they can continue indefinitely (they're heroes after all) but they stop gaining XP entirely and begin to take major penalties (-4 to everything, spell slots don't come back, the works).

The trick is, the only way to reduce fatigue is to do non-adventurey things. Every day spent doing non-adventure stuff returns a single point of Fatigue. Very relaxing places might restore two points a day. Fatigue doesn't accumulate above 100, so desperate adventurers could sit at the red line basically and remain just barely functional, just taking an extra day off after every encounter to get back spell slot regen and things like that, but it'd be harsh on XP gain. So the party can push on, but much like the adventuring day I think player psychology will make people say 'hey, lets take 3 months of downtime so I can get my XP gain rate back up and be in full fighting trim' whenever they begin to get near the penalty thresholds.

[Jay R]

Why is this different from ...
... the young D'Artagnan arriving in Paris able to defeat two of the Cardinal greatest swordsmen (Jussac and Bernajoux) in his first week?
... Einstein overturning Newtonian physics with special relativity, and publishing three other groundbreaking papers, at age 26?
... Picasso starting his Modernist period at age 18?
... Bobby Fisher becoming a chess grandmaster at age 15?
... Von Neumann learning differential and integral calculus at age 8?
... Mozart composing at age 5?
... my sister reading at age 2 1/2?

[veti]

I know they phased out those rules because most people probably ignored them anyway. I think this wasn't because it hurt enjoyment, but because the game itself was changing. As the game became more about playing scripted, encounter-based adventures rather than open-ended location based, keeping strict track of in-game time was something that became unnecessary and ignored.

I'm sure the way you handled it was correct, i.e. the way it was designed to be played, but even that was way too much of an imposition for us. We just plain ignored the whole thing.

The thing about 'easy levelling' is, it allows you to embark on ridiculously long-winded expeditions, quests, adventures etc. in the knowledge that you don't have to complete the whole thing at your current level - you'll likely level up several times during the adventure itself. That's a get-out-of-jail card for when you're ridiculously deep in the poo-poo and your 3rd level party would have no chance of getting out, so it's a good job you're now 6th level. That wouldn't be possible if you couldn't level without a stable, friendly base to return to.

Look at it this way: the biggest inspiration for most of our players was LotR. Can you imagine adventuring from being a gardener in the Shire to hiking up the slopes of Mt Doom, without going up a few levels on the way? Yet with the "training" rule in place, there would be no chance to gain those levels.

[Jay R]

Look at it this way: the biggest inspiration for most of our players was LotR. Can you imagine adventuring from being a gardener in the Shire to hiking up the slopes of Mt Doom, without going up a few levels on the way? Yet with the "training" rule in place, there would be no chance to gain those levels.

They spent two months at Rivendell, and another month at Lorien. By the old rules, they would certainly level up.