Tangent Thread: The Value of Encumbrance (or lack thereof)

[LordCdrMilitant]

They can go back to town, but then they've gotta start over. And that's only if there's not a time pressure put in place. They also have to not get lost which gets difficult depending on the terrain.

And it's not like I purposefully made it a mechanic. It's how I design my adventures. I also don't have a problem with them trying to do the one-a-room long rest thing if the dungeon permits. Problem is that the dungeon often does not permit.

I do see how it's an issue for you though. I don't think it's a factor of not being able to quit the dungeon to rest between days, but because you level up really fast and award a lot of treasure. I and my group may be slow and award less treasure than normal, but you're like 2 or 3 times as fast as the base rate is if you're leveling up every 2-3 sessions.

I know sunless citadel has in-dungeon leveling up, but in actual play I don't think I've ever had a mid-dungeon level up, so that puts a general upper limit on the amount of gold that can be expected to be recovered per trip to and from town, which at around 200-600 pounds of gold is easily split among a party of 4 without running afoul of encumberance.

[Zevox]

XP as a motivation, due to being a reward, is what needs to be replaced. There are many ways to steer motivation, of course. But XP is one of the best. Whatever you reward XP for is going to be what the game is about.

And of course, there's that the VAST majority of players love XP. Super emphasized because it's overwhelmingly in favor of XP in my IRL experience. I'll meet DMs in favor of milestones, but almost never players who like it. I'd call such players chimeras, except for folks here claiming to like it. I still hear (or at least did before everything went down) constant screaming about adventures league dropping it. That hurt official play attendance so very badly.

In that regard, it's the opposite of encumbrance, where most players will do without just fine.

XP as a motivation? I'm not sure that I follow. As a player, I'd presume that your motivation for playing is enjoying the game. Probably some combination of its many elements, whether it be the RP, the combat, hanging out with the other players, the stories involved, the inventory management apparently, etc; but certainly not just any one thing. And from that perspective, XP is only used to level up, and while that's almost certainly part of the fun of the game for most of us you'll still do that even without it, so... what would the issue be?

Honestly the only thing such a concept brings to mind for me is my experience playing Fallout 3, where my desire to play the game dropped dead the moment I hit the maximum level. But that made me realize that I wasn't actually enjoying the game, I'd just wanted to see the character build I'd planned out before I even started playing through to the end, so after that I never touched the game again.

Yeah, you level up around 2-3 times per adventure in campaigns I play. Those level ups might be way too slow for me. Huh, no wonder some people feel like martials aren't exciting if you don't get anything new within 2-3 sessions. It's also no wonder no one gets to high levels.

Wow. Uh... that's really fast. [Also, casters don't get anything new faster than martials do?]

I think the last time we leveled up was in January or February. A new player joined in october or november right before we leveled up to 8. Now we're about to level up to 10.

Maybe it's a matter of your adventures being shorter than Asisreo's? Because that sounds like a similar leveling pace to what my group has (we just leveled for the first time in our current campaign, and started it back in February, playing weekly aside from a few weeks that were missed due to scheduling issues), but I'd still refer to our pacing as leveling several times per campaign/adventure. Our previous campaign took us from level 1-5, but that lasted most of a year, for instance (and going from 1 to 2 was pretty quick, just a few sessions in, since nobody likes staying at level 1 for long).

[LordCdrMilitant]

XP as a motivation? I'm not sure that I follow. As a player, I'd presume that your motivation for playing is enjoying the game. Probably some combination of its many elements, whether it be the RP, the combat, hanging out with the other players, the stories involved, the inventory management apparently, etc; but certainly not just any one thing. And from that perspective, XP is only used to level up, and while that's almost certainly part of the fun of the game for most of us you'll still do that even without it, so... what would the issue be?

Honestly the only thing such a concept brings to mind for me is my experience playing Fallout 3, where my desire to play the game dropped dead the moment I hit the maximum level. But that made me realize that I wasn't actually enjoying the game, I'd just wanted to see the character build I'd planned out before I even started playing through to the end, so after that I never touched the game again.



Maybe it's a matter of your adventures being shorter than Asisreo's? Because that sounds like a similar leveling pace to what my group has (we just leveled for the first time in our current campaign, and started it back in February, playing weekly aside from a few weeks that were missed due to scheduling issues), but I'd still refer to our pacing as leveling several times per campaign/adventure. Our previous campaign took us from level 1-5, but that lasted most of a year, for instance (and going from 1 to 2 was pretty quick, just a few sessions in, since nobody likes staying at level 1 for long).

I mean, Asisreo said they level up once every 2-3 sessions, which is legitimately really fast. As I observed, "average" or "expected" based on XP-to-level from at-cr encounters gives like 8 average [6-15] encounters per level. That gives about 2-3 months per level, shorter at low level and longer at mid-higher levels.

My group is pretty slow. We go several, like 4 months per level, so we have a lot of time to get more adventures in even if they are the same length. If we both experience about 1 adventure per month/2 months, they'll be leveling up twice to four times every adventure, the expected at-CR encounter XP rate party will experiences 1-2 adventures per level, and we'll experience 2-4 adventures per level, which pretty much lines up with what the two of us were saying about how much treasure an adventure rewards and how hard it is to extract treasure.

Assuming that we were all awarded an appropriate amount of treasure per level, a normal party would be extracting 1-4 hoards per adventure, which would put them for the most part under their encumbrance limits except in the extreme cases. My party/s extracts much less, like 1-2 hoards, which means that as far as things go, our encumbrance is so far away it might not even exist. For Asisreo's party though, he's drawing out a lot more treasure per adventure because he levels so much faster, and even strong characters might be struggling with encumbrance.


As for adventure timing: if you level up at our rate, once every couple of months, or take a year to go from level 1 to level 5, which sounds pretty normal, but you also level up mid-dungeon often, I would suspect that you have really long adventures [or if you're leveling up mid adventure and only play 1-5, are conflating "Adventure" and "Campaign", which would be kind of like an extended one-shot in my mind more than a whole campaign].

[Chaosmancer]

They can go back to town, but then they've gotta start over. And that's only if there's not a time pressure put in place. They also have to not get lost which gets difficult depending on the terrain.

And it's not like I purposefully made it a mechanic. It's how I design my adventures. I also don't have a problem with them trying to do the one-a-room long rest thing if the dungeon permits. Problem is that the dungeon often does not permit.

Can you see what I am saying though?

You need literal tens of thousands of coins before there is even a thought about dropping anything. And you seem to be dropping four hoards every time they leave town, which still should be barely making them push their limits. And all of this is with a party of 4. My groups usually have 5 or 6 people, which adds another fifty to a hundred pounds of extra space.

[Asisreo1]

Can you see what I am saying though?

You need literal tens of thousands of coins before there is even a thought about dropping anything. And you seem to be dropping four hoards every time they leave town, which still should be barely making them push their limits. And all of this is with a party of 4. My groups usually have 5 or 6 people, which adds another fifty to a hundred pounds of extra space.

It was actually a party of 5, all but two of them dumped strength to be 8 score. So maybe that made it more apparent.

Honestly, it doesn't feel like that much gold even with the people that didn't dump strength. They pick up weapons alot, too, though. They'll try to pick up 8 shortbows and 8 scimitars, too. And 5 maces, and 3 mauls, and a couple of handaxes. My players are some little hoarders, so maybe that also has something to do with it.

Either way, I let them play how they like, I just ask they put stuff into their online inventory which sorts out the carrying capacity anyways. I was pretty surprised how often I heard "oh, I need to drop something" and they try to switch what they have with other party members and so-on.

[Asisreo1]

I mean, Asisreo said they level up once every 2-3 sessions, which is legitimately really fast. As I observed, "average" or "expected" based on XP-to-level from at-cr encounters gives like 8 average [6-15] encounters per level. That gives about 2-3 months per level, shorter at low level and longer at mid-higher levels.

My group is pretty slow. We go several, like 4 months per level, so we have a lot of time to get more adventures in even if they are the same length. If we both experience about 1 adventure per month/2 months, they'll be leveling up twice to four times every adventure, the expected at-CR encounter XP rate party will experiences 1-2 adventures per level, and we'll experience 2-4 adventures per level, which pretty much lines up with what the two of us were saying about how much treasure an adventure rewards and how hard it is to extract treasure.

Assuming that we were all awarded an appropriate amount of treasure per level, a normal party would be extracting 1-4 hoards per adventure, which would put them for the most part under their encumbrance limits except in the extreme cases. My party/s extracts much less, like 1-2 hoards, which means that as far as things go, our encumbrance is so far away it might not even exist. For Asisreo's party though, he's drawing out a lot more treasure per adventure because he levels so much faster, and even strong characters might be struggling with encumbrance.


As for adventure timing: if you level up at our rate, once every couple of months, or take a year to go from level 1 to level 5, which sounds pretty normal, but you also level up mid-dungeon often, I would suspect that you have really long adventures [or if you're leveling up mid adventure and only play 1-5, are conflating "Adventure" and "Campaign", which would be kind of like an extended one-shot in my mind more than a whole campaign].

I can assure you, I don't do anything special according to the DMG. It takes roughly 2-3 adventuring days to level up (adjusted xp) so I'm roughly on-schedule. And I sincerely believe the game starts to get stale, especially in terms of martials, when leveling up takes irl months.

I can't imagine playing in a game where it took more than 5 weeks max irl to level up, I'd be bored out of my mind. Even in a milestone campaign, I would appreciate some sort of indication that I'm close to a level up so I can think of my next options rather than having it sprung up on me.

But it's not like they go from 1-10 in 20-30 in-game days. I give huge amounts of downtime, at later levels it gets to years. Makes sense because the more skilled you are, the less likely people will ask you for your (probably expensive or hard to obtain) services for help unless something worthy of your time appears. It's my way to allow those personal character projects to manifest, like magic item creation or hiring retainers/mercenaries for a stronghold. I prefer doing it one-on-one with players so in-session time isn't wasted but they enjoy seeing and hearing what other characters are doing. Occasionally, I even have an urban encounter where two or more players happen to meet up and it usually segways into the next adventure's seed because they're available during the downtimes.

And when you do downtime in years, living expenses get extremely costly.

[Pex]

XP as a motivation, due to being a reward, is what needs to be replaced. There are many ways to steer motivation, of course. But XP is one of the best. Whatever you reward XP for is going to be what the game is about.

And of course, there's that the VAST majority of players love XP. Super emphasized because it's overwhelmingly in favor of XP in my IRL experience. I'll meet DMs in favor of milestones, but almost never players who like it. I'd call such players chimeras, except for folks here claiming to like it. I still hear (or at least did before everything went down) constant screaming about adventures league dropping it. That hurt official play attendance so very badly.

In that regard, it's the opposite of encumbrance, where most players will do without just fine.

I'm fine with either. So far the DMs I've played with who use milestones are doing so at appropriate moments. I can sort out the chapters that culminate in a big deal BBEG fight, and we level afterwards. Sometimes a factor is how many game sessions since the last level up. I have more an issue with the DMs who give out XP. It's given out per game session, and it feels too little.

Part of the factor is I'm used to old school when XP was only given out at the end of an adventure arc. You play two or three sessions of it then given a large number. You level after two or three adventure arcs. Today's DMs I play with when giving it out after every session I cringe because it feels so low. I consider the bad guys we face and the number of players, so I get the math behind it, but there's real world time and energy spent playing the game. I accept at face value when the DM says he gives XP for roleplaying, but the XP total is to me subjectively low I feel devalued. This is in general, not personally and the DM is not being "tyrannical".

It might be emotional, but give me the big number at the end of an adventure arc or use milestone. They're almost the same thing anyway.

[Zevox]

As for adventure timing: if you level up at our rate, once every couple of months, or take a year to go from level 1 to level 5, which sounds pretty normal, but you also level up mid-dungeon often, I would suspect that you have really long adventures [or if you're leveling up mid adventure and only play 1-5, are conflating "Adventure" and "Campaign", which would be kind of like an extended one-shot in my mind more than a whole campaign].

No leveling up mid-dungeon - we use milestones, not xp, so that wouldn't happen. We don't only play 1-5 either, that just happens to be what we did last year, starting a campaign in a new homebrew setting our DM created.

I was using Adventure and Campaign interchangeably there though. So by "Adventure," you just mean a shorter adventure that only lasts a couple of months of real time? Interesting if so. My group has done something like that occasionally (although shorter than it sounds like yours are; the longest ones only lasted a month and a half to two months, and the shortest was 3 sessions), but only as something that those of us that don't normally DM for full campaigns run in between the full-length campaigns. It's a combination of giving other members of the group a chance to try the whole DMing thing, and giving the regular DM more time to cook up the next full campaign. We've never leveled up doing those though, that's always wound up being a campaign-only thing (albeit I suppose that only by chance before we switched to the milestones system).

I mean, Asisreo said they level up once every 2-3 sessions, which is legitimately really fast.

I can assure you, I don't do anything special according to the DMG. It takes roughly 2-3 adventuring days to level up (adjusted xp) so I'm roughly on-schedule. And I sincerely believe the game starts to get stale, especially in terms of martials, when leveling up takes irl months.

I can't imagine playing in a game where it took more than 5 weeks max irl to level up, I'd be bored out of my mind. Even in a milestone campaign, I would appreciate some sort of indication that I'm close to a level up so I can think of my next options rather than having it sprung up on me.

Huh. Yeah, that does sound very strange (and very fast) to me, I must admit. Leveling is fun, but it certainly doesn't matter to me nearly that much. As long as it happens occasionally and the campaign doesn't feel like it's dragging, I'm good.

[Asisreo1]

Huh. Yeah, that does sound very strange (and very fast) to me, I must admit. Leveling is fun, but it certainly doesn't matter to me nearly that much. As long as it happens occasionally and the campaign doesn't feel like it's dragging, I'm good.

Here's a question for you, then: have you ever played a class and felt underwhelmed with their options? Like you'll never really get to experience when the class actually gets powerful and you're entirely stuck with what you have?

Like you have to retire your character because it didn't get what you were hoping for soon enough?

That's essentially what a faster leveling system solves. Now, it doesn't have to be XP. It can be just as good in milestone. But there's really no reason to slow leveling down too much. Especially since you probably have a mastery of the system and the small amount of incremental boosts per level-up aren't going to make you confused.

As for how to make it in a story setting, if you want, you can have them do the "training while downtime to level up" variant that makes it so you can't level up without training a bit, even with the necessary exp. They can train on their travel times and when they have a short breather in a settlement.



As a side, milestone is a bit of a misnomer. Currently, it basically means "anything that isn't xp." But it actually means they get experience for doing stuff besides combat. Most people that run xp in modern games are actually running with milestones.

What people mean by "milestone" is level advancement without xp. It's understandable it has a shortened version because of how long it is but there's actually 2 versions.

The first is very rare, gaining a level per session. That's kinda fast even for me but it might depend on the session. If it's 6 hours long and the pace is very fast, it might make sense.
The second type is plot-based advancements and it's by far the most common, at least of the xp-less rewards. It's also the simplest, yet it's apparently also the slowest. I've played in plot-based advancements and it does make my character feel very static in growth, relying more on new magic items rather than my own strength since it's unknown how long it'll take to level up.

Personally, it also feels very hand-holdy or railroady since it feels like we will get nothing but harm doing anything but exactly the plot-based stuff. Like, why should I even talk to NPC's and risk saying something bad if I could just go directly to the boss? And why not cheese the entire dungeon until the final boss like a coked-up speedrunner if everything in between only gets me coins which aren't going to be spent and enemies that are more trouble than they're worth?

[LordCdrMilitant]

No leveling up mid-dungeon - we use milestones, not xp, so that wouldn't happen. We don't only play 1-5 either, that just happens to be what we did last year, starting a campaign in a new homebrew setting our DM created.

I was using Adventure and Campaign interchangeably there though. So by "Adventure," you just mean a shorter adventure that only lasts a couple of months of real time? Interesting if so. My group has done something like that occasionally (although shorter than it sounds like yours are; the longest ones only lasted a month and a half to two months, and the shortest was 3 sessions), but only as something that those of us that don't normally DM for full campaigns run in between the full-length campaigns. It's a combination of giving other members of the group a chance to try the whole DMing thing, and giving the regular DM more time to cook up the next full campaign. We've never leveled up doing those though, that's always wound up being a campaign-only thing (albeit I suppose that only by chance before we switched to the milestones system).

Huh. Yeah, that does sound very strange (and very fast) to me, I must admit. Leveling is fun, but it certainly doesn't matter to me nearly that much. As long as it happens occasionally and the campaign doesn't feel like it's dragging, I'm good.

A campaign is composed of adventures and downtime. Each adventure is like a story arc [typically lasts a couple of sessions], between the adventures are downtime. The campaign I'm in right now has been going for about a year and a half now, and we're level 9 going on 10 and started at level 1. We've had many adventures.

We also have short single-adventure-campaigns like I think you're describing, for summer activities or things.

Here's a question for you, then: have you ever played a class and felt underwhelmed with their options? Like you'll never really get to experience when the class actually gets powerful and you're entirely stuck with what you have?

Like you have to retire your character because it didn't get what you were hoping for soon enough?

Uh... no? Usually we just play and are generally pretty happy. We take our level ups between sessions after we're told to level up.

That said, waiting for stuff to come online is why we often start at level 5 for short campaigns so that you start at the point where your signature features are online.

[Zevox]

Here's a question for you, then: have you ever played a class and felt underwhelmed with their options? Like you'll never really get to experience when the class actually gets powerful and you're entirely stuck with what you have?

Like you have to retire your character because it didn't get what you were hoping for soon enough?

No, I haven't. Though I also don't think I'd retire a character because they didn't feel powerful enough - combat is only one part of the game's fun, after all, and there's a strong likelihood that even if I felt underwhelmed by my combat performance, I'd be enjoying RPing the character.

I mean, hell, that's most of what I've been doing in my current campaign. As I mentioned it's been going on since late February, mostly weekly, and it's had all of two fights. One of which barely counts because we'd so thoroughly lead our enemies into a trap and sabotaged them in so many ways before it happened that it was basically over before the first blow was struck. During all the rest of the time we've done a lot of RPing, some shopping, exploration, investigated a murder mystery and participated in a trial for it, investigated leads on some villains we haven't caught up with yet, plus had some travel time of course. All a lot of fun, but at no point in it did combat capability matter, and what level we were only mattered insofar as our skill checks went.

As a side, milestone is a bit of a misnomer. Currently, it basically means "anything that isn't xp." But it actually means they get experience for doing stuff besides combat. Most people that run xp in modern games are actually running with milestones.

What people mean by "milestone" is level advancement without xp. It's understandable it has a shortened version because of how long it is but there's actually 2 versions.

The first is very rare, gaining a level per session. That's kinda fast even for me but it might depend on the session. If it's 6 hours long and the pace is very fast, it might make sense.
The second type is plot-based advancements and it's by far the most common, at least of the xp-less rewards. It's also the simplest, yet it's apparently also the slowest. I've played in plot-based advancements and it does make my character feel very static in growth, relying more on new magic items rather than my own strength since it's unknown how long it'll take to level up.

The second is what I've been assuming we all mean in talking about it. I've never heard of the first, which just sounds crazy to me.

Personally, it also feels very hand-holdy or railroady since it feels like we will get nothing but harm doing anything but exactly the plot-based stuff. Like, why should I even talk to NPC's and risk saying something bad if I could just go directly to the boss? And why not cheese the entire dungeon until the final boss like a coked-up speedrunner if everything in between only gets me coins which aren't going to be spent and enemies that are more trouble than they're worth?

Because leveling up isn't the sole (or even primary, at least to me or my group) goal of playing the game, it's just one of many fun parts of it? Because it would just be less fun to do that? I can't imagine even considering doing such a thing, personally.

[Asisreo1]

Uh... no? Usually we just play and are generally pretty happy. We take our level ups between sessions after we're told to level up.

That said, waiting for stuff to come online is why we often start at level 5 for short campaigns so that you start at the point where your signature features are online.

Alot of people who hate certain classes/subclasses don't like the fact they don't have any changes to their character for the majority of the campaign.

Have you noticed why wizards are a favorite? It's because they make decisions that affect their playstyle per long rest while spellcasters like sorcerers are stuck with their spell selection until level up where they can swap one. Eventually, you'll be playing exactly the same tunes over multiple encounters and you'll wonder if that's all the class/subclass has to offer.

Fighters are very dependent on level ups to make choices. They get tons of ASI's and feats but only if they can get to higher levels which might feel very static and unlikely when you haven't leveled up the past 2 months and the wizard gets to play with his toys and switch them around all he likes in a day.

I think it may actually be good for balance if a character levels up once per 3-4 in-game days because it will make the wizard's long rest preparations not as super good compared to other spellcasters. They only get a new spell and get to swap an old one but it isn't after 2 months of waiting and wishing you never chose false life over magic missile. Then the DM has to permit you to change spells and you're convinced both spells and sorcerers suck without DM input.

[Moxxmix]

Three different long-term adventures, with three different GMs, had us leveling up roughly once every 4 sessions.

The longest running one had us reach level 14 in 2 years 7 months, playing 2 out of every 3 weeks. That's a level gained (1–14 is 13 gained levels) about every 4.25 sessions.

The other games that ran weekly had us leveling up somewhere around once per month, so about the same. The recently started game is 8 weeks in, and we're level 3, but we did get to level 3 a couple weeks ago, so maybe 6 weeks? ~3 weeks per level. Seems reasonable for early levels, especially when some of that time was getting used to a VTT.

For encumbrance, we don't really track it. We're more likely to worry about, "You can't swing your polearm in this cramped tunnel", and "How many times do you have to cast Create Food and Water each day to feed the party and all the horses?" Also, "Cool! A lamp that lets us see invisible! Who's got some oil?" ... /crickets

But, I'll also caveat: 90% of early levels is spent in the city, in pretty much every game I've been in. There's no spending a couple weeks in the wilderness trying to weigh food vs gold or whatever. The gold you accumulate is more likely to be stored in your house... where you have to worry about thieves, not encumbrance rules.

[Asisreo1]

No, I haven't. Though I also don't think I'd retire a character because they didn't feel powerful enough - combat is only one part of the game's fun, after all, and there's a strong likelihood that even if I felt underwhelmed by my combat performance, I'd be enjoying RPing the character.

I mean, hell, that's most of what I've been doing in my current campaign. As I mentioned it's been going on since late February, mostly weekly, and it's had all of two fights. One of which barely counts because we'd so thoroughly lead our enemies into a trap and sabotaged them in so many ways before it happened that it was basically over before the first blow was struck. During all the rest of the time we've done a lot of RPing, some shopping, exploration, investigated a murder mystery and participated in a trial for it, investigated leads on some villains we haven't caught up with yet, plus had some travel time of course. All a lot of fun, but at no point in it did combat capability matter, and what level we were only mattered insofar as our skill checks went.

That's, to me at least, downtime. Yes, you can get in fights in downtime and yes they can be hard, but it's still seeding for the next adventure, as it seems you described it. Of course, you can have a full urban encounter like in Waterdeep but there usually isn't much time to relax during an adventure because of either an explicit or implicit time pressure. "Save the noble" isn't a specific time pressure but you can't leave him there if he's very important and eventually things might get out of hand, like more demons showing up or criminal activity spiking.

But also, adventures can link and merge into and out of downtime. For instance, your players might not realize that when you skip over travel, they have downtime. The wizard might be able to safely make a first-level spellscroll for further use or the barbarian might recuperate from a specter's life drain.

The second is what I've been assuming we all mean in talking about it. I've never heard of the first, which just sounds crazy to me.

It's actually from the DMG on the same page "milestone" is.

Because leveling up isn't the sole (or even primary, at least to me or my group) goal of playing the game, it's just one of many fun parts of it? Because it would just be less fun to do that? I can't imagine even considering doing such a thing, personally.

Getting stronger is a very strong reason for me to play. Maybe me and my DM are weird but we suck at interesting stories. We've tried making these really cool stories and they always fall flat because players don't buy into it, or pacing sucks, or there's no reason to even pursue the hooks. And as a player, we're supposed to play nice but we've lost interest after "Ah! The dragon was actually a frog dressed as a dragon! Wow! This story is so cool and it isn't hard to keep track of at all. But wait, my notes say the frog is the prince? Is the dragon a prince? Oh, it's a secret...alright then, keep your secrets."

I mean, maybe it's also the fact that I'm a gamer who is okay with story but doesn't want it to bog down the fact that it's a game. Like, I don't see what exactly is wrong with playing the game like it's a game. I'm not interested in my OC & gang's antics as much as I am feeling like a grandmaster chess player when I make exactly the right moves in combat or feel like I'm in skyrim discovering new things when I explore and even getting xp for uncovering secrets.

So I don't really have a problem with the game-side of the game.

[Zevox]

That's, to me at least, downtime. Yes, you can get in fights in downtime and yes they can be hard, but it's still seeding for the next adventure, as it seems you described it. Of course, you can have a full urban encounter like in Waterdeep but there usually isn't much time to relax during an adventure because of either an explicit or implicit time pressure. "Save the noble" isn't a specific time pressure but you can't leave him there if he's very important and eventually things might get out of hand, like more demons showing up or criminal activity spiking.

But also, adventures can link and merge into and out of downtime. For instance, your players might not realize that when you skip over travel, they have downtime. The wizard might be able to safely make a first-level spellscroll for further use or the barbarian might recuperate from a specter's life drain.

The only part of it that I could see being called downtime was the very beginning, when we did that shopping and got the initial adventure hooks. The rest of it was a whole subplot that we just solved with very little fighting because our party Ranger is a mad genius who enjoys schemes that manipulate and humiliate his opponents and seems to have the dice gods on his side - hence sabotaging our opponents so thoroughly that we were able to defeat them without any real resistance. Plus we also avoided another fight entirely through persuasion checks, so I guess that was a third potential fight.

Getting stronger is a very strong reason for me to play. Maybe me and my DM are weird but we suck at interesting stories. We've tried making these really cool stories and they always fall flat because players don't buy into it, or pacing sucks, or there's no reason to even pursue the hooks. And as a player, we're supposed to play nice but we've lost interest after "Ah! The dragon was actually a frog dressed as a dragon! Wow! This story is so cool and it isn't hard to keep track of at all. But wait, my notes say the frog is the prince? Is the dragon a prince? Oh, it's a secret...alright then, keep your secrets."

I mean, maybe it's also the fact that I'm a gamer who is okay with story but doesn't want it to bog down the fact that it's a game. Like, I don't see what exactly is wrong with playing the game like it's a game. I'm not interested in my OC & gang's antics as much as I am feeling like a grandmaster chess player when I make exactly the right moves in combat or feel like I'm in skyrim discovering new things when I explore and even getting xp for uncovering secrets.

So I don't really have a problem with the game-side of the game.

Nor do I, and there's nothing wrong with playing like that if that's how your group wants to. It's a just a foreign one to me personally. I like combat and leveling up in D&D, but like RP and collaborative storytelling just as much, so I feel little need to do the former with great frequency.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Getting stronger is a very strong reason for me to play. Maybe me and my DM are weird but we suck at interesting stories. We've tried making these really cool stories and they always fall flat because players don't buy into it, or pacing sucks, or there's no reason to even pursue the hooks. And as a player, we're supposed to play nice but we've lost interest after "Ah! The dragon was actually a frog dressed as a dragon! Wow! This story is so cool and it isn't hard to keep track of at all. But wait, my notes say the frog is the prince? Is the dragon a prince? Oh, it's a secret...alright then, keep your secrets."

I mean, maybe it's also the fact that I'm a gamer who is okay with story but doesn't want it to bog down the fact that it's a game. Like, I don't see what exactly is wrong with playing the game like it's a game. I'm not interested in my OC & gang's antics as much as I am feeling like a grandmaster chess player when I make exactly the right moves in combat or feel like I'm in skyrim discovering new things when I explore and even getting xp for uncovering secrets.

So I don't really have a problem with the game-side of the game.

Nor do I, and there's nothing wrong with playing like that if that's how your group wants to. It's a just a foreign one to me personally. I like combat and leveling up in D&D, but like RP and collaborative storytelling just as much, so I feel little need to do the former with great frequency.

Huh. I do not enjoy feeling like a grandmaster chess player in D&D. As I've mentioned, I have no less than 12 armies of miniatures and a good number of old fashioned wargames for that feeling.

I play and run RPG's for the storytelling and having a make believe character to play as. I pretty much try to avoid combat because I find D&D combat deeply unsatisfying, slow, and boring compared to both other RPG systems and being a wargamer in general [I don't avoid it that much. That would be mean to two of my friends, who basically live for combat, one of whom recuses himself at basically all other times.]

The game is the story.


Anyway, this is kind of even further tangential to the topic of encumbrance. How we run our games and how our levelling pace and rate of adventures/level is intrinsically tied to treasure gain which is basically the purpose of encumberance and explains why you encounter encumbrance often and I never see it, because I just don't collect treasure at nearly the same rate because I don't level at nearly the same rate.

[TigerT20]

The first is very rare, gaining a level per session. That's kinda fast even for me but it might depend on the session. If it's 6 hours long and the pace is very fast, it might make sense.

Based off the DMG: It is not every session. Getting to level 2, sure that's one session. But the DMG then says immediately after that that level three is two sessions after level 2. The number of sessions between them keeps changing, with some levels being longer than others - tiers two and three should be longer than one and four in general

They aren't blitzkreiging the game, they're just using the number of sessions played as the baseline for levelling.

[Tanarii]

Based off the DMG: It is not every session. Getting to level 2, sure that's one session. But the DMG then says immediately after that that level three is two sessions after level 2. The number of sessions between them keeps changing, with some levels being longer than others - tiers two and three should be longer than one and four in general

They aren't blitzkreiging the game, they're just using the number of sessions played as the baseline for levelling.

LEVEL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT XP
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.

STORY-BASED ADVANCEMENT
When you let the story o f the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

P263

Might as well quote the book at this point and get everyone on the same page. Using Level Advancement Without XP and the Session-Based Advancement option means advancing every 2-3 sessions! each 4 hours, after level 4.

Despite what it says this in no way mirrors standard advance,ent. That is actually much faster than rewarding creature XP, unless you make the mistake I did and reward encounter difficulty adjusted XP as a reward . The average pace of advancement based on adventuring days and creature XP for 3-6 creature encounters, and having all combat encounters, would be on average would be roughly 4-5 sessions per level. The only way to get 2-3 adventuring day sessions per level is for them all to be solo creature encounters or non-combat challenges.

Also note that in addition to not understanding their own adjust XP for encounter difficulty vs creature XP for adventuring days system (easy mistake IMO ), the designers pretty clearly expect a 4 hour session to be roughly an adventuring day's worth of encounters, combat or non. Given how often people complain about that clearly it's a problem for a fair number of folks.

-------------------

Also in 5e "Milestone XP" is a way of awarding XP. Ya'll need to get yer terminology right.

[Asisreo1]

LEVEL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT XP
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.

STORY-BASED ADVANCEMENT
When you let the story o f the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

P263

Might as well quote the book at this point and get everyone on the same page. Using Level Advancement Without XP and the Session-Based Advancement option means advancing every 2-3 sessions! each 4 hours, after level 4.

Despite what it says this in no way mirrors standard advance,ent. That is actually much faster than rewarding creature XP, unless you make the mistake I did and reward encounter difficulty adjusted XP as a reward . The average pace of advancement based on adventuring days and creature XP for 3-6 creature encounters, and having all combat encounters, would be on average would be roughly 4-5 sessions per level. The only way to get 2-3 adventuring day sessions per level is for them all to be solo creature encounters or non-combat challenges.

Also note that in addition to not understanding their own adjust XP for encounter difficulty vs creature XP for adventuring days system (easy mistake IMO ), the designers pretty clearly expect a 4 hour session to be roughly an adventuring day's worth of encounters, combat or non. Given how often people complain about that clearly it's a problem for a fair number of folks.

-------------------

Also in 5e "Milestone XP" is a way of awarding XP. Ya'll need to get yer terminology right.

I also want to get this out of the way. Because people get it wrong, including me.

Nowhere in the DMG does it say that 6-8 encounters is recommended for an adventuring day. 6-8 encounters is a hard maximum to what they believe players can handle before needing a long rest.

For 1st level players, they can only really handle 4 hard encounters between a short rest. The encounter difficulty threshold is continuous so it's possible to have a medium encounter without the adjusted xp being exactly 200 for a medium encounter. As long as it is lower than 300, it still counts as medium. This means that 6 encounters a day is a cap, not a baseline, unless you put in easy encounters in-between.

I believe LMoP's first fight is 4 cr1/4 creatures. It's interesting because that is definitely a "deadly" encounter for 1st level players and it's infamous for making the players seem weak at first level. It's actually funny that they claim the PC's defeat to be "unlikely" with such a deadly encounter. Especially with supposed newbies.

Despite the encounter being "deadly," it's not tpk-worthy since deadly encounters could be lethal enough to lead to 1-2 character deaths. The party does risk defeat, though.

I don't think an adventuring day is actually supposed to be 6-8 encounters. You're still playing "correctly" or RAW if you have less or don't even hit the XP threshold. Session-advancement is probably too fast even at first level but I can start to see it being reasonable past 3rd-4th level since it's generally the pace I go with adventuring day exp.

With adjusted exp, it usually does go roughly 2-3 adventuring days to get a level up and I can eek an adventuring day's worth of exp in a single day.

[kyoryu]

Since you missed the point while quoting the point, I'm going to repeat it.

Someone posted that encumbrance is always a negative for players.

Someone else responded it is a positive for some players.

If it's sometimes a positive for players, or a positive for some players, it's not always a negative for players.

I think negative and positive are being used in two different ways, here.

1) Encumbrance is only a negative for players - it never provides bonuses, it only provides penalties.
2) Encumbrance can be a positive for players - having to make encumbrance-related decisions can make a better play experience.

Yay, ambiguous language!

Oh, also, excellent posts earlier on the historic reason for encumbrance, and a great analysis. I'm a huge believer in understanding why the rules are what they are (especially when it comes to old D&D), so that you can know when to ignore them. I think there's a lot of D&D stuff that made sense in 1e with the assumptions of Gary's game at Gary's table, but are often less relevant today. Those things have been getting removed slowly, but it's still worth understanding the history.

And, as someone that's a fan of old-school D&D, I'd probably ignore encumbrance for most "modern" games.

[Deathtongue]

5E D&D's encounter assumptions are dissonant with how action-adventure fiction constructs its stories. Storytelling filler, even if it's action-packed, is generally a dirty word in television and paper media and is the Cain's Mark of unimaginative or pandering writers. And let's be honest, except in extraordinary once-in-a-campaign circumstances like storming the castle to save the planet combat past 2 or 3 encounters between the beginning of an act and its denouement is just filler. Which is okay and even necessary for a video game, but inappropriate for storytelling.

[Tanarii]

Which is okay and even necessary for a video game, but inappropriate for storytelling.

Which is fine, because storytelling and TRPGs are like oil and water most of the time. They're both fine things by themselves but they don't mix well.

[LordCdrMilitant]

LEVEL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT XP
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.

STORY-BASED ADVANCEMENT
When you let the story o f the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

P263

Might as well quote the book at this point and get everyone on the same page. Using Level Advancement Without XP and the Session-Based Advancement option means advancing every 2-3 sessions! each 4 hours, after level 4.

Despite what it says this in no way mirrors standard advance,ent. That is actually much faster than rewarding creature XP, unless you make the mistake I did and reward encounter difficulty adjusted XP as a reward . The average pace of advancement based on adventuring days and creature XP for 3-6 creature encounters, and having all combat encounters, would be on average would be roughly 4-5 sessions per level. The only way to get 2-3 adventuring day sessions per level is for them all to be solo creature encounters or non-combat challenges.

Also note that in addition to not understanding their own adjust XP for encounter difficulty vs creature XP for adventuring days system (easy mistake IMO ), the designers pretty clearly expect a 4 hour session to be roughly an adventuring day's worth of encounters, combat or non. Given how often people complain about that clearly it's a problem for a fair number of folks.

-------------------

Also in 5e "Milestone XP" is a way of awarding XP. Ya'll need to get yer terminology right.

I have had my terminology right. ;) I have consistently just said "award levels when I/we feel like it".


Anyway, wow that's uh, fast. I used assigned levels, and we don't go anywhere near that fast [as mentioned, we're like half the normal pace]

It takes 300 XP to go from level 1 to level 2.
A CR 1 enemy, approximately a at-CR encounter for 4 level 1 PC's, awards about 200XP. Split 4 ways, that's 50/player and 6 such encounters to level up.
That would be, for me, at least 3 sessions, potentially 6 or more if we aren't fighting continuously. I don't know how one would cram 6 encounters into one session, unless you played from dawn to dusk.

A CR 9 enemy would be approximately an at-CR encounter for my party, and awards like 5000XP. Split 4 ways, that's 1250/player out of 14000XP to level, meaning we'd have to fight 12 such encounters to level. That's definitely a solid 2 months of playtime.

Even tuning up to "deadly" encounters, we'd still wind up with a lot of encounters, like 6, to level up, which would still be like a month of game time.

I also want to get this out of the way. Because people get it wrong, including me.

Nowhere in the DMG does it say that 6-8 encounters is recommended for an adventuring day. 6-8 encounters is a hard maximum to what they believe players can handle before needing a long rest.

For 1st level players, they can only really handle 4 hard encounters between a short rest. The encounter difficulty threshold is continuous so it's possible to have a medium encounter without the adjusted xp being exactly 200 for a medium encounter. As long as it is lower than 300, it still counts as medium. This means that 6 encounters a day is a cap, not a baseline, unless you put in easy encounters in-between.

I believe LMoP's first fight is 4 cr1/4 creatures. It's interesting because that is definitely a "deadly" encounter for 1st level players and it's infamous for making the players seem weak at first level. It's actually funny that they claim the PC's defeat to be "unlikely" with such a deadly encounter. Especially with supposed newbies.

Despite the encounter being "deadly," it's not tpk-worthy since deadly encounters could be lethal enough to lead to 1-2 character deaths. The party does risk defeat, though.

I don't think an adventuring day is actually supposed to be 6-8 encounters. You're still playing "correctly" or RAW if you have less or don't even hit the XP threshold. Session-advancement is probably too fast even at first level but I can start to see it being reasonable past 3rd-4th level since it's generally the pace I go with adventuring day exp.

With adjusted exp, it usually does go roughly 2-3 adventuring days to get a level up and I can eek an adventuring day's worth of exp in a single day.

Huh? I'm confused by "I can eke out an adventuring day's worth of XP in a single day" do you mean "single session?" and what's "an adventuring day's worth of XP?"


XP is OOC, and governed by encounter and level, not by in-game adventuring days, which could include many encounters or include very few. And one session-day could include a fraction of one adventuring day, or many. In general, from my experience, a party can expect to complete between 1 and 3 encounters per session-day, generally on the side of 1 rather than 3.



Treasure, and thus your encumbrance, is based on level. Generally, one would assume that the party's wealth comes from loot whether in magic items or gold, and in a classical scenario all that loot would be carried out of the dungeons at the end of the dungeon delve [and then be converted into equipment and/or stored]. Over the course of X sessions from level A to level B, the party accumulates both the XP difference and WBL difference of those levels through a series of one or more "adventures".

In general, an "Adventure" includes one or two expeditions to a dungeon, where the party gets treasure and XP. A trip to the dungeon isn't necessarily one adventuring day [since establishing guarded camps in the AO are common problems], and definitely isn't one session-day. A medium-sized adventure for us is usually around 4 session-days, and I would guess this is "normal", since it seems congruent with almost everybody else and most modules I've read, which feel like they range from about 2 session-days to about 8 session-days in complexity depending on the module, though this can obviously vary with your table's efficiency.


Total accumulated wealth is a factor of your level, but the frequency that you get to extract treasure from the dungeon is based on how long adventures take to complete. The rate you have adventures is largely unrelated from the rate at which you level up. So if you level up "fast" [particularly if you level up mid-adventure], you will accumulate treasure quickly relative to your opportunities to extract it, and thus often find yourself at encumbrance. If you level up "slow", you will accumulate treasure slowly relative to your opportunities to extract it, and rarely carry much at all out of the dungeon.

If you follow standard XP-based progression for a 4-person party and distribute hoards evenly across the levels, it would generally line up like [The two red columns are Katherine's Estimation and subject to considerably variance by GM and campaign. I've also assumed that you actually spend your GP on stuff like Magic Items or castles or nice things like you're supposed to, or at least drop it off in your house/castle/airship/whatever so you can sit on it like a dragon, rather than carrying it around everywhere your go because I have in fact seen somebody who was new and didn't know what to do with gold and never spent it until he went "uh, I've got 400 pounds of gold on me" and we went "wait, what, why, how?"]:


If the number of encounters per session changes, or the number of sessions per adventure changes, then the amount of weight carried out per adventure would change.

I've estimated 4 sessions per adventure based kind of on dead reckoning and personal experience, and estimated 1.5 encounters per session because I've seen 1 encounter session, I've seen 2 encounter sessions, and I've even seen the exceedingly rare 3 encounters/5 hour session, but I've never seen anyone get through more than that in 5 hours.

But anyway, note how low your encumbrance-to-treasure is [until level 17, when the hoard size gets huge]. This leaves 60 pounds of gear for a S8 character to carry after treasure, which is a lot of space to work with and not really at risk of tripping the base carry limit.

[Zevox]

Anyway, this is kind of even further tangential to the topic of encumbrance. How we run our games and how our levelling pace and rate of adventures/level is intrinsically tied to treasure gain which is basically the purpose of encumberance and explains why you encounter encumbrance often and I never see it, because I just don't collect treasure at nearly the same rate because I don't level at nearly the same rate.

True. Collecting stuff isn't really a focus on my group's campaigns either. The only time I've ever seen my DM roll against a DMG table for loot was for some explicitly temporary magic items from a dungeon that would vanish once the villain we were after was slain. We don't really just find gold or valuables lying around, we mostly get money via quest reward from grateful NPCs, and magic items are rare and generally something that someone in the party will find useful and want to keep. Large hauls of items just aren't a thing for us - at most they build up over time in our inventories.

[Asisreo1]

Huh? I'm confused by "I can eke out an adventuring day's worth of XP in a single day" do you mean "single session?" and what's "an adventuring day's worth of XP?"


XP is OOC, and governed by encounter and level, not by in-game adventuring days, which could include many encounters or include very few. And one session-day could include a fraction of one adventuring day, or many. In general, from my experience, a party can expect to complete between 1 and 3 encounters per session-day, generally on the side of 1 rather than 3.



Treasure, and thus your encumbrance, is based on level. Generally, one would assume that the party's wealth comes from loot whether in magic items or gold, and in a classical scenario all that loot would be carried out of the dungeons at the end of the dungeon delve [and then be converted into equipment and/or stored]. Over the course of X sessions from level A to level B, the party accumulates both the XP difference and WBL difference of those levels through a series of one or more "adventures".

In general, an "Adventure" includes one or two expeditions to a dungeon, where the party gets treasure and XP. A trip to the dungeon isn't necessarily one adventuring day [since establishing guarded camps in the AO are common problems], and definitely isn't one session-day. A medium-sized adventure for us is usually around 4 session-days, and I would guess this is "normal", since it seems congruent with almost everybody else and most modules I've read, which feel like they range from about 2 session-days to about 8 session-days in complexity depending on the module, though this can obviously vary with your table's efficiency.


Total accumulated wealth is a factor of your level, but the frequency that you get to extract treasure from the dungeon is based on how long adventures take to complete. The rate you have adventures is largely unrelated from the rate at which you level up. So if you level up "fast" [particularly if you level up mid-adventure], you will accumulate treasure quickly relative to your opportunities to extract it, and thus often find yourself at encumbrance. If you level up "slow", you will accumulate treasure slowly relative to your opportunities to extract it, and rarely carry much at all out of the dungeon.

If you follow standard XP-based progression for a 4-person party and distribute hoards evenly across the levels, it would generally line up like [The two red columns are Katherine's Estimation and subject to considerably variance by GM and campaign. I've also assumed that you actually spend your GP on stuff like Magic Items or castles or nice things like you're supposed to, or at least drop it off in your house/castle/airship/whatever so you can sit on it like a dragon, rather than carrying it around everywhere your go because I have in fact seen somebody who was new and didn't know what to do with gold and never spent it until he went "uh, I've got 400 pounds of gold on me" and we went "wait, what, why, how?"]:


If the number of encounters per session changes, or the number of sessions per adventure changes, then the amount of weight carried out per adventure would change.

I've estimated 4 sessions per adventure based kind of on dead reckoning and personal experience, and estimated 1.5 encounters per session because I've seen 1 encounter session, I've seen 2 encounter sessions, and I've even seen the exceedingly rare 3 encounters/5 hour session, but I've never seen anyone get through more than that in 5 hours.

But anyway, note how low your encumbrance-to-treasure is [until level 17, when the hoard size gets huge]. This leaves 60 pounds of gear for a S8 character to carry after treasure, which is a lot of space to work with and not really at risk of tripping the base carry limit.

In general, I can fit roughly 5 encounters in a session if things are moving smoothly. More if my players are on-top of things. By "adventuring day exp," I mean the adjusted exp in the table for each level. For example, 4 1st-level characters will have 1200 adjusted exp between them. If I give characters the baseline for hard encounters, 300exp, it's only 4 encounters. I could actually throw the baseline for a deadly encounter and a couple slightly-harder-than-hard encounters and bring the encounters to hit the "adventuring day exp" in the table to 3 encounters. Since you're constantly changing the exp using adjusted exp, they won't actually level up in an adventure following this method unless the entire adventure day is made of solo encounters, which would probably suck.

But I'm also saying that there's no need to force yourself to hit that maximum. One or two encounters a day is perfectly valid, though it'll swing things in favor of Nova/LR classes.

I'm also not claiming it's better to cram these encounters into a session but it isn't that hard to get 5 combat encounters in my 4-hour games. Combat doesn't really take more than 30mins-1hr at most.



For Encumbrance, I've looked at my players inventory and stuff is actually comical. Why are they carrying 55 pounds of foraged food, 15 pounds of skinned hide, 8 spider gland sacks, 5 pounds of Vinegar, and 8 pounds of apples? I don't really know. Apparently they value these items, too, since they will drop torches and stuff to keep carrying these and gold.

So if your players are metaphorical goblins like mine, they might enjoy "filling" their carrying capacity by picking up useless crap until they have to drop their arms/legs.

They recently got a donkey but they instantly forgot about it and they're deep within the adventure's Jungle. It'll be rough for them since they also just recently lost 2 party members who were the "strong men" if the group. The new characters should be strong people as well, though, so I think it's fine.

[LordCdrMilitant]

In general, I can fit roughly 5 encounters in a session if things are moving smoothly. More if my players are on-top of things. By "adventuring day exp," I mean the adjusted exp in the table for each level. For example, 4 1st-level characters will have 1200 adjusted exp between them. If I give characters the baseline for hard encounters, 300exp, it's only 4 encounters. I could actually throw the baseline for a deadly encounter and a couple slightly-harder-than-hard encounters and bring the encounters to hit the "adventuring day exp" in the table to 3 encounters. Since you're constantly changing the exp using adjusted exp, they won't actually level up in an adventure following this method unless the entire adventure day is made of solo encounters, which would probably suck.

But I'm also saying that there's no need to force yourself to hit that maximum. One or two encounters a day is perfectly valid, though it'll swing things in favor of Nova/LR classes.

I'm also not claiming it's better to cram these encounters into a session but it isn't that hard to get 5 combat encounters in my 4-hour games. Combat doesn't really take more than 30mins-1hr at most.



For Encumbrance, I've looked at my players inventory and stuff is actually comical. Why are they carrying 55 pounds of foraged food, 15 pounds of skinned hide, 8 spider gland sacks, 5 pounds of Vinegar, and 8 pounds of apples? I don't really know. Apparently they value these items, too, since they will drop torches and stuff to keep carrying these and gold.

So if your players are metaphorical goblins like mine, they might enjoy "filling" their carrying capacity by picking up useless crap until they have to drop their arms/legs.

They recently got a donkey but they instantly forgot about it and they're deep within the adventure's Jungle. It'll be rough for them since they also just recently lost 2 party members who were the "strong men" if the group. The new characters should be strong people as well, though, so I think it's fine.

Why is there a quota of XP for an adventuring day? What does the adventuring day have to do with either XP gain rate or wealth gain rate/session and /adventure? I'm confused still. It matters for how stressed the party is in the encounters they have, but how many encounters per adventuring day isn't really a driver in how long it takes to level up and how much wealth you get per adventure.



Also, wow, how do you have 5 encounters in 4 hours? With 4 of us and the monsters to go, it takes like 30 minutes for every round of combat. So like a 5 hour session for us where there's a fight can easily just "be the session".

The most encounters I've had in a session was 5 encounters in a 9-and-a-half hour session from Noon to 9:30.


And that's kind of funny. 55 pounds of food. Why? Rations are like 2lb/day, so that's like a whole month of food they're carrying.

[Tanarii]

In general, I can fit roughly 5 encounters in a session if things are moving smoothly. More if my players are on-top of things.

5 is on the very low side for a 4 hour session for me. In four hours my players would usually fit in 1-1/3 to 1-2/3 adventuring days (with 3-4 short rests) then pull out and end the session (which was automatically a long rest IMC).

That was a mix of combat and non combat, but non-combat actually takes longer to resolve than combat for the same difficulty. Especially Easy non-combat (no significant resources required, I.e. just checks and player skill).

Easy combat takes less than 10 minutes. Even a Deadly combat doesn't take more than 40.

[Asisreo1]

Why is there a quota of XP for an adventuring day? What does the adventuring day have to do with either XP gain rate or wealth gain rate/session and /adventure? I'm confused still. It matters for how stressed the party is in the encounters they have, but how many encounters per adventuring day isn't really a driver in how long it takes to level up and how much wealth you get per adventure.

There isn't a quota per-se but the DMG has the adventuring day adjusted xp table. I being it up because many people believe that's what an adventuring day should be when there isn't really any proof that doing it another way is wrong.

As for the rate of level-ups, the rate is typically just based on how many encounters you can get through in a session. Not all combats are the same and depending on the DM and players, it could take longer to finish an encounter. The longer it takes to make an encounter, the less encounters you'll have in a session but there's also probably less encounters in an adventure, too. Because being in the same adventure 6-8 sessions might get stale when everyone wants to move-on. Still, it depends on the party.

Also, wow, how do you have 5 encounters in 4 hours? With 4 of us and the monsters to go, it takes like 30 minutes for every round of combat. So like a 5 hour session for us where there's a fight can easily just "be the session".

Less hp-meatsack monsters overall. When there's multiple creatures that get close, they'll get AoE'd. And people usually just go quickly with their turn when they both know the rules and know their character. It becomes quite fun watching the party work together to quickly end the battle as opposed to some parties I've played with where they have to stop and read/ask about a rule while it's their turn.

I've considered having unprepared players forgo their actions during combat. I'm not that cruel, though. It's fair game to look up/ask a very vague ruling. But if you're asking something like "Can I use charm person to make the guy jump off a bridge?" Nah, that get's old super fast and it just hurts the fun of everyone else who actually read their abilities. My current group is pretty good about that, though, so that's good.

The most encounters I've had in a session was 5 encounters in a 9-and-a-half hour session from Noon to 9:30.

I wouldn't have been patient enough for that. If combat takes longer than maybe an hour, I check out. I'm in a campaign that's 2 hours long and we've gotten to 3 combats per session. We mostly know exactly what ability is useful in which scenarios and how to use them. We also synchronize our abilities and do what's good for each.

I remember a spellcaster used hold person on a low-wisdom NPC. My Ranger capitalized by using ensaring strike. The creature was high strength and was large so normally the spell wouldn't be useful but because he was paralyzed, he was going to fail his strength save anyways. I hit him, eventually he got out of hold person but because ensnaring strike requires an action, he missed roughly the entire fight. He wasn't the only NPC, there was a second one but he was the priority. After the hold person, the spellcaster just ran and kept hiding because their concentration meant way more than any damage they'd have to put on the table. I'm proud of that moment and the combat took only 3 rounds and 45 minutes.

And that's kind of funny. 55 pounds of food. Why? Rations are like 2lb/day, so that's like a whole month of food they're carrying.

Apparently, "Real adventurers eat meat, not berries and nuts." Lol.

[Zevox]

My group would typically be able to fit about two fights into a session (average length 5-6 hours), if there's multiple fights in fairly quick succession to be fought. Maybe thee if one is on the easy/quick side.

[Tanarii]

My group would typically be able to fit about two fights into a session (average length 5-6 hours), if there's multiple fights in fairly quick succession to be fought. Maybe thee if one is on the easy/quick side.

Okay but how long would those two fights each be? And what difficulty? Because if you guys run two medium fights for thirty minutes and spend the rest of the time exploring and doing non-combat encounters, that's totally different from if a medium difficulty fight takes you an hour.

If the latter is happening the group probably needs to revisit why their combat is so excruciatingly slow.