I wanted to run a game with four players around level 7 and the expected length would be around six months playing once a week for five or six hours. I took a look at the medium XP chart and noticed something a little odd I hope someone can clarify for me.
There's this weird jump in XP requirement at level 10. It also happens at level 16.
The boring math:
Level 8 (51,000 xp) to level 9 (75,000 xp) requires 24,000 xp.
Level 9 (75,000 xp) to level 10 (105,000 xp) requires 30,000 xp.
A marginal increase from the previous requirement of 6,000 xp.
Level 10 (105,000 xp) to level 11 (155,000 xp) requires 50,000 xp.
A marginal increase from the previous requirement of 20,000 xp.
Level 11 (155,000 xp) to level 12 (220,000 xp) requires 65,000 xp.
A marginal increase from the previous requirement of 15,000 xp.
Level 12 (220,000 xp) to level 13 (315,000 xp) requires 95,000 xp.
A marginal increase from the previous requirement of 30,000 xp.
Simple terms:
Additional marginal XP requirements go from 6,000 to 20,000 to 15,000 to 30,000.
It's like the XP chart wants the game to slow down at level 10, make level 11 easy, and continue on past level 12 per the norm. I took a look at the Experience Point Awards table and that's linear as far as the XP reward increases go (in fact, every other level the marginal gain doubles from the previous one. Long story short, it's linear looking).
It seems relatively harder to go from level 10 to level 11 than it would be from any other spot. I thought that maybe this would be because of prestige classes or some universal event (e.g. every class gets a huge ability around 10) but it is not always the case. Some prestige classes can start before 10 and finish in the late teens which means this "bump" happens right in the middle of everything.
Even the slow and fast charts have this "bump" at level 10; although, the slow chart had "bumps" at 8-9, 10-11, and 12-13. The fast chart had level 13 as an easy one.
The entire reason for me asking and noticing is that I'm allowing my players access to item creation feats and a decent amount of in-game downtime between sessions, so I spent the last few hours going over excel spreadsheets with magic items and formulas. The XP chart happened to make its way on there because I was bored. Maybe I am over thinking this entirely but I like number crunching and irregularities get me thinking a lot. I'm hoping my tiredness didn't cause me to miss some paragraph explaining this!
Too long, didn't read version: The XP chart seems to section off games at level 1-10, level 10-16, and level 16-20. Epic does not exist for us at the moment; it was imbalanced in 3.5ed and we tend to play for RP and flavor if games extend for years and hit that point. Anyway, am I crazy in this assumption? And if so, should I just start them at 10 instead?
