We've all seen it before: a party of 15th level PCs that have only been adventuring for a year or two ICly. What options do you use to slow down the advancement rate to a more reasonable level?
Make sure that you have to train in order to get levels. There are several guidelines in the DMG to cover the various time requirements that you can use, from either making players train for each skill point and feat to just having them train for their actual levels.
If player's have something time consuming coming up, like having their castle built, they might stay around the new fortress while it is being built to make sure everything is going well.
Player characters might be assigned as ambassadors or do to something else tedious at the behest of a king that they may simply say that they have done and return to their home a year later, perhaps with just knowing some more contacts within the region that they have been assigned to.
Forget about training. No matter how conscientious you are, you'll eventually put your players in the position where they have to go and save the world RIGHT NOW, but they'll all be killed if they don't spend several weeks training to up their levels first. Moreover, most training schemes also require an ever increasing investment of cash. You'll spend many headache inducing hours calculating how to give your party more treasure to compensate. Or you won't, in which case the party's wealth levels will be perpetually low and your players will hate you forever.
The answer to your problem is to be liberal about saying, "And then nothing much happens all winter. In the spring…" Let the party go on sabbatical for a few years before throwing the next end of the world scenario at them. Let the players tell you what happened during the enforced down time. In my Freeport campaign it took about six months of game time to get from level one to six. The arc wrapped up and the next time we gamed we picked up the story nearly four years later. I gave the players a pretty free hand to decide what the characters did during that time. They loved it. Characters experienced personal growth during that down time that they never would have gotten while running from crisis to crisis during the game itself. This allowed the players to refocus and move forward with the game with the characters they had imagined playing when they started the campaign.
Morrow
Ah, I was not clear. I am fairly good at spreading the time out in most of my campaigns, I was curious as to what others out there do with their games.
I very much prefer to use the training rules myself, as it drains away excess gold and slows the pace down a bit. The only time I ignore it is when I'm running a fast-paced, questing game.
Good ideas, though.
Well, as far as what I do personally, I do make them train between levels, but they don't have to train for feats and skills. They can train in half the time if they hire a tutor, or in the usual amount of time if they have the right equipment at hand (wizards and priests tend to need do to reading, warriors need a place to be able to move and practice, etc).
Players can have their characters "pre train." This came up because one member of the party is a level higher than the other two. When he trains for his level, the other two pre train for theirs, so while time still moves forward, there isn't that akward , "okay I trained for my level, lets adventure," then spend another two weeks for the next character to train, then the next two weeks when the final one gets his level.
When the PCs started to run around in the winter, I made sure to point out that their horses had to make checks to keep from falling and getting hurt, it took them forever to move on foot, and all sorts of hungry predators are around, so that now its a lot more likely that they hole up for the winter or else only have a few short adventures near their homes.
So thats basically how I run things.
I, too, dislike the idea that someone can go from 1st level to 20th in just two years or so. What about famous adventurers who've been at it for years, but the DM doesn't want to make them epic? From what I've heard, the older editions took much longer to advance. One way to go about this in 3.x would be to reduce XP rewards by 1/2 or more, but I think many players would balk at that. Besides, if they're fighting an evil cult, starting at low levels and working their way up as they themsevles progress, it would progably irk the players that they could fight the evil cult for long amounts of time and still only be dealing with the lowliest of minions. So reducing XP inflow isn't the answer.
The problem with enforced downtime is, what if the character decides that he doesn't want to stop? He may be fine with stopping the current arc, or taking a pause from it for a while (so long as it is at an approrpiate time), but what if he decides, "I'm going to keep adventuring, I don't want to stop"?
I don't think arbitrary required training times between levels is a good answer, either. The PCs are presumed to be doing that in whatever downtime they get normally. I like the training time bank concept propsed by someone (I don't remember who, sorry if you read this) in another thread. It might take X amount of time to get a level, but if you've spent that amount of time already, you can get a level up anywhere, even in the middle of a dungeon.
Of course, that does nothing to slow character advancement in time. Another problem I have is that there are so many interesting things to use against the party at various levels, it seems the level too fast for you to get to use a lot of them.
I like the idea that, if the characters want something built, they should stick around to see it completed, or it will have flaws. If they want that castle, they need to be their to direct its construction, or it probably won't be to their specifics. Another thing to do is make sure that most magic items aren't just made and sitting in a shop. That's illogical on two fronts: 1. Why make an item that requires you to expend your own money and life force when there's no buyer lined up, and 2. It's a thief magnet. So, the fighter wants that fancy new sword? He's going to have to wait for it to be crafted. Wizard wants that staff of super flaming uber death? Come back in a month. This adds some time, but not as much as I'd like.
So far, the arbitrary down time seems to be the best option. Anyone have some good suggestions for making it interesting for the players so that they don't rebel against it?
The Characters don't have to choose to take a hiatus I think it's reasonable to assume that even with the D&D world there could be month's, maybe several, where the evil cult has run off after being defeated (the characters could try to find them but the trail will be cold), all the local monster populations are well within the control of the local athorities, and the world is safe for now.
So If I wan't to see characters grow I tell then that things will be quiet for awhile and ask them what it is their charaters would be doing. The run and gunners will sulk in a bar somewhere keeping their ear to the ground for work while the one's that enjoy role playing will start building relations with NPC's and other characters
Oh and just in case the run and gunners say they just take a walk through a dangerous area looking for a tussle (first explain to them that you don't want any adventuring for a while and ask them to be patient) them let them know that their "aid" is not well received. druids and rangers would keep watch over natural areas and probably would stop some adventurer from killing everything he meets. Or if the player claims to be only hunting for evil creatures ( a favored tactic of antsy paladins) the same druid grove would be outraged that some outsider is accusing them of not being capable to protect their home from evil. A twisted and blasted plain thats spawns undead may be placed under lockdown by a militant church the character is not affiliated with and vigilanties will not be tolerated.
I have an idea after reading the spellweaver post. James Jacobs said a character with equal spell casting ability is an equal CR of a spellweaver because they will have about 20,000 gold pieces in items. Thus there is balance to the CR. My thought is if a character has magic below his expected amount then a normal encounter will be more challenging and he should merit more xp. Likewise if a character has more magic items than normal he should have a much easier time and thus should get less xp. I am thinking about including a +/- level adjustment based possessed magic items. I have not worked out the exact details.
I agree with training it makes having new feats much more believable. Also long quests can take time away. There might not be any fighting encounters for quite some time until one leaves civilization. Weather has a great way of slowing lower level characters.
Hail! In my games of D&D, I've always envisioned the game as "PAUSED" when the players are no longer playing. In my mind, the world has totally stopped, and until the players return, it will cease to flow naturally, unless they are not in the middle of action. In which case, the players are in "Survival mode" [i.e. The Ranger/Druid/Fighter is off hunting food}.
As I like to call it, my players are only in Season 1 of my D&D campaign (pre-apocolyptic world), and will age slowly only due to the fact that our games run in the game's world as a day or so, but in reality a few DAY's worth. (My players are newbs, leave em alone! lol) In any case, there is going to be a time of great rest, and a small mini campaign will occur, some 10~20 years after the world is thrown into darkness. In this "Season" {Season 2}, the players will still play as their "old" characters, and will assign their NEW attributes where ever necessary (i.e. Older Humans gain -1's to STR, DEX, and CON, but +1 to INT, WIS, and CHA). It's very useful to use the ages from the Player's Handbook (v3.5) when creating NPC's, for it add "flavor". lol.
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I have always wanted to run a campaign that spanned years, if not generations. Pendragon had a badly implemented good idea for doing this. This is what I would do, but I haven't done it yet.
Essentially, you work out a character background that involves family and holdings etc. Pendragon worked on the basis of knights, but my plan is to have the players be community leaders in a growing colony. Then you set up a system for letting the players determine what happens with their family and holdings; basically it becomes a resource management sub-game. I haven't found a system I'm happy with for doing this, but Pendragon, Birthright, and games like Civilization have all inspired me.
Then you pepper your 'adventures' at key points over the span of years (Pendragon has all adventures occur in summer). I personally would give reduced experience, but allow the players to have their characters focus on training sometimes to gain more between adventures. Also, I'd like to include a mechanism for tracking the characters' immediate heirs. In Pendragon, when your character dies, you can continue by playing your own heir, who's background you have already built. And of course, you can even die of old age.
To me, the trick is to find or devise a system of managing holdings that is simple enough but not grossly unrealistic, and integrates well with D&D. Most systems fall into the trap of 'every year you may do one of the following...' with a list of actions that are in no way equivelant to each other in terms of effort and resources needed.
This model does not work well with the dungeon-crawl model of adventure either. IMO for this to work, each 'adventure' event should take at most two sessions. Specifically, no more than two sessions should go by without the players noting the passage of time.
My group still plays 2nd edition so level advancement is obviously much slower. Not trying to start yet another debate on the pros/cons of older vs newer editions but it IS a major complaint of mine with 3.x that characters advance so quickly. I never liked the idea of 17 year old humans who achieved high levels (let alone epic levels). I enforce training periods for level advancement - one week per level, so, for instance, 10 weeks of training for a character to advance from 9th to 10th level. It doesn't take long until training is taking up months of game time. Others may think this harsh but I've never had anyone in my group (mostly veterans but with occassional newbies) even bat at eye. I make adjustments for immenent danger or time-restricted adventures but those are not as common as you think. Up until 10th level characters MUST train with a tutor, at higher levels they can "self-teach". I know nothing about gold costs and do not charge any fee for characters in training unless they are involved in "special" training. For NPCs I roll a d4 and subtract one for the number of years per level after 1st. For instance suppose an NPC started at 18 years old and I want him to be 3rd level ... to calculate his age I roll the d4 twice, suppose I roll a 2 and a 4. My 3rd level NPC would then be 22 years old (18 + 2-1 + 4-1 = 22).
In my campaigns any epic level characters would be at least middle age. That seems realistic and fair to me. It makes motivations for "eternal youth" and "time/life extending" magic or artifacts much more obvious. It also sets the scene for building homes/castles and having campaigns be multi-generational.
I personally don't like the idea of just a vague "nothing of interest is happening" time passage. I especially chafe at the whole summer activity system that many use. I preroll the weather conditions for blocks of time in advance of gameplay (usually about a game months worth). Unless time is of the essence, I also play out all travel and keep track of days spent. My players (and their characters) are very aware of the changing seasons and the passage of time. I've developed a calendar of holidays/festivals and they look forward to various role-playing "seasons". Sometimes a spring storm or winter freeze can really shape a particular adventure. I think it makes it much more fun and helps the D&D world come to life. This of course takes lots of DM prep time and effort to establish and maintain so I recognize that it doesn't appeal to everyone. It appeals to my controlling nature (pun intended!) to have full control over everything happening in the campaign world.
I guess I don't have an answer for the what keeps the players from balking question. I've never had them complain so ...um {shrug} I guess I'd just be tempted to say 'If you don't like it, create your own campaign world!'.
The problem with enforced downtime is, what if the character decides that he doesn't want to stop? He may be fine with stopping the current arc, or taking a pause from it for a while (so long as it is at an approrpiate time), but what if he decides, "I'm going to keep adventuring, I don't want to stop"?
My response to this is, "That's fine. You continue adventuring." Said adventuring takes place completely "off-screen," carries no risk of harm, and generates no XP or income. The player is free to make reference to how his character spent the time "exploring the ruins of the Lost City of Z'blah," or "stealing the Crown Jewels of the Kingdom of Djarath," but he simply receives no game-mechanical benefits for those activities.
The only problem I see with this solution is if the DM imposes so much "mandatory downtime" that PCs move into the next age category (and suffer the appropriate modifications to their stats). Obviously, a physical-type is going to be negatively impacted by that, so it shouldn't be done (or the stat mods should be waived for those who don't want them).
A wife and children will take time away from adventuring and be an opportunity for more roleplaying. Also a post in the local government could offer the same.
There is a post over on enworld concerning at what level the most fun is had by players and at what level to stop play. Often the quick level advancement of 3.x is mentioned so I would say many share your opinion.
Well, we could all look at it from a historical viewpoint...Kings, heros and the like were made in short periods of time, sometimes overnight.
I handle it like this:
When they are adventuring, time is tracked normally (real time). When they are training, studying, or other similar ventures (those of the mundane variety) time accelerates. (Including running their businesses if applicable.) If however, the activity requires player input of any sort, I run it real time to get the maximum effect for role-play.
Stillfoxx
"Live or die, you decide..."
Ah, I was not clear. I am fairly good at spreading the time out in most of my campaigns, I was curious as to what others out there do with their games.
I very much prefer to use the training rules myself, as it drains away excess gold and slows the pace down a bit. The only time I ignore it is when I'm running a fast-paced, questing game.
Good ideas, though.
I'm big on training as well - though the point about having to add more gold to cover the costs is a good one. I use a system were the players can pay and get trained fast or they can do it themselves and get trained slow.
However the real reason I use training is that I am also using proteges - so each player has a number of characters. Pretty much every few sessions some members of the party gain a level level and go off to train and their proteges show up and continue adventuring.
For me this system was useful in dealing with two facets of the game. One was player death - I did not much care for the system of bringing in new characters already leveled up to the party average (or maybe a little lower) with a character that was 7th level but had not earned any of that experience (and was also now more likely to be taking some kind of a min/max build that no one in their right mind would go for if they had to suffer through it in the actual game to get to the final result).
I also had a large 2nd edition campaign arc that had been convereted to 3.5 and needed slow the rate of the players getting to uber levels but I did not want to actually give out less experience. This way they get all their experience - but since they are spreading it among multiple characters they are ultimatly going to higher level slower. It also results in a generally good party mix with no player always having to be the healer or whatever. Each player has varous characters and usually one of them can fill the healing role.
Couple of big downsides with protege characters however. One is lots of book keeping. I have one newbie in the party and she is somewhat overwhelmed.
The other major problem is the players start hive minding. They want their ranger to give his +3 Crossbow of Speedy Shooting to their mage when the ranger is off scene. Personally I put my foot down on that saying you could not act as if your three characters where the best of buddies while everyone elses three characters were not to be trusted with 'your' magic items. Then I had to deal with stuff like 'What if I develop special relationships between my three characters?'. I basically said - in this case you can't (screams of protest about how I was not allowed to control their players followed but they relented ultimatly). That said they did get around my restriction in the end with the rather interesting expedient of forming a large adventuring company of all their characters and sharing all their treasure among the commune. I decided to let that one slide...at least their not playing a hive mind.
In the end I'm mostly happy with the system - and some of my players learned interesting things about themselves. One of my players always plays a druid. He just thinks the concept is cool. With this system however even he was not going to make multiple druids. Ultimatly however he (and I) was suprised to find that the character he gravitates to when they are all available is actually his fighter. I'd say that this phenomina of players realizing that who they thought was their going to be their favourite and who their favourite actually turned out to be is probably different at least 50% of the time. A Player that took the Cleric only because the party needed one eventually finds that this is his favourite character (partly because Clerics in 3.5 really rock) etc.
If you are handing out half experience for encounters then the party will be gaining twice as much treasure between levels unless this is also halved. This extra treasure is a great way to offset the cost of training.
Jeremy as to your players wanting to share magic items, what would they do if they were attacked while training. Over the course of adventuring characters make many enemies.
If you are handing out half experience for encounters then the party will be gaining twice as much treasure between levels unless this is also halved. This extra treasure is a great way to offset the cost of training.
Jeremy as to your players wanting to share magic items, what would they do if they were attacked while training. Over the course of adventuring characters make many enemies.
They'd fight with their basic weapons. I'm not to pertubed by this however. If the party treats treasure as a commune then they, in practice have more treasure (since the short sowrd of speed is always in play). The solution is to cut back on the extra bonus treasure you have been handing out to cover training costs. This encourages them to sell marginal magical items and keeps the numbers of magic items floating around more reasonable.
Also tossing in the odd item that can't be shared sends them into coniptic fits. I had a Copper Dragon Egg in the dungeon (stolen by kobolds). When the players found it and took it back to town I basically said that they had two options. The egg could be sold in a major metropolis for 10,000 GP or as a one time offer any wizard could use a feat and take it as his familier (though until he was 10th level the only familier ability it would have was empathic link). The player with the wizard freaked out - he wanted that Dragon so bad. The rest of the party was much less happy - the Dragon would only hang around with the Wizard and would vanish when he went off to train. Session ends and for the next week the emails fly fast and furous as I sit in the background and laughed evily.
I Have a real simple soultion. Have them build more than one character. That way, they can cycle them out of the party. If characters fall behind the others, you can run games geared to lower levels. It will let you control their progression and keep you from having to come up with bigger bad guys for them to fight right away.
I Have a real simple soultion. Have them build more than one character. That way, they can cycle them out of the party. If characters fall behind the others, you can run games geared to lower levels. It will let you control their progression and keep you from having to come up with bigger bad guys for them to fight right away.
I like that. It inadvertantly solves a big problem my campains are facing. Characters that become boring or repetitive like Fighters with poor feat selection, or the players just getting a wild hair up their butt and wanting to try something new. Uprooting my campaign ideas
I thought about this very issue when coming up with the idea for my latest campaign. My solution was different from anything else that I had come up within the past. I set the storyline in a small mining town and wrote the story to occur over the period of the next 80 years. All of the heroes would come from this small town and all of the challenges would occur in the same town as it went through its lifecycle.
We are now about 25% of the way through the campaign. The plot has movde forward 21 years along with the human characters who are mostly all in their mid-30's. Most of the players know that their current player will not live long enough to finish the game, so they are encouraged to come up with novel ways to resolve the issue.
The Necromancer married, had children and will be using some rather dark magic to bleed the life force of his progeny to stay young. Other players are simply marrying, having children, grand children and great-grandchildren. They are then taking family members as cohorts with the Leadership feat and training them up to replace their primary characters when they die of natural causes.
Overall, most of the players have said that this is the more interesting and innovative story line they've ever played. This is quite a compliment from a group of 30 year old geeks, some of which have been playing for as far back 1979 in first edition.