I have a question...
how do you handle the passage of time in your game. The characters in the game I am running are nearing 12th lvl.. How much time would you say has passed since they started at 1st?
Thanks!
That, my friend, is entirely up to you. A good rule of thumb, for the sake of verisimilitude, is to not have a character gain more than 3 or 4 levels in a year.
But really, it's whatever works for your campaign. I don't believe there's been an actual rule for this sort of thing since D&D 2e.
in the game im running right now the players have gone from 1st to 8th level and they have only been traveling together for about 4 and a half months now.
the characters gain levels during this time but to them in game it doesnt seem like too much of a jump in power. levels are a game mechanic to keep things balanced while in game the players may not see much difference.
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When I run games I like to have long periods of downtime between adventures. So I will run and adventure that goes from 1-3 and then have a period of downtime where the characters age a couple years. Then after every few adventures I have some time pass; usually no more than 5 years. During this time I let the characters do things like build a house or craft things. One ranger started up a trained dog business.
Players are usually taken aback by this but they enjoy the time to do all the long term plans they want to do for their characters. I usually hand wave the monetary costs of things like houses, keeps, churches and say that they used their "off" time to earn the money for these things too. I keep a bit of a limit on it but it make for a lot of fun.
In the campaigns im playing right now, we usually roleplay every single day. Character that are level 10 or up may have aquired that in several weeks. That may not be entirely realistic but necessary for our playstyle.
I had one game where we gained 3-4 levels per game day (except for the few days we were travelling between cities, which we handwaved). I've run games where there's been days and weeks of downtime between things happening, so levels were every month or two. It all depends on the plot and how often the PCs need their 8 hours of rest.
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I like to keep track of game time, because it allows the players (and me as the DM) to plan events ahead of time and it allows me to know what the season is, what the weather is like, etc.
In my current game, the PCs started adventuring in September and have hit 5th level by January. The campaign date is currently in mid-to-late march and the party should be hitting 6th level soon.
I use existing calendars to keep track of in-game time. I've tried before to use my own made-up calendars with unique names for days, months, etc. However, it ends up being a lot of work for almost no benefit, since the players NEVER learn the new calendar and just don't think in those terms. Using a normal calendar just makes it very clear to the players WHEN they are in the story. If I say "It's late november" then they know right away without having to look at anything that they need to start buying cold-weather gear. I don't necessarily keep track of every single game day - sometimes I rule after the fact that X number of days have passed, or I just reset the in-game date to something plausible when we lose track of what day it should be.
For my current game I started the adventure on September 1st, 1901 - you can find the old calendars easily online. You get all of the moon phases laid out for you as well, if that's important.
Our group gets called out to adventure about every 2 weeks in game time. We also usually level after about 2 adventures. So I guess that's approximately 1 level per month so far.
Kingmaker has been 7 levels in 2 years.
Council of Thieves has been 8 levels in 4-5 months.
Rise of the Runelords has been 8 levels in about 3 months.
Even in APs, it's pretty varied. A lot depends on how fast players want to keep moving. Kingmaker lends itself to a longer time because PCs wanted to build the kingdom and craft. In CoT, I've asked my players at each break point how long they want, and they've wanted to keep trucking.
My KM group has a lot of crafters and item creators. I don't think a single person has those skills in CoT. It totally depends on the party, in my estimation.
There is no "X amount of time = Y amount of XP/level gained".
However much time actually passed is how much time actually passed. ALOT of AP's have you advance relatively quickly, if measured in days passed.
Take RotL for example:
If you are starting the PC's at some advanced level- let hte PC's pick their ages. Some maybe young and quick at leveling, others may be older and slower.. or just took their time or had something else going on.. (like a family, or a career other than adventurer).
In short- the time that's passed is the time that has passed. If you haven't "advanced" time at some point (i.e. announcing that 6 months pass before they pick up adventuring again) then its not unreasonable for them to go from 1-20 in under 6 game-world months.
-S
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Arbitrary. I used to approximate 1 year each level, rationalizing that a 20th level human character should never be age 18-24. Second edition even had a weekly breakdown of how long it takes to train, and 3rd edition as well, if I recall correctly.
However, with a campaign that might not let up, you can't adhere to a formula like that. Some can become powerful quickly in trial-by-fire and others take time with leisurely progression.
I rarely even think about this consciously. I generally deal with time differently depending on the sort of sessions I am running. If I am running a monthly game, I deal with it differently than if I'm running a weekly game. In general a monthly game will have faster in-game character advancement than a weekly game. I know that level advancement is very important for some people so I try to keep them moving up the ladder at a reasonable pace. I tend to move through levels 1 - 4 faster than 5 - 8, and so on. In a weekly game where we spend at least three hours per session, I like to level up every third session or so. For a monthly game I prefer to level up each session, mostly just to give the players a reason to be excited about coming back for the next session.
I almost never even think about game-time. I once had a group of players level up from level 2 to level 4 in a three day kobold lair episode that took two weekly sessions to complete. They just did that much stuff.
But for me personally, I rarely even think about leveling up and am frequently surprised when the opportunity to level appears. I think many games level up too fast and players never really learn how to utilize all their abilities, which makes it more difficult to synergize with new abilities, resulting in less than optimal game play.
But then again, I'm one of those people who just like to play. Leveling is just a bonus to me.
The way our DM does it is he has each gaming session (adventure) take a month's game time. So if our adventure only takes a couple weeks game time, we will do micellaneous actions back at home base for those remaining two weeks (craft, profession, etc).
Of course there are exceptions, but this is how it basically happens with us. And then he will mark it in his notes what month it is now with the passage of each month.
This is so widely variable it is hard to give intelligent advice. Since I excel at unintelligent advice, I thought I'd jump in.
It depends on how fast paced your adventures are and how much downtime the DM and players want between adventures. If the PCs are constantly adventuring, advancement can be incredibly fast in game time, sometimes running all the way to 20th level in less than a year. Age of Worms had a pretty fast timeline, if I remember correctly, with the PCs constantly being pulled from one plot hook to another, with virtually no down time. In contrast, Kingmaker has lots of downtime, and it is expected to span at least a few years and perhaps a decade or two before reaching its 17th level conclusion. It's all good as far as I'm concerned, so long as people are having fun.
That said, the rapid advancement of characters was one of the most jarring things about the transition to 3.0 from 2nd Edition. I strongly suspect the change was a deliberate design choice to appeal to the computer RPG and MMO crowd, which is used to very fast advancement. There's no doubt that leveling and improving your character is one of the greatest rewards in RPGs, and delivering that high as often as possible is smart design if you want to make money.
I really like that Pathfinder has fast, medium and slow tracks for advancement, however, allowing different groups to set their own speeds without houseruling.
I have a question...
how do you handle the passage of time in your game. The characters in the game I am running are nearing 12th lvl.. How much time would you say has passed since they started at 1st?
Thanks!
Ideally: Depends on the pace of your story. I personally like leveling to occur when there is a logical "break" in the narrative... like when you would expect to return and find the heroes are more practiced and confident. I think it should be a minimum of 6 months to 1 year per level. So 12th level = 6-12 years.
In practice, though: if you run a non-Kingmaker adventure path you will find that the players skyrocket through levels... about 10th level in 6 months, and I've been padding it out as much as possible. I really hate it being so fast, but in the course of a campaign it's easy to gloss over.
All things travel at the speed of the plot.
What do people normally accomplish during a session? With my group, we typically play between 3-4 hours every two weeks. Each of those 3-4 hour sessions usually includes a good deal of role play and a single encounter (sometimes two encounters), but not usually enough to cover a month of game time.
We usually game about the same amount of times per month, about twice a month. However, our sessions are longer, in the 7-8 hour range (or longer).
What really uses up the time (at least at lower levels) is the travel time. We have no means for fast travel so it can take days to get to a location on a lot of our missions. There are some closer locations for adventure, but we already went to them. :) When we get higher level and get access to faster travel spells (like Teleport), I am sure our adventures will take less time in the month and we will have more time for miscellaneous things like crafting, making money on our professions, etc.
Our sessions are pretty equal in regards to roleplay and combat. Our DM does a pretty good job of balancing both.
Recently my wizard went from level 3 to 6 in 3 months. In game it made a lot of sense. Our entire party was being harrowed in the underdark by a group of demon summoning cleric/cultists. As a result of the quick pace of our level progression I didn't have time to research new spells until we finally were able to reach safety.
However, normally we move at about a level every year or so. Taking long breaks between adventures and doing side quests like opening stores, building weapons and wasting our money in brothels.
