The more I read about 5th Edition, the less I like it. Luckily, the players who comment on official Wizards articles feel the opposite way, so at least we balance out.
This time the issue is with the advancement discussed in the latest Legends & Lore article. The post is largely about tiers of play and is largely boring (unless you’re new to D&D, in which case it’s pretty well-written and sensible), but the end of each section describes the expected level advancement:
[In the Apprentice Tier], the idea is to have one play session that covers character creation and reaches 2nd level, and then have a second session that takes you to 3rd level.
Adventurer tier runs from 3rd level to 15th level. You can expect to level every other session in this tier.
Legacy tier runs from 16th to 20th level, with characters gaining a level every three sessions or so.
Early in my career, I had characters level about once every three or four sessions. Eventually I slowed it down for a few reasons. One, it breaks verisimilitude to think that characters are going from mundane folk to serious heroes in only about a month of adventuring. Two, I don’t like that, by rule, later levels are just as fast as earlier levels. Three, when the game’s power level scales that rapidly it’s harder to get a feel for growth. Four, it makes players more likely to reach for future gains rather than thinking about the characters they have now. And so forth.
My campaigns now are a lot slower. Except for the Tower Campaign, where the whole point was taking a kick-in-the-door, fast-experience, no-consequences world and slowly introducing deeper story and long-running plots, characters in my campaigns level once every seven to ten sessions. There are outliers for story reasons, but in general I’ve thrown the standard experience progression out the window.
So when I read that 5th Edition is based on a faster progression than even the system I rejected for being too fast, I find that terrifying. I’m envisioning the kinds of players who are thrilled by leveling that rapid, and I’m not anticipating an exciting play experience with them. Instead, I’m looking at a game where the focus is on getting cool new abilities instead of playing a character, something that seems expressly at odds with the stated goals of 5th Edition.
From what I understand of 5th, there aren’t a lot of neat choices you can make at later levels either. You choose your class, your feat tree (like a fighter can focus in different weapons, a wizard can use different schools, etc.), your background, what have you, and then you start playing. There are no options in the build beyond character creation because everything is carved in stone. Perhaps this has changed, but if it’s still correct then I don’t even understand why somebody would want to level along a liner, non-branching path.
Interestingly, at the same time Wizards announced “leveling will be super-fast”, they also announced the apprentice tier, where they’ve taken 1st-level characters and actually split them up into three levels so that players can play characters in their pre-adventuring career. Thus an L3 character in 5th is the equivalent of an L1 character in any other edition. The comments section loved it. So what I’m seeing is “we love taking our time to slow down and develop our characters, as long as we get to dump that trash fast and get to watching numbers go up.”
The article does make a point of saying that it’s trivial to change the XP progression, and that’s true. If you double the XP it takes to level, character will level half as quickly. Simple. But that’s a house rule made by the DM, which means it’s not the way the designers intended the game to be played. Intention pervades the rules, and if Wizards really wants fast leveling, then rulebooks, published modules, future articles, everything will be based on this intention, leaving DMs on their own to fix it.
4th Edition caught a lot of flak for being too much like a video game and not enough like a pen-and-paper system. How can nobody see that 5th Edition is the same thing?
100% agree! Because levels are significant power upgrades in D&D, you need time to settle in, get used to your new powers/mechanics, enjoy what it’s like to be able to easily dispatch those demonic spiders you were having such trouble with before. Then you can go on to bigger and better things to challenge you to use your new abilities.
You also want to keep people waiting for “the good stuff”. In our “Savannah Greyhawk” campaign, which ran every Sunday for most of a year, we capped out at level 5 or so – high enough for the druid to get her flying form, which she had wanted the entire time. I tend to think that was a nice reward, and made all the better for the fact that she had to work for it and the fact that I made it make sense in story. Maybe she’d disagree. (You could ask her.) But that slow pace allowed everyone to see what everyone else could do; get used to fighting as a party; etc. and it made it that much more exciting when someone got a major upgrade. If the campaign had run to level 10 or 15, none of that would have happened, and there would have been no room for a cohesive story.
I’m a big fan of “play who the characters are now” and not “play for who they’re going to be at level 20”. I don’t think rapid leveling in the D&D sense encourages that type of play. I do play some games where advancement happens every session or two, but the steps are very, very small: one stat increase or a single new ability, not a whole D&D level full of stuff. And when I play 4E, I do find myself looking forward to the next level (with excitement and anticipation, especially if I’m going to have some nifty new trick), but I like that sense of anticipation; of waiting for gratification.