The rate of advancement in D&D (is a bit messed up)

Check this table out:

This is a combination of the “character advancement” table from the PHB (with some tweaks) and the “adventuring day XP” table from the DMG.

Notice anything?

The XP needed and the XP received line-up exactly, particularly at the first levels! In fact, one could say that “characters reach 2nd level after the first adventuring day, 3rd level after another adventuring day, and 4th level after two more adventuring days. Then spend two or three adventuring days for each subsequent level.”

I’ve put the above in quotation marks, because it is almost a direct quote from the DMG, under “session-based advancement”. The only difference is that the original talks about sessions, not adventuring days. It even adds a target length for a session: four hours.

So the assumption seems to be that one four-hour session equals one adventuring day, and up to three of those should be enough to level up!

Really though

So what’s the problem? Well, I don’t know about your game, but in practice, this doesn’t hold true for my games at all. Hitting second level usually takes two or three (or thirteen) sessions, and things definitely don’t speed up after that! And that slow progression messes with other stuff that could have been nice and simple too, like treasure distribution.

Here’s what the DMG says about treasure: “Over the course of a typical campaign, a party finds treasure hoards amounting to seven rolls on the Challenge 0-4 table, eighteen rolls on the Challenge 5-10 table, twelve rolls on the Challenge 11-16 table, and eight rolls on the Challenge 17+ table.”

And here’s what happens when you add another column to our table showing the number of adventuring days required to advance to the next level:

Check it out – a perfect match with the number of rolls on the treasure tables! So, conveniently, you should plan to give the players a big pile of loot exactly once a session!

Apart from things not working out that way, as I mentioned earlier.

I, personally, have been caught out by this problem when I discussed pricing for hirelings. I even used that stuff in my Old School Guide to Dotmm!

Finally, the other thing that should have been so elegant and simple: the Adventuring Day and its 6-8 encounters. Yes, that’s right it’s another post complaining about that stuff.

The adventuring day

Let’s talk about the dream. The way D&D (seems to) have been designed.

“Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day.” – DMG, “the adventuring day”.

That means: one sessions = one adventuring day = 6-8 encounters.

Is that doable? Given the four-hour average session time, an encounter would last 30-40 minutes. Pretty close to reality, in my experience. And conveniently the result of this Reddit poll (kinda)!

So that’s the plan. You sit down with your friends, play through a day of D&D, get some fat loot, and maybe gain a level. And because a session equals an adventuring day, it makes sense to bookend it with a long rest, and start the next session freshly recharged!

But that’s not what happens, and people either spread the adventuring day over multiple sessions or, more commonly, reduce the number of encounters in an adventuring day. Both aren’t great.

An adventuring day has a rhythm to it, a full-power start, followed by a steady reduction of resources, and a climactic final battle on your last legs. Adventure goals are also naturally linked to adventuring days – the treasure at the end of the dungeon. Splitting that up feels bad, sticks you too long in one “phase” of the game (either superpowered or scraping by), removes urgency, and makes it hard to deal with varying player availability.

Reducing the number of encounters in a day feels more natural, but it breaks the rhythm by always only playing the first half, the full power optimistic early exploration part, sapping the game of tension. Making up for that by increasing the difficulty of encounters isn’t great either, as it creates swingy encounters and doesn’t play nice with class design (if a barbarian can rage three times, he would normally rage in half the encounters, but is now able to rage in every single one).

So yeah, the reality and the design of the rules are misaligned, and that causes friction and lots of debate on /r/dndnext.

Why is this?

Leveling in D&D is slower than the assumption because we can’t fit an adventuring day into a session, and we can’t fit a level’s worth of XP into an adventuring day. This is caused by the design seemingly passing over two things that happen in “real” D&D sessions:

1. Roleplaying

I don’t know if there are stats for this, and the DMG doesn’t give an indication of what a healthy mix is, but in my experience about half of the playtime of a given session is spent on non-combat encounters. Parlaying with NPCs, overcoming traps and obstacles, gathering clues and information, that sort of stuff.

My experience is I get a max of 3 fights in a typical session, usually less, even in a dungeon crawl scenario. And I have the tapes to prove it.

2. Adjusted XP is not actual XP

Adjusted XP includes a modifier for group size, and that modifier is almost always greater than 1. For reference here’s the table from the DMG:

The average multiplier is hard to know, but we can safely assume it’s somewhere between x1 and x2 since mobs of 7+ (significant) monsters are rare. As an exercise, I’ve tallied the encounters in Curse of Strahd’s Death House:

Death House gives an average multiplier of x1.25. Higher-level dungeons will naturally start featuring more and larger groups. My own Hidden Grove of the Deep Druids has an average multiplier of x1.8.

What does that mean for our adventuring day? If we use a multiplier of 1.5x for simplicity’s sake, it means that our 300 adjusted XP only awards 200 “real” XP! If we then factor in our observation that we can fit maybe 3-4 fights into a session (instead of 6-8), we end up with a session that awards 100 XP, out of 300 XP required. Taking three of those to gain that first level, not one.

If we revisit the table using this metric, it looks a lot less elegant:

Seven sessions – yikes! No wonder people switch to “milestone” (GM fiat) XP!

So what happened?

From this point, it’s all conjecture. Well, even more than it already was, anyway. My theory is that some stuff changed late in development that threw a lot of previous calculations out of whack, with not enough time to revisit them.

One of those things, unsurprisingly, is the introduction of adjusted XP. I bet that for the longest time there was no such thing as an XP modifier for groups. And then in playtesting it turned out that three goblins are six times as difficult as a lone one, and people kept TPKing on goblin raids. Oops. Adjusted XP was introduced to compensate, encounter math for DMs became impossible without online calculators, and someone did a ctrl+f on “XP”, replacing it with “adjusted XP” here and there.

Another aspect could be the other side of this equation, namely the speed (and amount) of combat. Fifth edition is a reaction to fourth edition, where combats take forever. In fifth, things were more like the earlier editions of D&D, where fights are fast and furious. Roll to hit, roll damage, done. But complexity crept back up as PCs gained more options, and combat time increased again. I also wonder if at the same time the design moved away from fourth’s “series of set-piece encounters” and more towards exploration.

That’s all really interesting. So what can I do?

Well, at its easiest, you can just accept that leveling is slower than advertised and act accordingly.

Then, think about the relationship between adventuring days and sessions. Will you spread your adventuring day across multiple sessions, make it shorter, or do both? And how can you balance out the downsides of each? Personally, I’m a spreader, although I tend to balance my fights more on the deadly side as well. I also try to provide fewer rechargeable resources to my players, because they mess up this balance even more, and tend to stick to lower tiers of play.

If you do want speedier leveling, consider reducing the XP requirements to about 50% of what they are now.

Finally, let’s all hope that the boys and girls at Wizards of the Coast have spent the last 8 years thinking about this stuff and that the upcoming five-and-a-halfth edition will provide a beautifully elegant fix for all of this. 🙂