Quote from: rawma;1018210Again, in organized play you have to bring the character up from 1st level. (Adventurers League has a couple of oddities; you can use downtime to advance a 4th level character to 5th, and a 10th level character to 11th - for the former it is certainly the case that 4th level is a slog to get to 5th level without it, since the first tier adventures don't award much experience.

I was just reading Xanathar's Guide, which gives advancement rules for AL. It says that PCs advance every 4 hours of play in Tier 1, every 8 hours Tier 2+? This seemed very fast to me BTW, I prefer about twice that number of hours played on average, slower at very high level.

Mike Mearls elaborated on the "4 hours" thing.

It's "4 hours" of progress. So if the module says "it should take 4 hours to reach X point," that's what it means. It's kind of a milestone system. Ideally it should be 4 hours, but if they do it in 10 hours in actual practice, it's the same thing as 4 hours.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1018230Mike Mearls elaborated on the "4 hours" thing.

It's "4 hours" of progress. So if the module says "it should take 4 hours to reach X point," that's what it means. It's kind of a milestone system. Ideally it should be 4 hours, but if they do it in 10 hours in actual practice, it's the same thing as 4 hours.

Yes, it does say that - so really it's an XP system, a "4 hour adventure" is worth 4 XP. And you get a bonus for lower Tier PC completing higher Tier adventure.
It's not a bad system - basically it's 4 or 8 XP to Level - but about twice as fast as I like for regular campaign play. I guess with all PCs starting at 1st, and often playing different PCs, having a fast CRPG type advancement rate for AL makes sense. For regular campaign play I wouldn't want PCs going from 1 to 20 in 136 hours of play. I find for 5e that about 2 sessions/8 hours works well for 1st>2nd and 2nd>3rd, then about 4 sessions/16 hours per level after that. In practice using the 5e system it's often just 1 session 1>2, and I've seen PCs go straight from 1st to 3rd or 2nd to 4th, but it settles down after that.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1018207That's actually the exact situation that made me ask this OP.

The two highest leveled players are the guys who have had their same original PC from Day 1, two years ago. The rest have gone through multiple PCs. But these two are still on their very first.

Then my recommendation is that, if at all feasible any time soon, run a one-shot adventure or two, with new low-level characters, that is deliberately designed to be rough on the characters.  Give these players a solid chance to get a character killed, or at least feel like they only made it due to smarts and/or luck.  

You can ratchet up difficulty in an existing game, especially if you explicitly explain that you intend to do so before it starts.  But the effort is not without risks, not the least of which is that you might not strike a good balance, and thus get unintended side effects.  The worst thing you can do--even worse than a TPK--is tell the players you intend to make the game tougher, and then they still walk all over everything.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1018117How do you handle the death of such characters?

The same way that I deal with the death of any high-level character, PC or NPC. There shall be ripples in the pond, and they may impact anyone.

QuoteThey have the potential to end the campaign or dissolve the party if everyone else was mostly tagging along.

Which is why it's important to not let "everyone tagging along" happen;).

QuoteIt's also a big blow to lose a character after investing so much time in them.

Don't get them killed, then.

QuoteDo you just let them die, and let the campaign die if that's the natural result?

If a campaign can die because of a character death, so be it:D!

QuoteOr should one put ways to bring the character back, or avoid the death altogether?

To the latter: no. To the former: if it fits the setting, and only then.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1018117Do you just let them die, and let the campaign die if that's the natural result?

Yes.

QuoteOr should one put ways to bring the character back, or avoid the death altogether?

No. What? They weren't OP enough already? Why even use game mechanics if you're going to overrule them when you get a result you find upsetting?

It seems to me it would undermine the entire experience - the effort, tension, stakes, removing pretty much all of the danger supposedly being faced, as if GMs who would consider doing that don't already try to make everything artificially calculated to have the players not get killed, anyway.

And if you're so worried about players enjoying a certain version of what happens in the game, how about the players who have been living in the shadow of the higher-level characters as you described? So, they're to be forced to never have the opportunity to possibly adventure without the now-imortalized PC?

It'd be enough to answer it for me just to notice how much it limits what's possible in the game if some PCs aren't allowed to die and the GM will use his _deus ex machina_ to not let that happen. Having the universe behave consistently and not bend to be nice to certain players is really important. Death, disaster and failure need to be real possibilities, and in fact lead to some of the most interesting, tense and unpredictable situations.

But... but... but... what if it gives their dinkie a sad?

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1018334But... but... but... what if it gives their dinkie a sad?

Why is that my problem?

Quote from: S'mon;1018228I was just reading Xanathar's Guide, which gives advancement rules for AL. It says that PCs advance every 4 hours of play in Tier 1, every 8 hours Tier 2+? This seemed very fast to me BTW, I prefer about twice that number of hours played on average, slower at very high level.

Although it says those are the rules for AL, they aren't the current rules. Currently, XP, gold and items are awarded in the usual way, albeit with specific limits and rules for how permanent items are distributed. Note that Xanathar's Guide came out in the middle of season 7, and official sources merely observe that they don't change the AL rules in the middle of a season. So it's a good chance they will implement those rules (to some degree) in the next season, but they haven't yet.

(To some extent, they can already control the rate of advancement in modules, since the published modules have a minimum and maximum XP award which overrides the computed XP if it's outside that range. But the lower level characters in a tier will advance faster with that than higher level characters in the same adventures, because of the differences in XP needed for a level, and the minimums I've encountered will not suffice to advance characters in the upper end of a tier in anything like four or eight hours. And the campaign books are run for AL with straight XP rules, although sometimes by milestone advancement at low levels - e.g., the first tier chapter of Storm King's Thunder.)

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1018138Also, the old epics always end with the hero's death.

That would be, in part, because his epic isn't done until the hero dies the final death.

Quote from: AsenRG;1018290If a campaign can die because of a character death, so be it:D!

I like it. It's the best way to kill a campaign.  When the hero dies, the story is over.  All campaigns are either comedy or tragedy.

Quote from: Madprofessor;1018762I like it. It's the best way to kill a campaign.  When the hero dies, the story is over.  All campaigns are either comedy or tragedy.

Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

If it happens to you it's tragedy.
If it happens to somebody else it's comedy.

Actually, a related question: how do you guys feel about long term campaigns ending in a TPK?

This isn't "two sessions in and everybody wipes," but having played for years and made it to a final boss, and then getting destroyed.

Good, bad? Just play it out and let it end on a sad note? Give them a way out?

First, don't have final bosses.

Second, why does the campaign end?  Were they the only people in the world?

The old heroes die, new heroes are born, the world continues.