Ok, not how it sounded.  Understand better.

I will say I give experience for just about everything. So the more you interact with the environment and learn new things, the more experience you accrue. Now not everything is worth the same amount, but 5 XP here and 10 XP there for opening up new mysteries and lore in town adds up. I reward active play of all sorts.

It's just you're not going to level that fast in many of my games, particularly my AD&D 2e ones.

My 5e RAW PbP here leveled up pretty fast, though. If it was face to face it would have been by the end of their second 4 hour session — they just haven't long rested yet. If I was to run not RAW I would pace things slower.

Quote from: woodsmoke;827485I agree, though I can't entirely fault players for wanting to advance their "build," much as I hate to use that term in reference to tabletop. To some extent it's simply the nature of the beast in level-based games, unfortunately. If I'm playing Earthdawn and I have a pile of unspent LP I can decide my character does a lot of studying and practicing in his downtime and put another rank in his melee weapons skill, f'rex, or he decided he wanted to learn some acrobatics and put a couple ranks in that. In D&D, if my rogue wants to improve his knowledge of history, he can read and study all he likes and nothing will change until he levels and can put another rank in the skill or his proficiency bonus increases.

That's a problem with 3e/PF I think because they have both levels and skill points/skill ranks, and you're not supposed to get skill points until you level.
In Classic D&D and AD&D, at least before Non Weapon Proficiencies, it's completely freeform - a Thief player can declare he's studying history for a year and the GM can tell him to put 'knows history' on his character sheet, just like he can add 'knows Orcish' etc. This 'Mother May I' freeform style, as the bad people call it, avoids a lot of trouble with class/level systems.

Quote from: LordVreeg;827491Indeed.
I was incomplete and made the mistake that people were familiar with earlier posts.  My mistake, really.

Both of those games are designed for longer term, or try to.  This is perfectly true.  
They are not designed for my sort of game (My main live campaign is about to crest 160 sessions) where the pcs are still challenged by the mundane and political.  And after all that time, PCs still don't want to mess with dragons.

I think that's pretty much true of 4e, although it's open to reskinning - my 23rd level 4e game still includes 'mundane & political', the PCs IMC are merely the rulers of a small frontier barony in the Forgotten Realms - but it does feel a bit odd to be dealing with honey export tariff income one day and battling incarnations of the Primordials the next.
Classic D&D is pretty similar, at 30th level the PCs are likely to be dealing with political stuff, but the default assumption is probably large empires and kingdoms, and fighting at least the smaller dragons is pretty routine by then, with the largest dragons posing beatable challenges.  

Neither support a Game of Thrones type feel, where your 100 session PC could get shanked by some bandit in a seedy dive; Runequest/BRP or GURPS much better for that I agree.

Quote from: S'mon;827595I think that's pretty much true of 4e, although it's open to reskinning - my 23rd level 4e game still includes 'mundane & political', the PCs IMC are merely the rulers of a small frontier barony in the Forgotten Realms - but it does feel a bit odd to be dealing with honey export tariff income one day and battling incarnations of the Primordials the next.
Classic D&D is pretty similar, at 30th level the PCs are likely to be dealing with political stuff, but the default assumption is probably large empires and kingdoms, and fighting at least the smaller dragons is pretty routine by then, with the largest dragons posing beatable challenges.  

Neither support a Game of Thrones type feel, where your 100 session PC could get shanked by some bandit in a seedy dive; Runequest/BRP or GURPS much better for that I agree.

That's kind of the crux of it.
My main online game is 47 full sessions in, and the PCs are still first year students at a huge Collegium of Magic.  The game allows us to scale back even starting characters to pre-starting ones, and while there has been some progress in social skills and some magic, the PCs are still weaker than a normal starting Guildschool character.  Scaleability and flexibility are important here.  

But to emulate so many of the really epic games, you need a system that plans on an escalating set of perils and a cosmology built around these.

The rate I use depends on the type of campaign; both in terms of how long I expect the campaign to be, and in terms of just what the power-level of the world is by default.

about moderately paced but the more encounters you have the faster you will level up if your in a warzone expect your level to skyrocket

I run long campaigns*, but I am not especially interested in running zero to hero to apotheosis. Therefore I tend to prefer a logarithmic type power curve where characters start out competent but with room for growth. Where growth is faster in the first 10-20 sessions and gradually slows thereafter. Runequest skill increases sort of follow this, as it gets harder to increase a skill the more skilled a character is.


*Later today I'll be running the 157th session of my Honor+Intrigue campaign.

Quote from: Bren;828813I run long campaigns*, but I am not especially interested in running zero to hero to apotheosis. Therefore I tend to prefer a logarithmic type power curve where characters start out competent but with room for growth. Where growth is faster in the first 10-20 sessions and gradually slows thereafter. Runequest skill increases sort of follow this, as it gets harder to increase a skill the more skilled a character is.


*Later today I'll be running the 157th session of my Honor+Intrigue campaign.

It's nice when they start moving outward as well, in skills.  rounding out, so to speak.

I don't use the default Mekton method for increasing skills, as I feel the RAW encourages skill spamming more than anything else.  Instead, I hand out a lump sum of Improvement Points which can be used to increase whatever skill desired.  The simple nature of how games go already encourages those points be spent on skills which are used during a session.  The award total ranges between 30 and 70 Improvement Points.  That's enough that a player is mostly guaranteed to be able to raise at least one commonly used and important skill, or improve a few lower rated ones.

I also have a rule that no skill can be increased by more than one point per episode.  Also, only one new skill can be learned per episode.  So that prevents something like a character going from a Mecha Fighting of 2 to 5 in one outing.

Quote from: LordVreeg;828852It's nice when they start moving outward as well, in skills.  rounding out, so to speak.

I find players seem to naturally want to round out their characters. I suppose I might be encouraging that desire by the way I GM.