I haven’t had a chance to play DW yet, but I’d like to start running it soon. I’m just curious about the leveling pace. If you assumed a 4 hour session about how often do players generally level? And how many sessions to get to level 10?
I’ve been running games long enough I can generally figure these things out, but DW is completely different from anything I’ve ran before.
I would say they level once per session at most at the beginning. You can get close to a second, but it doesn’t happen a lot. Plus you need to Make Camp to do it anyways. Takes longer later on only because it’s harder to fail with better stats. Not much harder, but it is.
For our first DW campaign we’re doing double XP from the End of Session move, i.e. you get 2 XP each for defeating a notable enemy, learning a new world fact, and looting a worthwhile treasure. It was nice for the first few (3 hour) sessions, because everyone always levelled, but it’s starting to feel a little too rapid. I think we’re going to turn off that spigot at level 5.
I’m my experience the leveling pace feels very fast to me. I’m only just running my first long-running campaign and by the end of the first adventure (about 4-5 long sessions) half the characters were already sixth level and it never really slows down appreciably, one extra xp needed per level isn’t much of a curve.
I don’t know if reality will bear this out, but one hope I have for the accelerated leveling pace of DW is that it’ll make permadeath less painful. I’m hoping at least one player achieves a complete character arc and dies valiantly, opening the way to a new PC.
Yeah I was concerned that leveling would be too fast for my tastes. I prefer long lasting games with a fairly epic scope.
I’ll just have to feel it out and think about options to slow it down if necessary.
We got to level 7 in about 14 sessions. Levels 1-3 flew by (like 1 per session; I think one of them was level 3 by the end of session 2). It felt too fast to me, as we only really got through 2 adventures (one short one, and one that was a big 3-front megadungeon).
For a slower-burning game, I’d probably go with level + 12, or maybe (2 x level) + 6. Or I’d drop (or reduce?) the end-of-session XP.
You could also require longer downtime to level up (days or weeks), and something to spend XP on besides leveling. E.g. spend 1 XP to add +1 to a roll after the dice hit the table… which would actually be more like a 2 XP cost since it would often result in not getting XP for a miss.
I thought I read somewhere that you are only suppose to level once per adventure. But I could be mistaken, I’ve been reading Fantasy Craft recently so maybe I read it there.
well this depends on your gm style. do you make them roll to wade across that river or just let them do it but make them “spend thier resources” <-- second one is much more fun. >🙂
at 1st lvl players have close to a 50% chance to fail the average roll. so if each player is made to roll 14 times a session then they will average 7 fails and 7 xp on top of a possible 3 xp from end of session questions and up to 3 xp from resolved bonds and an additional 1 xp from alignment. every session.
however!
you also need to ask yourself how nasty are you as a gm. my PC’s live in terror of when the fail a roll because they will lose items, take damage, watch their hard earned loot swallowed up by unspeakable somethings… in short if my players had faild 7 times a session then their character is likely dead. so my players work to not roll. i encourage being prepared and only ask them to roll when something very big is at stake. otherwise i make soft moves and force them to react.
on top of that i encourage bonds to represent big shifts of character. ie- the theif surrenders to the cops and returns his stolen gold…. or the paladin becomes friends with the necromancer even after swearing to kill him. i make bonds about character development and so they are rarely resolved more then every three ish sessions.
once you play with your players for a while you can mess with them in fun ways. that magic sword you spent all session looting? it has been taken by that theif hireling you never paid. no xp for loot this session. make them work and risk for the things that give them xp and it will be fine.