The reason for it at the time was thinking about how to smooth leveling. What I mean by that is that rather than leveling "like normal" you can get one of the advancements associated with the next level at a time, which stretches it out. You can't advance beyond the next level until you've taken all of the advancements associated with the level that you're on. For example, if a first level character were to advance to second level, but with level smoothing, when he got his first advancement, he would take, maybe the new hit points. The second time, it would be the skill points. At that point, he's "fully" 2nd level, and the next time he gets an advancement, he can start taking advancements associated with 3rd level. If I counted right, there are 24 total advancements to get a a fully 10th level character from a 1st level character at chargen.
If I decided that, just picking some numbers at random, you'd get an advancement after five sessions, say, which seems like it'd be pretty comparable to a game like Call of Cthulhu, which also has modest improvements that are relatively infrequent. Under this scheme, in Old Night I'd get to full 10th level after 120 sessions. That's similar, more or less, to my 100 session estimate from before... except that I don't know for sure that I really want to play at a full 10th level or not. What I'd like to do is also approach it from a different method; what if I gave one advancement every time a column on the 5x5 were completed? If I did that, the characters would be able to advance to 3rd level immediately after finishing Darkness in the Hill Country, would advance two levels while doing Cult of Undeath, etc. Two levels every full 5x5 campaign.
While that seems reasonable, that also means that I wouldn't want the same group of characters to do all six campaigns, because that would get them all the way to 10th level and beyond. It's also worth wondering how long I think my campaigns would last in terms of sessions. This is somewhere between a "wild guess" and an "experienced estimate" but given my relatively light, fast and loose planning style anyway, I'd think that one box on the 5x5 Front matrix could take from one to three sessions, depending on how meaty it is (and they're not all created equal. By design.) Let's say, for the same of argument, that there's an average of two sessions per box on the matrix. There are twenty five boxes in the 5x5 matrix, so that's fifty sessions. Does that seem reasonable? That actually seems really long to me. But maybe it's not unprecedented. Especially if I fudge it and throw in additional boxes for the campaign starting stuff; at least two to three sessions, and time spent on out of matrix character hooks. If I have sessions that are three to four hours long, that's 150-200 hours of play. Of course, how focused we are matters; my current group is more focused in many respects than the one I used to have back in my old state. We spend more time playing and less time chatting. Although after switching DMs, we also spend more time on puttering around doing shopping, and other roleplaying things that don't necessarily advance our "plot" very much. I guess I'm not sure what to expect there, as my experience is that this is pretty group and GM dependent. I think I'd move faster; I'm using a much leaner system, and depending on who we play with, we'd likely be more "on task" than either of those two groups were. I also tend to err on the side of rushing forward as a GM; I need to actually take a moment to think about not going too fast. I'm confident that I can easily fit a campaign in fifty sessions. Maybe even considerably less. Without doing a bit more planning in the immediate preceding days before a session, I could easily do it in half that time. But let's stick with that estimate for now; fifty sessions per campaign as a max number, and twenty five for a minimum number, depending on speed and pacing. That's my bracketed estimate of how long one of my 5x5 Front campaigns would take to play.
If I go with my expectation above that we do two full levels each campaign, then I'd need 25-50 sessions to get to a full 3rd level, at which point Darkness in the Hill Country would be over. Ideally, I'd time it so that the characters reach third level literally at the end of the campaign, and are ready to start playing again as fully 3rd level character working towards 4th level when they start Cult of Undeath. There are five advancements that they'd need to get in the smoothed system, which means, under the minimum expected number of sessions, they'd need to get one on average about every five sessions, and under the maximum, every ten sessions.
Thinking about it this way makes me see it differently. One minor advancement every ten sessions seems... slow, even to me. I know, I know; I'm the preacher of slow advancement. But its worth it to go through this episode to see what slow advancement really means. If it means you get halfway to level 2 after ten sessions and level 2 after twenty sessions, that's probably considerably slower than even players who are on board with the concept would be happy with. If I broke up the +2 hit Points into two +1 Hit Points as separate advancements, that helps a little, but still. I could, in theory, add yet a third hit point per level, and have it be a separate advancement. That would spread it even more (as well as making the hit point escalation less flat), but might be a way to extend campaigns without running into either the problem of too infrequent advancement of any type, or two fast advancement. The goal, of course, is to have the flexibility of extending play if you desire to have extra long campaigns without power creep becoming a problem like it does in D&D.
What this makes me wonder, more than anything else, is if I actually think its viable to have one group of characters do all of the campaigns back to back (to back, etc.) Maybe that's the problem; I'm trying to keep this going with the same characters, when I need to think about just having a different set of characters for each campaign. This was my original paradigm a couple of years ago when I first started the campaign briefs, the modern run of iconic characters, and all that jazz. There's several ways to skin that cat;
First, keep my current advancement schedule. Characters will finish a campaign just reaching 3rd level. Then go to another set of characters for the next one. Then leapfrog back to the other set. If I go back and forth between two sets of characters, then they only do three campaigns each. They play the first campaign as levels one and two, their second as levels three and four, and the third as levels five and six. We don't ever get to the higher levels under this scheme, unless the campaigns are going on the slow side of the bracket. If I do that, then it's likely that each campaign will get an additional level out of each campaign, and they'd end at just reaching 9th or 10th level.
Second, and related to that, is to attempt specifically to stretch the campaigns more to the longer side of the brackets, so characters can actually see more of the levels and more of the powers. These levels shouldn't really be seen like levels in D&D; they benefits of each level are much more modest. I should probably not worry as much as I do about having character accumulate so many levels, to be honest with you.
Finally, the real ideal state would be to be able to run multiple campaign concurrently with two different groups of players. That way, it's very clear that not everyone is meant to be running the same campaign; I have one group that does, for example, Darkness In the Hill Country, Icy Graves in Hyperborea and Cult of Undeath. An eastern group, while a western group does (maybe not in this order, even) Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, Terror in Timischburg and Curse of the Corsair Coast. Whether any of those need to be reset with new characters can be TBD, depending on pacing and flow. And, honestly, character replacement. It's entirely possible that either characters will die and need to be replaced with sufficient frequency that getting all the way to the top isn't a worry, or that players just want to change characters at some point for variety and change.
Which is another question; especially with the smoothing house rule; if there are replacement characters, how do they start? At 1st level? Or at the same level (or near the same level) as the rest of the characters in the party?
I'll keep that for a part II post, though.
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