I've been running my Ravnica game for five years now, which is honestly crazy. We had two home games before the Covid pandemic forced us to go remote, and while vaccines have allowed us to play in-person again, this game has remained primarily online just because I've got people living all over LA County (and one player in Orange County).
At this point, the party has spent over a year at level 17 - in fact, they hit 17 right at the end of 2023. Now, in terms of plot points and story, this has been justified. But it has been a minute since they powered up.
At this point, we're really only a couple sessions away from finishing the current arc and having them all hit level 18 (if it's one combat encounter per session, we're talking four-ish) but I, frankly, am feeling a bit guilty that they've been stuck at this level for so damn long.
Now, I overloaded this campaign with goals the party would need to complete. Set in Ravnica, I built it around a conspiracy by famous MTG bad guys, the Phyrexians, with a "Praetor" seeking to infect the plane of Ravnica hidden in each guild. The final one is the Praetor in House Dimir, who is a bit different, being an Elder Brain from the primary D&D multiverse who is hoping to use Phyrexian technology to further the Ilithids' "Grand Design."
Even what I have left in the campaign is pretty substantial - level 18 is going to see them traveling different Magic the Gathering planes to piece together the fragments of the Golgothian Sylex, which the ancient planeswalker Urza used to defeat his Phyrexian-corrupted brother Mishra long ago. Level 19 is going to be a delve through the nine layers of New Phyrexia (some taking longer than others - the Bleak Facade is basically going to be one combat encounter and then a big hole down to the next layer). And then, level 20 is where they get connected to the D&D multiverse and spells like Plane Shift, Astral Projection, and such finally become fair game, which will culminate in a climactic fight against Elesh Norn at the massive portal connecting Ravnica and Sigil, which will remain a canonical thing in my future campaigns (even if I'm unlikely to spend much time in the Magic multiverse in future campaigns).
This is all well and good.
The campaign has been milestone-based, which has given me a lot of control over the pacing of the campaign. It's also why a 5-year campaign allowed players to honestly hit level 10 quite early and then spend far, far longer in tier 3, and of course will spend nearly a year and a half at level 17 (my poor Storm Sorcerers are champing at the bit for their 60 foot flying speed).
My original campaign was XP-based, and I remember feeling somewhat frustrated at the slow rate of leveling in that one. But I think a big part of that was that my combat encounters were undertuned. D&D 2014, for one thing, was balanced around dungeon-crawls, where a party would have many encounters each day. And as such, a single encounter being kind of trivial, like when I had them fight a single Spectator at level 3 that died to just two turns by the Fighter and Paladin before it could act, make sense in the context of a dungeon that keeps sapping their resources, but is not as well tuned for big, climactic fights.
The new rules, notably, don't actually tell you how many encounters a party can expect in a single day - which I think is a flaw, to be clear - but it does suggest that, with the encounter building guidance, we're talking about fewer, bigger fights.
And that also means that each fight is going to award more XP.
The very first session I ran, the party (3 players at the time) fought first two Kobolds and an Octopus (the latter of whom they befriended and kept as a pet) and then a second fight against a single Thug - none of my monsters even got a turn.
Today, even if both were designed as low-difficult encounters (which they sure as hell were, and were even supposed to be) we'd be looking at 6 Kobolds in that first fight and then maybe a Tough (the new equivalent of a Thug) and two Bandits. So, we'd be going from a total between both encounters of 160 xp to 300 xp, nearly doubling it. And, I bet those would have been more interesting fights as well.
Sure, you'd need four more low-difficulty encounters to level up a party from 1 to 2, but using the old guidance, it would have taken even longer.
At the very earliest levels, it's easy to feel a bit impatient to level up. At high levels, it's not quite as urgent. One reason I don't feel as bad as I might otherwise feel for keeping my party at level 17 for over a year is that they're in tier 4 - they have their highest-level spells (unless our Artificer decides to suddenly jump ship and multiclass into Wizard for some reason) and most of their cool abilities.
But I really do feel like the amount of crazy stuff they've accomplished and the fights they've had means that they really ought to be more powerful than they are now. Just looking at the current dungeon they're in, we're talking about six low-difficult encounters and one high-difficulty encounter (along with a couple optional moderate-difficulty ones, one of which they did and another they turned into a social encounter). Per player, that's 4,500 per low-difficulty encounter and 11,700 for the high-difficulty encounter, so that's 38,700 xp per player for just the mandatory encounters in that dungeon. The xp required to go from 17 to 18 is 40,000, so just the single moderate encounter they've done in this dungeon alone would give them more than enough. And to be clear, this is the fourth major chapter of what they've actually done this level.
So: one thing I intend to do in future campaigns is to narrow the focus a lot more. Ten major villains, none of whom are even the campaign's final boss, is a little insane (Matt Mercer expressed a similar sentiment about having had five major ancient dragons for Vox Machina to fight, and I've doubled that!)
But I also think, on a certain level, leveling up should feel like the players' accomplishment. If the big bad is underpowered compared to them because they've leveled up higher than I had originally planned, that might just be the reward they reap.
Of course, one of the issues that arises with this is that it incentivizes a certain kind of play. Awarding XP from defeating monsters is very straightforward, but sessions that are much more RP-focused have a less clear reward structure. You might say that "quest rewards" can be used, but there's less explicit guidance here. If the party meets with the local King and convinces him to send troops to guard the excavation site of that ancient temple, do you get the XP value of the king and his guard? It's tough because such an accomplishment could hinge on a single good Persuasion check - and is that really as much of an accomplishment as taking down some tough monster?
Milestone leveling is certainly a way to make sure that leveling up feels like a major event. But I do think there's something kind of "honest" about XP.
I've been rebuilding the adventure that I had just started when my original campaign fell apart, and I'm going to try and see if I can get some of the players from said campaign to jump into it (along with some of my more recent players, who could join in). Of course, there's also a scheduling challenge - my Ravnica game is the one I run each week, and I've got two other campaigns that I play in. Still, it would be really cool. And it would be a good way for me to feel out the pacing going back to XP.
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