We had a small problem at the game over the weekend, and we needed to come up with a way to fix it. I’m not sure that what we decided is the best solution, but I’ll lay it out here and if anyone has any suggestions, I’m anxious to hear them.
We are all seasoned gamers. Three of us versus one DM (Dungeon Master), there isn’t a chance. We have too many contingencies covered. I would say that even given a party of 1st level bards, we have a pretty good chance of surviving most encounters. It’s difficult to craft a challenging encounter for our characters.
Often a DM will resort to adding special non-standard powers (or class levels) to a monster, just to throw some surprises in. For a while, this was upsetting some players who knew the material so well that adding these features was throwing their game. But they’ve eventually come to terms and happy slug away for the extra XP (experience points).
Here’s the basic problem: Because it takes higher-CR (challenge rating) creatures to offer a challenge, and the books say that higher CR results in more XP, we’re making so much XP so fast that we’re commonly increasing by a level per session. For instance, Saturday’s session would have been 25200XP per 12th level character, which is 800XP shy of two level increases, not counting any XP that we had accumulated prior to that encounter.
Increasing levels so quickly has a variety of problems, mostly for the DM. Primarily, if you have designed a dungeon at a certain level of difficulty, you would have had to incorporate thinking into your design for level increases every session. This is very difficult to do. Ramping up an existing dungeon every time the players do is a terrible hassle.
The problems for the PCs aren’t as awful, but I personally feel that characters should sit at a certain level for a decent amount of time before being granted all the sorts of extra powers that are garnered with advancement of levels.
So how do we handle the issue? Here’s what we came up with.