Quote:
Originally Posted by Boge
It feels a fine line to walk, giving players a feeling of advancement without increasing too quickly. I recently played a campaign where I went from a sword skill of 16 to Weapon Mastery and sword skill 22 (DX+7) all within about 20-25 sessions. The campaign timeline was about a year and a half. Another player went from no skill to 20 (DX+7) with weapon mastery. That felt too fast for me.
I'm trying to come up with some house rules to keep a good pacing. Some of our play sessions have time gaps inbetween, weeks of traveling, a month of recovery, etc. Others go day by day, one day being one play session. So I think the advancement needs to be based on sessions rather than in game time. I'm thinking maybe a limit of 1 point per skill/advantage/attribute per session. But, I feel it should be more difficult once you reach higher skill levels. Someone DX12 with a skill of 13 should have an easier time advancing that skill than someone skill 20, but the Gurps rules are 4 points per skill up regardless of how high you get.
So, I'm just trying to sort though some ideas. Do you have any rules that help keep a good pace without things getting out of hand?
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I grew up on D&D in the 80s where leveling was at a moderate pace (i.e. "slow" by today's standards). As a consequence, I mostly tend toward that kind of progression in GURPS now.
A typical campaign that I run might consist of 4-8 adventures each of which might be around 6-16 sessions long. I award a block of points at the end of each adventure. The amount of points awarded depends on how much progress the party made toward the campaign goals as well as how much down-time the party is about to have (and hence, how "realistic" it will be for them to grow). But it tends to come out to about 1.66 points per session. So I'm usually awarding blocks of 10-25 points each time.
I keep the pace from getting out of hand on any one trait by limiting the progression of any trait by one level per block of points. So even if a player just got 15 points, they can't raise their Sword skill by a bunch of levels. They can raise it one level and spend the rest of the points on other things. Sometimes exceptions are made. For instance, if the adventure break happened to occur in the Temple of the Sword Dancer Instructors, then just this once, players may spend points to raise Sword skill by more than one level.