Comic for Wednesday 6/19 (Early High Res)

One of the campaigna I'm part of (D&D 3.5e) is going for 18 months now. In-game, roughly a week has passed... we're level 2 now....sloooooooooowest burn, ever xD

That's why you have to test new systems once in a while and swap DMs. After a long and cruel campaign in earthdawn we always played something like paranoia or in nomine satanis or PPP or my little pony. 😄

Time to try a new system that is vastly different.

Ah, see, this is why it's vitally important that DMs full party kill on the regular. It's like plowing a field, getting rid of the old detritus hanging around to make room for new experiences. Alternatively, you can just drastically change the settings and/or significantly up the stakes. It's also why I almost always object to the logarithmic progression of XP charts in most RPGs. Progression slowing down at later levels is a distinct cause of burn-out and boredom. To some extent it is driven by the way videos games are crafted these days, but people need a steady trickle of happy-juice rewards to stay interested in things, and slowing down the pace of those rewards is a great way to lose their interest. XP required for each level can go up as you level, that's fine, but it needs to be balanced by an equivalent experience gain from encounters, such that the number of encounters needed to reach the next level stays relatively constant. It is, imo, a cardinal sin of the RPG genre that the last handful of levels usually takes a quarter to half of the total time required for the entire leveling progression. It almost invariably makes those final levels feel like such a *slog*, and really drills in the "grindy" feeling in most games.