A Year in the City - Character Advancement
A note on Training to Gain Levels.
We have discussed how advancing in your class requires you to seek and study under a trainer. And that these trainers need to be sought out to do so. What may have been less apparent is that your trainer will not be able to advance you straight through levels 2-20.
The DMG - Training Downtime Activity breaks it down into 4 bands: 2-4, 5-10, 11-16, and 17-20.
Seeking a new trainer will require a Workweek of downtime Carousing: Levels 2-4 as Low-class, Levels 5-10 as Middle class, and Levels 11-16 as High class.
Though Friendly Factions may be an ideal place for newer initiates to seek guidance.
Those who are Masters of the World (Level 17-20), are so rare that to advance within this band requires long periods of self-study. No one can teach you. Though you may call on powerful beings to guide you in specific areas of your studies.
You may have also noticed that Time is starting to become a factor, another resource that Players will have to manage.
And though we are not strictly sticking to the strictures of Jeffro-gaxian 1:1 timekeeping, we will be trying to adhere to a stricter sense of in-game timekeeping (a terrible hybrid variable).
Hence the use of the in-game calendar.
Our usual Sunday game nights will fall on the 1st, 11th and 21st of the in-game calendar. The Patrons will be given a Workweek (10 in-game days) between most sessions to undertake external matters (running a business, researching quest info, or planning a little B&E), provided they are not in the middle of adventuring.
...Ideally the Player Characters would 'make it back home' at the end of every session, having advanced the in-game calendar by their actions.
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At 1st level, the Player Characters will need to spend 1 workweek (1st - 10th) finding a suitable instructor, and a subsequent workweek (11th - 20th) undergoing the training required to advance to 2nd level.
This puts a Player Character a couple weeks into the "future", meaning they will only be available 'to play' on the 21st of the in-game calendar.
You can see how, by design, a roster of potential groups of characters will begin to emerge.
I will admit that this is a crude kludged attempt at the "always on" campaign style.
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Which leads us nicely into the topic of XP for Advancement.
Our group has mostly run D&D using Milestone character advancement, this campaign however will be using Experience for character advancement:
"As your character goes on adventures and overcomes challenges, he or she gains experience, represented by experience points. A character who reaches a specified experience point total advances in capability. This advancement is called gaining a level."
"When adventurers defeat one or more monsters — typically by killing, routing, or capturing them — they divide the total XP value of the monsters evenly among themselves. If the party received substantial assistance from one or more NPCs (Hirelings), count those NPCs as party members when dividing up the XP."
To tie that into the example in the Time discussion; If you gain enough XP to advance to lv.2, and spend a workweek finding a trainer, but decide not to advance, because they wish to play that Character on the game session run on the 11th. The character will still be level 1, and any XP gained will be capped at 1 point below what is required for them to advance to lv.3, i.e. 899 of 900xp.
Meaning the player Character would require training to 2nd level to lift the cap, and additional XP (from a meaningful source) to advance to 3rd level, before spending more time and gold to undertake the Training required to actually become 3rd level.
The Player Characters gain no benefit of their new level (spells slots, hit dice, class features) until they have undertaken the Training required.
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