I often read posts on Reddit seeking alternative approaches to tracking experience progression in their D&D or D&D-adjacent games. In this post, I describe the session-based leveling method I’ve used for the past few years. I’m not the first person to use session-based leveling, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone use the exact system I do. I also share PDFs of the ledger I use to track my players’ progress at the end of my post.
My Campaign’s Ecology
As of right now, my three-year old campaign has spanned 38 sessions, 23 unique players (15 of whom have played 3+ sessions; though I’d consider approximately 10 of these players regulars), 102 characters (47 of whom have been used at least twice; 14 of whom died post-funnel). The sheer number of characters stems from my campaign using Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) and onboarding new players with funnels—a single session adventure in which players control multiple classless level 0 characters. These characters are extremely fragile and players essentially trauma bond with any of theirs that survive.
Broadly speaking, I run an open-table west marches hexcrawl campaign. Sessions typically last 3-4 hours, and while I have a core group of players who play regularly, routine player attendance is not expected. Some of my players will attend a few times a year more as a social activity. Players usually run one leveled up character and supplement their party with one of their level 0 characters or hirelings/henchmen. All of my players have a stable of characters to draw upon depending on their objectives for that session and whoever else is present.
I describe the makeup of my ongoing campaign at length because I think this context is invaluable for understanding why I prefer session-based leveling. One of the OSR community’s strengths is the free exchange of creative ideas and homebrews. Unfortunately, people often share their ideas without explaining how they fit into their own table’s ecosystem and gaming preferences. This makes it difficult to adequately judge the merits of someone’s idea. Moreover, since people rarely play rules as written, it’s a fool’s errand to assume they are playing the same game, so to speak. For instance, something as simple as the availability of healing potions can impact the lethality of a game. If someone’s homebrew eliminates clerics, but they don’t explain the way in which a cleric’s healing responsibility is taken up elsewhere (or not) or their rationale for making this choice, it’s hard to know how this plays out in reality. Alternatively, adopting a gold-for-XP progression system but quietly doing away with encumbrance results in an entirely different game.
My Session-based Leveling Method
My session-based leveling system is an extrapolation of DCC’s rules, which automatically advance level 0 characters to level 1 after a funnel. In essence, it takes one session to become level 1. My experience system extends this logic by letting characters level up once they’ve played a number of sessions equal to their next level. For instance, level 1 characters must play two sessions to progress to level 2; level 2 characters must play three sessions to progress to level 3, and so on until a character hits level 5. Characters level 5 and higher only need to participate in five sessions to level up for each subsequent level. The reason for this higher-level modification is threefold: 1) Although DCC offers guidance for characters up to level 10, there are only 5 levels of spells; 2) Few campaigns make it to higher level play, most likely because of the leveling system. 3) Five sessions seem like an appropriate amount of time to level up with higher characters. Without this modification, players would need to play 55 sessions to hit level 10; with the modification, they only need 40.
After each session, I simply mark who was present by jotting down the date in the leftmost available box (figure 1). If I ran a funnel, I write down the names of every character that survived. Since players do not decide whether their human characters are a cleric, thief, warrior, or wizard until they are level 1, I just leave their class blank until they play their first session as a level 1 character. If players use one or more of their level 0 characters to assist their primary character during a session, I make note of it on their class line. These level zeros receive half the experience of their leveled counterparts. If a character dies, I just highlight the entire row and label them dead.
PROS
It streamlines the process of divvying out experience. I never need to tally the number of creatures my players killed, the gold they found, or the milestones they crossed. This is a HUGE bonus to me since tracking this has always felt tedious. Instead, I can spend more time doing the things that make me happy—like designing fun situations that promote emergent narratives.
This approach is extremely memorable. Players do not need to consult the rules to determine how much more experience they need. It’s easy to remember that they need to play sessions equal to their character’s next level to level up.
It reduces uncertainty about character progression. A few years ago, I played in an Old School Essentials (OSE) campaign where my level 1 fighter never leveled up once despite playing eight 3-4 hour sessions with the same character (my fellow players had the same experience). I still had a lot of fun in that campaign because I was hanging out with friends, but after a while the lack of progression was confusing. In retrospect, we should have had a conversation with the DM. I think the culprit was that the DM often ran non-OSE modules that did not have adequate treasure. (This is one more example about the importance of understanding a campaign’s ecology.)
This leads to my final point—session-based leveling is fairly immune to variance across systems. I do not need to worry nearly as much about balancing the amount of treasure scattered throughout prewritten adventures since my players do not use gold to level up their characters.
CONS
My method does not tie experience progression to in-game actions, which could seem to create a fairness problem: players who risk little advance at the same rate as those who play more heroically. This is not usually a problem, however, insofar as parties using other systems almost always level up from the same XP pool. If the party brings back X amount of gold, the XP is divvied up equally among players. Or if players cross some milestone, all players receive the same amount of XP.
Another potential concern is that motivation to play will dip since characters only level up based on players’ attendance. In my experience, however, this fear has been unfounded. After all, who really wants to attend a 3-4 hour session and do nothing? Do you? I know some D&D players can be faulted for min-maxing their characters, but I’ve never seen anyone adopt the strategy of waiting out a problem by doing nothing, especially when we won’t play again for another two weeks. If anything, I find the biggest problem I run into is that my players often want to view every encounter as a combat encounter. And even if my players wanted to spend all session in town roleplaying or discovering what their magical items really do, more power to them. They are still playing the game. And so, personally, I don’t consider this a con at all, but your own campaign’s ecosystem may prove otherwise.
Handouts
The following handouts are not necessary for tracking session-based leveling, but I have found them extremely useful as a tangible ledger. They can easily track each character’s current level at any given moment. This is particularly important in my campaign since players use a stable of characters.
I’m including two variations (both as PDF and Word Doc). Both variations have the same content, they just differ in compactness. Feel free to modify them.
Conclusion
Overall, I am extremely happy with this methodology. Sometimes I’ll homebrew something like an encumbrance system and then come to regret it or fiddle with it more later on. This approach, however, has remained incredibly stable from the start owing to its simplicity and clarity. Apart from wanting to better understand another system’s implicit experience ecology, I cannot imagine wanting to track experience progression any other way. As always though, I am happy to hear your thoughts and experiences.
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