nvgm/campaign-and-character-progression.md

Campaign and Character Progression

By NVGM
Written February 2019

You’ve decided to start your new campaign at 5th level. The core rules of 5th-edition D&D do not give explicit guidelines for handling the myriad questions arising in such a scenario. How much XP should you budget for one adventuring day with this party? How much gold should the party have acquired in the time before the campaign started? And how many adventuring days have the party completed together? According to the guidelines in the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, as well as some arithmetic, the answers are 3,500 per character, about 1,300 gp, and 10 respectively. After looking through the full collection of 5th-edition published works, I’ve assembled a spreadsheet to answer any questions about advancement pacing and wealth and magic item acquisition rates in an “average” campaign.

In the interest of digestibility, I’ve split the sheet into two segments: advancement, and treasure. You can find the complete sheet here.

All of the guidelines in this post are what I call the “second-most valid answer.” That is, the GM’s word is the highest authority, but should the GM prefer to defer to the designers of the game, the answers contained herein are those written thereby.

Advancement and Pacing

Your party are a band of mercenaries who’ve been working together since the beginning of their adventuring careers. By 5th level, how many full days of adventuring have they completed together? The table below describes the assumed rate of progression for parties using a “party XP” system wherein all PCs gain XP at the same rate.

Level	XP to Next Level	Adjusted XP per Adventuring Day per Character	Adventuring Days to Next Level	Cumulative Adventuring Days
1st	300	300	1	0
2nd	900	600	2	1
3rd	2,700	1,200	3	3
4th	6,500	1,700	4	6
5th	14,000	3,500	4	10
6th	23,000	4,000	6	14
7th	34,000	5,000	7	20
8th	48,000	6,000	8	27
9th	64,000	7,500	9	35
10th	85,000	9,000	10	44
11th	100,000	10,500	10	54
12th	120,000	11,500	11	64
13th	140,000	13,500	11	75
14th	165,000	15,000	11	86
15th	195,000	18,000	11	97
16th	225,000	20,000	12	108
17th	265,000	25,000	11	120
18th	305,000	27,000	12	131
19th	355,000	30,000	12	143
20th	30,000	40,000	1	155

Of course, the XP to Next Level column is drawn from page 15 of the Player’s Handbook. The Adjusted XP per Adventuring Day per Character column is pulled from page 84 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. The last two columns are arithmetically derived from the other two.

Interestingly, if you award one week of downtime per full adventuring day, your campaign will span nearly exactly three (2.98) in-game years. This is the rule of thumb I use to awarding downtime in my home games.

And lastly, it is correctly written that the core rules assume that if you’re awarding epic boons for each 30,000 XP your PCs earn beyond 355,000 as described on page 231 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, they will gain four boons for every three adventuring days.

Treasure and Magic Items

If your campaign is starting at 5th level, your players will likely ask about equipment, particularly magic items. Should 5th-level characters start with the same equipment as a 1st-level character? I believe not, but the question of post-1st-level wealth and equipment is not concisely answered anywhere in the 5th-edition corpus. But if your party is assumed to have been adventuring together since the beginning of their careers, it seems likely they will have found some magic items. But how many, and of what sort? The table below describes the average party wealth and magic item progression for a party of four members. For a larger or smaller party, adjust as you feel appropriate.

Level	Gold Value	Minor Magic Items	Major Magic Items
1st	0 gp	2	0
2nd	321 gp	4	1
3rd	642 gp	6	1
4th	963 gp	9	2
5th	1,284 gp	13	3
6th	5,641 gp	17	4
7th	9,998 gp	22	5
8th	14,355 gp	27	6
9th	18,712 gp	32	7
10th	23,069 gp	37	8
11th	27,426 gp	41	9
12th	60,176 gp	45	10
13th	92,926 gp	49	11
14th	125,676 gp	53	12
15th	158,426 gp	57	13
16th	191,176 gp	61	14
17th	223,926 gp	65	15
18th	555,926 gp	70	17
19th	887,926 gp	75	18
20th	1,219,926 gp	80	20

The Gold Value, Minor Magic Items, and Major Magic Items columns are all cumulative. The Gold Value column was derived from the Treasure Hoard tables and guidelines on page 133 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide by assuming a 51 on every percentile roll and taking the parenthetical value instead of rolling the dice, and including the value of all gems and art objects. The Minor and Major Magic Items columns are derived from the Magic Items Awarded by Tier table on page 135 of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. The full sheet includes breakdowns by rarity.

For some further insight, here are the rates at which the above are accumulated:

Tier (Levels)	Gold	Minor Magic Items	Major Magic Items
1st ( 1- 4)	321 gp	2-3	0-1
2nd ( 5-10)	4,357 gp	4-5	1
3rd (11-16)	32,750 gp	4	1
4th (17-20)	332,000 gp	4-5	1-2

It’s worth reiterating that these rates apply to parties, not individual characters.

Conclusion

All of these guidelines are subject to the “second-most-valid-answer” rule. You, the GM, have the ultimate authority to determine the pacing appropriate for your campaign. The guidelines in this article are meant to help you make decisions more confidently. If you’ve ever been asked by the player of your 5th-level fighter, “shouldn’t I have plate armor by now?” then you know how difficult it can be to make snap judgements about questions like that.

Our example 5th level party has likely been adventuring together for ten advenduring days, earned nearly 13,000 gp, and acquired 13 minor magic items and 3 major magic items.