Pencils and Paychecks
Today’s comic may look like a dig at players, but in reality, it is I who am Wizard. Shall I tell you the sad tale of how I scuttled my own Starfinder session? Let’s shall. (Minor Splintered Worlds spoilers ahead.)
So no shit there they were, hot on the heels of Corpse Fleet operatives. After a harrowing adventure out in the Diaspora, the plucky crew of that National-Enquirer-in-Space, the Yellow Rag, were chasing a hot lead cross-system to the corpse world of Eox. The clock was ticking. A planet-destroying superweapon was nearly in the clutches of the undead armada, and only the expert investigative reporting of the Pact Worlds’ leading journalists could blow the whistle on the operation. Tensions were running high. Worlds were at stake!
“You guys got my message on the group forum, right?”
“What message?”
“The one about leveling up? You’re supposed to hit Level 6 before you get to Eox.”
“Found it! It looks like…. Dude. You posted this four hours ago.”
So no shit there they were, hot on the heels of Level 6. After a harrowing adventure out in the Starjammer SRD, the plucky crew of my Dead Suns campaign were filling in skill points all across their character sheets. The clock was ticking. A session-destroying fuck-up by the GM was eating into precious game time, and only the system mastery of my players could save the Pact Worlds from yet another missed session. Tensions were running high. The campaign was at stake!
You get the idea.
When a game of Dungeons & Dragons turns into a session of Pencils & Paychecks, it can feel like a giant waste of everyone’s time. Especially in an era of highly-edited actual play podcasts, any time spent bookkeeping at the table seems like an unnecessary delay. The guys on Adventurous Role don’t spend hours of play time buying items and leveling their characters. We’re clearing doing it wrong! Those guys also leave plenty of material on the cutting room floor. While there’s no denying that I screwed up with my Starfinder game (I wound up eating about 90 minutes of a four hour session with my little SNAFU), I’m equally sure that my players would tell me not to worry about it. A little bookkeeping is necessary at every table, and it can even have a few benefits. For example, my guys realized they’d missed a couple of class abilities while leveling up alone, and so came away from the in-game level-up with a suite of unexpected bonus powers. Who knows how long they’d have missed out without the group version of level-up?
So here’s my question to the rest of you. How do you like to handle Pencils & Paychecks sessions in your games? Do you try to keep everything down to between-sessions management, or are you OK devoting a little game time to healing, shopping, and leveling? How much is too much? Sound off with your preferred approach down in the comments!
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Leveling up in our Pathfinder campaign usually happened between sessions. But that’s because it comes with a lot more options than 5e does. A couple of sessions ago, the GM told us that we could level up in the middle of the session. For that, it was mostly just rolling the HP since 5e doesn’t have the gazillions of classes and archetypes Pathfinder does. It helps that we play on Roll20 so the proficiency bonuses are automatic. You just have to note down any new class features.
For shopping, we need to do it during the game since that’s when everyone is there. If it’s a custom crafting, we just tell the crafter what we want when there’s downtime and pay for it.
My own Pathfinder group just realized that they’re rich enough to craft staves. Their world exploded into a thousand shimmering fractals of possibility. A week later and no one has any idea what’s going in that stick, least of all me.
We mostly left the crafting to either an NPC or a single character with a crafting feat. Irlana ended up with a bunch of wands when the wand crafter character got killed since she was the only other caster at the time. Never really used them other than the Cure wands.
My paladin buddy has a couple of levels in bloodrager. Apparently, that means staves are a solution for his “I don’t have much game against swarms” problem.
I had two nearly fully charged wands of Fireball. And one wand that Burning Hands altered to Acid instead of Fire damage.
Get your wizard the ‘staff-like-wand’ arcane discovery and start using wands with the same effects as from a staff. Necklace of fireballs? Try a wand of fireballs that uses your regular casting CLs and effects!
Only real reason why I have craft staff, really (prerequisite feat). I could probably make an OP staff, but I’ll be damned if knew what is a cost effective combo of recharging spells on a stick!
One of the funny things about allowing alts in my group is that staves can be charged back up very easily between sessions. That alts thing… It continues to amaze me how many repercussions can echo out from one decision point.
What do you mean by alts exactly?
It’s a megadungeon game. You adventure until you’re nearly dead, then you teleport back to base. When you’re back at base, you can choose to play your other appropriately-leveled PC. Both of your characters level up at the same rate. You can use all characters’ resources during down time. Etc.
Ooh, that would let me try out multiple characters. I really want to see how well my Captain Cold build does.
That’s the benefit. But like I said, there are many unexpected tradeoffs. Party loot, planning character-specific arcs, and the crazy utility of having multiple high-level casters just hanging around back at base are all issues this decision brings to the table.
Depends on the system. D&D/Pathfinder as well as Anima tend to get the level at the end of a session so that decisions can have a week to sit and be calculated. I’ve never actually leveled a Mutants and Masterminds group, and World of Darkness doesn’t use levels, so gaining things in narrative by just spending an XP here and there is fine. Exalted tends to handle itself due to the listed training times. Buying things is generally done in game, though that one does slow us down pretty bad.
Generally, I treat it like I treat everything else when I run a game. I watch player faces and engagement. The fewer players with smiles and engaging with the game, the more likely I am to look at someone and go “yeah, we’ll get to that after the session. ” or move the game along for the next action scene. I will concede that it has been a while since I ran an equipment heavy game like Pathfinder. I lean toward systems that the players are more than the sum of their swordbelts.
We’ve always handwaved training time. In your experience, what’s the benefit of keeping that mechanic?
In my group, the biggest consequence of following the training times is we often accumulate XP quicker than we spend it. So the bigger limiting factor in how quickly you can become an unstoppable demigod depends on scheduling and logistics. How much time can you afford to set aside for training, instead of pursuing your actual goals? Are you willing to invest chargen resources or in-game time to securing people or things that can teach you, or in things that allow you to train faster? Adds a lot of weight to what you choose to make caste or favored.
I also find it’s kind of fun when the player characters get an excuse to train each other in different things. It’s a nice opportunity for roleplay.
It generally forces the group to remain the same Essence rating and take their “time off to contemplate their navel” together so that no one is left out. The other training times are light enough that they don’t tend to interfere much.
People coordinate their XP expenditure to that degree? Yo…
Most of my games tend to have one or two that go for high Essence before the end. Campaigns tend to be about 18 sessions in my Exalted experience. That means that “settle for Essence 3” or “go for Essence 4” are both viable over the course of the campaign. How does it work out when everyone more or less makes the same decision about navel-contemplation time?
My group dynamics have never been stable enough to get even that level of longevity, so your guess is as good as mine. x.x Someone always has something come up, or someone is at someone else’s throat, or something. If I wasn’t running it, then the GM looked at us and said “Well, that’s all I had. What’s next.”
But like…?
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/JubilantAcademicIrishwolfhound-mobile.mp4
If you’re running short campaigns, how do you get enough XP for increased essence to be a consideration?
I generally have the players level up as soon as they can; current, we use milestone, which meant that the players levelled up during a natural break in gameplay, but in my previous campaign, we levelled up immediately after enough XP was awarded; usually that meant after combat, but there were one or two situations were a player was unconscious, and then an ally’s kill gave enough XP for them to level up, immediately giving them hit points and waking them up.
However, if the players would level up around 20 minutes before the session’s end, then I’ll just hold off, as nothing much is likely to happen before then, and thus it’s just easier to get the extra time.
This was in a 5e game, though; 3.5 had a much more complex XP system. As such, an old DM of mine would calculate our XP at the end of each session, then tell us, then have us level up the next time we were in a town, or other safe place.
I’m flashing back to my WoW days so hard right now… How did you justify these shenanigans narratively? For example, how did you handle prepared casters suddenly knowing spells?
Why, the deities, of course! Although, actually, our prepared casters consisted of two paladins and a cleric, so that would have worked, for gaining prepared spells. However, generally if we levelled up mid-combat, it was only so that a PC could become conscious, and maybe get a spell slot to spend; the more laborious parts of a level-up, such as spell selection, would occur after a combat. It was always fun to have a player suddenly level, stand back up, and start shooting the enemy, but anything more than that disrupted gameplay.
I’ve never tracked XP on a per-monster basis. It was always an after-the-session sort of thing. Do you ever find that it breaks up the flow of the game?
I have the PC’s current XP on hand at all times, and the monster’s XP in the statblock, so giving out XP just takes a quick mental calculation and a few types of the keyboard; as such, it doesn’t break flow at all, just due to how quick and easy the process is. I could calculate a whole encounter’s worth of XP in the time it takes a player to figure out their actions; it’s just about finding the natural pauses in gameplay, I think, those precious few seconds when the DM isn’t needed.
I’m the only one at the table who takes notoriously long to level up. I like going over my options. ALL my options.
Unlike me, my players are fast. They could blast through a dungeon partway through a session, get told “Okay guys, take ten minutes to level up, use the bathroom, etc.”, and they’d be done in two minutes.
As a slow leveler, I don’t know how they do it.
I know! It’s like… I haven’t even got through writing the first forum thread on my build. How can you possibly be done already!?
I often feel I have the opposite problem; I go through all of my options in advance, picking out the best feats and spell choices, which leads to me being more obsessed with the next level up than what we’re doing now.
I like to look at my “build plan” as a default. If story things happen, I get to have fun deviating from the plan and improvising my power-ups to fit the narrative.
Our group tries to level up between sessions. Emphasis on tries – we occasionally have a screw up where we take about 10-30 mins leveling mid session. Such are APs and not tracking exp points so much as leveling ‘when we’re supposed to’.
Notable with this comic, is that it also applies to shopping for equipment, crafting magic items, selling treasure, dividing money shares and other forms of loot management! That stuff is impossible to work out in the span of a session – especially if you don’t know what you want to get. We handle it by claiming loot on the spot whilst calculating dividing treasure and coin when we’re presented with a shopping opportunity, and making a ‘crafting queue’ list for our magic item crafts.
The crafting queue is a concept I haven’t heard of before. How do you handle it? Roll-offs to see who’s up first?
Mostly it’s to simplify figuring out how much stuff can be made in limited downtime. Whoever has a crafting feat, makes a table detailing what they can make, how fast they can make it (progress per day) and a list of days. The other players then list their requests and the crafter decided which of those they can craft in the short time to get the most benefit. The table lists all the days of available downtime (e.g. 14 days for 2 weeks downtime) and the queue is essentially who gets what crafted in those two weeks.
We don’t roll for it, it’s pretty much a convenience thing – people with important crafts (stats, party items or big power boost items) go first, then the less important crafts.
So for example, I and another PC want a belt and headband made, both are put into the table and one can see that the headband is finished on day 8 and then the belt is finished on day 16. Anything not made during the downtime is crafted during adventuring days or travel days.
Do you guys just share a Google Sheets document or something?
Nope! We use Roll20 for all the dice rolling and token activities/maps/RP, and have a discord group for the OOC stuff and downtime crafting/loot stuff (and memes, music…). We’re a text-only online group, but it can function for voice chat groups too.
https://imgur.com/a/7oRnR0Q
Previous groups I was in did use google docs, though. And we use roll20 for a big master list of the loots, which one other player (who, get this, enjoys math) maths it out, whilst our discord lootlist (a group the DM just posts the loot we find, for simple reference and immediate claiming if need be) is there for mid-game stuff.
Do you do text-only in real time, or is it play by post? I ask because I’m trying to figure out how to implement a battle map for PBP gaming.
Real-time, I’m afraid! Seek your PbP answers elsewhere. Or maybe turn an editable google docs excel table into a battle map? With table cells representing 5ft squares?
Regarding PBP battlemaps, in a recent PBP I took part in the DM probably used either roll20 or a simple image processor to create the map and the tokens representing our characters and the opposition. The sides of the map would then be marked 1-whatever and A-ZZ so we could indicate where we’d be moving on our turns, and then the DM would update the map after every round of initiative to represent the changing situation.
I’d link to the PBP, to show how that looked in practice, but unfortunately the forums are down right now.
So players would call out “I move to 1A” as in Chess / Battleship?
Yep, pretty much. The same also went for placing AoE’s and similar if it was particularly relevant to give their exact location, though more often it was done more along the lines of ‘I’m using this ability which gives me a 180 ft cone AoE which should hit those 6 enemies on the right’.
Well, in KAP (King Arthur Pendragon) this is all part of the session anyway. The conceit is that you only play one session per game year, as knights have only 60 days per year to do their military stuff with their liege, and go on quests and stuff. The rest of the time/year they’re busy with the proper knightly stuff, like raising kids, horses, and managing the farm that is part of the manor.
So every session ends with this thing called the “Winter Phase”. In that phase you raise the skills, traits and passions and such that were ticked during the session, and then do training, in which you can raise any skill, characteristic, passion or trait. Lastly you roll to see what happens with your family, and your horses. Ussually all this will take about 20 minutes.
Man I need to play more games… Every time you describe KAP there’s another funny little element that makes me want to sit in for a campaign. In this case, building the level-up into the fiction is such an obvious idea you’d think that it would be more popular.
Does it ever feel a bit mechanical though? I could imagine that a formal “Winter Phase” could come off as a bit more game-like than narrative-like.
Well, yes and no. It is indeed basically an administrative activity after the narative of the session. However, especially the Family rolls (as we play them) will set up plot hooks, and give further narative reasons for adventure. “Your brother vanished during this year” => next years adventure will probably be a search for him. “Your sister/mother/aunt/wife/daughter has a child born out of wedlock” => Who has besmurged the honour of our family?! He will pay! is another plot hook right there.
Also, the skills, passions and traits checked during play might not be the ones that you want your character to specialize in, so during the training phase you can raise the ones that you do want to have higher.
Also it is the time in which you get the Glory that you ammased during the session, (sort of like XP only you don’t go up a level when you cross a tresshold) and that usually is when you do a short recap and try to convince the GM that your, or somebody elses, actions were worthy of Glory, and that it should be awared to you/them.
To me personally it feels a bit like when you leave the theater after the movie, reminicing about the movie, putting your popcorn trash and drink rubbish in the bin, and fantasicing about the next movie you are going to see. So a natural part of the experience, but not part of the narative.
Hope that helps
Interesting perspective. There’s a performance studies model I like that includes “cool-down” as part of the performance. Neat to see that experience inscribed in an RPG.
I quite like discussing a level up at the end of a game session, as sometimes someone will mention an option for your next level that’s really cool and that you hadn’t thought of. It’s how my sylvan-blooded sorcerer ended up with Form of the Dragon as his first 6th level spell, so he can turn his animal companion into a dragon a few times per day. The actual levelling I like to do between sessions though, and I like to print a new character sheet for each level.
Shopping we do some and some. Quite often if we’ve got a boat load of loot and haven’t been to a settlement for a while we’ll liquidate the non-cash loot and handle the big shopping between sessions. Ad hoc shopping we’ll do in game though.
In the Zeitgeist AP you don’t get loot, you just get paid at certain times by the law enforcement agency you work for and immediately spend it all on gear. When we were playing that all shopping was done between sessions. Personally I prefer loot though.
Huh. Maybe that’s why Maleficent didn’t go dragon herself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D83PDx_dNmQ
Am I a bad DM for liking doing leveling up editing a session? That way everyone can help each other if they have questions. Also, it pads out session length. Though if you’re running a tight schedule I can understand why that might not be a good thing.
Naw man. You’re good. My Starfinder game happens to be on a schedule of one 4-hour session every three weeks, so that gives us an incentive to pack as much adventure as possible into a session and do as much bookkeeping as possible between sessions. If you’re running longer and more frequent sessions, I think that at-the-table number crunching becomes a lot more viable.
We normally do it during a session, over pizza. It makes the bookkeeping parts more fun and social to do them together, plus you get to make the evolution of characters more of a group thing. “I’m thinking of taking X, might be useful for Thing”, “ah cool, in that case I’ll go for Y, I’ve wanted it for a while but didn’t want to take your potential special thing” etc.
It’s especially fun for the shopping parts. Doing those together really gets people thinking about what will be useful, what we can afford, and negotiating with each other to be able to get that special thing. It’s good, lighthearted, semi-in-character stuff that helps cement group dynamics.
That may be we the teamwork feats seem unpopular to me. If you’re not in the same room together, you’re always going to take a me-first approach rather than carrying a group evolution mindset.
Totally agree. I think it helps new players in particular understand the ways that their levelling up can be part of the storytelling.
These days most people coming into the hobby have played some from of CRPG (or a game with “RPG elements” which I think is code for “incessant grinding”) and thus assume they should look for “whatever gives the most plusses”.
Do it together, and there’s more of a sense of “we had this adventure, therefore my character learned these things”. Also I think that the group environment gives permission to think like that: when isolated, there is always the worry that your characters will be “behind” the group or that the other players would have preferred a more optimised levelling rather than a fun, storytelling one.
I personally prefer to level between sessions.
Mainly because i play casters (and spell choice is a huge thing.)
Some games though, you realize where you are going, and you need to pick up x or y for the place, and a quick excursion is in order, or perhaps a spell or three with the party. Those rare few modules that have well, a scheduled in game downtime for session are generally rare, but tend to have the when pretty reasonable.
Overall, its very much a you can use discord or talk after session on ideas or to spitball on ways to take things when you level. Item wise, buying in the downtime between is usually the reasonable deal, less pressure.
I’ve always wanted to run a “luck sorcerer” and roll randomly for my spells.
For example… If I’m going Pathfinder 1e… Not taking bloodline into account… Assuming an 18 Cha…
0th: Touch of Fatigue, Jolt, Ray of Frost, Scrivener’s Chant
1st: Discern Next of Kin, Snowball
Now there’s a proper challenge! Sorcerer on Hard Mode, and it saves time. 😀
Isn’t that just a wild/primal magic sorcerer? 😀
Also, make sure you get an intelligent, floating rod of wonder that activates itself every round unless wielded. In which case it activates itself to shoot whoever attacks the wielder.
I’m shooting for sub-optimal, not suicidal! 😛
In good editions leveling is not a laborious affair so it’s not an issue.
We usually do leveling up in-session, and it often falls towards the end of the session. (You beat the guy! Congrats, you’re all Level 3!) At that point, I’ll usually have the Player’s Handbook and kinda go down the list of things each person gets while everybody else does stuff like HP. If we need to look up spells, either I’ll hand the book off or somebody will look things up on their phone.
A couple of times, we’ve had somebody away during the session where everybody dinged, at which point I’ve gone over their new stuff at the start of the next session.
I think it’s been so long since my group has experienced the combination of deep system + lack of automated character sheets, we wound up forgetting the benefits of in-session leveling. Of course, it’s somewhat less fun over Roll20, but having the GM in the same room to go over choices really does seem to come with advantages.
We haven’t play Pencils & Paychecks in a while. We are waiting the new edition. I have heard that now a skill check will make the grapple rules easy by comparison 😛
When we make a mid-battle dramatic-level-up we have already the character sheet filled and in perfect condition to use our pc new powers to defeat the bad guy. Other than that we level-up between sessions as polite and civilized people 🙂
Also we usually divide the time between combat and roleplay. In combat time we combat, in roleplay time we roleplay. We keep that second time for all the discussions, wound-patching, shopping, wound-patching and buildings and slaves management we need.
But what about the wound-patching? 😛
We use two wound-patching, one for the PVE and another for the PVP 😛
Does this mean that the team should be level 9 now?
Not until Skullcap Gorge:
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/009/443/656/large/pixoloid-studios-pzo7203-skullcapgorgebattle-pixoloid.jpg?1519044471
We’ve been just taking twenty minute breaks to do everything. I play online mostly, and I find it’s definitely easier than leveling up at the table with friends in person.
Also, we found out that leveling in 3.5 doesn’t require a full rest, when you level up, you gain most of the benefits instantly. Granted, it doesn’t take story into account. Prestige classing should be a downtime thing, as should learning a new feat. Scribing a new spell into your spellbook takes time as well. But things like hit points, bab, saves, skill points, class features, you get the benefit instantly.
As for shopping, I find it easiest to do during downtime. There’s too much book-browsing otherwise.
Well then. There’s a google for me. It’s been a minute since I looked at the RAW level-up rules for 3.5.
“As soon as he accumulates a total of 3,000 XP or higher (2,000 more than he had when he gained 2nd level), he reaches 3rd level. Going up a level provides the character with several immediate benefits (see below).”
It makes certain webcomics make a bit of sense, and the text doesn’t outright say anything about 8 hours of rest.
It helps martials a lot more than it helps casters, fwiw.
using Excel character sheets my characters and spares are plotted out through to level 15 and I do the update during sessions. So whenever the XP get to a level where about as many XP as the last session will get me to the next level I print it out and just need to roll HP. sometimes I even remember to roll HP the session before a levelup.
Have you got a link to your sheets of choice?
that would be a very heavily modified and totally outdated version of erian_7’s Excel-based Character Sheet
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2juq4?erian7s-Excelbased-Character-Sheet
and a less modified Yet Another Pathfinder Character Generator
http://yapcg.sourceforge.net
the first is just short of failure from overloading excel with calculations, but is easier to modify with simple excel skills.
The latter is more complicated to modify but easier for advanced planning and transfer of the level by level advances to a new sheet as I level up.
I have my players level up between sessions – sometimes immediately before scheduled session start time (often, they arrive a bit early, but this is online so they can tend to last minute tasks if we haven’t started yet, so long as they’re ready at the scheduled minute of start) or, less often, immediately afterward. If session start arrives and they’re not leveled up yet, they use whatever level’s saved to their sheet at the start of the session. (Which is why some players show up a few minutes early then level up, having procrastinated leveling up as long as they can.)
I also don’t run challenges that require a specific level; if they haven’t leveled up, that makes the challenge harder, not literally impossible. Nor do I plan a given session’s challenges to require an ability that I do not actually see on the party’s sheets yet – e.g. if they get a flight ability at a given level, but don’t actually put it on their sheet until just before the first session after reaching that level, flight won’t be required until the session after that.
How frequent are your sessions and how long do you run? I ask because I’m wondering if making the level-up part of the in-person experience is better when time is at less of a premium.
Honestly, it’s one of the good and bad things about pbp. You never have to “waste time” leveling up (kinda, I mean sometimes it still slows things down a bit). On the other hand, leveling up as a group really furthers people understanding what everyone can do even if nobody means to intentionally ask what someone did this level, just because at least a few people will have questions for the GM. This kind of group activity also helps avoid that “everyone is building their character in a vacuum rather than as a party” issue which is endemic to pbp.
I’d say overall I prefer spending game time doing it with everyone together than doing it by yourselves. If only because you’re rarely in a group where everyone is 100% system proficient and this just means everyone sitting around waiting for one or two people while everyone else just twiddles their thumbs having nothing to do because the GM can personally handle one or two people’s system questions without any assistance.
I may need to revise my process. I’m honestly surprised how many people prefer to “level up together” approach as opposed to my “homework” style.
(already did the joke on patreon but it’s good enoug hto share again, if I do say so myself)
“People are dying and Drow Priestess is dyeing!”
It’s good enough to warrant a repeat.
Also of note: It is scientifically impossible for gamers to resist a pun-off.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/in-your-end-o
Realized a little belatedly that we’ve done a fairly similar topic before. Linking it here for reference: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/shopping-expedition
On of the downsides of the Kingmaker computer game is that when you level up (especially if you have it set so that the whole party shares XP, so they basically always level up at the same time), you are in for about 10-20 minutes of paperwork. If you are lucky and know what you are trying to do. It’s unavoidable, I suppose, but still annoying.
In 2e, though, my group has leveled-up in-session more than once, and it didn’t really take that long, and that’s with half the party having to check the Core Rulebook. While there are a lot of bits to most characters on level-up (skill feats, class feats, etc), there aren’t a metric ton of options for those yet, so it isn’t overloading. Also, the chart of “this is everything you get this level except HP” is really helpful.
Looking forward to getting into Society for a little hands-on 2e experience. One of my campaigns is about to end, so I finally have time to get more than a single demo game under my belt.
The game I was in in college was ALL Pencils & Paychecks, by the time we all got our characters made – after multiple sessions – my schedule changed and I had to leave
You’re describing my high school experience. That frequent cancellation mess is what drove me to start GMing in the first place.
I ended up making a combination of xp and milestone leveling for my current West Marches campaign. We use the Pathfinder system and you level based on how many sessions you have completed and what level you are. But you also get a certain amount of xp for spending on extra feats and skill points based on the difficulty of the session.
With that said, the players will usually tally up their xp totals and spend it right there at the table after each session. That way they don’t forget about it before the next session since we start as soon as everyone is at the table.
For my regular campaigns, I give out xp and let the players spend it on their next level, extra feats, or extra skill points with everyone getting the same amount of xp. So most players will level up and spend the xp at home after looking up their choices and letting me know. I just require that to spend the xp, they have to be in a safe environment. If they are in a dungeon, they might get enough xp for more than a single level and have to wait a few sessions before they can spend a few days in game resting and getting their new abilities.
So you “spend” XP like a resource? That sounds a bit like d20 Mutants and Masterminds.
Play a system where levelups are easier.
But I’m tired of Honey Heist! I can only criminal bear so much!