CODA Advancements in a Campaign
This didn't seem to be that much of a problem when we had a Lord of the Rings campaign. The characters advanced quite a bit, and it was tough to find suitable adversaries for them, but the quckness of advancement wasn't really a problem or issue.
But now we're playing Star Trek pretty regularly (we have our next session scheduled for tomorrow), and we're at a pace of playing through an episode about every two sessions. Our characters seem to advance at a pace of about one Advancement per Episode, and that doesn't seem like too much, on the surface.
But if you stop and think about that, it means that the characters on the TV show would be advancing about 20-24 Advancements per year! Multiply that by the number of years we saw them (usually seven), plus the Advancements they had before we saw them on the show, and the numbers quickly break down. On just a five year mission, characters like Kirk and Spock would get 100+ Advancements!
Now it's my opinion that a few of the characters printed in the NG are a bit "underestimated" as regards to Advancements (especially McCoy and Tuvok). But still the numbers don't work out if you compare to the rate and speed that our characters are advancing at.
For our characters pasts, we used the recommended amount of one Advancement per year (two during a "War Year"). That seems about right. But when we actually sit down and role-play, they're getting much more than that.
I suppose one could rationalize that we don't do 20-24 Episodes each year. For timing purposes so far I've spaced it out so that we are only doing about 3 Episodes a Year. Still, that rate of advancement is much faster than even a "War Year" as Decipher recommends.
Anyone have any ideas or thoughts?