How often to your players gain an advancement level?

[Soulclaw]

My group dispensed with handing out experience long ago, now the GM just tells everyone they levelled up when the GM feels enough time has passed or a goal has been reached. I am planning to run this game the same way, but I was curious how often the canonical experience system let players level up.

[Landorl]

A lot of it depends upon what the characters are going through. If you have a challenging game session in which the characters are solving some difficult problems (combat or otherwise), then it is likely that they will get an advance at the end of that session or adventure.

If they are doing a session that involves more story setup and less actual challenges, then it may be a couple of sessions.

Some people wait until the characters are at a "lull" in the adventure to give the advancement to represent them having some time to concentrate on what they have learned. I don't know if that is necessary, but it is up to you.

[Storm]

I have discarded the advancement scheme altogether and use the demea or/theme wheels of Chronicles of Ramlar instead. Due to that advancement is fairly slow but very balanced and diverse as well as very much tied to the way players play their characters. Furthermore I use the rules for aquring skills through training from Paths of the Wise. Though that is tied to lore and languages I use it for more or less all skills where a character has a trainer for.
But still advancement is comparatively slow with regard to other games since training actually takes up much time...and that is often a crucial detail in my campain.

[Landorl]

I did one campaign in which I started the characters off as beginning characters. We played the first adventure which was about a raid on the village that they were in, which introduced the characters, and gave them their motivations for the future. We then flash forwarded 1 year and I gave them each 3 advances in their chosen professions. In that situation advancement happened very fast!

[Soulclaw]

I have discarded the advancement scheme altogether and use the demea or/theme wheels of Chronicles of Ramlar instead. Due to that advancement is fairly slow but very balanced and diverse as well as very much tied to the way players play their characters. Furthermore I use the rules for aquring skills through training from Paths of the Wise. Though that is tied to lore and languages I use it for more or less all skills where a character has a trainer for.
But still advancement is comparatively slow with regard to other games since training actually takes up much time...and that is often a crucial detail in my campain.

Yeah, I did the whole time and training thing back in RQ1, 2, and 3 back in the day and at the end I decided that all that training time broke the flow of the story and was not really contributing any fun factor to the game, so any training required in a game I run now happens "off camera". The assumption I make now is that the characters are studying and practicing in their spare time and when they spend the points for a new skill or spell this represents the fruition of their efforts.

As to restricting what they can advance in, I don't care for that either, all it does is force the players to take actions that are only intended to allow them to advance in a specific skill or spell or whatever. We went through this in RQ and it again had a low fun factor.

[Storm]

I see. But I think it's a wee bit different though as to the way we handle it. The demeanor/the-stuff grants you points to spent on your order skills. These are earned through playing your character as "typical for his order". You earn points in another wheel for spending as "common knowledge" in all other skills. This is a more or less automatic process.
Determined training to aquire skills takes time but can grant you points to increase you skills also (PotW). But this training always takes place "off camera". It was impiortant to us that character advancement does enhance play instead of standing in it's way, as well as requiring only a low amount of book keeping.
The training-rules of BRP games and the like have been cumbersome for us also, way back then. So we ended up ignoring all that. Now Middle-earth is different and the system we use supports this "difference" very well. That's why we decided to take this up and play with training. Just consider the fact that the LotR tokk up more than a year and it was "just a simple voyage from Hobbiton to Mount Doom". And the company took many resting times in between where many a day passed while they rested - or trained. And yet time was a crucial factor for the story and the events...