I have heard 3.0+ edition character advancement was excellerated anyone out there know if that is so and by how much?
If it is the case, obviously that would have a dramatic impact on the pacing of LG campaigns as the Triads try to rush the arcs to challenge the players on a strictly level basis.
comments are welcome...
LG advancement, however is *far* slower than 3rd Edition. There are XP and gold caps on each mod that are, on average, about 1/3 what the characters would receive if those caps weren't in place. A typical Living Greyhawk character has less gold than what the DMG recommends for each character level (except for first, when the LG Character gets max gold and is therefore quite wealthy). Furthermore, LG Characters are quite limited in their access to magical items.
Rather than character advancement, I think actual time is more a factor in the "quickness" of events in LG. LG deals with "Time Units", which are approximately 1 week of a character's time, and each character gets 52 Time Units per year with which to adventure. A regional adventure (an adventure relatively close to the character's home) takes 1 time unit, and a far off adventure takes 2 time units, regardless of how far-off that adventure is. So a character could travel the breadth of the continent in a single time unit (week). Die hard LG'ers use every single time unit available to them, meaning their characters spend every single minute adventuring. Whereas in a home campaign you can declare "okay, five years after your last adventure, your characters find themselves summoned once more before the King..." in Living Greyhawk that "five years" becomes one week.
It's a necessary evil in a campaign like LG, where keeping track of time is important (for things like dead familiars, crafting magic items, and so forth).
The xp system in 3rd edition is based on having about 13 encounters per level. In my game this works out to a level every 3 or 4 sessions. That's not too fast in my opinion. The DMG has many variants on handling xp, so it's not really a critical part of the system. If you want to reward half the xp, that's fine, as long as you also cut the treasure in half to keep it in line.
As for LG, there are many systems in place to keep characters from over leveling. A character can only run so many scenarios per year, and there are only so many high level scenarios available that would give him much xp. There is also a hard cap of 18th level, where the character basically retires from normal scenarios and can only participate in special high level ones.
First, advancement in 3E/3.5 is significantly faster than in AD&D. Going from 1st level to 20th level is supposed to happen over a year of casual gaming. This is supposed to reflect both how long campaigns last for "typical" groups (that is, 1 year), and what levels "typical" players want to play at (that is, all those available from 1st to 20th.)
Second, advancement in LG was deliberately set at half this rate when the campaign started in order to make it last a bit longer. This has changed several times to accommadate several issues that have come up that I will note separetly.
Third, advancement in LG has been deliberately gerrymandered to accommadate less play at certain levels and more play at other levels. Specifically, less play at levels 1-2, and more play at levels 6-10. This is because players have expressed these preferences, pretty much negating one of the primary assumptions mentioned above. (The other, campaign length, is negated by default of the campaign lasting more than 1 year. That is why the newer RPGA campaigns are being designed with a set shelf life.
Fourth, LG has adopted a level cap. (That is, characters are now retired at 18th level, not 20th, and next year they will be retired at 16th level instead.) This is due to a combination of the difficulty of writing for 10 separate encounter levels while still providing enough modules for all characters with the limited number of modules, as well as the difficulty of designing suitable encounters for the vast variety of parties at the highest APLs. (There are also some serious issues about the stability of the game engine itself at those highest APLs. It is increasingly difficult above APL 12, that is an adventure for a group of 4-6 11-12th level characters, to desgn encounters that are not highly to exclusively dependant on who wins initiative as to whether *** is a TPK or a cakewalk.)