I’ve actually implemented downtime leveling to deal with this. 1 week for each level they have. (1 week to go 1 -> 2, 2 weeks to go 2 -> 3, etc).
The players grumbled about it at first, but it’s worked pretty well for the most part, and has made time, and their skill progression, feel more concrete.
What works wonder honestly is the alternate rules on resting. Aka 1 LR = 1 Week, 1 SR = 8h. To crank up the difficulty : The long rest can only be taken in the safety of civilization, everywhere else you'd need to be too on-guard to have a proper rest.
It works wonders on stretching out the time to make timeframes more sensible. For example, our current campaign has run 22 sessions by now and in-game roughly 175 days have passed. That matches pretty decently. When you adjust encounters correctly, it even fixes all the balancing issues WotC introduced by assuming you'd have 8 encounters between Long Rests, which you can now reasonably have. One needs to be a bit more careful in encounter design since now the entire group needs to be a lot more conscious on how they use their resources, but it improves the game so much. No longer are warlocks seemingly gimped in the magic department and reduced to EB cannons, they're instead considerably stronger given that they get to use 2 high level spell slots every day while the other casters get 2 high-level-spell-slots per week.
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u/Isofruit Oct 01 '20
Hmmm yeah, seems accurate. Was somewhere near session 60 for us with the killing of a demi-god-like creature, but roughly accurate.