So I just started my new Pendragon game at the local RPG club to take a bit of a break from the GPC campaign I'm running at home. Thing is, to really give myself a change I decided to run my favourite rule system with my favourite setting, A Song of Ice & Fire or Game of Thrones to those of you who only watch the TV show.
I made some home rules for the different religions, character generation is based upon which house you are related to and the noble house is generated using the House rules from the Green Ronin RPG. This is where I have come a bit unstuck.

Pendragon works with a base adventure period of years, each year, you do some questing and get some ticks to improve skills and then get some money from the winter phase. ASoIF house system has a base adventure period of per month. Each month the house gets a fortune roll and you can improve your house standing and also look to improve your PC.
With no manorial system to worry about, I'm now only concerned with the improvement of the PC's and from that, ageing, yearly bonus, etc. I don't want the PC's get get too strong too soon, but then I don't want players to feel like they are not improving as characters.

I may have staved off some of the issue as I'm actually running the game in 2 parts with the players running around Kings Landing for a few sessions, then switching to new characters in Bravos for other (possibly linking) adventures. This duel time line may give me some breathing space and the ability to say that "3 months has passed since last we saw the knights..." at which point they could improve.

Anyhow... enough waffle.
Anyone have some ideas on pacing for the campaign? Anyone else run a game set in Westeros? Anyone used Pendragon without the yearly construct? Any ideas much appreciated.

I have run a convention mini-campaign (2 sessions) using Pendragon system to play in Middle-Earth. Rohan, to be exact. Let me see my notes about what I did there...

Alright, the campaign timespan was TA 3007 - 3019 (the War of the Ring).

The PCs started as 'youths', 15-year olds who had just started the real weapon training. They had their first encounter with the Orcs then, at 3007. Award checks, roll experience increase.

Skip forward 6 years to bring them up to the standard Pendragon starting age of 21, at Winter 3013. Add stats and skills. Run a boar hunt as a 'test of manhood'. Award checks and roll experience increase.

Fast-forward another 3 years to Spring 3016. Give normal 'Training & Practice' options to the players. Another 'scenario' in Spring 3016, award checks, roll for increases...

But I think that is not exactly what you are looking for. As you can see, I was skipping forward a lot there. In 3019, all the important bits are squeezed into March, which is the opposite case. I had them roll increases after each 'scene', pretty much. Works well enough in a con game that needs to be fast-paced, but less well in a campaign, I suspect, that might span tens of sessions and hundreds of scenes.

If your campaign's base time is a month, I'd probably roll experience checks at the end of each month. Yes, I know that increases the improvement speed by a factor of 12 or so. You can be more thrifty with checkmarks if that bothers you (I probably wouldn't care: it still will take two years of game time to get that Sword from 20 to 21 with experience checks alone). Depending a bit on your pacing, I might throw a 'Seasonal Training' every 3 months or so. Just to keep the players happy with the speed of progress.

I did have the opposite problem when I was thinking of a long Pendragon campaign in Middle-Earth, with the players playing Dunedain/Gondorian nobles, who at the start of the game could easily live to 150 or more years. Using the yearly Training & Practice would have made them insanely skilled and tough, so I was thinking something like slowing down the learning like every second year 50-100, every fourth 100 - 150... To reflect the fact that it would become harder for them to pick up new things. (Don't get me started on the problems of immortal elves...) Of course, the 'solution' I was starting to think about was to run more 'episodic' games, jump into an intresting 20 year period in Gondorian history (Kinstrife, anyone?), and then run it as a regular Pendragon game. 20 years would not be enough to make the long lifespan anything to worry about. Then skip a couple of hundred years ahead and play with your own great-great-grandson or something... By the time you reach LotR, the lifespans have diminished to normal human range, and the problem is solved.

Anyway, back to your 'problem'. The question I would ask myself is, 'what is the pacing and the projected length of the campaign'?

Experience checks:
Not really a problem. Roll monthly if you wish, or after each 'adventure/event' if you have those like once per month. Since you said you'd intend to skip forward a bit, you might get the average of 1 roll / 2 months. Of course, at that point you might consider making it seasonal, too. Assuming the time span of a decade, that is perhaps +3 to skills in excess of 20. So the PK might end up being one of the best swordsmen in Westeros during that time (a bit of Glory boost as well), which I think is a rather acceptable outcome in a 10-year, 60-session campaign. :)

Training & Practice:
You don't want these -too- often, but at the same time not too rarely, either. I'd consider something like once per 6 sessions or so, which may correspond to a season (3 months) or half a year (6 months) or even a year (12 months) in your campaign. You should, if you wish to keep it 'reasonable' to consider how long a character might survive and how long the campaign might last. With something like 1 / season, you'd probably be good to go for a decade-long campaign without too many problems (40 training opportunities, IF the PC survives 60-120 months or sessions...). 1 / 6 months would span two decades without problems, and 1 / year doesn't have a limit since the PKs would be dropping from old age before it would become a problem.

I haven't used KAP to play in the GoT world, but the thing is that ASoIaF is built, like most RPGs, to develop characters much faster because the story lines aren't supposed to cover entire generations, like KAP. While you can easily make character advancement slower by using KAP rules, the campaign's pacing will be different from the books/TV series. The biggest problem, as you point out, is the House "fortune" rules. I don't remember how they work, but what you have to take into account is how much granularity per year do you want. If you're going to play by one-month checks as in ASoIaF, then your game years will be far more intense in terms of activity and adventures than KAP. And if you also advance the PCs monthly, they will develop much faster than in normal KAP. I don't think there is any "right way" of doing this, you simply have to consider what kind of campaign you want to have in the GoT setting and how that will affect character advancement, pacing, etc.

One thing you may want to check out is the campaigns some people have been doing using KAP in the Frank Herbert's Dune universe. I don't know if there are any campaign write ups on the net, though, but they would probably have some of the same problems as you in terms of character advancement and pacing.

Sorry that I can't be more helpful.

EDIT: beaten by Morien :P

Thanks for the responses guys, much appreciated.
Its actually the second session tonight and after reading your thoughts and spending a week mulling over the systems I decided to let the PC's accrue the ticks to skill rolls as normal and find convenient breaks for rolling these up, when they get a long term break between adventures, that kind of thing (thinking month to 2 months at a time). The house system would occur around the same time and that would lead nicely into progressing the rise and fall of houses.
For the yearly checks I will probably only do these at the end of major plot points or the end of the 8 week rotation at the club. Gives a nice incentive to have the players return to the game when its run again.

I'm currently writing this up as a post on the clubs forums and on our wiki but would love to read any of the Dune write ups if there are any.

I thought of an easy way to tie in Pendragon's advancement per year with Game of Thrones advancement per month. Just think of it as conducting one winter phase for each year that GRR Martin takes to write the stories.

Only two years have passed in the Game of Thrones story timeline, but GRR Martin started writing the first book in 1991. So that is about one GRRM-writing-year per in-story month.

The characters may still be young by the time the story concludes, but they will be played by the original players' grandchildren.

lol