My original campaign, I used XP for leveling. As a new DM, I really only rewarded it when the players took down monsters, which meant that those sessions that were heavy on RP, without any big monster fights, left my players feeling like they were stalling out.
Furthermore, I didn't really do a lot of thinking about "encounters per day," and so I think the players weren't really facing as many things as they should have been (also, my early encounters had too few, higher-CR monsters, when I should have been throwing lots more smaller creatures - not sure how that would have worked out, XP-wise).
My next big campaign, which is now over three years running, used Milestone leveling. Initially, I had players leveling up every session, taking inspiration from that Adventurer's League season. But upon hitting tier 3 (which they're just nearing the end of,) I swapped to more traditional milestone leveling - as in, they needed to get through a major plot point to advance.
But that's also hit some snags: See, my campaign is probably too big and complex, with ten major villains I wanted the party to take down before hitting tier 4. Initially, I had them level up after each one, but I decided later on that I wanted to carve out some levels in the true endgame for other plot points. As such, they've been sitting now at level 16 for a good long while.
Furthermore, as they've taken down big legendary boss monsters over and over, I've handed them a lot of gold and magic items, to the extent that they're now practically drowning in them - the poor artificer can barely offer anyone infusions because everyone's full up on their attunement slots.
And it got me thinking: XP isn't just a way to handle progression. It's also a way to have something to reward to your players.
Now, my early experiences with XP were that it caused leveling to happen too slowly. Milestone is useful in that you can tune it precisely for climactic moments.
But I have a better sense of how to build adventures and indeed how to build encounters these days (ok, to be fair, I still like to have some guidelines on CR, and I'm OCD enough to try to keep it in-line with such guidance) and I was thinking about how much XP you would award per day using a consistent encouters-per-day system.
So, I'm looking again to Flee, Mortals!, which has both encounter-building and encounter-per-day guidance.
First off, let's look at encounters per day:
FM's system uses points for Trivial, Easy, Standard, Hard, and Extreme encounters. The idea is that you give your players generally 6-8 points per day. Trivial encounters count for nothing, then Easy ones are 1 point, Standard are 2, Hard are 4, and Extreme are 8 (in other words, don't throw your party up against an Extreme encounter if they're expecting to do anything else dangerous that day).
Of these difficulties, only Easy, Standard, and Hard have building guidance, so we'll assume here that you are avoiding Extreme encounters, and we'll ignore Trivial ones as we can assume these will contribute only occasional bonuses to XP.
What I am curious is: how long does it take to level up using this kind of encounter-per-day math.
I suspect it's not consistent - while an Easy encounter is worth half the encounter points as a Standard one, it's not only half the amount of XP (I think). So the math might get funny here.
Given that XP is divided between party members, we can look simply at the CR contribution per character to get a sense of how much XP they, individually, are earning in a fight. (Solo encounters do also mess this up, but we'll ignore them for simplicity's sake - basically, you'll probably be fighting less total CR, so less XP, against a solo monster, which means you should probably supplement the players - more on that later).
So, we have a few variations to contend with that I think will make this math difficult: How difficult are the encounters we're using, whether the math is all linear (do two creatures with half the CR give half the XP?) and how much XP is required for each level up.
To retain some sanity, I'm going to limit this to a few levels - and specifically the first few, when I think players are most impatient to level up.
At 1st level, FM gives a CR of 1/8 per player character in both easy and standard encounters and 1/4 in hard ones (personally I'd just say that "there is no such thing as an easy encounter at 1st level" because a single crit can knock you unconscious pretty easily). So, if Standard encounters are having one 1/8 monster per player character, and we're getting 3-4 Standard encounters, that's 75-100 XP per adventuring day. If we instead have at most two Hard encounters, that's 50 XP per CR 1/4 monster, giving us 100 XP per day.
And that means that a 1st level character can, by this system expect to hit level 2 after three days of adventuring, as they need 300 xp to hit level 2. Frankly, this is where I think the biggest antipathy toward XP leveling comes from: I basically never want to force any player to sit at level 1 for more than one session, because so many classes feel hollow before you hit level 2.
Getting to level 3 requires 900 xp, or 600 beyond what they needed for level 2.
At 2, Easy Encounters are 1/8 CR per player, Standard are 1/4, and Hard are 1/2. So, we can have 6-8 Easy Encounters, giving us a total of 150-200 xp per day, we have have 3-4 Standard encounters, also giving us 150-200 per day, or 2 Hard encounters, giving us 200 per day.
So, again, we're looking at 3 adventuring days to level up if we're doing some hard adventuring. Granted, I'm more ok with this at level 2, because at least we've started getting some crucial class features.
To go from 3 to 4, we need 2700 XP, which is 1800 more than we already have.
For easy encounters at level 3, it's 1/4 CR per player at easy, 1/2 per player at Standard, and, interestingly, 3/4 per player at hard. And here, the linearity of CR-to-XP ratios becomes important. So, that's 50 xp per easy encounter, 100 per standard encounter, and will be 150 per hard encounter (whether that's a 1/2 CR and a 1/4 CR monster, three 1/4 monsters, or even six 1/8 monsters).
Now, with 8-point days, that's then 400 per day with all easy encounters, 400 per day with all standard encounters, but only 300 per day with all hard encounters... interesting. So, hard encounters will slow down level progression. If we have more, easier encounters, we're looking at 4 and a half days to go from level 3 to level 4. If we are getting harder encounters, we're looking at 6 days. (At this point simply assuming we're doing full 8-point days).
Ok, now what about hitting tier 2? This will be the last level-up we do here, just so I can eventually go to bed.
To get from 4 to 5, we need 6500 XP, meaning we need 3800 more than we previously had.
Level 4 characters contribute 1/2 CR to easy encounters, 3/4 CR to Standard, and 1 CR to Hard.
So, 1/2 gives us 100xp, meaning 8 easy encounters per day gives us 800 xp. 3/4 (no matter how you slice it) gives us 150 xp per encounter, and with 4 standard encounters per day, we're looking at 600 xp. CR 1 gives us 200 xp, so with two hard encounters in a day, we're looking at 400 xp.
In other words, we could be looking at 4 3/4 days, 6 1/3 or 9 1/2 days, depending on whether we're having lots of easy fights or fewer, hard fights.
So, there are a couple problems that arise with this system:
First off: I don't think that the FM encounter-building system is designed with XP leveling in mind, nor is the encounters-per-day system. Instead, these are meant to make for challenging fights that drain resources, and days where players should feel they need that long rest at the end of it.
But if we assume that XP, and leveling, is a reward that shapes player behavior, it means that this makes players generally prefer to have days with lots of minor fights against easily-overcome enemies.
Ironically, the climactic, epic boss fights become the least rewarding, at least in terms of leveling you up.
So, how would we then approach dealing with this system?
Quest XP is a good thing to add to your game if you're using XP, because it will encourage players to pursue story, and make it feel as if a session in which they don't spend the entire time hacking away at monsters is not "wasted." But it's not always obvious how to reward said XP - how much do you give?
And I think we can take this math and come up with a formula:
If your party goes and faces some big boss, meaning that they're probably doing like, one or two standard encounters and then a hard one, you should figure out how much XP they would have gotten if they were fighting 8 easy encounters that day, and give the deficit in quest XP.
Alternatively, you can be even more generous: When the party finishes a major story beat, give them XP equivalent to a full adventuring day. Sure, they might have spent the entire day performing diplomacy with the King's royal conjurer (an Archmage) that involved no physical danger, but plenty of careful maneuvering. Perhaps the XP for the Archmage is a bit much to hand to them, but it was still a major bit of story and involved a lot of clever play and successful ability checks. So, you look at what they would have gotten if they had been fighting a level-appropriate monster type all day, and you toss them that.
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