Death House and Milestone Rules

Tyranthraxus · Feb 23, 2016

THe reason is the have never been usuable before for AL. THats the only reason thats needed. Gamers being gamers people are going to hear that milestones are now allowed then bang.. they will start to apply it to other AL modules and such.

'Oh I heard it was legal now to use Milestones'.
Then you are going to have to spend time saying 'Well actually not, thats only for Death House as a once off'

THen Ill get 'But why? It would just make it easier to apply it to the other modules as well. It would be so much easier!'

I just dont want to have that conversation because its a dead end of player expectation and whinging to be honest. I dread the day when I find out that someone in a gamestore got confused and started to apply it to each chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen because they heard milestones were now usuable.

All I can say to groups I run is that I dont use Milestones and leave it at that.

RCanine · Feb 23, 2016

Tyranthraxus said:
THe reason is the have never been usuable before for AL. THats the only reason thats needed. Gamers being gamers people are going to hear that milestones are now allowed then bang.. they will start to apply it to other AL modules and such.

'Oh I heard it was legal now to use Milestones'.
Then you are going to have to spend time saying 'Well actually not, thats only for Death House as a once off'

THen Ill get 'But why? It would just make it easier to apply it to the other modules as well. It would be so much easier!'

I just dont want to have that conversation because its a dead end of player expectation and whinging to be honest. I dread the day when I find out that someone in a gamestore got confused and started to apply it to each chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen because they heard milestones were now usuable.

All I can say to groups I run is that I dont use Milestones and leave it at that.

Your argument makes no sense. This conversation:

Player: Oh I heard it was legal now to use Milestones
DM: Well actually not, thats only for Death House as a once off
Player: But why? It would just make it easier to apply it to the other modules as well. It would be so much easier!

is just as likely as:

Player: Oh I heard it was legal now to use Milestones
DM: I dont use Milestones
Player: But why? It would just make it easier to apply it to the other modules as well. It would be so much easier!

I feel like you're making mountains out of molehills, tbh.

kalani said:
Then there is the fact that the DDAL modules usually require players to complete 2-4 modules before leveling (on average). ... XP is awarded specifically to avoid these kinds of issues.

Literally your rule could be:

You earn one milestone for every 2 hours the adventure is designed to run.
You level after six milestones

...then you could hand wave the last five minutes of the slot involving a bunch of math. Now, regardless, it doesn't matter. Milestones aren't allowed in AL adventures anyway, and I'm not sure that's worth changing any time soon. But the reason you should use milestones for Death House is easy: because level 1 is not fun, and you should do everything in your power to minimize the time your PCs spend there. If I had my druthers, I'd eliminate 1 altogether, have PCs start at level 2 but 0 XP.

But I don't have my druthers. Oh well.

skerritthegreen · Feb 23, 2016

RCanine said:
[*]You earn one milestone for every 2 hours the adventure is designed to run.

Okay, so how do you deal with the guy who starts an adventure but has a family emergency and leaves part way through an 8 hour adventure. Does he get four milestones after the first fight? What if your table is RP heavy and you played for 10 hours already but only did the first fight and fully intended to go another 12 hours? Does he get zero? one? four? ten? If you do xp, you can total up the xp so far and say here you go, this is what you earned.

RCanine · Feb 23, 2016

skerritthegreen said:
Okay, so how do you deal with the guy who starts an adventure but has a family emergency and leaves part way through an 8 hour adventure. Does he get four milestones after the first fight? What if your table is RP heavy and you played for 10 hours already but only did the first fight and fully intended to go another 12 hours? Does he get zero? one? four? ten? If you do xp, you can total up the xp so far and say here you go, this is what you earned.

This hypothetical adventure would have to put the milestones in specific places as death house does. Then the DM could say, "you've reach milestones A, B and C, but didn't get to D, so log three milestones on your character sheet." This would take 15s or so.

In your example, the DM would have to pause the game for a few minutes while he does a bunch of math, and the PCs would all pull out their phones.

XP and milestones are abstractions of the exact same thing on different scales, like Fahrenheit and Celsius. And like those two scales, both are easier to use in some places and harder in others.

Like Farenheight, XP is more precise, while Celcius like milestones is better at defining important break points (freezing/boiling and leveling respectively).

In general, I think the milestone system has slightly better incentives. Most of the time the XP system is focused on what you killed, whereas I think the best systems are objective-based. Obviously you can do both with either system since in the end it's all just math. I just think milestones make more important things easier.

skerritthegreen · Feb 23, 2016

RCanine said:
This hypothetical adventure would have to put the milestones in specific places as death house does. Then the DM could say, "you've reach milestones A, B and C, but didn't get to D, so log three milestones on your character sheet." This would take 15s or so.

In your example, the DM would have to pause the game for a few minutes while he does a bunch of math, and the PCs would all pull out their phones.

XP and milestones are abstractions of the exact same thing on different scales, like Fahrenheit and Celsius. And like those two scales, both are easier to use in some places and harder in others.

Like Farenheight, XP is more precise, while Celcius like milestones is better at defining important break points (freezing/boiling and leveling respectively).

In general, I think the milestone system has slightly better incentives. Most of the time the XP system is focused on what you killed, whereas I think the best systems are objective-based. Obviously you can do both with either system since in the end it's all just math. I just think milestones make more important things easier.

I'd milestones also work well if the adventure is quite linear. If its not, the hypothetical person in my example likely gets nothing from milestones. Oh you guys RPed about halfway to the first milestone, but then you sidetracked to the crawl and began it, but took a beating so you bailed on that. You never actually reached either milestone. Sorry you get nothing.

mflayermonk · Feb 23, 2016

skerritthegreen said:
I'd milestones also work well if the adventure is quite linear. If its not, the hypothetical person in my example likely gets nothing from milestones. Oh you guys RPed about halfway to the first milestone, but then you sidetracked to the crawl and began it, but took a beating so you bailed on that. You never actually reached either milestone. Sorry you get nothing.

If the player had a family emergency, I'm sure she/he wouldn't mind having to replay 2 hours of some module.

Pauper · Feb 23, 2016

mflayermonk said:
If the player had a family emergency, I'm sure she/he wouldn't mind having to replay 2 hours of some module.

Problem with that idea is that, if the other players had already completed the module, the player who bailed couldn't legally replay the module with the same character. He's out of luck.

--
Pauper

mflayermonk · Feb 23, 2016

Pauper said:
Problem with that idea is that, if the other players had already completed the module, the player who bailed couldn't legally replay the module with the same character. He's out of luck.

--
Pauper

He's already out of luck. He had a family emergency.

RCanine · Feb 24, 2016

skerritthegreen said:
I'd milestones also work well if the adventure is quite linear. If its not, the hypothetical person in my example likely gets nothing from milestones. Oh you guys RPed about halfway to the first milestone, but then you sidetracked to the crawl and began it, but took a beating so you bailed on that. You never actually reached either milestone. Sorry you get nothing.

Agreed. Milestones encourage completing tasks, XP encourages killing things dead. In the end it's personal preference. I don't think one could declare either approach objectively better.

Death House and Milestone Rules

Tyranthraxus

Explorer

RCanine

First Post

skerritthegreen

Explorer

RCanine

First Post

skerritthegreen

Explorer

mflayermonk

First Post

Pauper

That guy, who does that thing.

mflayermonk

First Post

RCanine

First Post

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