D&D 5E XP gained in official 5e adventures

Sword of Spirit · Mar 30, 2017

(I know I asked something like this a while ago, but I can't find the thread, and it may have disappeared in the lost content.)

Does anyone know the amount of XP gained in each of the published campaign adventures that WotC has put out?

If my info is correct, the level ranges for the adventures are:

Horde of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat = 1-15
Princes of the Apocalypse = 1-15
Out of the Abyss = 1-15
Curse of Strahd = 1-10
Storm King's Thunder = 1-11

I'm intending to insert some of them in to a longer campaign, and I use XP exclusively, along with a custom chart that requires much more XP to advance. So basically, I should be able to pick a level somewhere in the listed level range of the adventure, and expect that the party will gain about 1 level, rather than 10-15 through the course of it. This does mean that, unaltered, the beginnings will be easy and the endings hard, but that's okay.

So, who knows the XP gained?

pukunui · Mar 30, 2017

I have not poured through the books and totalled it all up, but I am aware that the general consensus is there's never enough XP in the adventure to get you all the way to the top. That's why so many of the adventures favor milestone leveling rather than using XP.

Croesus · Mar 30, 2017

pukunui said:
I have not poured through the books and totalled it all up, but I am aware that the general consensus is there's never enough XP in the adventure to get you all the way to the top.

I can confirm that Princes does not have enough XP in the written encounters to reach 15th level. My group was 10th - 11th level by the time they finished the module.
Even though I added a lot of extra encounters and missions, and quite a bit of XP for achieving various goals, I only awarded 350K XP total. Four PCs at 15th level would require 660K XP.

Sword of Spirit · Mar 30, 2017

Croesus said:
I can confirm that Princes does not have enough XP in the written encounters to reach 15th level. My group was 10th - 11th level by the time they finished the module.
Even though I added a lot of extra encounters and missions, and quite a bit of XP for achieving various goals, I only awarded 350K XP total. Four PCs at 15th level would require 660K XP.

Thanks! How much of that XP would you say was in the adventure, and how much did you add? (Rough estimates are fine.)

Croesus · Mar 30, 2017

Sword of Spirit said:
Thanks! How much of that XP would you say was in the adventure, and how much did you add? (Rough estimates are fine.)

Probably 50/50. The early part of the adventure, the party mostly stuck to the module. As time went on, they got bored of the grind, so started asking for me to come up with other stuff to do. At the end, they spent more time dealing with an invasion by giants/orcs/gnolls and a dragon than they did with the module.

One thing to keep in mind is that they didn't defeat every single encounter in the module. There were a lot of encounters that were bypassed and/or avoided, a number of NPCs who ran away rather than be killed. Trying to track down every single cultist or creature wouldn't have made much sense and would have been incredibly boring. Overall, as I gave out story awards for achieving goals, they probably didn't miss out on much XP from the stuff they missed.

Kalshane · Mar 30, 2017

Kind of off-topic, but I generally reward PCs XP for enemies they force to flee if it resolves the situation. "Runs to the next room to get help?" No XP. "Runs off into the hills, never to be seen again?" XP awarded. It seems unnecessarily punitive to make them hunt down and slay every single mook and henchman that realizes they've no chance against the heroes and makes a run for it.

pukunui · Mar 30, 2017

Kalshane said:
Kind of off-topic, but I generally reward PCs XP for enemies they force to flee if it resolves the situation. "Runs to the next room to get help?" No XP. "Runs off into the hills, never to be seen again?" XP awarded. It seems unnecessarily punitive to make them hunt down and slay every single mook and henchman that realizes they've no chance against the heroes and makes a run for it.

Agreed. You get XP for defeating a foe, not just killing it. Forcing it to run away and never come back counts as defeating it. So does, in some cases, completely bypassing it - either by stealth or by social interactions - without facing it in combat.

Croesus · Mar 30, 2017

Kalshane said:
Kind of off-topic, but I generally reward PCs XP for enemies they force to flee if it resolves the situation. "Runs to the next room to get help?" No XP. "Runs off into the hills, never to be seen again?" XP awarded. It seems unnecessarily punitive to make them hunt down and slay every single mook and henchman that realizes they've no chance against the heroes and makes a run for it.

Yep, I do the same thing, though with a caveat: is the threat really gone, or just delayed? Many of the NPCs from the module that got away are still out there, able (and willing?) to cause trouble. For those, I gave half XP, since they eliminated the immediate threat, but not permanently.

In fact, one of the issues they have to deal with is one of the Black Earth cultists left the cult, taking up residence in Red Larch. Over time, many lower-ranking cultists fled from the PCs, joining him in Red Larch. Now he's running the town, protecting it from other threats, bringing in creatures from the Earth Plane, building up his own power base. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Well, that depends on if the party get in the way of his ambitions. But he's certainly not "defeated".

Rils · Mar 30, 2017

The trouble with trying to total up the XP earned from defeating baddies in one of those adventures is it assumes you actually found them all. I have never run an adventure yet, 5e or otherwise, where the players found every single person/trap/room/situation in the module that awarded XP.

Curse of Strahd for example. The highest level area (Strahd's castle) is noted as a challenge for four level 9 PCs. However, my three PCs have all three artifacts and are headed for the castle - and they've covered maybe 60% of material in the module. There's whole areas they haven't even gone, and they certainly didn't follow up on every single plot hook mentioned in the adventure. And that's typical. If I awarded XP, they'd be maybe level 3 or 4 at this point. Actually, they'd probably be dead... But, as it is, using milestones, they'll probably be level 8 when they face Strahd - and even that's a level lower than the adventure assumes.

The way these are written, they are too sand-boxey to say "PCs will be level X when they get to the end" - because there's so many different ways of getting to the end, you can't guarantee they'll cover enough of the content to get that XP. They may cover more and be higher level, but odds are better that they'll cover less. Just something to keep in mind.

Sword of Spirit · Mar 31, 2017

Rils said:
The way these are written, they are too sand-boxey to say "PCs will be level X when they get to the end" - because there's so many different ways of getting to the end, you can't guarantee they'll cover enough of the content to get that XP. They may cover more and be higher level, but odds are better that they'll cover less. Just something to keep in mind.

Yep, that's an important consideration. I figure some ballpark figures based on either tallied up XP or anecdotal experiences are still helpful in estimates as to what my party my experience.

Does anyone have any XP info for the other adventures?

D&D 5E XP gained in official 5e adventures

Sword of Spirit

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pukunui

Legend

Croesus

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Sword of Spirit

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Croesus

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Kalshane

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pukunui

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Croesus

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Rils

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Sword of Spirit

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