D&D 5E Curse of Strahd, How to Handle XP?

WarpedAcorn · Jan 19, 2018

I'm running a "Solo" Curse of Strahd Campaign for my girlfriend, so its just her character and my DMPC. We just finished the Death House intro adventure and she is about to set out into Ravenloft for real. I typically don't run pre-planned campaigns, so I might be having a little bit of an issue understanding how this is put together. I get that this is more of a sandbox setting (which is cool), and it will be up to my girlfriend to figure out where to go and what to do. Also, following the dungeons or encounters that pop up is no problem, I can read the book just fine.

My question comes in a more "between the lines" aspect of, how exactly are characters supposed to be leveling up? I am using the table at the beginning as a guide that states what level characters should be at for each "section", but especially early on I don't see where a lot of the XP is coming from. Should it be from the random encounters during travel? I'm just a little lost on this bit.

Also, if you just have any good general tips for running the game please let me know. My girlfriend LOVES horror stuff (major reason we are playing it), so anything in that vein that super spooked your players would be fantastic.

toucanbuzz · Jan 19, 2018

I'm coincidentally prepping to run that campaign very soon and highly recommend visiting this guy's excellent site. I liked his ideas so much that I bought his Guide on DM guild and home-brewed my own material with it.

As to XP, I'm going with milestones because it fits the campaign better, and there's going to be several times when running or other options are better than hack n slash. A simple approach is to level-up when you feel the party has adequately resolved an area [sblock] For example, in Barovia, they bury Kolyan and/or otherwise convince Ireena to leave, and they've gotten a Tarokka reading with Madame Eva = 1 level [/sblock]. As to artifacts, you could grant a "half" credit for a level for finding one (there's 3), and a half-credit for the ally (or if none just give it anyways). I'd also consider half or quarter credit to a level for neutralizing a major enemy (whether by combat or other means, doesn't mean they're dead). [sblock] These would include the Hags, the Abbott, the Roc, Baba Lysaga, the Werewolf leader, and the Gulthias tree.[/sblock] This site has them listed out.

As to a solo hero, you'll need more than 2 people. [sblock] It's all about action economy. Strahd has a TON of lair abilities, and if run properly, can easily walk over a 10th level party of 4-5 heroes, even with artifacts in hand. There's a lot of NPCs in the module, including the Tarokka Ally, and I'd definitely boost the party size instead of levels.[/sblock]

As to running the game, you're already halfway there because you're both invested in playing dread. No matter how much low-light and creepy music you add, you're still around a table with snacks, bathroom breaks, and so on. It's half on the player and half on the DM's skill in weaving a description. For music, I have my notes to play certain music for Strahd's appearance (Phantom Toccata, Carmina Burana, and may use Spotify or YouTube for general atmospheric music (or the Witcher CDs if you have those video games).

On my front page of notes, I have common phrases from the Barovian language (Balok), and reasoned that Strahd has always required they learn Vaasi, a heavily accented version of common. I got the Ravenloft language ideas from here.

Charlaquin · Jan 19, 2018

Curse of Strahd is a very difficult module to handle XP for. There definitely aren’t enough combat encounters to get the players to the levels they need to be with combat XP alone, so you either need to just hand out levels at the appropriate times (personally I hate this option), or you need to give out a lot of XP for non-combat accomplishments (I personally find this to be a much better option, but it does take a lot more work.) If you want to take the latter route, what you’ll need to to is figure out how much XP is needed in each section of the adventure to get the players to the level needed for the next section, and seed the section with that much XP, plus a little extra because it is most likely that the PCs will miss some things. Once you know how much you need to seed the section with, look through the book for any planned encounters, work out how much XP the PCs will get from those, and that will tell you how much you need to assign to non-combat accomplishments. Then look through the sections for different achievements the players can complete in that section (for example, finding the missing bones in Vallaki, returning them to the temple, finding the missing Vistani girl, returning her to the camp, etc.) and assign XP amounts to each of those, totaling your needed XP to reach the level for the next section plus maybe 10-25% extra.

WarpedAcorn · Jan 19, 2018

Charlaquin said:
Curse of Strahd is a very difficult module to handle XP for. There definitely aren’t enough combat encounters to get the players to the levels they need to be with combat XP alone, so you either need to just hand out levels at the appropriate times (personally I hate this option), or you need to give out a lot of XP for non-combat accomplishments (I personally find this to be a much better option, but it does take a lot more work.)

Thanks. I was thinking I might have been crazy so I'm glad to see that is not the case and there does some to just be less XP there. Giving "Quest" or "Milestone" XP will be how I handle it. Its how I do it in my homebrew games, I just didn't want to unbalance anything since this was a Pre-Made adventure.

Also super thanks to toucanbuzz. I'll check out those links!

Swarmkeeper · Jan 19, 2018

I'm running Strahd now and it is working well with XP. The players are plundering the Amber Temple at the moment and are approaching 9th level.

Strategic use (but not overuse) of random encounters helps a bit.

I also am generous with non-combat XP...
[sblock]e.g. saving Arabelle, cutting down the Gulthias Tree (oddly the only non-combat thing that has been assigned XP in the book - at least that I can recall), finding an artifact, making an ally, purifying the wine vats, stealing the dragon skull and activating the beacon, anything that might otherwise be considered a "milestone", etc.[/sblock]

There's a good discussion about non-combat XP here:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?600634-Non-combat-Experience

Enjoy!

OB1 · Jan 20, 2018

I recently ran Strahd for a two person party, and used milestone leveling as a tool to pace the adventure, handing out levels when I wanted them to begin pushing into new areas and quests. I didn't worry about XP at all.

We got through the story in less than 30 hours of game play, leaving about half of the book unseen, but giving it a fast paced cinematic feel that focused on big story beats and specific character choices. It was a nice break from the 3 year and 4 year long home-brew campaigns that we are involved in.

evilbob · Jan 25, 2018

I have been running the campaign using milestones instead of XP and that is my preferred method for several reasons (lack of bookkeeping, encourages non-combat problem solving, can adjust more easily, etc.). One slight oddity is that since it's more "objective" based this means sometimes the characters went a long while without a reward, while other times they got a lot at once, and while normal XP can run this way as well it just ended up being a little more uneven. Not a big deal to us, though.

The way I did it was to create a list of all the thing that would trigger a milestone and decide how many milestones I wanted there to be. So, I think it was like 5 milestones = 1 level, and characters would be going from level 1 to a max of 10. Level 2 and 3 came after 1 milestone instead of 5, but otherwise that was the pattern, and I think the new expansion book uses a similar tack. So I ended up making about 40 milestones, and there's probably a list on this site somewhere but I could look it up if you wanted it. The characters have nearly finished and they're halfway through level 9 so it ended up tracking out quite well.

As for general tips, there are a TON on this site - I think there's a thread called Curse of Strahd Enhancements or something similar that tried to round all of them up, but partially got deleted in the big crash, and mostly restored. But search and ye shall find a lot of discussion and ideas for fleshing stuff out!

Edit: toucanbuzz linked to a site that has a link to some of the best resources on this site, including that thread I mentioned! I just saw that; that's a great resource to start with!