Why I dislike Milestone XP

[Rod Staffwand]

Presenting 20 Alternate Advancement Systems for 5E!

1. Millstone Advancement. The party gains 1 level for every millstone they carry with them.
2. Saison Advancement. XP for buying the DM slightly fruity beers. [This one is a personal favorite].
3. Story-Based Advancement. You gain a level if you tell the DM a really entertaining story on how and why your PC should level.
4. XP for GP. You gain 1xp per 1gp acquired as treasure. Sp, cp, pp, ep and all other forms of treasure do not count. Only gp.
5. Random Advancement/Regression. Roll 1d20 at the beginning of the session. That's your level.
6. Facebook Advancement. Gain 1xp for every NPC friend your PC makes.
7. The One Advancement. Kill a series of alternate dimension dopplegangers to advance in levels.
8. 1-Minute Advancement. Quickly level your PC when the DM shouts "DING!". If you don't complete the update in 60 seconds or less you fail to level and everyone laughs at you.
9. Player Fiat Advancement. You play your PC at 20th level and hope the DM doesn't notice.
10. Advanced Advancement. Every possible action your PC takes is worth some fractional xp total (say .00001 for taking a step or .00025 for eating a ham sandwich). Please keep meticulous notes.
11. Gold Star Advancement. Your PC doesn't advance, but the DM gives you a gold star for your character sheet whenever you do something cool. These have no in-game effect, but you can take it home and maybe mommy and daddy will put it on the refrigerator and say, "Little Timmy is doing a great in D&D this year!"
12. Survivor Advancement. Each session every player votes as to who should level. Least amount of votes is up for elimination! I hope your PC found the immunity idol hidden in the dung pit.
13. Lazy Advancement. You don't bother to level but force to make everything in the world weaker to compensate.
14. Anti-Advancement. You start at level 20 and the DM removes levels when you irritate him.
15. Bingo Advancement. Every PC gets a bingo card with relatively common adventuring incidents on them: "Killed orc" "Avoided treasure chest trap" "Parlayed with duke". Filling out a row gets you a level and a new card. [Actually, I kinda like this one...].
16. Merit-Based Advancement. Your PC needs to pass an examination testing their competency of current level abilities including an extensive oral examination of procedures and methods by higher-level practitioners of your class. In addition you should collect no less than ten letters of recommendations from pillars of the community with whom you've adventuring for or with over the course of the level. Final, you need a 10000 word easy, written by the player, entitled "Why [Insert PC Name Here] Should Be [Insert Next Higher Level Here]." Please weight 3 to 4 months for a response from the review board.
17. A Different Sort Of Milestone Advancement. PCs level on their birthday! Hurray and huzzah!
18. Anime Advancement. PCs can only level in the midst of boss combats, usually to the disbelief of the boss. "Impossible! I thought they were only level 5..."
19. Level Advancement. You gain a level every time you get to a deeper dungeon level.
20. Zen Advancement. You understand that levels are only a state of mind. Numbers on a sheet. You are both player and PC. Controller and avatar. All things are simultaneously possible and impossible.

 

[Gradine]

I've been recently branching outside of D&D; my partner has decided to start running Monster of the Week (a Powered by the Apocalypse game), and we stumbled across the original rules before finding the revised rulebook. Each take a different approach to XP (and XP, I think we can mostly agree, exists as a game mechanic primarily to encourage particular styles of play). The original rules had this setup where another player picks one of your stats, the GM picks another, and you gain an XP every time you performed an action requiring you to roll one of those two stats. And this, I suppose, is a kind of way of encourage particular behaviors, especially on the GM side (if the GM was highlighting Tough for most people, for instance, that would indicate that they are wanting us to get into a lot of fights, while highlighting Sharp would indicate this adventure is more focused on investigation), but it ended up getting too fiddly. The revised rules instead give you an XP every time you fail a roll, which as I understand is how Dungeon World (the most D&D-adjacent Apocalypse-esque game) also does it. Which is an entirely different style of player encouragement (specifically, encouraging players to attempt things they're more likely to fail at). Which makes a kind of sense for a system that is more narrative focused (and particularly MotW, which is clearly not designed with character longevity in mind). There are also other, class-specific ways to gain XP that encourage playing towards their archetype (the Mundane has a move to gain XP for getting captured and rescued, while the Flake has a move to gain XP for getting someone else's advice, and then refusing to follow it).

This has made me think more about why I don't bother using XP in D&D, and haven't since at least 3.5 (I did run one campaign where I tried it out, and it had absolutely zero impact beyond making my job more difficult). Part of it is that the math is simply way too complicated and convoluted. In MotW you level up every time you gain five XP. Easy to track. Numbers ranging into the thousands? Not so much. And the tables and the multipliers and modifiers and all the little variables to track, in basically any modern edition of D&D, is just too much. But there's also the fact that the default rules don't encourage the type of gameplay me and my players are most interested in: combat. I hate that I have to hack the game to get it encourage different styles of play.

And I don't think "quest XP" is an answer either. Absent a specific system, this usually amounts to an arbitrary fiat by the XP (just like story-based or milestone), and doesn't encourage... really any kind of thing at all, really. Show me the D&D party that needs to be encouraged to accept quests, please. All it does is add one more number for both me and my players to keep track of. And I understand that a not-insignificant player base within D&D likes watching their numbers go up. And if that's worth the extra effort for them, more power to them, I say.

It'd be interesting to see what a more DW/MotW-esque XP system would look like D&D. Something with smaller numbers to track, maybe based less on failed rolls and more on playing to class archetypes (which, as I understand, older editions of D&D/AD&D did have in some form).

 

[guachi]

I give XP at the end of sessions except on rare occasions. It takes about 60-90 seconds of my time to total XP and divide by players.

It's not really a big deal to me. I like giving XP every session as it rewards players who show up consistently, among other things.

 

[guachi]

I'm beginning to think you might not like the 5e healing rules.

I'm with Saelorn on my dislike of the default 5e healing rules. I hate them so much I find games that use them not really that fun to be a PC in.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I give XP at the end of sessions except on rare occasions. It takes about 60-90 seconds of my time to total XP and divide by players.

It's not really a big deal to me. I like giving XP every session as it rewards players who show up consistently, among other things.

Very much this.

PCs end up being at different levels when you award XP only to those players who are present but in my eyes that only adds to the flavor of the party.

I give XP for:
- defeating monsters/enemies (which isn't always killing them)
- avoiding monsters/enemies in clever ways (same XP or even a slight 10% or 20% bonus)
- successful social interactions/puzzle solving/trap disabling (based on complexity)
- side-quest completion
- major story arc components completed

What's that? You were told there would be no math?? Even with all these variables, it still only takes a short amount of time after each session to total up XP and divvie it out.

 

[JonnyP71]

I dislike milestone xp, it feels like a bit of a lazy cop out, often used to compensate for poor adventure design.

My players sit and gaze at me like eager spaniels at the end of each gaming session, pencils and erasers at the ready, waiting for their xp award. I love it when one of them cheers excitedly to signify they have enough xp to gain a level.

I give xp for 'dealing with dangerous situations', not just killing monsters. If they avoid an encounter using stealth/diplomacy/trickery they get full xp as if they had killed the enemies - as long as a tangible threat was there. If they RP well they get bonuses, these can vary from player to player and from session to session. On the other hand they get zero xp for unnecessary killing or enemies that posed no real threat - such as NPCs, civillians or a lone goblin scout.

XP also rewards regular session attendance, the players know that 'no show means no xp'. I have no problem whatsoever with characters being of different levels.

 

[Phasestar]

I'm also not a fan of the idea of milestone XP vs. traditional XP, though I think it is probably "good enough".

To be fair, I have not yet tried milestone XP, only read about it, but my players love the traditional system when combined with bonus XP for roleplaying, quest/story completion, etc. I see milestone XP as easier for the DM, but less interesting and exciting for the players. I think the higher resolution system I'm used to using gives players more incentives for just about anything they do and they know that the amount of reward is fairly predictable even when they are acting outside of a planned or prepared story.

Of course, I'm also the guy who loves playing in Fantasy Football Leagues that have Individual Defensive Players and points based on 100 point scales that include normalized rewards across player positions for just about every possible thing a player can do on the football field. It's fun to see "your" player accumulating even a single point or a half point when they are on the field, just like it's cool to know that that extra goblin raiding group you went out of your way to defeat, even though it was not part of the main storyline, was not in effect completely worthless because the milestone reward for getting to the next story milestone was the same whether you stopped those particular goblins or not.

 

[jaelis]

I give xp for 'dealing with dangerous situations', not just killing monsters. If they avoid an encounter using stealth/diplomacy/trickery they get full xp as if they had killed the enemies - as long as a tangible threat was there. If they RP well they get bonuses, these can vary from player to player and from session to session. On the other hand they get zero xp for unnecessary killing or enemies that posed no real threat - such as NPCs, civillians or a lone goblin scout.

I guess my idea of milestones is just a little different than some peoples', because what you describe sounds like my idea of milestones.

I consider it a milestone any time the party accomplishes something significant. If you have to beat a monster to get into the castle, then beating the monster is a milestone and you would get XP. If you manage to get into the castle without beating the monster, I would give the same XP. If you decide you don't want to visit the castle and instead rout the bandits in the forest, then finding the bandits would be a milestone and defeating them another. If you just randomly attack a bear in the woods, I wouldn't consider that a milestone. If you defeat the monster at the castle but then decide to tackle the bandits, then you don't get a milestone.

So someone explain the more constraining concept of milestones that people are railing against?

 

[The Human Target]

I'm with Saelorn on my dislike of the default 5e healing rules. I hate them so much I find games that use them not really that fun to be a PC in.

I think they are a bit clunky.

I just don't think they have anything do with milestone xp.

Not that the OP really does either, but still.

 

[iserith]

This has made me think more about why I don't bother using XP in D&D, and haven't since at least 3.5 (I did run one campaign where I tried it out, and it had absolutely zero impact beyond making my job more difficult). Part of it is that the math is simply way too complicated and convoluted. In MotW you level up every time you gain five XP. Easy to track. Numbers ranging into the thousands? Not so much. And the tables and the multipliers and modifiers and all the little variables to track, in basically any modern edition of D&D, is just too much. But there's also the fact that the default rules don't encourage the type of gameplay me and my players are most interested in: combat. I hate that I have to hack the game to get it encourage different styles of play.

I think there's plenty of good reasons to criticize XP, but c'mon man, doing so on the basis of not wanting to do simple math or just opening up the calculator app on one's phone to do a little elementary-level multiplication, addition, and division is just a little hard to swallow. Are other methods easier? Sure. Is D&D's method hard? No. I don't mean to pick on you specifically either. Similar comments have been made before.

And I don't think "quest XP" is an answer either. Absent a specific system, this usually amounts to an arbitrary fiat by the XP (just like story-based or milestone), and doesn't encourage... really any kind of thing at all, really. Show me the D&D party that needs to be encouraged to accept quests, please. All it does is add one more number for both me and my players to keep track of. And I understand that a not-insignificant player base within D&D likes watching their numbers go up. And if that's worth the extra effort for them, more power to them, I say.

For milestone XP, the rules give guidelines on how much to give for achieving specific goals. A major milestone is like a hard encounter. A minor milestone is like an easy encounter. I wouldn't say it's arbitrary, especially since milestones are tied to certain events or challenges in the adventure design. There's a purpose to it - to incentivize the players to engage with the prepared content.

And I've seen plenty of players in my day who need to be encouraged to accept quests. I call them "defective adventurers." It's a player problem mostly, but it's a human universal in my view that if you want people to do a thing, recognize it when they do it so that they will do it again in the future. (This works for more than just accepting quests in D&D. Try it.) XP does exactly that, for whatever you set the XP to reward. Even people who are going to do it anyway (like me) will appreciate it in my experience.