Why I dislike Milestone XP

[5ekyu]

Ok so about advancement... To me first you need to figure out why you all want characters to advance, then let that guide how characters advance and when.

If you want characters to advance to give the GM influence over player choices , then xp only given for choices GM approves is great.

If you want characters to advance to punish players who cannot play as often, then big xp losses for missed sessions is great.

In our last game, it was supers and they started at like 10th and advancement was minimal... A few xp now and again. Half the players never spent their xp. It was not important. I think they got a level a year.

Our current game is scifi and the advancement pace we are using is 8 sessions per level at tier 2, then 12 at tier 3.

Faster levels means more "keeping up" more trying to figure out new stuff, less time to get used to and see your stuff in play before you get settled in... For us at least.

I find with my players if i lay out diverse stuff, they find fun stuff to do with it. Sometimes its more fun than what i had planned.

Maybe part of this comes from me working their characters elements and background into the things, people, places and events around them but i dont need or see it as beneficial to say to them which choices will be rewarded with advancement.

The purpose of advancement in our games is to produce the style of escalating adventure with greater and greater adversaries and challenges.

The modified session xp system is just an efficient implementation of that, giving players and gm a way to measure time left.

Next campaign, if it is similar, i plan to double levels.

As in you level up half as often but gain two levels.

I think this cuts down on the incremental workload, makes each level more dramatic and more breakthru while giving everyone time for a long stretch to explore ther stuff.

 

[Bradley Hindman]

I've played in 2 games where the DM has used Milestone xp, or rather milestone levelling, as xp has not existed as we know it.

At the end of a 'chapter' of the game the DM has simply said - 'you have all gained a level'. There's no differentiation between characters that have been present for all the sessions of the chapter and those that have maybe only been in the party for 1 or 2 sessions.

I am slightly baffled by this mentality (which seems to be rather commonly held). Our group feels that missing out on the fun of a gaming session is sufficient punishment that an XP penalty isn't required. Is this idea that players should be rewarded for being present a result of using XP as an incentive? Do some tables really need to incentivize showing up? Does the mentality have something to do with a table that enjoys inter-player competition? Some other option that I can't think of?

It is lazy, it is forced, it's a clumsy way of keeping everyone at the same level.

I used to award and track XP. But, I stopped when I realized that the story awards that I was compiling were just a complicated and opaque way of using milestone advancement. As I said earlier in the thread, I now just level characters up at the end of story chapters. Unlike how some in this thread have characterized milestones, I don't decide weeks in advance which conclusions to a story arc will be rewarded. Instead its organic. The players set their own goals and the chapter ends when it feels dramatically appropriate to do so. Usually that means those goals have been reached. But sometimes not.

 

[Imaculata]

If you want characters to advance to punish players who cannot play as often, then big xp losses for missed sessions is great.

Why would you ever want to do that? And why would it ever be 'great'?

Being unable to play as often as you'd like, due to real life, is enough of a bummer. But then the group also punishes you for having a real-life obligation, by denying you exp? Having your character get more and more behind on other characters, is not going to make those real-life obligations magically go away.

 

[jaelis]

I've played in 2 games where the DM has used Milestone xp, or rather milestone levelling, as xp has not existed as we know it.

At the end of a 'chapter' of the game the DM has simply said - 'you have all gained a level'. There's no differentiation between characters that have been present for all the sessions of the chapter and those that have maybe only been in the party for 1 or 2 sessions.

It is lazy, it is forced, it's a clumsy way of keeping everyone at the same level.

It just doesn't 'feel' remotely right to me.

Huh, I would not have called that milestones then, I would describe it as free-form level advancement. I'm not particularly opposed to that either, and I guess I can see how they are related, if you just call each chapter one big milestone. But whenever I've used milestones they've come in smaller amounts with more per level. To me the point is to reward progress toward your goal (whatever goal you have decided on), not just reaching the goal. And not just mechanical activities like fighting or finding treasure.

 

[iserith]

I've played in 2 games where the DM has used Milestone xp, or rather milestone levelling, as xp has not existed as we know it.

At the end of a 'chapter' of the game the DM has simply said - 'you have all gained a level'. There's no differentiation between characters that have been present for all the sessions of the chapter and those that have maybe only been in the party for 1 or 2 sessions.

It is lazy, it is forced, it's a clumsy way of keeping everyone at the same level.

It just doesn't 'feel' remotely right to me.

It's also not terribly important to keep the PCs all the same level in terms of survivability, at least not in D&D 5e. Because in my last three campaigns players always start characters at 1st level even after PC death or joining the campaign late, I've played a number of games where characters were up to 7 levels apart and it went fine. The lower-level PCs had to be a little choosy about how to engage combat challenges at first, but quickly gained levels and toughness after just a couple challenges were completed.

Also, what you're referring to is story-based advancement or session-based advancement. Milestone advancement uses goals and XP.

 

[iserith]

Milestone xp seems a little railroady. Suppose I am not interested in your milestone and want to take my character in a different direction? Or what if I turn left instead of right?

It's not "railroady" though. A clever DM will have explained to you the kind of game he or she is going for and how you will get XP, then asked for your buy-in. If you agreed that achieving certain goals put before you is how you earn XP in the game, then you are not being railroaded because of your agreement. If you then turned left instead of right so to speak, you'd be going against your agreement and thus the one at fault. And you'd earn no XP. Ideally, in my view, there'd be a number of milestones and you could pick and choose the ones you'd want (and pay a price for ignoring some when that made sense), but that's not always how a DM sets up his or her game.

If the DM instead told you it was a sandbox, but you only ever got XP for completing particular goals and he or she always steered you toward those goals despite your best efforts, then yeah, it might be said to be "railroady." That DM made the mistake of not being upfront with you regarding the expectations of the game and is coercing, negating, or subverting your choices.

 

[Sunseeker]

It sounds like you've been DMing for too many players that don't mesh with your style. I say that because you are coming off as believing that the players not taking the hooks you've planned out is a personal disrespect to you and your efforts as a DM... where I, and possibly many other DMs, would simply see that as having chosen the wrong hook for the players in question (i.e. one they aren't into, and it's totally okay for people to be into different things) or otherwise not at all a problem because there are more hooks to toss them and see which they'll take.

It's like you are saying either you get your way and the campaign goes to plan and you have fun, or the players try to take the lead and shape the campaign and you don't have fun - if you were playing with a compatible group of players, the outcome would be everyone having fun whether the player's took your lead or you took theirs, because you'd be all intentionally be heading to the same place.

Or maybe you just need to cut back how much prep-time you spend so that you aren't so emotionally invested in a dragon flying over town that you get angry if the players don't feel like dealing with a dragon at the moment, because as GameOgre says, DMing should be fun, not work.

Not all campaigns are free roaming do-whatever-you-want sandboxes.

 

[iserith]

I am slightly baffled by this mentality (which seems to be rather commonly held). Our group feels that missing out on the fun of a gaming session is sufficient punishment that an XP penalty isn't required. Is this idea that players should be rewarded for being present a result of using XP as an incentive? Do some tables really need to incentivize showing up? Does the mentality have something to do with a table that enjoys inter-player competition? Some other option that I can't think of?

I think it's a little much to say it's a "punishment" not to get XP for a game in which you didn't play. It is reasonable in my view to say that because of the plot-based game you choose to run, you use story-based advancement and you prefer to keep all the characters the same level for some reason and thus, if you don't show up to a session, your character levels up anyway. That's a good tool to use in a plot-based game. But other games are not structured that way. In a sandbox game, for example, there is no plot in the same sense and thus another advancement tool simply works better than the story-based advancement you use.

 

[Oofta]

I am slightly baffled by this mentality (which seems to be rather commonly held). Our group feels that missing out on the fun of a gaming session is sufficient punishment that an XP penalty isn't required. Is this idea that players should be rewarded for being present a result of using XP as an incentive? Do some tables really need to incentivize showing up? Does the mentality have something to do with a table that enjoys inter-player competition? Some other option that I can't think of?



I used to award and track XP. But, I stopped when I realized that the story awards that I was compiling were just a complicated and opaque way of using milestone advancement. As I said earlier in the thread, I now just level characters up at the end of story chapters. Unlike how some in this thread have characterized milestones, I don't decide weeks in advance which conclusions to a story arc will be rewarded. Instead its organic. The players set their own goals and the chapter ends when it feels dramatically appropriate to do so. Usually that means those goals have been reached. But sometimes not.

I agree on both counts. First, missing a game sucks and is usually out of the control of the person missing the game. It may not "matter" if people have different levels but it feels like a punishment for having the flu and not wanting to get everyone else at the table sick as well.

For the latter, I think one of my biggest goals is to make a campaign feel as much like an organic story and as little like a board game as possible. We're not playing Monopoly, the dragon doesn't have to land on Boardwalk for me to collect rent XP.

Besides, if the PCs do something completely unexpected and train the villagers to fight for themselves while helping construct defenses and scouting out the weak points of the invading orc tribe instead of diving straight into combat, why should that not count as winning the day? I run a fairly sand-boxy game (a topic for another thread) so I don't care how the PCs achieve goals.

If people complain about PCs being murder hobos and then only reward them for being murder hobos they don't have much ground to stand on. You get the type of play you encourage.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

We don't have a problem with PC missing XP if the player is out, someone else will just run that PC along with their character. Now if you insisted your PC stood back and did nothing while you are out then I guess you would fall behind.