D&D 5E Do the official WotC adventures cheat with xp?

[MerricB]

One of the chief bonuses of milestone-based levelling is you get a lot more story-based content in adventures, rather than "we need to fill this adventure with pointless fights to give players the XP".

However, you have to be aware of when an adventure is written in such a fashion (as most of the official ones are), and be prepared if you still want to use the old XP system. Personally, I still use XP in my home campaign, but if I ran Tyranny of Dragons in that setting, I absolutely would use milestones.

Cheers!

 

[Guest 6801328]

In Storm King's Thunder, it's an adventure for levels 1 to 10 and the PCs are not even expected to go to 4 of the 10 major locations.

It's ludicrous. Why set up those great settings and then set up the adventure to not go to them? smh

I was greatly annoyed by SKT, too. At one point I did a page count; I can't remember the exact number but it was pretty shocking how few pages you actually used in a run-through. The WotC apologists all said, "But if you run it multiple times it's different each time!"

Great. So only DMs who run multiple groups get their money's worth? And, even then, why does anybody (DM, players) have a better experience? Maybe because of the perception of not being railroaded, mentioned by BookBarbarian.

The conversation seems to keep veering off into a defense of milestones, but I haven't really seen anybody attack milestones. The complaints are not that milestones are bad, but that milestones in the published adventures are far, far too generous. A corollary is that the milestones are effectively mandatory, because if you try to use traditional XP the PCs won't be high enough level at each new chapter.

I would 100% fine with the length of the books if they were advertised for levels 1 to 8. I just want my higher levels to feel like genuine achievement.

 

[KarinsDad]

I was greatly annoyed by SKT, too. At one point I did a page count; I can't remember the exact number but it was pretty shocking how few pages you actually used in a run-through. The WotC apologists all said, "But if you run it multiple times it's different each time!"

Great. So only DMs who run multiple groups get their money's worth? And, even then, why does anybody (DM, players) have a better experience? Maybe because of the perception of not being railroaded, mentioned by BookBarbarian.

Maybe.

I just changed the adventure so that the PCs eventually HAVE to go to every major setting in the book if they want to finish the adventure. It gave me a lot more material as a DM and it allowed the players to explore and adventure more.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I'm in the opposite camp compared to most posters. I don't like getting XP to raise my character's class level (or getting milestone based leveling) for things that, well, shouldn't actually affect their class abilities. How does completing goals or milestones help you swing a sword, learn new spells, etc?

I also think that even the standard XP requirements in 5e are way too fast. The only way to make it at all believable is if your campaign is episodic, and it is assumed the characters take off time between each adventure for training and minor adventures that you don't play through.

I truly despise just getting levels for showing up. You end up with characters you aren't even familiar with. You have abilities you get 4 levels ago that you still forget you have because you've never (or almost never) used them. And you have to completely hand-wave any sort of suspension of disbelief regarding your character adventuring in a consistent world.

I don't want a new level until I have my character's sheet basically memorized and have used their features again and again and again, when it actually makes sense to get significantly better.

 

[Shasarak]

To call that "cheating" is not to realize the shifting times we're living in.

Ha, Fake Adventure. Sad.

 

[clearstream]

On page 15 of the PHB there is a table which is dear to the heart of every player, showing how many xp you need to earn to get to the next level. The DMG page 260-261 explains how to give xp for defeated monsters, non-combat challenges, and milestones. But if I follow these rules, even with generous interpretation, in a published WotC adventure, my characters level up far slower than the adventure suggests.

Example: Princes of the Apocalypse says in a boxed text on page 41: "Feathergale Spire is designed for a 3rd-level party, Rivergard Keep works best for a 4th-level party, ... Each outpost the characters overcome should advance them at least one level." For Feathergale Spire, assuming a standard group of 5 players, getting from level 3 to level 4 means handing out 8,000 xp. But all the enemies combined in the outpost are worth only just over half that, and even handing out a minor and major milestone reward leaves the players well short of level 4.

What is your experience with character advancement in the WotC adventures? Is it all story-based advancement, that is you just give a level to everybody at the end of a dungeon or story event without considering the xp rules and tables? What if, like it is well possible in Princes of the Apocalypse the players don't do all the dungeons, or don't do them in the "right" order?

I'm not finding this so far with Out of the Abyss. Story-based awards have been greatly outweighed by encounter XP. My PCs are at level 4 and look likely to hit level 7 at about the right point. I don't know what will happen after that. My approach is that PCs do not have to slaughter creatures to earn XP for them so long as they resolve the encounter. For some creatures of course, there's only one option.

For me it is important that advancement is validated in terms of risks taken and challenges overcome. Therefore I dislike story-based awards that simply say "If you've reached this point you are granted this level." I feel like that is better managed by doing the work of breaking down the XP and assigning any supplementary/story-based awards to concrete challenges. That makes it clear what risks are being taken and problems overcome to validate the advancement. Put another way, I don't demand that all XP is earned from fighting but I do demand it is all earned from risk-taking and problem-resolution. And I expect professional game designers to put in the work to formally map XP out over the adventure. Frankly, that isn't onerous and for me greatly improves the value of the product.

 

[Tobold]

I thought it was because people were asking for more sandbox adventures, or that players dislike being "railroaded" or something like that.

In Princes of the Apocalypse as written you end up with, to use sub-theme of this thread, a "Fake Sandbox". The adventure suggests you can go where you want, but in the end you have to fight a CR 18 to 20 prince of elemental evil. Which means that if you skipped too many of the dungeons, you get your ass handed to you. That is even more annoying because of the milestone system, because if you just follow the logic of the story you would skip several of the book's 13 dungeons and not have enough levels for the final. I will have to modify the story and introduce keys or stuff to get my group to play all of the content.

 

[Tobold]

For the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign I am about to start I consider using the following house rule: Every combat encounter that isn't the first after a long rest gives double xp. That way my group should be able to keep up with the level requirements of the adventure. And they are discouraged from the "5-minute workday" approach of resting after every fight.

What do you think?

 

[clearstream]

For the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign I am about to start I consider using the following house rule: Every combat encounter that isn't the first after a long rest gives double xp. That way my group should be able to keep up with the level requirements of the adventure. And they are discouraged from the "5-minute workday" approach of resting after every fight.

What do you think?

I like the suggestion to increase the XP for encounters after the first. I don't think they need to be combat encounters, only that they involve risk and use of resources to resolve. I like the simplicity of doubling although my intuition is that perhaps it should scale. Resetting after each long-rest.

 

[Aldarc]

I care. I don't like fast leveling. It cheapens the experience. I like feeling invested in my character, and cheap levels diminishes that. (Honestly I find even RAW to be too fast.)

I can sympathize with your concern. I like feeling invested too, but I don't think that cheap levels inherently diminishes that. It can but it's not some sort of hard rule, but a subjective sense that may factor into a set of other considerations. It may feel cheap, for example, because your character has not done much, which may be the case for these published adventures and their rapid pace of leveling. I have a greater sense of character investment from my story investment than from my mechanical investment, so levels have felt like artficial and gamist means of judging character investment. All tables play differently and all players have different preferences. So the key should be to evaluate the different players (GM included) and their preferences rather than impose one preference as canon law. As I said before, I suspect that the level progression rate for published adventures is meant to reflect a "highlights" of content across the span of D&D levels to ensure that possible new players can see "cool" stuff that would otherwise be atypical for their leveling.