D&D 5E Do you use XPs or Milestones?

[Coroc]

XP atm. to test the system. Did use milestones before, I like them because it is less work to trace and you want no level differences in the group it is easier to justify somehow. But I wanted confirmation, that not only the wits made the PCs adventuring day but also their luck and skills in combat.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I have used various systems of xp rewards, quest rewards, time-based rewards, and so on.

In my current campaign, I'm doing session-based advancement... In a d20 game that is not D&D 5e.

We did four sessions at level one, then six sessions at level 2. We are currently five sessions into the eight to get to level 4.

Players seem to be pretty happy. Although I have gotten some complaints about the slow speed of leveling, that seems to happen no matter the rate.

 

[atanakar]

71 votes so far :

• 2/5 use XPs
• 2/5 use Milestones
• 1/5 use an alternate system.

One thing that I find fascinating is the fact that the some DM uses a different progression system for each group he/she plays with. This never occured to me. But it makes a lot of sens when explained. (It also makes interpreting the votes very difficult!)

 

[Bupp]

I play a milestone system, but I give the players XP.

I've found that players like tracking XP. Watching the total grow, knowing, "after the next session, I'll level up".

I hate keeping track or calculating the XP earned. At the end of the session, I just give an amount of XP that seems appropriate to the milestones that they've received.

 

[Inchoroi]

We ran with milestones for a while in 5e, but our various groups decided we liked tracking XP better. I'll tend to give out bonus XP for good RP or story achievements, etc, in addition to the normal XP for defeating or bypassing entirely monsters.

 

[iserith]

71 votes so far :

• 2/5 use XPs
• 2/5 use Milestones
• 1/5 use an alternate system.

One thing that I find fascinating is the fact that the some DM uses a different progression system for each group he/she plays with. This never occured to me. But it makes a lot of sens when explained. (It also makes interpreting the votes very difficult!)

And probably a good portion of respondents for "milestones" are actually using story-based advancement which is an "alternate system." At least based on the posts I'm reading.

 

[ART!]

I use XP roughly. I don't want to use a calculator at the table nor end up talking about decimals of an XP, so I go with the old 'round to an appropriately close hundred and call it a day'. More often than not this means three basic levels hard/medium/easy for both combat and story goals, adjusted sometimes on the fly for differentiated difficulty. I also don't award XP for random encounters for the most part. Not when they're a result of player sloth anyway - those encounters are a natural consequence of procrastination that chews resources, not a tasty little XP snack on the side.

Experience points all the way, by individual character (if a character's not involved in something that grants xp then no xp for that character) - your character gets what it earns via contributing and-or taking risks. I do it this way largely to discourage 'passenger' characters who like to let others take the risk, of which I've seen a few too many over the years.

I also have very slow advancement a la 2e, and a high tolerance for variable character levels* within the party. Xp are never given out for anything outside the fiction e.g. bringing me a case of beer before the session will get you my thanks but won't get your character any extra xp!

* - not recommended for 3e or 4e but fine in 0-1-2-5e.

To avoid having to track lots of ticky-tack stuff, at the end of each mission or adventure I'll give out a "dungeon bonus", whose base value is based on a host of factors (sometimes including my mood!) and then modified per character by the number of adventuring days that character spent in the adventure. (thus if I'd set the base bonus at 6000 xp, a character who was in for the whole 10-day adventure would get 6000 but a character that for some reason was only in for 4 of those days would get 2400) This dungeon bonus in a small way also replaces some of the xp they'd have otherwise got were I using xp-for-gp; the bonus is unrelated to the size of the party treasury. (and some of my players are already greedy enough, thanks! )

This assumes all the benefits of a new level accrue to the character >blip!< just like that, much like a typical video game, with no training or rest or anything else required first. I've always had training rules, and even if I didn't I'd still only ever give out xp after an overnight rest (or "long rest" in 5e).

This is one place I've always disagreed with Gygax and other designers: to me, a Goblin that's worth 15 xp at 1st level is still worth 15 xp at 10th level - the difference being that at 10th level you need a helluva lot more multiples of 15 xp in order to bump, to the point where getting to 11th take wiping out most of the Goblins on the continent and even that might not be enough.

I kind of wish I could give out XP like this, but my ADD brain needs as few things to track as possible. If I had to figure out how much XP to give out for everything that warranted XP - even if I had a table or list to base it on - it would drive me at least a little batty at the table.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

Me and my players are currently 12 levels into what we hope will be our first 1 to 20 campaign. As such, I'm tracking XP so it feels like we're playing by the rules and earning each level fairly. (FYI, it took 74 sessions of approximately 4 hours each to hit level 12. That's nearly 3 years of playing. I estimate 5 years total to hit level 20 and reach the end of the campaign.) I award XP for overcoming monsters and completing quests.

A while back, I stopped awarding individual XP because the players were simply not doing a very good job of accurately recording it. Now I track XP for the whole group and everyone levels at the same time. It seems to work for us.

If we had more time in our lives (most of us are in our 40s with younger children) I would use a more granular XP system to incentivize the behaviors I want to see in players. But I don't. The squeeze just isn't worth the juice.

When this campaign is over I'm definitely interested in trying a variety of different approaches and finding the right one for the next campaign. I think the desired outcome should dictate your approach and there's not necessarily a "right way" to award XP. Different campaigns have different feels, and so do different ways of earning XP. If you put some thought into it, they can work together.

Right now, I'm reading Descent Into Avernus and the milestone leveling just seems really, really fast to me. But who knows, maybe my players would dig it. Worth a try!

 

[Mr. Patient]

Right now, I'm reading Descent Into Avernus and the milestone leveling just seems really, really fast to me. But who knows, maybe my players would dig it. Worth a try!

It is indeed really fast, especially in the beginning. The goal is to get you quickly to the point where you can reasonably survive Hell, which I endorse. I prefer that to extending the Baldur's Gate portion of the adventure just to grind out the appropriate number of XP. (Hell is the main attraction here!) My players were leery at first, but I think they're down with it now.

 

[iserith]

It is indeed really fast, especially in the beginning. The goal is to get you quickly to the point where you can reasonably survive Hell, which I endorse. I prefer that to extending the Baldur's Gate portion of the adventure just to grind out the appropriate number of XP. (Hell is the main attraction here!) My players were leery at first, but I think they're down with it now.

I'm playing in this and our DM just had us start at 5th level with the city falling into Hell, skipping all the content prior to that. We've been using standard XP.

How fast is the advancement by design in Avernus? Because I know the average adventure in my campaigns will easily take a character from 1st to 3rd level in one session with standard XP.