XP for Non-Combat Tasks

[jayoungr]

I usually use milestone XP, but I'm starting a campaign that's going to do it the old-fashioned way. I'm just wondering if anyone has made a stab at working out good amounts of XP to award for small, medium, and large tasks that don't involve combat. If so, where can I find it? Thanks!

 

[iserith]

Basically all you need do is award the same XP as a combat of the same difficulty, but only if there was a meaningful risk of failure. Just gut-check the difficulty level based on the number of tasks with uncertain outcomes you might reasonably expect and finite resources that might be expended to succeed.

You might also think about skewing XP based on what you want to incentivize the players to do. For example, if you want to see more social interaction challenges than combat challenges, you might award more XP for changing an NPC's attitude or forging an alliance or the like instead of just beating them up and taking their stuff.

 

[Tormyr]

Was the task Easy, Medium, Hard, or Extremely Hard / Deadly? Give the experience from an equivalent encounter.

 

[LordEntrails]

"Quests" give the party quests, determine their CR and difficulty and give them corresponding XP.

 

[Prakriti]

As others have said, use encounter XP. I would just use the XP thresholds as outlined in the DMG. For example, a party of four level 3 characters would earn the following, depending on the task's difficulty:

Easy: 300 XP
Medium: 600 XP
Hard: 900 XP
Deadly: 1600 XP

Calculated with http://dhmholley.co.uk/encounter-calculator-5th/

 

[Oofta]

As others have said, just use standard encounter guidelines. Many non-combat encounters may end up falling into the "easy" difficulty category depending on the level of risk and complexity involved. The more the party has to expend limited resources and the more complexity and planning required the higher the difficulty.

 

[cooperjer]

I'm on the same page as the others in previous posts, but I feel it's a little harder to determine the potential resources used on the challenge. A couple examples come to mind.

1. The party encounters a ghast in the remains of a destroyed house. The ghast is angry as the loss of their home and their lively hood by the hands of an unknown force or creature. The party (levels 8-11) agree to not kill the ghast, but to allow the bard (level 11) to try to calm it down and not be aggressive. Estimated CR to change the ghast attitude is 20 to 30. I set it at 20, aka hard. Two successful persuasion rolls later the ghast is now neutral to somewhat friendly with the bard, but still very angry. The net result, in my opinion, the party gain some ghasts as allies for a short time. Net resources used was about eight HP from the barbarian. I gave XP equivalent to the XP for the ghast.

2. The party needs to travel to the top of a waterfall to continue on through the dungeon. Climbing alongside the waterfall is a CR 15. The risk to falling is "drowning" per the PHB rules for drowning. To achieve this goal, one character uses misty step, one character climbs using pitons and rope, one character uses claws of the umberhulk to dig a ramp up to the next area through the surrounding wall. The remaining characters climb using the rope at advantage or take the ramp. I gave zero XP for this encounter.

If XP is based on potential resource uses dose this XP value sound correct? When it comes to encounters that involve potential damage to characters through monsters or traps it feels pretty easy to use the guidance in the DMG. When it comes to XP for travel challenges, I feel it becomes much more difficult.

 

[Shiroiken]

I currently halve the XP from combat (MXP), and have added in social xp (SXP), exploration xp (EXP), and quest xp (QXP) to balance out the difference. MXP is just half the normal xp, rounding down after totaled (I try to use even number of monsters if the xp total is odd). SXP is based on completing various tasks that require social interaction with NPCs, with the amount equal to an encounter for the adventure's average level (easy, medium, hard, and deadly). QXP is normally only used if the adventure has a primary goal that doesn't have to be completed for the adventure to end, or for side quests, and are normally equal to between 10% to 50% of the total value of the xp for the entire adventure.

EXP is tricky, and I change it up for each adventure. I tried giving traps a CR, but quickly learned that this just doesn't work, since it can be easy for a party to bypass a higher level trap, earning far more xp than they should, not to mention that it often causes me to litter the adventure with traps to make up the xp total. For my megadungeon, I give out EXP for areas not previously explored, generally valued based on the dungeon depth. For a Hex-Crawl I've been running, I've given out EXP based on the difficulty of the area exploring (deep woods is worth more than open plains, for example). I've also created specific exploration challenges that work the same ways as social encounters.

 

[Blue]

I usually use milestone XP, but I'm starting a campaign that's going to do it the old-fashioned way. I'm just wondering if anyone has made a stab at working out good amounts of XP to award for small, medium, and large tasks that don't involve combat. If so, where can I find it? Thanks!

I'm going to spin this around a little - what's a good rate that you and your players like to level?

I bring this up because adding task-based XP on top of encounter XP will mean more total XP per session and more rapid levelling.

Since I don't like rapid levelling, I find the question expands from non-combat XP, to rebalancing all XP.

I tend to ignore the combat vs. non-combat portion. How big of a challenge was overcome? I don't care if if was overcome via combat, stealth, roleplay, high tracking skills, etc. But I only award it once - if you sneak past a set of guards, and later make noise the guards come to investigate and the party has to fight them, they don't double-dip XP.

Mind you, some challenges may be easier or harder to overcome based on your approach. I don't care - if you're smart enough to use a better approach, more power to you. Hmm, those mercs are a tough fight - but easily bribed with that dwarven spirits we found a few adventures back. No problem, same XP either way.

As a side note, I've foudn this, plus thinking more "treasure packet" like 4e did it instead of just loot-the-bodies, and move people away from the default murder-hobo take. When you are equally as rewarded for different ways to overcome a challenge, you don't always take the same approach.

 

[Yaarel]

Obviously, combat is exciting. But I want D&D to be better at rewarding noncombat that is interesting.



Personally, I abandoned xp. I now adjudicate advancement by encounter difficulty − assessed after the fact.

If an encounter happens to turn out to have been challenging, then I award credit for it. On average, 8 challenging encounters are required to advance to the next level. (Individual levels vary, for example, Level 1 only needs 4 challenging encounters to advance, level 5 requires 16, and level 13 on up requires 8.) (Also, a trivial encounter counts as ½, a crazy hard encounter counts as 2). This system made it easy for noncombat. If a noncombat encounter turns out to be challenging, then it counts toward advancement.