Running WotC Adventure Question

So, I have been looking into something and I have a simple question for those of you who have run or played in WotC adventure books:

Do you find after completing the encounters you are running short on XP to make the levels you are supposed to be?

From some threads I read, if I recall correctly, this seems to be an issue (but I could be wrong as I haven't played in any of these nor run one).

In a related concern:

Do you offer XP for treasure retained, completing missions or accomplishing goals, and other options besides defeating opponents in encounters?

James Grover said:

So, I have been looking into something and I have a simple question for those of you who have run or played in WotC adventure books:

Do you find after completing the encounters you are running short on XP to make the levels you are supposed to be?

Click to expand...

Yes - though I know Curse of Strahd recommends milestone leveling and perhaps others do as well. I'm a glutton for punishment, I suppose, and prefer XP. Therefore, I made sure to award XP for non-combat successes and add thematically appropriate encounters to give even more XP so the PCs could level.

James Grover said:

From some threads I read, if I recall correctly, this seems to be an issue (but I could be wrong as I haven't played in any of these nor run one).

In a related concern:

Do you offer XP for treasure retained, completing missions or accomplishing goals, and other options besides defeating opponents in encounters?

Click to expand...

Yes. In all our campaigns, I award XP for defeating foes (not necessarily just murder hobo-ing them), overcoming traps and other obstacles, successful social interactions, discovering secrets, completing missions, etc. I don't give XP for treasure.

The planned encounters might fall a little short (I haven't run into this issue myself yet, so I can't say yay or nay on it).

But all the ones I've seen also expect some level of random encounters to come up, which, depending upon the campaign/adventure can pad a party's XP quite a bit over a few sessions.

I believe that if you give out XP strictly from fighting monsters, you usually will be short (unless you also have random encounters fairly often.)

In addition, most of the adventures I do not believe list out Quest XP that often, nor XP you might earn from roleplaying scenarios (because I imagine they did not assume the default was to give XP for that stuff and would leave it in the hands of individual DMs to add it in if they felt the need.) I think more often than not the default lines up to using a milestone leveling system-- complete a certain section of the adventure, you level PCs up.

Personally, when I ran both the Hoard of the Dragon Queen / Rise of Tiamat adventures, and Curse of Strahd... I used milestone leveling rather than giving out XP. I preferred controlling when the PCs leveled, so that it made sense in both the story and against the enemies they eventually would move on to.

It seems to be a common complaint about the adventures. When I started PotA, I found my players were falling behind where they should be, despite being homicidal murderers who kill everything that wasn't specifically there to help them (ie rent them a room, or offer quests). I initially started offering bonus XP for completing quests, then just switched to milestone XP (Not milestone leveling).

I don't offer XP for treasure - I never DM's editions that do - because I don't like the logistical puzzle of moving 10 000GP in copper from the dungeon to somewhere civilised. Otherwise I offer XP for completing goals and overcoming enemies, not necessarily killing them. Convincing the goblin chieftain to leave the villagers alone for example.

I've had this issue with every adventure I've ever run, in every edition of the game. I tend to cut out boring combats, skip over random encounters, etc. Or the party is too big and XP is divided too many ways. Or people missed a few sessions and fell behind in XP. Or didn't get a story award because they didn't look in the right spot. There have been various reasons over the years, and it has been a near-constant headache until I finally decided to abandon XP altogether. Milestones. Only milestones. For the rest of my life, nothing but milestones.

Well, the reason I ask is I have been using the revamped printing of Keep On The Borderlands for 5E, but it has taken a bit of modifying once the PCs got above 3rd level. Now, after clearing out the original caves and river/wilderness areas, most of them are 5th level and a couple are close to 6th.

I am a mathematician and have been experimenting with the XP system as presented in the DMG, trying to go with the suggested guidelines for encounters per day and so on, and because of the number of foes multiplier I am usually only awarding about half the XP suggested for the encounter. For example, take a group of 4 1st-level characters. For them, a Hard encounter has an adjusted XP value of 300-399 points. But if I do, say 2 CR 1/2s, the XP value is only 200, but the adjusted value because there are two of them is 300. That makes it a Hard encounter, but the group only gets 200 XP for it, not 300.

I think that is the issue with the printed adventures. Adjusted XP is used to determine the difficulty, and the designers aimed for X easies, Y moderates, and Z hards, but in most cases the actual earned XP ends up being 1/2 or less than the adjusted XP!

If that is the case, no wonder parties are falling short of making the levels desired to continue on in the adventure. Sure, ideas, tactics, role-playing, finishing tasks, etc. can bolster the XP, as can random encounters, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when such things are necessary and the core system for determining XP falls short IMO.

Does any one else have a similar take on all this?

James Grover said:

So, I have been looking into something and I have a simple question for those of you who have run or played in WotC adventure books:

Do you find after completing the encounters you are running short on XP to make the levels you are supposed to be?

From some threads I read, if I recall correctly, this seems to be an issue (but I could be wrong as I haven't played in any of these nor run one).

In a related concern:

Do you offer XP for treasure retained, completing missions or accomplishing goals, and other options besides defeating opponents in encounters?

Click to expand...

I looked at XP briefly for my Tomb of Annihilation game. While I opted to go with milestone leveling instead, it was plainly clear that I'd need to add quite a bit to make combat encounter XP get the PCs to the level thresholds recommended for various areas in that adventure.

I go with XP. XP for combat and occassional extra XP when the group complete an adventure. Very rarely I will give a character some extra XP for something amazing that they did themselves (such as one character bypassing all of Firefinger's defenses by climbing up the outside of the tower successfully during a storm and retrieving the item.

So far the characters seem to always be pretty much where they should be in terms of levels.

To me, XP feels more honest. Leveling up at milestones feels (to me) as if I am levelling up at the whim of the DM rather than due to the amount of action and adventure I have seen.

In the ones I've read/ran/played? If XP only came from monsters defeated/killed? Yes. Adding to the deficit is that our group is usually 5-7 people.