Esker
Hero
Something I have never understood about XP advancement in 5e is the disconnect between the recommended measure of encounter difficulty and the amount of XP awarded. If encounter balancing guidelines use an adjusted XP measure to account for action economy, why shouldn't XP awarded also use the adjusted number? If characters are supposed to gain experience as a reward for overcoming challenges, why not tie XP to the scale of the challenge? As it is, facing many weaker creatures incurs a double whammy relative to one big one, holding assumed difficulty constant: more play time to get through it, and less payoff afterward.