XP Unhappiness

[Stormonu]

Mike's comment in the latest L&L (on monster design) has me a bit perturbed.

The adventure design guidelines give an XP budget for an entire day, a range of XP values for easy, average, and tough fights, and a suggested maximum XP value for a single monster. In other words, you have a daily budget you can spend, guidelines for how much of that budget to spend on a given fight, and a limit of how much XP you can spend on a single monster. As with everything that focuses on the DM, this is all advice to use as you see fit.

If 5E is supposed to be equally balanced on three pillars, can we get away from th majority of XP being earned from killing stuff? I'd much rather see the XP budget to be split for quest/accpomplishments, traps, puzzles and other activities, with combat XP taking up at most a third of the XP pie.

 

[Ahnehnois]

XP is one of the easiest aspects of the game to modify, as it has no relationship to any other game mechanic (excepting the 3e XP costs for spells and items, a terrible idea that is doubtless dead and buried). I would expect to see multiple complete XP systems in the 5e DMG. I would also expect (as always) that many groups won't use XP anyway.

 

[keterys]

That all depends on whether the other two branches actually eat up any resources at all. Signs currently point towards "only if the casters really feel like it" and "maybe some gold", so no reason it should impact.

 

[BobTheNob]

If 5E is supposed to be equally balanced on three pillars, can we get away from th majority of XP being earned from killing stuff? I'd much rather see the XP budget to be split for quest/accpomplishments, traps, puzzles and other activities, with combat XP taking up at most a third of the XP pie.

I been doing this since 2e. I havent counted a point of XP in decades. To me, games of any kind are about having fun and micro-managing XP is no fun at all.

Even what Mearls is suggesting in the forms of "XP Budgets per day" puts me to sleep, far too sanitized and "correct". Its boring to have just the "right" amount of challenge per day. I like getting the amount of challenge wrong sometimes, it keeps things interesting.

Hoping for XP to be entirely optional (and would probably house rule it out if it wasnt anyway).

 

[TwinBahamut]

You know, stuff like this is what makes me wonder if the whole "three pillars" thing is just marketing fluff, rather than an actual design goal. If the three pillars mattered, why only give experience points for one? If they mattered, why have they basically already said that they don't intend to create more complex rule systems for exploration and social encounters? If all the rules are built for combat, and all experience is provided by combat, then combat is the only real pillar. At that point, calling them the three pillars and talking about how some classes give up ability at one pillar in order to be more skilled at another is just a smoke and mirrors trick to cover up the imbalances and flaws in the game.

Until the 5E designers actually prove that there is some substance to the three pillars talk, I think it's safe to assume that 5E is as combat-obsessed as every previous edition of the game. It would take a pretty big shakeup of the D&D formula to make it anything else, after all, and they've made it clear that they want to stick to the formula to the letter.

 

[ComradeGnull]

I think they are trying to balance designed adventures and undesigned, sandboxy play. If you have XP guidelines for a day of adventuring and guide.

If you are designing an adventure: Once you have the daily guidelines and the easy, hard, average guidelines, you can just replace monsters with non-combat challenges of corresponding difficulty. You can also just treat things more 'holistically' using the daily/adventure-long guidelines.

If you are not designing an adventure: The guidelines give you structure to use some combination of random tables and DM judgement to build combat encounters. If you want a non-standard difficulty encounter, the XP budgets tell you what range to look in. If you want normal difficulty encounters, ditto. The same can apply to random or semi-random social or exploration encounters, and the daily XP suggestion can be used to round out sessions that don't correspond to a written-out and fully planned and plotted adventure.

 

[Sunseeker]

This is why I run XP-less games. It's simply too contrived to try and reason why you get 10xp from a Kobold and 100xp from disarming a trap. If you're gonna handwave and say "cause I said so", you might as well just hand out levels when you "said so".

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

"XP budget for the day" brings to mind visions of players tracking monsters, then declaring "Well, we might as well rest, because we've earned all of our XP for today."

 

[Herremann the Wise]

There is a philosophy I would like to see in the game when it comes to XP for those who enjoy using it:

* A Section of an Adventure ("The Goal")is worth a certain amount of XP, let's say 1,000XP.
* This entails going into the dungeon and rescuing/stealing the McGuffin.
* As long as you succeed in the goal, you get the XP. You could have fought every monster there was, or evaded all of them; regardless the XP is the same.
* You offer bonus XPs for things deemed to be worthy of merit. For example 100XP for discovering the secret plot, 100XP for negotiating a peace deal, 100XP for finding the secret door and disarming the nasty trap, 100XP for defeating the BBG, and so on.

I think if you do this, you don't overly reward the cleaning out the dungeon and instead focus on the scenario goal and thus story of the dungeon which I think more important than how many creatures you had to pound through to achieve the goal. I would prefer players interacting more with the entire scenario (and all three pillars), rather than over-focusing and having only the combat goggles on.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[GX.Sigma]

If 5E is supposed to be equally balanced on three pillars, can we get away from th majority of XP being earned from killing stuff? I'd much rather see the XP budget to be split for quest/accpomplishments, traps, puzzles and other activities, with combat XP taking up at most a third of the XP pie.

They've already said they're going to have options for XP: treasure XP, roleplaying XP, no XP, etc.

Of course, XP budgeting is only a set of guidelines for DMs who care about balanced combat encounters. If you don't, you can feel free to ignore it.

From Mearls's AMA:

The XP system is the kind of thing where I want to do a few different systems and have the DM pick one (XP for treasure, XP for killing, XP for meeting story goals, etc) to establish the tone for his or her campaign.

One of the things I really want to do with Next is build in different group and DM styles, and make it clear that those are just ways to play the game. Like, if you're group likes to make optimized characters the DM runs the game in Nightmare mode and that's fun, or the group that hates combat uses story-based XP and never fights anything.