D&D 5E EXP options That we use.

[Nebulous]

You're either uncommonly lucky, or uncommonly forgiving.

Sure, until someone loses a level somehow (a mechanic that absolutely should be in 5e, count me disappointed that it's not), or gains a level from something like a Deck of Many Things or divine favour or a wish or whatever. And this is assuming you-as-DM allow replacement characters (after deaths, retirements, etc.) to come into the party at the same level as the rest of the group; not everyone is cool with this.

I have never had a problem with it either, my players play to have fun and everyone contributes to the story equally, it's not about them doing something only to gain an XP, or somehow *not* doing something. It is 100% a non-issue for us. And if someone is less effective in one adventure they're usually more productive in the next for whatever random factors come up during the session.

And myself and my players are absolutely fine with someone dying and coming in with a new character at the same level. They just don't care. It's a game. If someone actually lost a level in older editions they found it utterly demoralizing. Scary, yes, permanent level-draining was awful, but also unduly harsh in our opinion.

 

[Mouseferatu]

[MENTION=31465]Nebulous[/MENTION] just wrote everything I would have, so... This.

 

[Bayonet]

I dislike giving out exp for monsters. My players tend to only do what earns the most exp. Every fight is my default "kill everything for the exp's" Even when I award exp for defeating the encounter or monster without fighting it.. they just fight it anyway out of habit.

A friend of mine doesn't give EXP at all. He just tells the players when to level up(they hate using this method).
I thought about awarding EXP for Gold and Treasure instead but 5E doesn't use a set treasure by level and I think I like that.

I saw a post once for pathfinder where someone had worked out a simple easy to use system based on encounters per level for fast medium and slow exp tables. It was something like every fight gave 1-3 exp and you needed like 20 to level (or something like that). That might work with 5E but I have not started to work on it yet.

So I thought I would jump on here and see what some of you have come up with for awarding exp that isn't in the book.

This is the way my DM does it, and I honestly prefer it over any method. I'd much rather make it to a 'milestone' and be told to level up than be awarded bits and pieces of xp over ever goblin I stomp and barmaids arse I pinch. Too much mucking around with the char sheet, not enough adventuring.

I've also noticed that it keeps our group from falling into metagaming and xp chasing; we're concerned solely with playing our characters and adventuring around, because we know that levels will come when they come.

 

[Fralex]

I think the more story-focused groups tend to care less about XP gain.

 

[Blue]

Nice way of doing it - DM lead rewards can feel a bit like social engineering but player buy in will mirigate that.
I would also point out you need to consider partial successes and even failures in your reward scheme.

Great points. I'd be flexible with it so as not to appear to be railroading on only accepting certain solutions. If the party comes up with something like convincing the hobgoblins that the ancestral spear was rightly given to the mayor and they need to stay and defenders of the town for their honor, I'd cheer them and give buckets of XP even if that wasn't a milestone I had expected.

It also works well when you have things like several options but a time/resource limit so you can't pursue all of them. "Do we try to go after the caravan that is several days late, or do we stake out the town during the full moon and look for the shapeshifter that has been spotted?"

Of course, I'm rather flexible with XP. Last D&D campaign I ran I had players give each other poker chips for great RP moments that translated to bonus XP, and cut encounter XP in half because I gave out a lot of story awards.

The flip side is right now I'm running a 13th Age campaign, and the rules for that are: no XP, level when it makes sense, but get an incremental advance (something that your next level would give you) frequently (ever session or two). So there are lots of valid options.

 

[Blue]

As I point out every time this comes up, the problem with arbitrary party-wide level-ups is that it unduly rewards the passengers: those characters (and-or players) who tend to sit back and let others take the risks. Having played with such, let me assure you the last thing I want is to see them get the same rewards that the risk-takers receive.

I think I differ stylistically from you. I see encounters as just a part of the whole adventure, and different characters having different strengths so that skewing rewards towards only the characters who are most helpful in combat seems counterproductive. Or at least it will make everyone want to focus on combat, perhaps to the detriment of other parts of the game.

Some characters get vital information from an NPC, another sneaks past some guards and spikes their drinks so they fall asleep. The party gets in, recovers some prisoners, and ends up fighting a different set of guards on the way out. Rewarding characters based on how they did in that fight seems to ignore all the other contributions they could have made.

 

[Blue]

What reason do they give for hating it? No trust in you as the DM? I do it this way, and my players don't mind. I actually find it less arbitrary than just adding up XP for dead monsters, as the levels come when it makes the most sense.

I can debate either side of this. Getting to raise the total XP on your character sheet and seeing the level getting closer can be a reward/anticipation for the player.

On the other hand, it's relatively easy to build up trust just by having them level up at a reasonable rate. 13th Age has this as their official system (no XP), though they cover the first by having Incremental Advances (small bits of next level goodness) that the GM can give out regularly.

 

[MostlyDm]

It depends a lot on the setting/system/style, as others have said.

I'm late to the 5e party, as I'd basically given up on D&D in favor of my home brew systems a few years ago. But I'm really liking what I've seen so far, and in the two games of 5e I am running I'm largely going by the book. I have been giving a bit extra XP for large numbers of foes (seems odd that they have a formula for XP value difficulty but it does not in any way change real XP gains), and for RP challenges since it's not unusual for my games to go multiple sessions without a significant fight. But even then, they give broad guidelines for such in the DMG, so... as I said. Basically by the book.

On the other hand... in my long running home brew game (3e Epic 5 variant chassis with some 1e flavor, some 5e mechanics like advantage, and a metric crap ton of outright home brewed mechanics) I use a wildly different XP award system.

Early on XP rewards became largely disconnected from CRs or other official XP materials, since so many threats were wholly custom anyway. So XP rewards were basically just decided by me and the players based on how the game went and what was accomplished/learned. I realized I never gave out less than 100 XP per session, so we dropped the extra 0s. So, gaining a benefit after level 5 takes 50 XP (instead of the 5,000 we were using initially, which is the XP needed to gain level 6... which doesn't exist in an E5 variant).

Depending on the session characters earn anywhere from 1 to as much as I think 20 in the very extreme cases (happened once). It's close to a milestone game, but since there's no major long term rails plot this works better for us. They can still advance while going off on random player driven romps and avoiding whatever broad "milestones" I might have in mind

But there's no way I'd use this system for every game. It's way too fluid, and subject to DM fiat and player cooperation. It works for this group because it's basically just me and two guys who I've been gaming with for decades. All three of us have extensive GMing experience, and we decided to play a very cooperative, story driven game where they have significant out of character influence (including brief stints GMing secondary PC groups in less fleshed out parts of the world).

They're each running something like 6 or 7 characters, including characters working in direct opposition to the main party. Some of the less competent characters are the ones that often earn 1 (or even 0) XP per session... Though we all agreed their villain characters should earn bonus XP to ensure they stayed threatening

Man, that got a lot longer and more rambling than I expected. I guess the short version is just that it depends on the game. Don't be afraid to try something new and see how it works!

 

[Lanefan]

I have never had a problem with it either, my players play to have fun and everyone contributes to the story equally, it's not about them doing something only to gain an XP, or somehow *not* doing something. It is 100% a non-issue for us. And if someone is less effective in one adventure they're usually more productive in the next for whatever random factors come up during the session.

I guess our games are somewhat grittier or more deadly than yours; and some find their fun in surviving where others die - which is fine except when said survival comes specifically at the expense of someone else dying, and over the long run it often ends up being the same players' characters surviving where in theory random chance should spread the dying around much more evenly.

And myself and my players are absolutely fine with someone dying and coming in with a new character at the same level. They just don't care. It's a game. If someone actually lost a level in older editions they found it utterly demoralizing. Scary, yes, permanent level-draining was awful, but also unduly harsh in our opinion.

Again, comes down to grit-and-deadly level. I see level loss as being similar to death in the game: it's a setback, but there's magic out there to (usually) fix it provided the DM makes such magic available in the game world.

I think I differ stylistically from you. I see encounters as just a part of the whole adventure, and different characters having different strengths so that skewing rewards towards only the characters who are most helpful in combat seems counterproductive. Or at least it will make everyone want to focus on combat, perhaps to the detriment of other parts of the game.

Some characters get vital information from an NPC, another sneaks past some guards and spikes their drinks so they fall asleep. The party gets in, recovers some prisoners, and ends up fighting a different set of guards on the way out. Rewarding characters based on how they did in that fight seems to ignore all the other contributions they could have made.

Ah, but the one who did the drink-spiking should get some xp for that, and the info-gatherers should get some xp for that, etc. This is fine.

What's not fine is this, using your notes as an off-the-cuff mini-dungeon and showing what each character did (assume for these purposes that Fighters A and E have essentially the same stats, items, abilities, etc.):

Fighter A: stood guard while info was gathered, rescued prisoners, took part in battle vs. guards and died there
Cleric B: gathered info from NPC, rescued prisoners, took part in battle vs. guards and died there
Thief C: spiked guards' drinks, rescued prisoners, took part in battle vs. guards
MagicUser D: gathered info from NPC, rescued prisoners, took part in battle vs. guards even including melee combat
Fighter E: did nothing while info was gathered, shot a few arrows into battle vs. guards but carefully avoided any risk, helped with prisoners only after all guards were known to be defeated

In an arbitrary level-up system C, D and E would all get the same reward for this adventure even though the contributions by C and D far exceeded those of E; never mind that had E jumped into the guard battle it's quite likely A and B would have survived. In a per-encounter xp system C and D would get the most, A and B would be next, and E would not get much at all; and to me this is much more fair as xp should reflect both risk (within reason) and result.

The discrepancy is more obvious in a small party like this. Our parties tend to be quite large meaning E-like behaviour is easier to slip in, but it doesn't go unnoticed.

Lan-"I've run with too many E's, and been A too many times"-efan

 

[Nebulous]

In an arbitrary level-up system C, D and E would all get the same reward for this adventure even though the contributions by C and D far exceeded those of E; never mind that had E jumped into the guard battle it's quite likely A and B would have survived. In a per-encounter xp system C and D would get the most, A and B would be next, and E would not get much at all; and to me this is much more fair as xp should reflect both risk (within reason) and result.

Lan-"I've run with too many E's, and been A too many times"-efan

I guess in our games these things happen too, yes, but during the course of a level, the roles A,B,C,D will switch between characters, so in the end, over multiple sessions, it comes out even. A helps B live one time, but B does something to help A live the next, or maybe C does something unexpected to help A and B. Having D sit in the background while A, B and C do all the work just doesn't happen consistently, usually not at all. They all contribute in their own ways to survive, and if they didn't, they would die. My players (and myself) find satisfaction in the strategy and story, so rewarding them incremental XP is not as meaningful for reward as what happens during the session, so we long ago opted to drop that system. And no one's ever missed it. But I absolutely see why people DO like that system and I fully encourage people to play to the game they like and what they have fun doing, and if that means finding satisfaction in giving/gaining reward for per session contributions, I wholly endorse it.