D&D General An alternative to XP

[Charlaquin]

The quote was that out-of-combat XP was loosy-goosy. What context did you put that into, because no other context other than how 5e presents it was present.

The quote was that the CR system is loosey-goosey, which it is. There’s numbers, but if you crunch them, all they result in is a very rough idea of how likely an encounter is to kill a party of 4.5 adventures of a given level. Its loosey-gooseyness is a well known and much-maligned fact, and most experienced DMs I’ve heard from either don’t use it, or treat it as an extremely rough way to eyeball encounter difficulty. If you’re awarding progress (be it XP or Yaarel’s fractions of encounters) for how difficult the encounter felt after-the-fact, rewards for combat encounters (again, be they XP or Yaarel’s fractions of encounters) are really no more or less precise, let alone “real” than rewards for non-combat encounters.

 

[Ovinomancer]

My point was that one can define a "level" to be as large or as small a package as one wants (even if the game itself does not refer to it as such). A package deal of "one thing that improves at the smallest resolution the game offers" can be a "level" by this point of view. It's a frame of reference. I suppose I am not expressing this point clearly, but it's not all that important in the long run.

That renders the terms useless, then. You've turned it into a generic term that holds no value in discussion. And because of this widening of the term, people not aware of the dilution will have misunderstandings when discussing it. I don't see much value to doing this.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The quote was that the CR system is loosey-goosey, which it is. There’s numbers, but if you crunch them, all they result in is a very rough idea of how likely an encounter is to kill a party of 4.5 adventures of a given level. Its loosey-gooseyness is a well known and much-maligned fact, and most experienced DMs I’ve heard from either don’t use it, or treat it as an extremely rough way to eyeball encounter difficulty. If you’re awarding progress (be it XP or Yaarel’s fractions of encounters) for how difficult the encounter felt after-the-fact, rewards for combat encounters (again, be they XP or Yaarel’s fractions of encounters) are really no more or less precise, let alone “real” than rewards for non-combat encounters.

??? Here's the quote, bold for emphasis:

I find counting encounters more helpful for the tone of my campaign and its adaptability to players preferences. What counts as an encounter is normally obvious. And neutral, as it might be a noncombat encounter or a combat encounter. Whether the challenge turned out to be easy or hard is also fairly obvious. Indeed the players themselves know how difficult it was. Difficulty is a neutral metric, whether noncombat or combat.

Even for a combat encounter, counting encounters is more helpful than xp. For example, hostiles might flee, thus ending the encounter. The encounter evaluates according to how much effort it took to get them to run. Then a decision to chase after them counts as a separate encounter. Similarly, if the party captures the hostiles alive, there might be several encounters before handing the hostiles over to authorities.

Counting encounters is more open to diverse scenarios and players choices.

My difficulty with xp is it incentivizes lethal combat.

DMs can and do give xp for noncombat challenges. However the xp for combat is carefully micromanaged according to killing hostiles. In contrast, xp for noncombat feels more arbitrary and loosey-goosey to quantify. Combat is more reliable. Noncombat feels less "real" in relation to combat xp. All of this situation incentivizes combat, in the eyes of the players, and in the eyes of the DM. For example, I have never seen a DM award more xp for noncombat than for combat. Even if the noncombat challenge is far more difficult than the combat challenge, the DM routinely undervalues noncombat, because combat so tightly defines xp, and noncombat is so different.

 

[Rabulias]

But the idea that 2 weeks of training (in game) equates to two weeks passing IRL so that player can't play that character is nonsense IMO. That is the point that was being made and I asked for a citation on.

Again, not really arguing in favor of the suggestion, but I do not read the DMG suggestion as saying this is what happens. Groups of players in the same campaign that don't always play together can get out of sync with each other. The full example given in the DMG (the entirety of which I did not quote) illustrates this somewhat, as some players choose to not play a session. By the time they get to play, time has passed and other players have looted a sizable treasure in the dungeon. If players are not willing to wait for their friends that are off training, they may miss out. Still a stupid result, IMO, but not as bad as you read it.

 

[Scruffy nerf herder]

They'd be more motivated, but in the wrong way: they'd start playing specifically to level up rather than just play and have level-up occur as an occasional side effect.

Also, any system like this puts far too much weight on DM fiat, and forces a DM to either a) level everyone up at the same time whether each character deserves it or not or b) be wide open to charges of favouritism if she levels up some characters but not others.

We're all family and friends (my brother, my sister in law, her sister and her sister's husband), so this issue of DM fiat you're bringing up is fair but kind of a non-issue here. We're not going to get tripped up or mad at each other over something trivial, leveling up is just an occasional and clear positive.

Lol the hypothetical "psychology-ing" that people do is pretty interesting sometimes. I see you saying that this would motivate the players in the wrong way but have directly experienced that my players are motivated in a very good way to be driven to engage with the world and improve themselves.

 

[Charlaquin]

??? Here's the quote, bold for emphasis:

Mhmm, and that was contrasted against their “counting encounters” system, the suggested benefit of the latter being that combat XP is equally loosey-goosey with non-combat XP. My argument was that you can be just as loosey-goosey with combat XP if you want to, so the benefit is not with counting encounters over XP, it’s with judging encounter difficulty after-the-fact and awarding progress (be it a fraction of an encounter or an amount of XP) based on that, as opposed to planning combat encounters around an award budget and then giving that budgeted award regardless of how difficult the encounter actually ended up being. Whether the award is XP or counting encounters doesn’t actually make a difference, except that the former is more granular.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Mhmm, and that was contrasted against their “counting encounters” system, the suggested benefit of the latter being that combat XP is equally loosey-goosey with non-combat XP. My argument was that you can be just as loosey-goosey with combat XP if you want to, so the benefit is not with counting encounters over XP, it’s with judging encounter difficulty after-the-fact and awarding progress (be it a fraction of an encounter or an amount of XP) based on that, as opposed to planning combat encounters around an award budget and then giving that budgeted award regardless of how difficult the encounter actually ended up being. Whether the award is XP or counting encounters doesn’t actually make a difference, except that the former is more granular.

Okay, you just said that "loosy-goosy" was in relation to the encounter system. I showed the quote showing it wasn't. You're spinning to make a case that what you want to talk about it how it applies to something that wasn't in the quote, and wasn't the discussion I was following from that very quote. If you want to talk about something else, let's do that, but let's not pretend that this was the topic under discussion the whole time. I mean, your first response to me about this didn't go down this tangent, it was specifically constrained to how the DMG talks about non-combat XP awards. I'm tired of chasing the pea.

 

[Charlaquin]

Okay, you just said that "loosy-goosy" was in relation to the encounter system. I showed the quote showing it wasn't. You're spinning to make a case that what you want to talk about it how it applies to something that wasn't in the quote, and wasn't the discussion I was following from that very quote. If you want to talk about something else, let's do that, but let's not pretend that this was the topic under discussion the whole time. I mean, your first response to me about this didn't go down this tangent, it was specifically constrained to how the DMG talks about non-combat XP awards. I'm tired of chasing the pea.

Ok. It’s clear to me you either haven’t been following or haven’t understood the conversation I’ve been having with Yaarel.

 

[cavetroll]

Either system is fine. I liked the XP value levelling in 2e because it made levelling authentic, it wasn't just a DM handing out free levels, or random XP, each level was earned based on the written rules which gives in weight. At the end of the evening, after the big boss battle, that was a break and people would level up then, and it felt rewarding after a massive dangerous fight.

I think for a DM to do milestone levelling works fine if you want to skip the overhead of calculating XP, and make it more tied to the story, or play time in hours.

Where issues arise is in module design. If you have content for level 3 and the next chapters content is for level 5, what happens if the party skips half the content? Are they level 4 for the next chapter and more likely to die or do you give them a free level or do you force them to do an arbitrary side quest? Or is the expectation that the DM makes the fights easier and easier? Or do you ensure that the party can't skip too much content.

 

[Lanefan]

I agree it is a silly suggestion, and we never followed it, especially as we would often have to end play mid-dungeon, or even mid-combat!

Thanks! A moment ago I stared at that very page in the DMG and missed this passage. I knew I'd seen it somewhere.