NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6709425" data-attributes="member: 6787650">1.) I get what you mean about sandbox play. My inclinations are similar. Nevertheless, in the spirit of "planning is indispensable but planning is useless" I would suggest, as an exercise, that you design some encounters of your choice (as hard/medium/etc. as you like, though I've disparaged those labels on this thread) and then add up the XP totals, and design some completely by-the-book encounters to fill up the rest of the daily XP budget, if any. If nothing else it is an aid to creativity, but more importantly I've found that the daily XP budgets are "better" in a sense than the individual encounter budgets--I get more out of designing a days' worth of encounters to the budget than I do from designing an individual encounter.You can then break up that daily budget into multiple areas and let the players tackle as many or as few of them as they want, but I believe the exercise of calculating the budget will be useful to you.2.) It doesn't really imply a ridiculous rate of advancement. Not only is it a ceiling on activity, not a floor, so there is no guarantee that players will even reach their daily XP budget in a gameworld day (maybe emergencies only happen once a month and so 33 "adventuring days" really takes three years), but remember that the players usually don't earn the whole budget even if you use up the whole budget, because only raw XP gets awarded but the budget goes against adjusted XP (which I wish they'd just called "difficulty" to avoid confusion with XP). A mind flayer, two intellect devourers, and eight goblins may cost 12,600 difficulty in your daily difficulty budget, but they're only worth 4200 XP to the lucky adventurers who defeat them. To get from daily budget tables to actual advancement rates, you should divide difficulty by a factor of 2 or 2.5. Call it 80 maxed-out adventuring days to hit 20th level. That could a solid four or five years of real time.Of course, you regularly exceed the difficulty ratings by an order or magnitude, as I do at my table, you wind up with faster advancement and appropriately-epic stories to go with it. I.e. I'm not promising that it will take four or five real-time years to get there. My table has only been playing for most of a year and we've already got a fourteenth-level PC.</blockquote>

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