D&D 5E Do you use XPs or Milestones?

[Mr. Patient]

I'm playing in this and our DM just had us start at 5th level with the city falling into Hell, skipping all the content prior to that. We've been using standard XP.

How fast is the advancement by design in Avernus? Because I know the average adventure in my campaigns will easily take a character from 1st to 3rd level in one session with standard XP.

DiA has you level essentially after the first encounter, and then again after completing about a 30-room dungeon. This was 3 sessions for my group. I think in another 3 they will have hit the 5th level milestone. So you might actually be faster, but then again you might have less screwing around at the table than I do, or play longer sessions.

 

[iserith]

DiA has you level essentially after the first encounter, and then again after completing about a 30-room dungeon. This was 3 sessions for my group. I think in another 3 they will have hit the 5th level milestone. So you might actually be faster, but then again you might have less screwing around at the table than I do, or play longer sessions.

Yeah, our sessions are 4 hours long and we get after it.

 

[Mr. Patient]

Yeah, our sessions are 4 hours long and we get after it.

We play four hours as well, but lose about 1/3 of that every session to bickering. (We've been together for 23 years, and we're like a married couple of eight people).

 

[THEMNGMNT]

I'm playing in this and our DM just had us start at 5th level with the city falling into Hell, skipping all the content prior to that. We've been using standard XP.

How fast is the advancement by design in Avernus? Because I know the average adventure in my campaigns will easily take a character from 1st to 3rd level in one session with standard XP.

If I ever play this, I'll likely start at that same point. Just cut to the good stuff. Or rather, the bad stuff.

The chapter of Elturel in Hell looks like it could be played in 2 or 3 sessions (for most groups) and characters jump from 5th to 7th level. Like I said--fast!

 

[CleverNickName]

I've done all three options at some point. In my current campaign, however, I'm back to using XP.

 

[Charlaquin]

And probably a good portion of respondents for "milestones" are actually using story-based advancement which is an "alternate system." At least based on the posts I'm reading.

Yeah, the lack of consistency around how those words are used is surely throwing off the results. For instance, I always use XP over story-based or session-based advancement. But I also award milestone XP (literally XP for certain in-game accomplishments, such as major story beats) in most of my campaigns. I accordingly voted for both XP and Milestones, so anyone who is interpreting votes for Milestones as votes for some form of advancement that doesn’t involve XP is not getting a wholely accurate picture.

I blame Horde of the Dragon Queen for this linguistic confusion, as it was the first published adventure for 5e and it conflated story-based advancement with milestone XP.