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

[Charlaquin]

Well, yeah - obviously it works. By "works for us" I mean it has proven to be preferable - for us - to other approaches, including XP-based.

Cool!

I was the first 5E GM for our group, and initially went with XP-based, but found it to be too much work to decide how much XP every significant thing was worth. I gave up on that, tried story-based, and that's much more my speed.

Four of us have DMed since then, and we've all used story-based. There's never been so much as a whisper of a mention of going back to XP-based, or to any other method. It's less work and it emphasizes major goals.

Interesting. In what way do you find it emphasizes major goals? I can see how story-based advancement would be less work, in my evaluation that’s its primary advantage. But I don’t see how it would serve to emphasize major goals, at least not more so than XP does. Would you be willing to elaborate on what experiences have led you to this conclusion?

There's no lack of RPing going in our group, so rewarding that kind of thing with fiddly XP is just unnecessary and an unwanted burden on the DM.

In my experience, awarding XP for “RPing” generally leads to poor results.

 

[ART!]

Interesting. In what way do you find it emphasizes major goals? I can see how story-based advancement would be less work, in my evaluation that’s its primary advantage. But I don’t see how it would serve to emphasize major goals, at least not more so than XP does. Would you be willing to elaborate on what experiences have led you to this conclusion?

In a nutshell, when they do something that makes me think "Whew! They've really earned that next level!" (achieve a major goal, solve a big mystery, overcome an obstacle that leads to the next big thing, make it through a deadly or otherwise very dangerous encounter, etc.), that's usually when I say, at the end of the session, "level up for next week, guys!", and all the players go "woohoo!" or the like.

Maybe that's super-obvious, or maybe that doesn't answer your question. It's a reward for doing the really fiddicult thing, and a reward that they know is coming if they can actually get that really difficult thing done.

 

[Charlaquin]

In a nutshell, when they do something that makes me think "Whew! They've really earned that next level!" (achieve a major goal, solve a big mystery, overcome an obstacle that leads to the next big thing, make it through a deadly or otherwise very dangerous encounter, etc.), that's usually when I say, at the end of the session, "level up for next week, guys!", and all the players go "woohoo!" or the like.

Maybe that's super-obvious, or maybe that doesn't answer your question. It's a reward for doing the really fiddicult thing, and a reward that they know is coming if they can actually get that really difficult thing done.

What I don’t see is how that emphasizes said accomplishment more than awarding XP for it would do.

 

[Stoutstien]

In a nutshell, when they do something that makes me think "Whew! They've really earned that next level!" (achieve a major goal, solve a big mystery, overcome an obstacle that leads to the next big thing, make it through a deadly or otherwise very dangerous encounter, etc.), that's usually when I say, at the end of the session, "level up for next week, guys!", and all the players go "woohoo!" or the like.

Maybe that's super-obvious, or maybe that doesn't answer your question. It's a reward for doing the really fiddicult thing, and a reward that they know is coming if they can actually get that really difficult thing done.

is the difficulty of said goal determined by the DM or Players perspective?

 

[ART!]

What I don’t see is how that emphasizes said accomplishment more than awarding XP for it would do.

With XP advancement, you could just as likely hit that next level's benchmark after an easy combat. A milestone or story-based advancement is based on the dramatic high points.

is the difficulty of said goal determined by the DM or Players perspective?

By the DM, but we're a pretty close-knit group, so the DMs have a pretty good feel for where the players are in terms of their characters' personal journeys and their investment in the story.

 

[Oofta]

It's always interesting to see how other people handle this kind of stuff. For example, I don't view leveling as a reward at all. It's simply a reflection of growth of the PCs as they train and gain experience along with my wanting to change the threat level the PCs are facing. Maybe they've been on a losing streak. Maybe the bad guys are winning. That happens sometimes either because of bad luck, bad planning or simply logical progression of events. But it may make sense for the story for them to grow because of the adversity. Kind of a "that which does not kill me makes me stronger" thing or "we got our butts handed to us last time, we need to get better before we try that again."

PCs are rewarded by gaining alliances, gold, fame and so on.

 

[ART!]

It's always interesting to see how other people handle this kind of stuff. For example, I don't view leveling as a reward at all. It's simply a reflection of growth of the PCs as they train and gain experience along with my wanting to change the threat level the PCs are facing. Maybe they've been on a losing streak. Maybe the bad guys are winning. That happens sometimes either because of bad luck, bad planning or simply logical progression of events. But it may make sense for the story for them to grow because of the adversity. Kind of a "that which does not kill me makes me stronger" thing or "we got our butts handed to us last time, we need to get better before we try that again."

PCs are rewarded by gaining alliances, gold, fame and so on.

It's a good point. On a couple of occasions, I have booted the PCs up to the next level after a major failure, if I got the sense that the characters were really affected by it.

It might be cool to give them a level bump in the middle of a major, major encounter some time. It would kind of be like a major league, heroic second wind or something.

 

[Charlaquin]

With XP advancement, you could just as likely hit that next level's benchmark after an easy combat. A milestone or story-based advancement is based on the dramatic high points.

Only if the DM awards XP for easy combats.

I’m all for milestone XP (giving XP for those dramatic points). I just don’t see any benefit to players for cutting XP out of the equation and leveling them up at said points. The only benefit I see to story-based advancement over milestone XP is that it’s easier for the DM. And for plenty of groups that’s reason enough to go for it, but personally I prefer to do the extra work of awarding XP to give my players the benefit of a progress bar they can see filling up as they complete those dramatic high points.

 

[Stoutstien]

I wholeheartedly agree in rewarding XP for failure sometimes. is especially true if the failure occurred because they are pushing themselves beyond a perceived limit of some sort.
A little risk/reward is nice.

 

[Oofta]

I do think there's another aspect to this. As part of my session 0, I discuss how I want to handle leveling and the fact that I don't use XP. We talk about how quickly we want to level. We then have discusssions at various points - are we leveling too fast or too slow? I get feedback from my players on what they enjoy. We also change the pace at different levels, going slower in the low-middle levels that seem to be the sweet spot (even if I do enjoy higher level play as well).

But I would do that even back in the day of yore when I used XP. Did we want to use standard advancement? Count gold as XP? What about XP for noncombat encounters? Ultimately I realized the numbers didn't really mean anything. I was just kind of calculating how many hours I wanted to play before we leveled up based on what amount of XP they probably would have gotten if most of our time was spent on combat. So I got rid of the middle man because I'm lazy.