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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MostlyDm" data-source="post: 6498482" data-attributes="member: 6788973">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 mindBut 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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />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!</blockquote>

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