Axiie
First Post
This on so many levels; the one thing I've noticed in this XP budget system is it plays way too much like a war game. Now don't get me wrong, war games are great when it comes to building armies, or even war bands. Both players come in with a set resource and spend said resource up to its fullest without going over... ever. The rules in a war game are set in stone, never change rules that facilitate fairness of play and balance between two armies. D&D encounter design is not a war game.
I think this is a case where choosing your wording is important, and WotC fell down hard in this respect. It shouldn’t be called XP Budgeting, and this implies exactly what it says. That the Dm has a budget he has to stick too. Instead I refer to it as XP Encounter Rewards. I design my encounter, then check to see where the reward is and maybe tweak it, exactly as Libramarian suggests. This means that for the given situation, the encounter difficulty is designed, and should the PC’s overcome this, they are rewarded proportionate to the challenge they faced.
An example; I had designed a cave system that the PC’s needed to get through in order to reach a valley. I had played this cave system up as a dangerous place, and the destination they were heading that took them through this route was an optional destination; they could have completed their current quest without going there, but they choose to do so because of an NPC with that may have been able to give them knowledge which would have drastically assisted them in overcoming the current threat. That’s no to say they couldn’t have beaten said threat without the knowledge; so again, the option to trek on was entirely plausible. Would it have made sense to scale the encounters down to that of a level 2 party? I don’t believe so. It was a classic crawl, where they chose the direction they went when they reached a junction, and with several caverns in the system, encounters where a distinct possibility. I had given them a route of which I knew they could fight through, should they be required too, but I also added encounters that where vastly inappropriate to their current level. As you’d expect, they hit one of these higher level encounters, and actually managed to surprise me by sticking around and defeating it. They opted not to run, defeated a creature of a far higher level than them, and they got the XP Encounter Reward for that creature, which was a huge burst of XP for their level.
Had I approached these encounters with the XP Budget mind frame, then it would have been a case ensuring that the encounters are all within budget for the characters of that level. I feel Libramarian’s way of looking at the chart is spot on, as opposed to ‘choose a difficulty for the encounter, consult the chart, and spend the XP budget’. It’s a very subtle change in design philosophy, but it drastically changes the outcome and, for my PC’s and I at least, offers a much more rewarding experience when they do manage to defeat a challenge they knew was stacked against them, as opposed to a budgeted encounter. It just feels a more natural, more organic way of using the XP or whatever reward rules in any given system, as opposed to a synthetic, almost clinical way that’s more befitting a war game.
