Experience Q's

[TheOmega720]

1) First off is a basic one, but i could not find this anywhere in the PHB and after consulting my friend he agreed he wasn't sure. When you level up do you go back to having 0exp or do you continue on adding to the exp like a total.

2) Second as a house rule we total the exp and add it at the end of the entire dungeon. Would it be wrong to imbalance the exp. Say allowing one player to have 2000exp and the other 3 each only receive 1000exp each?

Thanks a bunch. Sorry if these questions are obvious. I am new to the wonderful world of D&D and appreciate your help.

 

[glass]

1) First off is a basic one, but i could not find this anywhere in the PHB and after consulting my friend he agreed he wasn't sure. When you level up do you go back to having 0exp or do you continue on adding to the exp like a total.

2) Second as a house rule we total the exp and add it at the end of the entire dungeon. Would it be wrong to imbalance the exp. Say allowing one player to have 2000exp and the other 3 each only receive 1000exp each?

1) Keep adding to the total. EDIT: If you reset to 0 each time, it would be one of the steps in Gaining Levels: Step By Step on pages 27-28 of the PHB, which it isn't.

2) Probably. Why would you want to give one PC twice as much XP as the others anyway?


glass.

 

[hafrogman]

1) XP is a running total. You never lose it, and it never resets to zero. Its pretty early in the PHB, I think in the text near the level chart. I don't have my books handy to give you an exact page number.

2) Wrong in what way? If you keep dividing it unequally in the same way, it would eventually lead to one character being of higher level than the others. Which can lead to some players feeling marginalized, and difficulty designing encounters. The basic assumption for the game is that each character in a party is the same level, and each gains the same amount of XP. Small discrepancies aren't important, a level here or there. . . but in my games that's usually because a player missed a session, rather than being awarded less xp for the same challenge than another player.

 

[TheOmega720]

reason being we switch off DM so we are all basically the same level but not of same exp because some dungeons render more exp than others.

so to kind of balance it out because one character is now a level behind i figured we could just give him a larger share. Also the event has occurred where a player may need an amount of exp as small as 50 to reach the next level and in that case the group would want him another level up to give him an extra boost in battle.

both of these have been discussed by the group and no real answer has been reached
so i decided to bring it to EN World

 

[TheOmega720]

Oh, and thanks for the answer to the first one.
I appreciate it!

 

[RigaMortus2]

reason being we switch off DM so we are all basically the same level but not of same exp because some dungeons render more exp than others.

so to kind of balance it out because one character is now a level behind i figured we could just give him a larger share. Also the event has occurred where a player may need an amount of exp as small as 50 to reach the next level and in that case the group would want him another level up to give him an extra boost in battle.

both of these have been discussed by the group and no real answer has been reached
so i decided to bring it to EN World

In light of the fact that you are doing this to correct the problem of players falling behind and keeping everyone on as even a level as possible with one another, so long as everyone agrees, I don't see a problem with doing this.

 

[TheOmega720]

good point.
i suppose splitting up exp is fine then
i mean, i was for it. I don't see any reason not to.

not to change the subject but another thing i was looking at in wizards
1) spellbooks can only hold so many spells right?
where does it say the limit and how much more space does the feat give called expand spellbook or increase spellbook. its a suggested for one of the builds.

2) rituals: i have no idea how these work.
do you buy them? can you keep them?
are they objects? we looked at them for awhile and then just decided to go on without them. then my friend dies...
if someone dies you need the bring back dead ritual, right?
can you have that at any level?

 

[Fede]

Look at page 158 of the player's handbook, under "capacity". It says 128 pages per spellbook. The feat doesn't increase the spellbook's capacity, but they allow the wizard to learn an additional daily spell per level

 

[mattdm]

reason being we switch off DM so we are all basically the same level but not of same exp because some dungeons render more exp than others.

so to kind of balance it out because one character is now a level behind i figured we could just give him a larger share. Also the event has occurred where a player may need an amount of exp as small as 50 to reach the next level and in that case the group would want him another level up to give him an extra boost in battle.

So, in our crrent game, we're simply using one XP total for the entire party, even if someone misses a session. It's working out pretty well, and sounds like it's effectively what you're doing except with decreased paperwork rather than extra paperwork.

 

[Paul Strack]

So, in our crrent game, we're simply using one XP total for the entire party, even if someone misses a session. It's working out pretty well, and sounds like it's effectively what you're doing except with decreased paperwork rather than extra paperwork.

That's pretty much what I am doing, except that I don't bother handing out XP at all. After X number of adventures, everyone in the party goes up a level, whether the player was able to attend or not. I only use XP values for encounter balancing.