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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kalendraf" data-source="post: 297371" data-attributes="member: 3433">In all my 3e DM'ing situations prior to last night, I'd had a very easy time using the chart on pg 166 of the DMG for awarding experience.  Once I got the hang of it, it's been rather easy to compute the experience for the groups I DM'ed for as they progressed from 1st level on up.However, last night I was presented with a rather odd situation which seems to point out a fundamental flaw here.  Let me explain the situation.  The party began Siege of Durgam's Folly and was performing some caravan guard duty.  During the session, they were attacked by a Roc.  They managed to defeat the huge bird and only lost 1 wagon and 1 guard across the entire battle.  So there were 27 survivors which included the party (levels 8,8,8,8 and 7) and the guards (1 at level 4, 2 at level 2 and 19 at level 1). My 1st instinct was to take the party's level (8th) and index the Roc's CR9 entry finding 3600 exp and then divide by 27, resulting in 133 exp per character.But then one of the players pointed out that the average level of this party is much lower than 8th, so after some quick level totalling and dividing by 27, the avg party level was found to be about 2.44.  That meant that the Roc's experience was 7200 instead of the 3600 it had been.  So the exp per character was essentially doubled.After some more thinking about this, I decided to investigate some other situations, and I think I've found a bug in the table (or at least in the fact that pg 165 suggest using the average party level).  Consider the following:A) An 11th level character defeats a CR10 monster.  The award is 2200exp.B) A 1st level and 11th level character (avg level = 6) team up to defeat the same CR10 monster.  The award is 7200 divided between them, or 3600 exp each.This doesn't make sense.  Situation A is harder for the 11th level character since he must singlehandedly defeat the enemy.  Situation B is easier as there is now another character to help flank, and draw attacks as well as deal damage.  Yet by following the rules on pg 165 and 166, situation B earns more experience for the character.  This appears to be a bug in the exp calculation.My suggestion for fixing this is to instead do the following:1.  Find the EFFECTIVE party level by grouping lower level characters into groups on par with the highest level characters.2.  Calculate exp as usual.3.  Divide up exp between characters/groups.  Then divide exp in the groups based on levels.Here's an example.  The mixed group from last night was effectively an 8th level party broken up as follows:Character #1 - 8th levelCharacter #2 - 8th levelCharacter #3 - 8th levelCharacter #4 - 8th levelCharacter #5 - 7th levelGuard Group #1 (7 level 1 guards, 1 level 2) - 9 levels worthGuard Group #2 (7 level 1 guards, 1 level 2) - 9 levels worthGuard Group #3 (5 level 1 guards, 1 level 4) - 9 levels worthAvg = 8th levelThis resulted in 8 groups dividing the 3600 exp.  The result after dividing it out was as follows:Each Character - 450 expEach level 1 guard - 50 expEach level 2 guard - 100 exp4th level guard - 200 expThis makes sense given the fact that the party dealt a majority of the damage, and the guards did very little besides fire a few crossbow bolts (most of which missed).  The higher level guards were working to break the lower guards out of their scared state and each scored a few hits on the Roc as well.  I'm pretty comfortable with the result that I came up with.  Both the 133 exp and 266 exp values for the party were just too low of a reward for this type of situation, and likewise too rich for the low-level guards.Has anyone else encounter a mixed party level situation where they have had to do this?  That example with the 1st and 11th level character seems to indicate that the formula needs some DM-intervention in the calculation for wide level ranges.</blockquote>

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