D&D 5E Gaining Experience

[neobolts]

Part of the problem for me with arbitrary leveling and story awards is that those things presuppose a story or plot in the game, when it is my contention that story is what emerges from play, not what drives it. That's not to say you can only give XP for for killing things and taking their stuff. The things you reward XP for are, IMO, the things you are asking your players to engage in.

Yeah, the XP awards in Numenera felt pretty arbitrary at times. For the 5e game I'm hoping to cut down on that. When the players decide to take on something, they are getting clear objectives with assigned XP values, essentially a quest log. This campaign has a lot of lore and political intrigue from the outset, so the players are expecting a story to be in place for them to dive into. That said, the game will still progress organically. When they surprise me by deciding to take on some task unexpectedly, it will get added to the quest log as well.

 

[iserith]

Part of the problem for me with arbitrary leveling and story awards is that those things presuppose a story or plot in the game, when it is my contention that story is what emerges from play, not what drives it. That's not to say you can only give XP for for killing things and taking their stuff. The things you reward XP for are, IMO, the things you are asking your players to engage in. If you give XP for treasure, you are asking them to make acquiring the gold their #1 objective with everything else, including killing stuff, a secondary goal. if you give XP for finishing small quests around NPCs and other setting elements, you are asking them to interact with the world and focus on problem solving. If you give them XP for just showing up, then you are asking them to just show up.

In the context of an RPG (if not other places), "plot" and "story" aren't the same thing. So you can have a game with a plot and one without a plot and they both produce an emergent story as a result of play. As you say, XP incentivizes particular behaviors. In the case of "story awards," it's incentivizing players to stick to the plot. Story awards of this nature don't work in a sandbox game with no plots, of course.

 

[Reynard]

In the context of an RPG (if not other places), "plot" and "story" aren't the same thing. So you can have a game with a plot and one without a plot and they both produce an emergent story as a result of play. As you say, XP incentivizes particular behaviors. In the case of "story awards," it's incentivizing players to stick to the plot. Story awards of this nature don't work in a sandbox game with no plots, of course.

Agreed. Usually when folks say "story" I assume they mean "plot" as well. I should probably stop making that assumption.

 

[S'mon]

I like my 4e game's typical advancement rate of 1 level per 4 3-hour sessions, though it was faster in Heroic Tier (we're at 22nd level now). My Pathfinder game was levelling every 2 4-hour sessions which seemed a bit quick.

As far as the 5e XP table goes, it seems well suited to status-quo sandboxing, which IME gives much slower rates of XP gain than linar Adventure Path play. I played a 5e game recently where our 1st level PCs had 1 fight in 4 hours, the GM was only going to give us 50 XP for the session, but we bargained her up to 150.
When I tried using 4e RAW for sandboxing the PCs were taking ca 6 5-hr sessions to level, it felt too slow so I had to modify it. 3e works fine as-is for sandbox (but too quick for AP I think) and 5e looks similar.

 

[Hussar]

Agreed. Usually when folks say "story" I assume they mean "plot" as well. I should probably stop making that assumption.

And, really, "plot" is problematic too because people use it differently. I think you are using it to mean "pre-scripted", while I would use it to mean the literary meaning - what happened.

Keep on the Borderlands has a plot - the players are expected to explore (and probably kill everything they meet) the Caves of Chaos. It's the most likely event of that adventure. Certainly not the only one, but, I'd say the most likely. The Slave Lords modules had a pretty strong plot running through them, as do the Against the Giants modules.

Having a plot only means that there are signposts saying to the players, "Hey, adventure is this way."

 

[Nebulous]

I'd like experience earning to be much slower. I was recently shocked to learn in another thread how fast some people think it should be. I made this thread to talk about "gaining experience" as in going on an adventure just for it. I am talking about going through the wilderness for as long as you need to, taking random encounters. Or staying in a dungeon and taking random encounters with wandering monsters. It seems like this is totally unknown now, so it's an area where 5th Edition could need an article.

It's a big part of the adventure experience that has been a lot of fun for my players. The best way to envision it may be to think of an old video or computer game, such as Final Fantasy VII for Playstation I which was very popular, and the original Bard's Tale, for computer. Most of your time would be spent just gathering experience. You would walk around and come back when you needed to heal up or recharge your resources, then go back out again. Some monsters gave a huge amount of experience, like the metal slime and metal babble especially from one of the Dragon Warrior games for Nintendo, and you would jump to find it. You'd have to kill it quickly, which was difficult, because if it ran away you'd get no experience.

These kinds of "experience runs" are bread and butter of adventure. It seems like many have never experienced it, and level advancement today is delivered quickly by the set encounters only. Just the presence of wandering monsters, and encounter tables, seems rare. I think that's a bit unfortunate that it hasn't been suggested by anything in print. In 4th Edition, encounters could take a long time, but in 5th Edition, encounters should be fast enough so you can have 20 or more good fights in a single session. I know I would enjoy playing this way, and it would also be a nice change-up during an adventure path or other adventure that seems too railroadey for you.

In the kind of game I run, which is story based and I don't use XP at all, and I have not for a long, long time, if the players survive a particularly difficult encounter they are just glad to be alive. Their tactics, strategy and in-game roleplaying contributed to their survival. Here was my initial formula: 1 adventure = 2nd level. 2nd level = 2 sessions. 3rd level - 3 sessions and so on. But we played brief 2 hour games. And the higher level they get it slows down.

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

Something else to consider about "old school" style play...

I have been rereading the AD&D 1st Edition DMG and there is a particular emphasis on cleverly avoiding and evading unnecessary encounters, whether by stealth, running away, or what-have-you. That's why wilderness wandering monster tables tended to not care about party level at all - it was expected that the party would hide from a dragon flying over or a giant strolling by. The bulk of experience was expected to come from treasure acquired, not monsters defeated.

 

[Lanefan]

No edition of dnd bumps you three levels for a single mission. An entire module might bump you two but you'd typically have several missions.

4e - H1 Keep on the Shadowfell - intended that you go in at 1st level and come out at 3rd, with notes contained within the module as to when the characters should bump. Ditto H2 (4th-7th) and H3 (8th-10th I think - haven't read it).

H1 is a single self-contained adventure designed to be gone through in one run, maybe with a long rest or two along the way. Its time-crunch story design certainly does not allow for the party to go back to town in mid-adventure.

Lanefan

 

[Kikuras]

Whatever makes you and your players happy. The above does come off as kind of limiting, though, implying that player agency is not a thing you really care for. What do you do when they find some background element more interesting than your predetermined plot? Do you gently nudge them back on track or do you have them just come up empty for hours until they figure it out? Punishing agency seems like the fastest possible route to bored players.

I get what you're saying, and I can tell you that my subtle point was overshadowed by my blunt words.

Yes, I do believe that a group of players should have the option to ignore all obvious adventure hooks and go off into whatever terrain to look for adventure off the beaten path, to which I, as a DM, would likely have dungeon or side-quest or something for them to stumble on. THAT is a lot different than the PCs wanting to walk in circles through the forest outside of town to trigger random encounters to gain XP for leveling up. That's not adventure, it's not even hunting, it's spending hours running pointless combat in an effort to accomplish a meta goal that could be accomplished by half a dozen more logical and efficient means within the framework of the game.

If Jimmy knows you're running some module, and knows that the final boss is still going to be too hard by the time the party gets there, then yes, I suppose the solution would be to grind for XP, however this scenario speaks to a greater issue.

 

[Reynard]

I get what you're saying, and I can tell you that my subtle point was overshadowed by my blunt words.

Yes, I do believe that a group of players should have the option to ignore all obvious adventure hooks and go off into whatever terrain to look for adventure off the beaten path, to which I, as a DM, would likely have dungeon or side-quest or something for them to stumble on. THAT is a lot different than the PCs wanting to walk in circles through the forest outside of town to trigger random encounters to gain XP for leveling up. That's not adventure, it's not even hunting, it's spending hours running pointless combat in an effort to accomplish a meta goal that could be accomplished by half a dozen more logical and efficient means within the framework of the game.

If Jimmy knows you're running some module, and knows that the final boss is still going to be too hard by the time the party gets there, then yes, I suppose the solution would be to grind for XP, however this scenario speaks to a greater issue.

One would hope that in a real world scenario, the discussion between the players that amounted to, "There's no we we can kill the boss! We need to gain a level or something first!" would lead to a table discussion regarding that goal. Obviously, the players would want to grind XP for a purpose. Simply reminding them that there are hanging plot threads here and there fore side quests and minor dungeons/lairs should, we'd hope, be neough to avoid the, "We travel north making as much noise as possible so we can have an encounter!"

Now, even this would not particularly bother me because I view random encounter charts as descriptions of what is in the area. It has nothing at all to do with character level, so if they wander off in the direction of ogers when they are looking for goblins, well, we can start a new campaign all the quicker.