D&D 5E Gaining Experience

[Kikuras]

"We travel north making as much noise as possible so we can have an encounter!"

Isn't this what we're really talking about when we talk about grinding XP? If not, then we're simply having a debate over semantics. To me 'off-path adventuring' is not the same as 'xp grinding'.

And while I appreciate the logical honesty of allowing the PCs to take their lives into their own hands when they go out into the world, I'm not really out to kill them... mostly because the next party will be full of monks and bards.

 

[Sunseeker]

Lan-"I'll say it again - level advancement works best as an occasional side effect of play, rather than the central goal of play"-efan

I can't agree more. Leveling is an outcome of a fun time. Gaining new powers and abilities is a pleasant side effect, but it is precisely that, a side effect. Since there's no arbitrary system preventing faster leveling, or preventing you from starting at a certain, or even maximum level (such as computer code which you cannot alter), if you want to be high level, play a game where you're high level. If you want to have all the cool powers, play a game where you get all the cool powers!

Otherwise your general goal at the table should be to have a jolly good adventure with friends and enjoy all that that entails. Leveling should occur precisely as fast or as slow as the table needs and not be code-locked to what the game system says.

 

[Hussar]

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

Sorry, but, isn't that two levels?

And the "take a week to train" is only a 1e thing anyway. I thought you meant that in a single scenario, you'd bump three levels. Isn't KotS broken up into a few chapters? TBH, though, I'm very unfamiliar with 4e modules. The only ones I really read were the ones in Dungeon magazine.

 

[Lanefan]

Sorry, but, isn't that two levels?

And the "take a week to train" is only a 1e thing anyway. I thought you meant that in a single scenario, you'd bump three levels. Isn't KotS broken up into a few chapters?

KotS is a full-on dungeon grind and really nothing else. The party could, I suppose, choose to approach it in stages - go in, clear out another dozen rooms, leave and rest; lather, rinse, repeat - but the adventure's backstory (such as it is, it's not great) assumes you'll go in and blast through it pretty much in one go, reaching the end encounter in time to stop a particular event from occurring.

Regardless, the end point I'm trying to get at is that no single adventure should bump a character more than once unless your intent as DM is that the campaign only be about 6-10 adventures long (in other words, much as a published AP would have it) from first level to whatever the system assumes the maximum is. To me, at the 6-10 adventure point a campaign is just nicely getting started: a few star characters are starting to rise above the rabble, various plotlines are either underway or being hinted at for later, and both characters and players have learned their way around the local bits of the game world.

Of course by this point my campaigns would likely also have multiple interweaving parties, all sorts of character turnover, rivalries-friendships-romances-jealousies within the parties, and so forth.

Lan-"sometimes the actual adventure finds itself buried pretty deep in the background of play"-efan

 

[Paraxis]

My group can burn through most pathfinder adventure path issues in a single month, maybe a little longer once they get higher level or if there is a huge dungeon crawl.

 

[SirAntoine]

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.

There are all sorts of reasons why someone would gather experience. It's friendly to campaign development and camaraderie. Some players may get bored, and be disappointed with the overall game if the party decides to do this for a long time, but the DM should take care of those players at the same time. They can go off alone if they want to, or something they would find more interesting can happen to them when they're with the party.

 

[Uller]

I can't stand xp grinding in CRPGs. My group gets together about twice per month on average for about 4 hours per game. I would consider it a complete waste of time if they wandered around just looking for stuff to kill with no reason behind it. This is why story awards are so important...you gain XP faster for accomplishing things that affect the world, not just killing 12 giant wuzzlewumps in the dark forest.

 

[Hussar]

KotS is a full-on dungeon grind and really nothing else. The party could, I suppose, choose to approach it in stages - go in, clear out another dozen rooms, leave and rest; lather, rinse, repeat - but the adventure's backstory (such as it is, it's not great) assumes you'll go in and blast through it pretty much in one go, reaching the end encounter in time to stop a particular event from occurring.

Regardless, the end point I'm trying to get at is that no single adventure should bump a character more than once unless your intent as DM is that the campaign only be about 6-10 adventures long (in other words, much as a published AP would have it) from first level to whatever the system assumes the maximum is. To me, at the 6-10 adventure point a campaign is just nicely getting started: a few star characters are starting to rise above the rabble, various plotlines are either underway or being hinted at for later, and both characters and players have learned their way around the local bits of the game world.

Of course by this point my campaigns would likely also have multiple interweaving parties, all sorts of character turnover, rivalries-friendships-romances-jealousies within the parties, and so forth.

Lan-"sometimes the actual adventure finds itself buried pretty deep in the background of play"-efan

Totally fair. We've covered this ground before. For me, ten adventures is about all I want from a campaign. By and large that would be about 18 months of play for us, which is fine by me.

I'm not interested in campaigns that would take longer than that to resolve.

 

[S'mon]

Totally fair. We've covered this ground before. For me, ten adventures is about all I want from a campaign. By and large that would be about 18 months of play for us, which is fine by me.

I'm not interested in campaigns that would take longer than that to resolve.

I like both sorts, My 4e Loudwater campaign is a Lanefan style epic with dozens of adventures, started in 2011 and we just played the 81st session - http://frloudwater.blogspot.co.uk/ - the 4e PCs are 22nd level but the actual campaign scope feels more like ca 12th level in AD&D. However many of my campaigns recently have been more like 20 sessions, with a limited scope. My Pathfinder Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign http://smonscurseofthecrimsonthrone.blogspot.co.uk/ will only be 5 full adventures (having skipped the Book 4 railroad) over something like 35 sessions - and it could stand to have been shorter, Paizo stick in a lot of padding to get the level-ups they want. These 20-35 session campaigns typically run around
18 months, the kind Hussar prefers, with a defined scope.

I think D&D design needs to accommodate both sorts of campaign. I'm in the early stages of planning for my first 5e campaign, and it looks as if the system's XP track, bounded accuracy and lack of magic item reliance should be well suited to lowish-magic exploratory sandboxing (thinking about using it for Caverns of Thracia), or possibly for some of the lower-powered Paizo APs (thinking about using it for converted Skull & Shackles, a piratical AP whose naval theme makes little sense in Pathfinder rules where magic does everything).

 

[wedgeski]

Otherwise your general goal at the table should be to have a jolly good adventure with friends and enjoy all that that entails. Leveling should occur precisely as fast or as slow as the table needs and not be code-locked to what the game system says.

This conversation might be falling foul of the usual internet extremism, so I'll say this for the record: playing by the numbers, enjoying the XP awarded for a good encounter, looking forward to leveling as a goal in itself...none of these things preclude the emergence of a story at the table, and none of them fit the definition of "XP grind", which is something I've never seen at my table.

What I have seen is "loot grind", where adventurers hoover up every piece of treasure they can find even after the goal of the dungeon has been well and truly met. I don't think I've ever seen anyone complain about that.