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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5683023" data-attributes="member: 54877">The only effective difference for me is at the margins. That is, if we tracked XP precisely according to RAW--at the end of an 18-24 month campaign, the characters would all be within half a level of whatever they ended up with our looser version. Part of this is the way 3E and 4E are structured, but mainly it is because our play is fairly consistent over time. Now, in the story line, it can be a fairly big deal at moments. Getting to round up from about 10.75 level to 11th level in a 3E or 4E campaign, before you start the next adventure, can be a huge boost. So I'm with Hussar on this. Mainly, we went this way not because of any particular dislike of the XP pace itself, but because the XP calculations were taking too much time for what they gave us. (This was especially true using 3.5 calculations, first introduced in 3E Forgotten Realms, with a large group of mixed level characters. Pain in the behind.) If you want to precisely track different experience levels, negative level drains, magic item and other such XP expenditure, etc.--then keeping the running total is not only helpful, but vital. But if all you want is to pace a party of adventures gaining power over a series of adventures, it is overkill. So I guess it was more that we abandoned RAW on other uses of XP, and the way we calculated it just followed naturally from there. Since 4E also abandoned those other 3.* uses of XP, there was really nothing left to the mechanic but teaching pacing to novice DMs. Once you've got the pacing, you no longer need the mechanic.</blockquote>

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