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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 7572502" data-attributes="member: 907">Milestone leveling (or checkmark leveling, when you level upon gaining a certain number of checkmarks for accomplishing lesser and greater goals) works best if you're in a pre-determined campaign. For example, in Princes of the Apocalypse the adventure specifies points where leveling is appropriate (mostly after each sub-dungeon). The main advantages is that no-one has to keep track of XP, or worry whether avoiding an encounter and/or going on a side trek will mess things up.However, one disadvantage is that it bypasses some of the thought given to the level/XP tables. Unlike 3e, the progression isn't as straight as it used to be - in 3e, the XP needed to level up was 13 1/3 times the XP you gained from an "average" encounter. In 5e, you need 4 hard* encounter to go from level 1 to 2, 4 more to go from 2 to 3, 8 more to hit level 4, and then 10 or just over it at each level from 5 to 10. Level 11 is a little slower at just over 11 encounters, and then it speeds up with between 6 and 7 encounters per level up to 20 (13 to 14 is a little faster for some reason).Some of that is accounted for in the varying nature of the game - a high-level game would likely have more encounters with plenty of minions, and while having many opponents increases the XP for the purpose of calculating difficulty, it doesn't actually give more XP (for a group of 4 12th level PCs, a single CR 15 monster or four CR 5 monsters would both be "hard" encounters, but the CR 15 monster would give 13 000 XP while the CR 5 ones would give 7 200 XP). Another, related, issue is that by that level, encounters are likely to be more complex so you spend more time on any given encounter. But another part is that by that point, you've probably been running your campaign for about a year, and having things escalate in speed is probably a good thing.So I'm thinking that for my next campaign, I'll probably implement a checkmark version of milestone leveling, and set the number of checkmarks to match the number of "hard" encounters you'd otherwise have.* Using the official definition of "hard" which I know many people here would dispute, but I only use it as a baseline for comparison.</blockquote>

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