KotS question: Quest XP balancing?

[Rechan]

So, I'm looking at KotS, and I notice something odd.

Each of the hooks has a quest, and each quest has an XP amount. But, the amount is very fat; 1250, 1750, and 2000.

Is this meant to be split up between the PCs, or does each PC get the stated amount?

In addition, how did they reach this amount of XP, since the guidelines in the DMG suggest that a quest's XP = monster of appropriate level (i.e. a 1st level quest garners 100 xp).

Incidentally, I have given out three different Hooks (and thus, three different quest XP amounts) to my PCs, (so 2 got the Mentor, 2 got the Cult, and 2 got one I added myself), so I'm not sure how I should handle the quest XP.

Not to mention that if PCs have different quests with such fat XP rewards, I'll end up with say, two PCs who get 1,250 Xp (and thus, likely a level up) way ahead of the others.

 

[Infiniti2000]

The XP, like all normal XP, is divided up evenly. If you gave out different quests then you're on your own, but I would probably simply average them and divide them. I personally don't like independent XP awards as it makes things a huge hassle in the long run and quite frankly not worth it. In fact, I simply add all XP, never divide, and simply tell everyone they level up when the group XP value is >= LVL_REQ * 5. I suggest you do the same after normalizing the quests (and giving them to everyone because I find it highly unlikely that, say, the other PCs won't help with the rescuing of the mentor so you'd really be screwing them over by only giving two PCs extra XP for that).

I can't help you figure out the calculations on the quests, however.

 

[Rechan]

Bump for more answers.

 

[deleteme123456]

KOTS is weird in general because it was out before the core rules were, so if you figure they had something near the same lead time at the publisher, they might have been tweaking rules for an extra month after sending KOTS to the printer.

I would probably do two of these as minor quests, and the cult as a major quest. You can decide what level the quests are based on how many encounters they'll entail and what level those encounters are. For example, the mentor is probably a Level 1 minor quest, but the cult is probably a level 3 or 4 major quest (you also don't get the reward until the very end, so you want it to be more fitting to level 3 or 4 characters -- btw, you probably want to get them to level 4 before the final fight and reduce the BBEG's defenses by about 2 across the board, or the fight will take forever).

I would use the XP values from DMG 122 then, and have those be per-party. Rescue the mentor? That's great. You get XP for the encounter anyway, and you get a trickle of Bonus XP for doing something nice and heroic. Stop the cult? Well that's a little more significant, so we'll basically give you an extra encounter's worth of experience.

 

[Rechan]

That sounds reaosnable. Thanks.