Milestones: XP Chain

[SabreCat]

I've seen a few discussions around here on whether or not D&D4's "milestones" are sufficient incentive to dissuade the heroes from taking an extended rest after every encounter. This idea just struck me as something that might be fun to encourage the party to forge on ahead.

When you achieve a milestone, gain bonus experience points equal to 10% of the XP you've received from encounters since your last extended rest.

So suppose, for simplicity, a party of five first-level adventurers are tackling a series of equivalent-level encounters. The party XP gain would look like this:

Encounter 1: 500 XP
Encounter 2 (milestone): 500 XP + 100 XP
Encounter 3: 500 XP
Encounter 4 (milestone 2): 500 XP + 200 XP
...and so on.

This is a pretty half-baked idea, and as such the 10% figure was picked more for ease of calculation than anything. Thoughts? Would this change the course of any 15-minute adventurers you've met?

 

[ravenheart]

I kind of like this idea, but I think the mechanic could use some work.

How about you gain bonus XP equivalent to a normal creature of the same level as the encounter (1 st level = 100 XP, 2nd level = 125 XP etc.) * n, where n is the number of milestones reached. This means that the party doesn't get a lot of bonus XP by doing a series of easy encounter, while a party braving a hard encounter is greately rewarded.

The bonus XP should be added to the encounters following the party reaching a milestone. Thus it encourages the party to go for that 3rd and 4th encounter, and even that 5th and 6th after that. Example:

Encounter 1: 500 XP
Encounter 2: 625 XP + 1st Milestone
Encounter 3: 500 XP + 100 XP (Bonus)
Encounter 4: 750 XP + 150 XP (Bonus) + 2nd Milestone
Encounter 5: 1000 XP + 400 XP (Bonus)
etc.

I'm not sure if this is balanced in the long run, but I think I could give it a try. I'm a little worried that the XP will be a too strong an incentive, causing a self-inflicted TPK due to greed.

 

[Fredrik Svanberg]

I don't think bonus xp would help.

If the players feel that they can't safely go on with another encounter, then they should always stop to rest if possible. Getting bonus xp for taking greater risk is pointless when you don't have a deadline. The encounters they don't take on during day one will still be there during day two.

Bonus xp would only be a real incentive to press on if you for some reason had a limited time to gain a level. This is practically never the case.

Maybe it would be better to change Extended Rest somehow. Make it shorter, and don't force people to take it all at once.

E.g. 2 hours to regain 2 healing surges and recover one daily power. It should probably not be shorter than 2 hours. You can only recover each daily power once per 24 hours, so you'll have to keep track of which powers you have recovered already during each day. A fixed number of healing surges to keep the math simple. Finally, if they take 8 hours in one go, they recover everything, as usual - except daily powers that have already been recovered during that period.

That might do the trick, perhaps. At least it would seem less ridiculous to me if people rested for a few hours after a gruelling fight and then went on, than having one fight and then go camping for 22 hours and wait for their powers to come back.

I might try this in my new game this weekend and see how it goes. Personally I think keeping track of which dailies have been recovered already will be the biggest problem.