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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7309572" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Yup, that one was Horde of the Dragon Queen. It’s interesting that a lot of people use the term “Milestone XP” for what HotDQ calls level advancement without XP. Milestone XP, as defined in the DMG, simply awards XP for hitting certain&nbsp; milestones, whereas story-based advancement directly levels PCs up for hitting (less frequent) milestones. But for whatever reason, the term “Milestone XP” seems to stick in people’s heads better, and gets used for various forms of non-XP-based advancement. Memory is weird like that.Well, if you actually do the spreadsheet, you find that different levels do take different numbers of appropriately-balanced encounters to reach. That’s because 5e doesn’t adjust both sides of the equation equally; it adjusts both sides, but in different amounts at different times to create a very specific leveling curve under the assumed encounter math. As for why they adjust the equation at all, it’s largely so that as you level up, you get diminishing returns for encounters that are below the appropriate difficulty for your level. Sure, this could be done by adjusting how much XP you get for an encounter based on its CR relative to your level, rather than keeping XP by CR consistent and adjusting the amount of XP required to level up, but that would make encounter-building math harder. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to go about it, but the way 5e handles it by default is not without good reason.Here’s that spreadsheet, by the way. In case anyone is curious.<a href="https://i0.wp.com/theangrygm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Building-Spreadsheet-2.png" target="_blank">https://i0.wp.com/theangrygm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Building-Spreadsheet-2.png</a></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 7309572, member: 6779196"] Yup, that one was Horde of the Dragon Queen. It’s interesting that a lot of people use the term “Milestone XP” for what HotDQ calls level advancement without XP. Milestone XP, as defined in the DMG, simply awards XP for hitting certain milestones, whereas story-based advancement directly levels PCs up for hitting (less frequent) milestones. But for whatever reason, the term “Milestone XP” seems to stick in people’s heads better, and gets used for various forms of non-XP-based advancement. Memory is weird like that. Well, if you actually do the spreadsheet, you find that different levels do take different numbers of appropriately-balanced encounters to reach. That’s because 5e doesn’t adjust both sides of the equation equally; it adjusts both sides, but in different amounts at different times to create a very specific leveling curve under the assumed encounter math. As for why they adjust the equation at all, it’s largely so that as you level up, you get diminishing returns for encounters that are below the appropriate difficulty for your level. Sure, this could be done by adjusting how much XP you get for an encounter based on its CR relative to your level, rather than keeping XP by CR consistent and adjusting the amount of XP required to level up, but that would make encounter-building math harder. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to go about it, but the way 5e handles it by default is not without good reason. Here’s that spreadsheet, by the way. In case anyone is curious. [URL]https://i0.wp.com/theangrygm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Building-Spreadsheet-2.png[/URL] [/QUOTE]

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