That's probably why it is an option: by the atandard rules, movement is more or less irrelevant, which is well and good. Adding the variant gives some purpose to movement, by a little bit, but doesn't make Advantage much easier.
Heck, I've heard Crawford and Perkins admit as much, and they wrote the darn thing.
100%.
What do you think of the actual rules though? The example I chose had to do with awarding non combat xp. Do you find the advice there helpful? What might we want out of that area in the 2024 dmg?
Usable and reasonable, though it's mostly guidelines and inspiration: the actual "rules" are mainly in the Starter Set booklet.
Well, I don't. But that's why it was brought up as an example of an optional rule in the DMG that's not particularly well thought through.
Use the rules for building combat encounters as a starting point for evaluating the difficulty of non-combat challenges and award the same XP you would for a combat encounter of the same difficulty. When designing adventures, designate key events and challenges as milestones and award XP equivalent to a medium encounter for reaching minor milestones and equivalent to a hard encounter for reaching a major milestone. That’s pretty damn good advice if you ask me.
At this point, I’ll be happy if the 2024 revisions include XP at all, even as an optional rule. But, if I were to improve on the advice for non-combat XP in the current DMG, I’d add some more guidelines for evaluating non-combat encounter difficulty and for how many milestones of each type to include in a typical adventure or session.
The optional rules are pretty hit and miss - some of them are quite good, some of them seem like an interesting start of an idea that could have used more development. In general I find them less useful than the rest of the rules and guidance in the book.
I don't see that it wasn't thought through, if it makes movement matter and makes an easy thing somewhat situationally easier.
