Level Up (A5E) To save a kingdom advancement question.

[MegaloRob]

I happily backed the Kickstarter. I have been enjoying going through the book. I love your storytelling.

I have a question on advancement.

To slay a dragon does not have a "character advancement" listing.

To stake a vampire has a "character advancement" listing that says players should be these levels when they get to these points if they win enough quests.

To smite a fiend has a "character advancement" listing that says you could award experience points but it is better to advance through milestones.

Why does each adventure in the book present a different advancement suggestion? Are the adventures so different that one advancement system won't work? I haven't read the book cover to cover so I don't know the answer to that.

I'm not complaining. It just struck me as odd and I am curious.

 

[Selganor]

Just my guess (I wasn't involved):

To slay a dragon act 1 has way more sidequests than are neccesary to level up to level 4 (where act 2 starts).
Originally the adventure started at level 1 (and the quests had level indicators) but since the collection starts the group at level 3 there is no need to indicate a level 1-3 since the party should be able to do it.

 

[Pedantic]

Yeah, the initial book seems to run off a standard XP model, with the assumption the party will do less than all of the offered small quests.

 

[Mike Myler]

By tier 2 if you don't have everything bolted onto rails the variance of what can happen makes standard XP a very tumultuous proposition (doubly so in A5E where travel is a way you can level with XP). With the wide-ranging sandbox approach it made more sense to do things by milestone experience rather than toss up the balancing of later encounters to the gods of the dice, consequence, and more variables than can be responsibly accounted for. Enough happens that you probably could do the entire adventure path with straight up experience points, but some groups that do so will have Very Very Hard™ Boss Fights while others (after I imagine many more sessions) will have an easier go of it.

 

[MegaloRob]

I get that.
But when I look at memories of holdenshire I see that uses milestone.

Then to slay a dragon goes to experience.

To stake a vampire goes to your party should hit this level before they fight this thing.

And to smite a fiend is milestone again.

My question is not "why would to smite a fiend be milestone." But rather "why make different advancement methods for different parts of a campaign."

I have seen campaigns suggest just milestone or experience. Sometimes both but when both are listed it's "you can advance through experience but if you want to do milestones here is the full campaign milestone breakdown."

This is the first time I have seen "in this part of the campaign use experience. Then stop tracking that and switch over to milestone."

 

[Mike Myler]

Milestone experience is also recommended starting in Act II of To Slay A Dragon. While some people might be starting with To Stir A Memory, the book doesn't assume that they are doing so. It's more like "the first of these 9 parts uses XP", and my thinking was that some people will be coming to this as their first advanced game and are very used to XP, so let's give them that in this part with more-quests-than-needed and then settle onto milestones for the rest of the way through.

There are a lot of adventures where you can advance through more than one means (be that XP, getting your hands on wishes or a Deck of Many Things, etc.) and I hope that 1 out of 9 won't distract you too much from the rest of the content.

 

[MegaloRob]

That makes sense.

It was difficult asking this question. It is hard to not sound like a dick with a written question. But I am coming from a place of curiosity because I really enjoy the A5e stuff a lot. Hearing design insight stuff is really cool and what I was looking for. And what you provided Mike. I appreciate that.

Now I will look forward to what comes next. After slaying a dragon, staking a vampire, and smiting a fiend.... Is it time to squash a spider? The players seem pretty ripe for a fatespinner harvest. I'm just saying.

 

[Mike Myler]

Ask all the questions you've got and we'll get you the answers we have.

There's a note somewhere about what could happen next to follow this adventure path—but there are other books on deck first. The thing I'm on now has lots of spiders. More spider than anyone could possibly be ready for.

 

[Pedantic]

I played around with the experience numbers a little to see if I could backport them into a milestone setup. To get from Level 3-4, you're looking for 1600 XP. After some categorization and averaging, I think you break the quests down like this:

Encounter	XP Reward	Milestone Points
Encounter 7	Small	0.5
Encounter 11	Small	0.5
Encounter 10	Small	0.5
Encounter 1	Small	0.5
Encounter 4	Medium	1
Encounter 6	Medium	1
Encounter 3	Medium	1
Encounter 4 (dungeon)	Medium	1
Encounter 8	Large	1.5
Encounter 9	Large	1.5
Encounter 2	Large	1.5
Encounter 5	Large	1.5

A medium reward is about 450 XP, a small is about 225, and a large is about 675. You can turn that into the point system in column 3, and say that players need 4 points to make it to level 4. It's not perfect, but it's close enough, and honestly my players are more likely to lean towards doing more than doing less. I would just keep them at 4 and doing quests around town until they're happy, and then trigger Encounter 12 when they're ready to move on.

 

[MegaloRob]

Mike does more spiders then anyone could be ready for include John Goodman?

Pedantic that is what I would do as well. Do the quests until they are ready to move forward.