[UA] Alternative XP progression - Yay or Nay?

[TwoSix]

Sigh...doesn't anyone give completely arbitrary amounts of XP anymore?

 

[MerakSpielman]

Sure.

TwoSix, I award you 100xp.

Ta Da!

 

[Mystery Man]

Yep, but there is no table or set ruling regarding that. It's up to the DM. That's why they call it "arbitrary". No relevance to monster XP awards (the killing of) in this case.

 

[Psion]

I like the new system MUCH better. The CR/EL system was always very wonky, and I never liked it since it was so subjective..

The scale and the award system aren't married. I don't use CR/EL for a long time, but still use the same scale.

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

I'll be picking up Unearthed Arcana, I'm sure (damn you WOTC for making a book that makes me break my boycott on your products!) to scavenge for ideas. Up until now, I was using the Rifts system (say what you will about the game, I liked its XP system) with values modified slightly downward.

Did they make any changes to the XP required for level-ups?

 

[Plane Sailing]

Do you think that cutting the awards in half would be too little? I'm trying to figure out if I want to half them or just use a quarter. I really, and I mean REALLY despise the rate PC's level up, but I'm not sure if a quarter is going to be too much.

I remember that back when 3e was first released they said that one of their design guidelines was to allow PCs to experience 1st right through to 20th level, and that their research had shown that playing characters above about 12th level was very rare in most peoples campaigns.

I know that I only had two characters over 16th level in 30+ years of 1e D&D, and the majority were 6th-10th. It took *for ever* to gain a level in those days.

Of course, in 3e the DMG tells you that you can easily reduce the xp awards by whatever fraction you desire to control the rate of gaining levels (and also warns you about adjustments that you should probably make to treasure gained in line with whatever reduction)

Cheers

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Did they make any changes to the XP required for level-ups?

Yes, they did. You now need more than 2.5 million XP for Lv 20 AFAIK.

Also, XP cost for magic Items goes up (and I think for spells, too?)

 

[Mystery Man]

Put this new alternative method into practice last night. Much easier to keep track of XP. Life is good.