D&D 5E Why do we award Encounter XP instead of Adjusted XP?

[DaveDash]

In 4e, for a 5 person party the maths works out roughly to one level per 8 or so "encounters" ("encounters" here a notional parcels of level-appropriate XP). Each "encounter" takes around an hour to play, longer if your table is slack and/or if PCs are higher level. So it's roughly a level per 10 to 12 hours of play.

The 4e DMG (p 121) estimated 18 months at 4 to 5 hours per week to get to 30th level: that's around 320-odd hours, which is relatively consistent with my previous paragraph.

My group plays for around 60 hours a year, and have been playing our campaign for around 6 years and are at 28th level. So we're a bit behind the curve (we're old and lazy and normally have young kids with us at our sessions), but not by much.

You can see the original thread here, with some assumptions and discussion around the advancement rate in 5e.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?403665-How-fast-is-the-default-advancement

 

[The Crimson Binome]

If "kiting" the goblins earns more XP but takes more time, then nothing has been gained as far as acceleration of levelling is concerned. If breaking the goblins into smaller, more digestible parcels takes time, and reduces XP earned, then it has been counterproductive because it reduces the rate of levelling.

For me, the concern is always about absolute XP gained, rather than rate. If you can get more XP out of this group of goblins by taking two hours to beat them instead of one, then that reduces the chance of everyone dying against the Big Bad later on. Better to spend a couple more hours now, rather than risk losing everything down the line.

I guess it might be more efficient to not worry about chains, and just grind on random encounters, but that seems even more game-ish to me (and risks the chance of everyone dying to a random dragon).

 

[Tormyr]

You can see the original thread here, with some assumptions and discussion around the advancement rate in 5e.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?403665-How-fast-is-the-default-advancement

Nice job finding that thread. The best reason I can find for encounter award xp not being the adjusted xp used to determine encounter difficulty comes down to the speed of leveling. A level 10 PC needs 21,000xp to go to level 11. If the encounter award xp was the same as the adjusted encounter difficulty xp, it would level after fewer than 3 "days" of adventuring (at 9,000 adjusted encounter xp per day). However with encounter xp awarded as it is, if each encounter's adjusted xp was twice that of the awarded xp, it will take almost 5 adventuring days (9,000 adjusted xp per day but 4,500 xp awarded each day).

At my table we get through 2-3 encounters per session, and the average difficulty is hard. In the above example, it would take us about 2 sessions to get through an adventuring day (hard difficulty for level 10 PC is 1,900 adjusted xp; 2.5 hard encounters per session). So this would mean the difference between leveling after 5 sessions vs. 10 sessions. Now, not every encounter has an xp multiplier of 2. Some have more, and several have less. So real numbers would be a bit different.

Interestingly for me, the 5e level progression is presumably slower than in 3e (although that is an assumption on my part). I started our Age of Worms conversion using encounter xp. I realized that we would not hit level 5 before the end of chapter 2. So to keep the party at the expected level progression, I switched to milestones. Ironically, we level up roughly once every four sessions, which is a bit faster than if we were using encounter xp.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The best reason I can find for encounter award xp not being the adjusted xp used to determine encounter difficulty comes down to the speed of leveling.

It's also just flat-out more work for the DM to calculate the adjusted XP for an encounter. If you're using listed XP, then the total XP is just the total for all monsters in the encounter.

 

[pemerton]

For me, the concern is always about absolute XP gained, rather than rate. If you can get more XP out of this group of goblins by taking two hours to beat them instead of one, then that reduces the chance of everyone dying against the Big Bad later on.

But that has to be discounted against the likelihood of there being a "later on"!

 

[Tormyr]

It's also just flat-out more work for the DM to calculate the adjusted XP for an encounter. If you're using listed XP, then the total XP is just the total for all monsters in the encounter.

Although some DMs will be calculating the adjusted xp already to gauge the difficulty of the encounter. For me it makes no difference as the spreadsheet spits out the encounter difficulty.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But that has to be discounted against the likelihood of there being a "later on"!

Fair enough. I was working from the assumption that the Big Bad was the most-likely cause of a game-ending TPK. I wouldn't suggest chaining encounters if it seemed like it was more than the party could handle.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Although some DMs will be calculating the adjusted xp already to gauge the difficulty of the encounter. For me it makes no difference as the spreadsheet spits out the encounter difficulty.

Spread... sheet? I guess I don't really see why the DM would want to gauge the difficulty of an encounter. I suppose if you were tailoring the encounters to fit the party, or something.

For the most part, though, six ogres are six ogres regardless of whether that's an easy encounter or a deadly one.

 

[pemerton]

Fair enough. I was working from the assumption that the Big Bad was the most-likely cause of a game-ending TPK. I wouldn't suggest chaining encounters if it seemed like it was more than the party could handle.

What I meant was "later on" in the real world. Deferring something exciting to next session so as to farm XP now looks like a time waste to me. Give me the action now!

 

[DaveDash]

Funnily enough depending on your party (spellcaster heavy) chaining encounters can be easier for them, since they don't have to rebuff/arm up in between encounters. Thus it can save them resources.

Other parties however who rely on short rest mechanics might not enjoy it as much.