D&D 5E XP Chart and High-level NPCs

[CapnZapp]

Because advancement is so quick and easy, and attrition is set up to be low, I'm starting to think that the default state of the 5E gameworld should resemble the Forgotten Realms: lots and lots of high-level PCs

If you have no problems with this: go ahead knock yourself out.

But I honestly think you should ask yourself "why am I assuming NPCs follow PC rules when it gives me trouble believing in my world?"

Thing is: there is nothing that suggests NPCs follow PC rules. If anything, they are about half as strong as player characters, always use d8 hit dice and very rarely get the cool class features PCs get.

If you rule that each NPC hit dice counts as a level, you solve all your problems in one stroke: not only does the world become much more scary, but your xp progression suddenly got a whole lot slower!

But I have a whole thread on this, so instead of rehashing why this is so, why not head over to http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?470436-Levelling-NPCs and post your opinion, Hemlock?

 

[the Jester]

Grongard here, going back to the old Red Box Basic Set in 1980.

I love 5e and I think it perfectly enables a low-level-npc background. In the campaign I'm running, there is no npc cleric around that anyone is aware of who can cast raise dead. There is no high-level wizard npc there to save the city. The highest-level npcs are fighter or ranger types, and they are few and far between.

One key part of how I'm doing it is to acknowledge that there are very few people who want to risk their lives day in and day out for coin. Also, combats can be quite deadly as long as you don't adhere to the encounter building guidelines, but instead build encounters like you would in a 1e or 2e sandbox adventure, judging what would logically be present and in what numbers and making whatever adjustments you need to to accommodate your party's size and composition and your playstyle.

Personally, I rarely tailor encounters to the pcs at all. When the lvl 4 through 7 guys were out in the winter, adventuring overland, and they ran into a CR 13 remorhaz due to random encounter charts- I went with it. And they slew it without a loss, though only because the wizard has regroup (a converted spell from 3e that lets you teleport your party members together, which he used to rescue a swallowed barbarian).

EDIT: That said, I do try to project some indicators as to what lives in a region, and I am explicit with my players that the pcs ought to know to run sometimes.

 

[Ristamar]

Thing is: there is nothing that suggests NPCs follow PC rules. If anything, they are about half as strong as player characters, always use d8 hit dice and very rarely get the cool class features PCs get.

I agree. There are plenty of examples of NPCs not following the rules. Just look at nearly every humanoid in the Monster Manual.

If the search for a believable model of NPC advancement truly bothers you, the number of official advanced (yet classless) bandits, ruffians, and mages might make your head explode.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

If you have no problems with this: go ahead knock yourself out.

But I honestly think you should ask yourself "why am I assuming NPCs follow PC rules when it gives me trouble believing in my world?"

Thing is: there is nothing that suggests NPCs follow PC rules. If anything, they are about half as strong as player characters, always use d8 hit dice and very rarely get the cool class features PCs get.

If you rule that each NPC hit dice counts as a level, you solve all your problems in one stroke: not only does the world become much more scary, but your xp progression suddenly got a whole lot slower!

But I have a whole thread on this, so instead of rehashing why this is so, why not head over to http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?470436-Levelling-NPCs and post your opinion, Hemlock?

Your thread is about something rather different: NPCs without a class. I don't give such NPCs a share of the experience at all. They're just not ambitious enough about bettering themselves.

In this thread I'm talking about full, class-levelled NPCs. Its traditional, simple, and easy to use the same rules for them that PCs use including for class advancement. You could ditch that rule but it doesn't actually solve any problems--you just wind up with a ton of anomalously high-level PCs and a bunch of low-level but wealthy NPCs with magic items and hirelings but no levels from looting dungeons. The middle way is therefore inelegant compared to either accepting the logic of easy advancement, or fixing it so advancement isn't easy.

 

[Ristamar]

XP, even as a static value tied to monsters, is a far too nebulous representation of practice and learning to make any assertive judgements about the ease of it's acquisition and extrapolating it to a fictional populace. There are an incredible number of variables to consider (method of character generation, party composition, combat environment, DM tactics, player skill, hit point variance in monsters, current party resources, magic item rarity, optional feats, optional multiclassing, house rules, etc), and any attempt to create an objective model based on it's relative ease of acquisition is a total crap shoot that has little relevance from one table to the next.

Putting all of that aside, if it's something that you feel is absolutely necessary, I'd recommend comparing 5e monster CR/XP values to their 3.x equivalents, compare the XP advancement tables, and work out the ratio of advancement each level for a 3.x (N)PC* vs a 5e (N)PC. Better yet, skip the monster CR/XP comparison and use the assumed 13 1/3 encounters per level in 3.x as your baseline versus 5e. Then, reference the appropriate 3.x tables that estimate the number of leveled NPCs per person as a baseline and extrapolate new numbers based on your ratios.

 

[CapnZapp]

Your thread is about something rather different: NPCs without a class. I don't give such NPCs a share of the experience at all. They're just not ambitious enough about bettering themselves.

In this thread I'm talking about full, class-levelled NPCs. Its traditional, simple, and easy to use the same rules for them that PCs use including for class advancement. You could ditch that rule but it doesn't actually solve any problems--you just wind up with a ton of anomalously high-level PCs and a bunch of low-level but wealthy NPCs with magic items and hirelings but no levels from looting dungeons. The middle way is therefore inelegant compared to either accepting the logic of easy advancement, or fixing it so advancement isn't easy.

Well, you went like this:

1) I'm assuming NPCs all are full, class-levelled NPCs.
2) The world isn't very dangerous for full, class-leveled (N)PCs.
3) This logically results in lots of high level NPCs.
4) Oh voy

To this I say:

First off, if this wasn't a problem for you there is nothing to fix. But since it appears to be, my advice is to pick any one step above and challenge its assumption. This way you won't end up with lots of high level NPCs. Simple!

As for my post, I chose step #1. If NPCs are not full, class-levelled NPCs the world is much more dangerous, avoiding the problem of #3. To support you in taking this step, I pointed out the fact that it is you who is making assumption #1, not the rules.

The rules do mention making full, class-levelled NPCs, but it does not make that the default. All official adventures to date use other ways to present NPCs.

I can also mention that there is no official support for the "NPCs without classes get no XP" rule. Not that it is a bad rule, but it is your rule. If you rule differently, that changes stuff and possibly makes your problem go away.

Finally, I can't find any support for the idea that Forgotten Realms are filled with high-levelled NPCs. Remember, this is a new edition. No official adventure has more than a few (non-BBEG) NPCs that can even match a mid-level character.

In conclusion: it might be helpful for you to take a step back and reexamine your assumptions. They may be colored by previous editions. They might cause problems with 5th edition. But the easiest solution is not to change the rules, but to change you.

You could ditch that rule but it doesn't actually solve any problems--you just wind up with a ton of anomalously high-level PCs and a bunch of low-level but wealthy NPCs with magic items and hirelings but no levels from looting dungeons. The middle way is therefore inelegant compared to either accepting the logic of easy advancement, or fixing it so advancement isn't easy.

Sorry but I don't see it.

The first part makes it seem like you want to eat the cake and have it too. Do you feel high-level NPCs are a problem or not? You can't really say high-level PCs are an anomaly, if you also consider "lots of high-level NPCs" a problem?

The second part I don't follow at all, I'm afraid.

If you read my linked thread you would realize that the NPCs in Appendix B have more hit dice than capabilities, to put it crudely.

Meaning they have weak capabilities (weaker than PCs anyway) but they have lots of hit dice, making them level like PCs of higher level. And higher level means more xp means slower advancement.

In yet more words: they fight softer but level slower. How is that not a solution for you?

Cheers,
Zapp

 

[Pauper]

Weird, but I just spent a good chunk of the weekend thinking about this question, but from the other direction: PCs get to high level way too fast.

If you combine the 'Adventuring Day XP' table from p.57 of the DM's Basic Rules with the 'Character Advancement' table on p.10 of the Player's Basic Rules, you discover that the expectation is that characters will go from level 1 to level 20 in about seven weeks of adventuring time. If there is little downtime between those adventuring days, then this implies that most D&D campaign worlds are going to look like anime worlds -- all the most powerful characters are going to be exceptional, very young PCs.

This only gets exacerbated when considering a campaign where multiple sets of PCs run through adventures in the same world -- from a power perspective, there's little reason for the 14th level wizard who served as the king's advisor in the first campaign to still be considered a big wheel in the second campaign when the PC wizard from that first campaign is somewhere around 20th level and is arguably still hanging around in the campaign world somewhere. For that matter, how is the king still an ongoing concern when the previous campaign's fighter could probably rout his entire army single-handed?

You could solve the problem from within the 5E system itself; award tons of downtime after each adventure or when characters level up, then force the characters to use that downtime (say, 30*level downtime days of training required to advance to the next level), but that only works if you're running your own homebrew game -- trying to run, say, Horde of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat where an emerging threat seems to be growing and needs to be stopped, and where events pile on pretty quickly one after the other, when your group is trying to scrape 210 downtime days together so they can level up becomes its own challenge.

It's less 'cinematic' than 'episodic TV' action -- at the end of each episode, things go back exactly the way they were, nothing changes. That's a bit disappointing.

--
Pauper

 

[Celtavian]

Given the difference between level 1 and level 20 isn't as wide as it is now, you may be right.

On a side note, I thought I was the only one that found 5E combat easy, me and my unique group.

 

[jodyjohnson]

My solution is that the "Adventuring Days" are spread over years. My world is not so full of monsters and challenges that the party can go from one adventure to the next with a mere long rest between them.

It might be weeks, months, or years before there is a threat worthy of the name "Adventure".

However, the AP style combined with a forced Random Encounter method does not support this. I could probably make it work in PotA but it is harder in OotA (although the speed is not crazy fast since the travel is slow and the distances moderate - forex 2 weeks just to get to the closest town if you are being careful).

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Weird, but I just spent a good chunk of the weekend thinking about this question, but from the other direction: PCs get to high level way too fast.

If you combine the 'Adventuring Day XP' table from p.57 of the DM's Basic Rules with the 'Character Advancement' table on p.10 of the Player's Basic Rules, you discover that the expectation is that characters will go from level 1 to level 20 in about seven weeks of adventuring time. If there is little downtime between those adventuring days, then this implies that most D&D campaign worlds are going to look like anime worlds -- all the most powerful characters are going to be exceptional, very young PCs.

This only gets exacerbated when considering a campaign where multiple sets of PCs run through adventures in the same world -- from a power perspective, there's little reason for the 14th level wizard who served as the king's advisor in the first campaign to still be considered a big wheel in the second campaign when the PC wizard from that first campaign is somewhere around 20th level and is arguably still hanging around in the campaign world somewhere. For that matter, how is the king still an ongoing concern when the previous campaign's fighter could probably rout his entire army single-handed?

You could solve the problem from within the 5E system itself; award tons of downtime after each adventure or when characters level up, then force the characters to use that downtime (say, 30*level downtime days of training required to advance to the next level), but that only works if you're running your own homebrew game -- trying to run, say, Horde of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat where an emerging threat seems to be growing and needs to be stopped, and where events pile on pretty quickly one after the other, when your group is trying to scrape 210 downtime days together so they can level up becomes its own challenge.

It's less 'cinematic' than 'episodic TV' action -- at the end of each episode, things go back exactly the way they were, nothing changes. That's a bit disappointing.

--
Pauper

Yes, exactly. Ubiquitous high-level NPCs are only a symptom, not the cause. So far in this thread we've heard suggestions to gate advancement behind a "PC-only" gate, to increase advancement costs (in time or XP), to make combat harder and deadlier by tossing encounter difficulty as a convention, and to just accept it and not worry about the implications.

After thinking about it for a while, I think I just need to run a deadlier and more uncomfortable game. E.g. if HP loss *hurts*, and monster killing is not generally lucrative, NPCs will be less motivated to seek power for its own sake. Then when the rare lucrative treasure-hunting opportunity occurs, only PCs will be well-placed to take advantage of it.

Shadowrun may be on to something by making runners broke and dangerous by default.

As part of this, I think I need to build adventures to be deadlier for PCs. If the average 10th level PC played with mediocre skill has about a 50% chance of coming out of a level 10 adventure alive, but very wealthy, I'll be pretty happy with the world that results. More deathtraps, more ancient horrors.