D&D General XP: How Do You Like To Earn It?

[Reynard]

This is a question primarily from a player perspective.

As a player, do you prefer to get XP from finding treasure? Killing monsters? "Overcoming obstacles"? Identifiable Milestones? GM Fiat?

There is a lot of nuance, of course, so feel free to comment as well as choose multiple answers in the poll.

 

[payn]

I prefer milestone but if I’m in a game using xp I prefer by the adventure or even by session end. I don’t care for minute xp awards like x for picking a lock, y for talking to somebody, and z for killing something.

Over the years I found xp distracts from the larger picture and bogs the game down in meta decisions. The focus just isn’t where I want it to be which is using a characters wide variety of skills and abilities to explore the world and those around them in ways interesting to the player not their idea of mechanical reward.

 

[Scribe]

 

[el-remmen]

I chose fighting monsters, overcoming obstacles, and social encounters - but also included Treasure, though that depends on the specific style of game, while the other 3 are pretty universal to my preferences as a D&D player.

 

[BenjaminPey]

Leveling (and thus awarding XP) is primarily for me a pacing tool (both for intra and extra-diegetic dynamics), best controled at the table level. So my favorite method is to frequently ask the question "should we level up now?" and form a consensus around the answer. Milestones in most of the recent official modules are close to the answers we come up with with this method, but there's a few exceptions (like the beginning of Shadow of the Dragon Queen, which is unsatisfying).

 

[saviirkad]

As a player, my preference is story-based milestones that I don't require to be visible; no XP whatsoever. As a DM I run it the same way, with visibility depending on whether drawing a goal line will improve motivation or steer planning. Like when the end of the campaign was in sight, the stages of the story remaining visible from their vantage point, I made it clear that these were the circumstances that would get them levels 18, 19 and 20. Not to motivate, they had plenty motivation, but to assist with planning and to give the finale more transparency.

 

[Basic Expert]

I voted for Milestones/Fiat/1983...

Generally, I favor quest/adventure rewards over individual encounter or challenge rewards. Oh, we need to get the MacGuffin of Ultimate Usefulness? Let me figure out how to do that in whatever way I want and reward us when the party is successful.

XP for treasure and monster slaying imposes too much of a restriction on character motivations, IMO. That's how you end up with murderhoboes and that's not really my thing anymore.

However, I can get behind whatever the DM wants to do and is easy for them. One of my friends runs level-locked mini-campaigns with little to no advancement almost exclusively and they can be pretty fun.

 

[Willie the Duck]

If I/the group is specifically looking for a curated treasure-hunter dungeon-crawling experience, I like me some good old fashioned gp=xp. Otherwise, yeah, concur with BenjaminPey that xp/levelling is more about pacing/trying out the gameplay at different capability levels than rewarding success at any given endeavor.

 

[Blue]

I had to click basically every one, and it still misses.

I want XP for overcoming challenges. I don't care if we overcame getting past the guardians via combat, talking our way past them, investigating an alternate route/finding a secret way past, bribery, intimidation, stealth, or engaging them in combat just long enough to run past and seal the way behind us. What is important is that we overcame the challenge.

That could fit under milestone, but most people use milestone only in the milestones for levels, not the more granular milestones for XP.

 

[Blue]

If I/the group is specifically looking for a curated treasure-hunter dungeon-crawling experience, I like me some good old fashioned gp=xp. Otherwise, yeah, concur with BenjaminPey that xp/levelling is more about pacing/trying out the gameplay at different capability levels than rewarding success at any given endeavor.

This is a great point -- we can very set (or shift) table expectations based on XP rewards, and use it to encourage modes of play. A "help the new colony thrive"/hexcrawl could have quite a different set of XP triggers than the treasure-hunter experience you mentioned, to the benefit of both games.