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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5576326" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, it seems like any sandbox is going to have a certain amount of variability in difficulty due to this, but having been largely a rather sandbox oriented DM myself I'd say that in all editions I've run extensively you have a similar issue, much higher or lower level encounters run into some sort of issue. Exactly what it is will vary from one edition to another somewhat of course. Maybe the XP issue is peculiar to 4e. Honestly I tend to find reasons to bring the levels of the encounters into reasonable line with what the PCs capabilities are, so I haven't really run a whole string of say level-2 encounters to see what happens XP-wise. The XP curve in 4e is a good bit shallower than in AD&D though. I'd expect you'd be seeing level advancement at something like half the rate for at-level encounters, but they probably wouldn't be all that challenging. AD&D being a lot more swingy you'd probably notice the level difference less there.So, maybe you do want to put in an XP modifier, something like dividing by the ratio of encounter level to party level. Noting of course this will also give out MORE XP for tougher encounters. Overall you'd probably see a slight increase in advancement rate. One thing that some people have noted with 4e is that level+N changes in meaning over a level range. At level 1 a level 3 encounter is going to mean a pretty substantial difference in opponent's total hit points and pretty meaningful difference in damage output vs player hit points. At level 25 2 levels of difference is pretty trivial, amounting to a microscopic relative increase in hit points and damage output. This might help to account for an apparent increase in leveling rate.</blockquote>

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