D&D 5E XP Per Adventuring Day Per Player is Ridiculous

[FormerlyHemlock]

Oh I have been. I was curious to see what kind day would be required to maintain the "expected" pace per the guidelines. I doubt the party could survive such a day.

Oh, I've exceeded daily encounter budgets by 30% in a single encounter, after a full day of other encounters. I think it could have been a TPK but it wasn't, and it was fun and memorable. IMO the daily budgets are just fine.

Remember that XP multipliers are applied before you tally the budget, therefore the PCs usually would only earn half the budget or less unless you were fighting mostly solo monsters.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I do find that the XP budget does odd things when you have more than 4-5 players, though. At 8-9 players, the budget is likely to get very strange.

Cheers!

Oh sure, it makes for huge encounters just to have a challenge. What it doesn't do is change the dynamic of XP per day per player which is a constant. I re-worked encounters for a party of 4 players:

2 ettercaps & 6 giant spiders: 2100XP

1 wereboar and 3 giant boars: 2350XP

1 wyvern: 2300XP

3 hags: 5400XP

1 harpy queen (CR6) and 4 harpies: 2900XP

These encounters are almost as deadly for a group of 4 but it does yield 3762XP each should they survive. All encounters except the lone wyvern are still way above deadly. The hags are overkill x2.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Remember that XP multipliers are applied before you tally the budget, therefore the PCs usually would only earn half the budget or less unless you were fighting mostly solo monsters.

I am reading the XP per day per player as awarded XP per player. If those amounts are difficulty adjusted numbers then that changes things quite a bit!

 

[pukunui]

My solution is to accept the logic: PCs are life force vampires who gain strength through the death of others. Like Highlanders for whom There Can Be Only One. It is still annoying but it is part of the game.

LOL. That's a good way of putting it.

My solution is to run an episodic campaign. I'm mostly only going to have the PCs level up during the indeterminate amounts of time that pass between episodes. (I am still tracking XP for my own purposes, though, so I can have a better idea of which adventures are appropriate at any given point.)

 

[Wik]

Well, regarding the passage of time, here's how I've fixed it up:

1. There are no overarching plots requiring time. In other words, I let PCs have some breathing room between adventures.
2. Finding "hooks" for the next adventure takes time, often a week or two.
3. I enforce training rules - particularly the time.
4. Selling and buying magical items is down as a downtime activity, and often there's only one "market" per month - if PCs aren't near that time, they have to wait.
5. getting to adventuring sites often takes days, or even weeks.
6. The winter months are no good for travel - or adventuring. PCs basically have to sit at home. I tell the players this, and they're all putting aside small nest eggs to cover expenses while they're stuck at home (little do they know that I have a murder mystery planned!)

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I am reading the XP per day per player as awarded XP per player. If those amounts are difficulty adjusted numbers then that changes things quite a bit!

It is adjusted XP. I'll quote the relevant DMG passage in case you're away from your books:

In the same way you figure out the difficulty of an encounter, you can use the XP values of monsters and other opponents in an adventure as a guideline for how far the party is likely to progress. For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party's adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest. [table follows]

The passage is poorly written and I can see how you might have looked at the "expected to earn in a day" sentence and interpreted it as an earned XP table. But it is an adjusted XP table.

BTW, I tried at one point awarding earned XP = adjusted XP, but it was way too much XP and it also didn't mesh with the "life force vampire" fluff I had given my players, so I dropped it after the first big fight.

 

[Quickleaf]

I am sitting here putting together potential encounters for one of my campaigns. I assembled a list of 5 DEADLY encounters that still fall short of the suggested XP for a day.

This campaign has 8, sometimes 9 players of 5th level. I did all my calculations based on a party of 8. Here is what I was playing around with for ideas ( forest encounters):

4 ettercaps & 12 giant spiders- 4200XP

2 wereboars & 6 giant boars- 4900XP

3 wyverns- 6900XP

Coven of 3 green hags- 5400XP

12 harpies & 1 harpy queen (custom CR6)- 4700XP

All that earns each character 3262.5 XP each. The "standard" is 3500 XP per day.

Based on the XP per day, characters should advance to 15th level in 33 adventuring days. This is beyond ludicrous.

Does anyone else think this pace is utterly ridiculous?

You're basing this off of "The Adventuring Day" in the DMG page 84, right?

The language there is ambiguous among the three paragraphs, but I interpret it to be a maximum (adjusted) threshold of what the party can be expected to handle. It's not, IMO, meant to be an average. It's meant to be: what can the party handle when pushed to the max in a series of encounters throughout a day?

The design aesthetic of 5e is pretty clearly a slower paced one resembling older editions where there are days of overland travel, characters pursue downtime activities, and so forth between adventures. It is NOT designed around an "all adventure all the time" philosophy (that seemed to emerge in 3e and was prevalent in 4e) which your scenario seems to assume.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Oh sure, it makes for huge encounters just to have a challenge. What it doesn't do is change the dynamic of XP per day per player which is a constant. I re-worked encounters for a party of 4 players:

2 ettercaps & 6 giant spiders: 2100XP [5250]

1 wereboar and 3 giant boars: 2350XP [4900]

1 wyvern: 2300XP [2300]

3 hags: 5400XP [6600]

1 harpy queen (CR6) and 4 harpies: 2900XP [6200]

These encounters are almost as deadly for a group of 4 but it does yield 3762XP each should they survive. All encounters except the lone wyvern are still way above deadly. The hags are overkill x2.

Just for fun, I've annotated these encounters with the adjusted XP numbers. Adventuring day budget for a level 5 is 3500 XP, so the total budget is 14,000 XP for the four PCs. Looks like they should be expected to handle about three of these encounters in a day. I'd call that pretty reasonable actually.

 

[Quickleaf]

Just for fun, I've annotated these encounters with the adjusted XP numbers. Adventuring day budget for a level 5 is 3500 XP, so the total budget is 14,000 XP for the four PCs. Looks like they should be expected to handle about three of these encounters in a day. I'd call that pretty reasonable actually.

That matches with my experience running lower levels. PCs seem able to handle about 3-4 encounters per day, depending on the specifics.

 

[Psikerlord#]

6-8 moderate enc is avg according to DMG i thought i read somewhere, with up to 2 short rests