This was prompted bythis thread, and I'm sure different people will have different opinions - but I'm curious as to peoples' opinions, not in locking down the "one truth".
It seems to me that we reward Character accomplishment in the game ( except possibly for those DMs who are leveling Characters up by DM fiat, or "1 level per 3 sessions" ).
Even those that are using story based milestones are handing out advancement when the Party reaches a certain point in the Story, and has accomplished something significant.
What I'm pondering is: are we rewarding the effort to get there, or are we rewarding the actual accomplishment?
Consider the scenario of a Party attacking a Dragon.
Party A wades into combat, fights in in the classic style, takes upteen HP of damage, expends half their spell slots, the Bard goes down in the fight ( revived later by the Cleric ), but eventually the Dragon falls.
Party B has the Monk run in, roll well, paralyze it with stunning strike repeatedly, and the Party proceeds to pummel it to death with melee attacks, with almost no damage sustained, or spell slots expended. While the rest of the Party is cataloging the loot, the monk takes a short rest to regain Ki.
Should both groups get the same experience? Would the Characters have learned the same amount from their respective encounters?
Under the "experience for accomplishments" model then yes. Both groups end up with a dead dragon. A dragon is a deadly encounter. The Party gains a set amount of experience. I would argue that not even RAW adheres completely to this model, since a 3rd-level Party and a 20th-level party gain vastly different experience for killing the same dragon. There is an element of reward proportional to effort, even in RAW.
Under the "experience for effort" model, then no. Party A expended way more resources, so they gain more experience. Their victory cost more, therefore it means more. With VTTs and platforms like DnD Beyond, we even have the theoretical means of determining exactly how much resources the Party expended.
The "experience for effort", or "experience for resources expended" has an added bonus to it: we can gauge the experience to be rewarded for social, puzzle, and trap encounters, if we quantify making a skill roll of DC X to be the expenditure of a type of resource.
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How I handle experience goes a bit like this. I give experience to the characters for each encounter. The encounter could be violent, it could be turning a violent encounter into a social encounter and talking their way out of it. If the DC is really high I'll give in extra exp if they make it because I want to reward creative thinking and calculated risks that benefit both the character as well as the party.
Sometimes I'll say "take 200 exp for that" to a character who picked a particularly hard lock. Maybe 500 if they picked a lock with thieves tools that was enchanted to be even harder to pick than it already was.
Other times, I may reward less experience to the party if they fall back on tried-and-true methods to kill an npc who I wanted to live. They'll still get exp because, but they may lose out on the rewards and even more exp had they not gone murder-hobo.
Really, it all comes down to the DM and the party.
The milestone method is a good way to keep everyone about the same level, tell a narrative that makes sense for the characters growth and can doesn't punish players for missing a session if they can't help it but it does mean the DM needs to find other ways to encourage creative problem-solving than experience points. At least, that's how it is in my experience. lol.
A challenge is anything that the party encounters that must be “overcome” in some way. It could be monsters, NPCs, traps, natural hazards, whatever.
It does not matter how the party overcomes the challenge, through combat, stealth, social skills, other skills, etc. if they overcome the challenge, they get XP.
To answer your specific question, if they choose to do it the hard way, that’s up to them. If they come up with something tricksy that allows them to overcome the challenge with only a fraction of the risk or effort, bully for them!! Their extra reward is not having had to expend those extra resources.
I also award additional XP (25) per individual PCs for good roleplay in lieu of Inspiration. I find this to be a stronger enticement to actually roleplay their characters. Pretty much everyone tries to do something for the extra 25XP most sessions. All of the PCs in the campaign hover within 200XP of each other from session to session, which for a party of 6 5th level PCs is practically nothing. But they enjoy the feeling of extra personal accomplishments.
I also award additional XP (25) per individual PCs for good roleplay in lieu of Inspiration. I find this to be a stronger enticement to actually roleplay their characters. Pretty much everyone tries to do something for the extra 25XP most sessions. All of the PCs in the campaign hover within 200XP of each other from session to session, which for a party of 6 5th level PCs is practically nothing. But they enjoy the feeling of extra personal accomplishments.
I rather like this, and I've experimented with it in the past. Good roleplay ( that is, making choices as if you were your Character; voice acting doesn't get you XP rewards ), good tactical thinking, creative problem solving, etc. - I think these are worth rewarding.
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I also award additional XP (25) per individual PCs for good roleplay in lieu of Inspiration. I find this to be a stronger enticement to actually roleplay their characters. Pretty much everyone tries to do something for the extra 25XP most sessions. All of the PCs in the campaign hover within 200XP of each other from session to session, which for a party of 6 5th level PCs is practically nothing. But they enjoy the feeling of extra personal accomplishments.
I rather like this, and I've experimented with it in the past. Good roleplay ( that is, making choices as if you were your Character; voice acting doesn't get you XP rewards ), good tactical thinking, creative problem solving, etc. - I think these are worth rewarding.
Exactly. If the big dumb fighter who loves to bash heads rushes into combat, or if a Good PC uses their Animal Handling to calm a carter’s nervous mule on the side of the road, or the smart Barbarian who got caught without a story when a Bard asked for one (that’s a big deal socially in my campaign world) so he goes to a sage to find a book of rare, forgotten stories so he will always have one to share....
This has been an ongoing divide in experience rewards going back all the way to the 1970s, and has been particularly prevalent since the days of video games and especially MMOs.
The "D&D model" which uses levels and what I call "batch experience," is your "experience for accomplishments" model. A thing in the game (usually an enemy, but possibly a trap, a social encounter, a puzzle) is worth a fixed amount of XP. If the party accomplishes the task successfully, no matter how hard or easy the task was in the moment to the particular party, that fixed amount of XP is awarded. Such games usually also have very coarse advancements of XP -- levels being the typical example. You fight enough orcs, and your abilities jump to the next level, which is a sudden increase in what you can do over last time. Thus the first 18 orcs don't teach you enough to actually get any better at anything, but the 19th orc teaches you enough to suddenly make a 2nd attack in combat every round, cast new spells, and take or dodge a lot more hits before you go down.
More modern codifications of this in computer games have been what I normally call "use-based experience." Your character uses a sword? You get sword XP. You can level up your sword ability, but not cast new spells, from killing things with swords. Star Wars Galaxies did this. As a Marksman, who could shoot pistols, rifles, or carbines, you had to fire pistols to level up pistol, carbines to level up carbine, etc. You could be a "Master Pistoleer" with 20 skill boxes (levels) of Pistol earned, but suck at Carbines because you have no skill at it. When you picked up a pistol, that Rancor on Dathomir might "con green" to you (it was an easy target) while you were standing at a distance looking at it. That's because you could probably 2 or 3-shot it. But switch the pistol for a carbine, and now it cons red (deadly, probably will kill you). Because you are not good at carbine and won't do much damage with your carbine and can't use a high level carbine. So the rancor will probably kill you before you can do enough damage to even make it feel itchy. Killing that rancor with a carbine though, would be worth massively more carbine XP, than killing it with a pistol would be for the same character.
And if you shoot it once or twice with the carbine and then in a panic swap to pistol to finish it off so it doesn't kill you, the XP is split... you'd get the % hp damage you did with the pistol in pistol XP, reduced by how easy it is, and the % of hp you did with carbine in carbine XP, scaled up for how hard it was. So let's say the rancor is worth 1,000 xp with the carbine and 100 xp with the pistol. You did 10% damage with the carbine and 90% damage with the pistol. The game message would say "You get 100 carbine XP. You get 90 pistol XP." (i.e, 10% x 1,000, and 90% x 100 -- and I am completely inventing the XP amounts just to do the example). Skyrim follows a similar type of model.
This is literally the experience for effort paradigm -- it's more effort to kill the rancor with a carbine, so you get more XP for it.
However, tabletop games don't generally follow the "use-based xp" approach, I think for one simple reason, which you have hit on by mentioning VTTs: it's a bear to try and keep track of all that by hand, and who the heck would ever want to? SWG had 33 professions in total, each with 18 skill boxes to track (4 lines of 4 skills plus novice and master) some of which took XP for different things (dancer had 2 types of xp - healing xp and knowledge xp which could be put toward different skill lines and not interchangeable). I would not want to track all that by hand. So this is a way more realistic way to deal with XP -- both how hard it was and which skill you used, and only that skill improves by only how much using that skill in this moment would have taught you. Killing a chuba with master pistol - literally no XP. You learned nothing (chubas con green to a novice). Killing a rancor as a novice, tons of XP - you learned a lot by not dying to it. But again, who wants to track all that, even with a spreadsheet or a VTT to help out?
But there is a third way that might work just fine in D&D. In Champions, there was a table of experience you'd give out at the end of the scenario (=adventure), but xp amounts were awarded post-hoc. That is, after the scenario over, the GM considered things like how long it had taken (+1 for a long adventure with several difficult encounters), how much RPing had been done (+1 for excellent RP, -1 for RPing against character), how much non-combat stuff had been done (another +1), whether the villains had been stronger (+1), about equal (+0), or weaker (-1) than the heroes, and the like. Base XP was something like 2 xp, and a typical scenario (for me) ended up awarding about 3-5 xp, depending on RP. The players could spend the XP, technically, on anything they wanted (+5 pts of Strength; +2 points to one skill and +1 to another; get a new Talent, etc.). The only restriction was that all expenditures of XP had to meet the approval of the GM. And as GM, most of us would demand an in-character reason for why you are getting stronger, more skilled, or what have you. Players could either suggest training... or refer to something that happened in the adventure as a learning experience. Or, if they saved up a bunch of points over many adventures, and wanted to do a big point-buy to radically change their character in some way, they could ask the GM for a "Radiation Accident" for their PC, which usually was an adventure that ended up inside a nuclear reactor or out in space subject to cosmic rays or something, to allow them to turn their Marvel Girl character into Dark Phoenix. This is basically the "experience for effort" model completely abstracted... no one is tracking individual skill XP or power XP or stat XP, but at the end of the adventure if the player can justify using XP to gain a skill or a stat, the GM approves it.
Here I think we can learn a potential lesson for D&D, and I might even think about using it. And that is determining "encounter difficulty." In D&D, they give you an XP amount for the monsters, and from that you determine a priori "how hard the encounter will probably be for the party." This is rife with inaccuracy, because it is impossible to predict, unless it is a stand-alone encounter, how hard the thing will actually be. If the party went down the left branch of the corridor first, by the time they get to this encounter, it'll be super hard. If they went right and hit this first, it's trivial. This is exacerbated by the fact that the easy/hard/deadly etc. rankings in the DMG/MM are based on the assumption of a large # of encounters per long rest which all the data indicates is not remotely representative of how tables actually run the game.
But what if, instead of using the easy/hard/deadly XP amounts that way, we used them the Champions way -- that is, post-hoc? Instead of giving XP for the dragon because that's what the book says, give XP for, at the party's level, how hard the encounter actually was. Your first example, that is a deadly encounter. Literally, someone went down and died and had to be revivified back to life. So for that party, you award them the "Deadly Encounter" level of XP. For the second party, of the same level, the stun-lock dragon-kill no-one-even-took-damage encounter was trivial. That party gets the "easy" XP amount. So at 3rd level, it's 400 xp for party 1, and 75 xp for party 2. Since party 1, using more abilities and seeing more dragon attacks, clearly learned more about the dragon. Party 2 only learned how to beat up a stunned enemy, which even I know how to do and I'm not an adventurer.
Doing it this way would work for traps, puzzles, etc. as well. We've all made up what we thought was a brutally hard puzzle only to have one player who has seen this type of thing before solve it in 30 seconds. Well, that was no deadly or hard puzzle. Award easy XP. We've also made puzzles or traps we thought were easy but takes the party all night to figure out. OK, that was clearly hard, and they used a lot more brain cells, and they all contributed to the solution, so they get hard XP for that one. Etc.
This is how Champions would have done it... don't determine the XP awards at the outset like D&D does (that dragon is worth a fixed amount of XP listed in the book in black and white), but rather, after the encounter is over, decide how hard it actually was for the party, and award XP for that difficulty level.
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Actually no, I often award player bonus XP for role playing several times per session. But with six player, if one of them get 3 bumps, four of them get 2 bumps and one of them gets 1 bump they’re all right next to each other in the grand scheme of things. I hand out the bumps mid session, so if someone does something well and I say “Take an extra 25 XP.” People know why it happened. I find it encourages people to look for opportunities to do the thing. I don’t mind makin’ it rain gold stars for the classroom so to speak. But I also hand it out for a well-disarmed trap, or a Cleric proselytizing, or all kindsa reasons. These are personal “rewards” for the PCs. The trick is to not award bonus XP for spotlight hogging.
I also don’t tally XP on a by kill basis for combat encounters. If one person kills 3 goblins and another kills 1 goblin it doesn’t matter. The whole party killed X Goblins, so the total XP for the encounter gets divided evenly. If it’s a mystery adventure, the party earns XP for every clue too. These are group “rewards” for the party.
Sure, maybe 3 or 4 PCs level up a session ahead of the other 2 or 3. I try to make sure that everyone gets enough XP that it doesn’t happen often, it’s rare, but it does happens. So what? That really doesn’t affect game balance much after the lower levels. But it encourages everyone to try a little harder for an extra bump or two every session. That encourages the players to work for their characters instead of themselves. By the end of the next session everyone is the same level again, and by the time the next level up happens it’ll likely be different PCs that level up a session before the others.
If it would be an instance where I feel the XP disparity would be too much I tell the players that I haven’t calculated XP for the session and that I’ll roll it into the next session’s XP and give it out all together. Once two sessions worth of XP get compiled the gap closes up again. In the end, it all comes out in a wash.
The more we kick XP and Player rewards around, the more I like Adam Koebel's idea of Milestone XP being awarded for the accomplishment - no matter how - of Character selected goals.
Especially - as I've been thinking - if you limit Character goals to those that can be justified by past Campaign events, Character Backstory, or Character Concept.
Essentially, story based Milestones, but Player selected, based on role-playing of the Character.
This make actual role-playing ( making choices as if you were your Character, not voice acting ) a pillar of the game ( an element which you cannot reasonably play the game if you avoid this activity ), and gives the Players one hell of a boost in the agency department.
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Under the "experience for effort" model, then no. Party A expended way more resources, so they gain more experience. Their victory cost more, therefore it means more.
That doesn't make any sense. If a party messed up, wasted all their fire spells on a red dragon while the other party used superior tactics, I wouldn't award the poorer players more XP.
In 2nd edition I always calculated XP carefully because I wanted to feel like they earned their level advancement, and that it wasn't arbitrary.
But apart from giving DMs a guide as to how fast to level up the party, experience does not matter at all, it is purely to give a sense of achievement and progression.
There is no way I would heavily penalize one set of players because they prefer role play and group interaction over killing monsters. Either way the story needs to move on and they need to level up.
That's always going to be a controversial topic: do we reward Players, or do we reward the Party?
I have no answer - I don't think there's a best answer here.
The cause of the dilemma is that not all Players are the same. If I had a table of all bright-eyed, active, engaged, thoughtful, and clever Players, all engaged in the story, it's not a problem. It's also not a problem if I have a table of "audience members" ( other than the fact that I'd go nuts, and would be forced to resort to railroading just to keep the story in motion; I think there are some DMs who would love a table like that, however ). It's the mix of the types that gets us.
Which pulls me into one of the other topics I'm pondering these days: building tables based on Player compatibility, not on Player availability. It's really only an option in the day of online TTRPG games, and it doesn't work for face-to-face established groups - but it might eliminate all sorts of issues.
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I agree 100% that spelling out expectations clearly is crucial.
I really like the idea both of Session Zero, and putting together a Campaign Pitch document - especially if you're recruiting online: This is the Campaign I want to run;These are the stylistic choices I've made; These are the types of game activities that a Player would need to enjoy for them to like this Campaign ( Player buy-in ).
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That's always going to be a controversial topic: do we reward Players, or do we reward the Party?
Kind of weird to be penalizing players by not giving them rewards. So the loud alpha male gets the rewards for role playing while the timid player falls behind in experience.
The only way I would see some players falling behind in levels is if they were missing sessions, and I would figure out a way for them to catch up.
That's always going to be a controversial topic: do we reward Players, or do we reward the Party?
Kind of weird to be penalizing players by not giving them rewards. So the loud alpha male gets the rewards for role playing while the timid player falls behind in experience.
The only way I would see some players falling behind in levels is if they were missing sessions, and I would figure out a way for them to catch up.
If "the loud alpha male" ( ow! I strained my eyes I rolled them so hard ) who is contributing little-to-nothing than their personal bluster and self-aggrandizement is getting rewarded over the quiet Player who is actually making the occasional meaningful and useful suggestions, that's the failure of a bad DM.
If a Player - extrovert or not - is actually contributing more, then why should they not be rewarded more?
The presentation of a Player is immaterial; it's all about what they actually contribute.
If you're going to take it upon yourself to "figure out a way for them to catch up" for absent Characters, then why not figure out a way to draw the ideas of your introvert Player out?
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That doesn't make any sense. If a party messed up, wasted all their fire spells on a red dragon while the other party used superior tactics, I wouldn't award the poorer players more XP.
We learn more from our mistakes and failures than we do from our successes.
Also, in the (admittedly edge case) examples provided, one party had to use teamwork, a full set of spells, and a bunch of actual tactics to beat the dragon. The other party watched as essentially the monk solo'ed it. Clearly there would be more learning from the experience in the first case than in the second.
The more we kick XP and Player rewards around, the more I like Adam Koebel's idea of Milestone XP being awarded for the accomplishment - no matter how - of Character selected goals.
I floated this idea to one of my players and he hated it. He wanted me, as the DM, to set the milestones, not the players. I tried to talk him into it but he wasn't having any of it, so I dropped it and did not bring it up to the rest of the party. He was pretty clear he'd be miserable with this method.
I still like it, but, I am not going to sic it on a player who hates it, given that so far everyone is happy with me choosing the milestones.
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I use Milestone mainly because it allows me to be less XP restricted into creating encounters. This is the main reason for me. Simply because my encounters have a lot of elements to them. To the point that I can blow a level's worth of XP in just 1 or 2 encounters. On top of that the way leveling is setup in 5e it means PC's level super fast to begin with. So those two factors combined ... the PC's would progress way to fast for my liking. Ending up at high levels super quickly with a relatively short campaign. I DO NOT want that to happen.
This means that my players will go through various encounters. Accumulating more XP than they would ever need. In that regard I am ok with a player that is absent for 1 session and still level up alongside the others. Especially when drawing the line with real life. We train, practice and our progressive will never be linear to the effort we put into something. Progress happens randomly. You can be stuck at a plateau for a while and then a day later make some surprised massive strides forward. Is it really such a stretch that one PC might need 1 less session then the companions? I'm not going to nit pick over that pointless detail.
In 5e I do not see a level up as a reward. Especially since the upgrades aren't all that great to begin with. In a whole different system this would be different. Some additional HP, an attribute increase, some meh feat....yeah that's not really all that rewarding or interesting to look forward too. The rewards in my opinion are the in-game elements. New loot, new interesting contacts, an amazing boon, a cool base of operations etc. And if players want that... they got to play the game. If a player isn't present during a session then they won't get that cool thing. A player who doesn't put effort into roleplaying won't get the maximized result of the reward either. Sure everyone has different levels of comfort. But at least they should put in effort. If the effort of trying isn't even there they can kiss goodbye to in-game rewards that rely on such interactions. So an introvert who tries to act out will still get recognized for the effort. And over time that player will get better at it.
I'm not someone that gives out rewards to motivate good behavior. I do not believe in participation trophies for just showing up. You play, you put in effort and then you earn the reward.
As for the example of two groups fighting the dragon and one getting a better reward. Beating the dragon is rarely the goal to begin with. The dragon either has something the PC's need for their goal. As long as they achieve that goal they get a milestone. Regardless of whether they killed the dragon. Or they came up with an elaborate idea to hide in a chest that the dragon would take into its lair. When the dragon sleeps the rogue steals the item and sneaks away. Goal accomplished no matter what.
That doesn't make any sense. If a party messed up, wasted all their fire spells on a red dragon while the other party used superior tactics, I wouldn't award the poorer players more XP.
We learn more from our mistakes and failures than we do from our successes.
Also, in the (admittedly edge case) examples provided, one party had to use teamwork, a full set of spells, and a bunch of actual tactics to be the dragon. The other party watched as essentially the monk solo'ed it. Clearly there would be more learning from the experience in the first case than in the second.
If I may, none of the experience system in D&D makes sense. In both cases, I really would like to know how anything in these fights helped the wizard develop a new spell level, or how the fighter suddenly developed the capability to cast spells as an eldritch knight. :D
That being said, I agree, you learn much more from your failures than your successes, something that most game system failed to implement. My main point is not to overthink it in terms of realism, it's more about managing players expectations.
Because the Wizard and the Eldritch Knight both had opportunities to practice.
Remember, XP is at least as much about a quantifiable increase in the Characters’ abilities through “experience” aa it is about rewarding the players themselves.
As a DM I never kill a PC, but the monsters and NPCs may. The players are also divorced from their Characters in much the same way.
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The more we kick XP and Player rewards around, the more I like Adam Koebel's idea of Milestone XP being awarded for the accomplishment - no matter how - of Character selected goals.
I floated this idea to one of my players and he hated it. He wanted me, as the DM, to set the milestones, not the players. I tried to talk him into it but he wasn't having any of it, so I dropped it and did not bring it up to the rest of the party. He was pretty clear he'd be miserable with this method.
I still like it, but, I am not going to sic it on a player who hates it, given that so far everyone is happy with me choosing the milestones.
Yeah - this would really only appeal to solid role players.
Players who are in it for the tactical combat, or are audience members, would hate this.
If I was going to pitch this in my next Campaign - and I am - I'd make this clear up front. I suspect it will be a good filter for the type of Player who would enjoy the type of game I want to run.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with other approaches or emphasis, they're just not something I'm interested in running right now. I'd rather run what I want, for Players who want to play in the kind of game I'm trying to run, than take a grab bag of random Players and try to run something that would appeal to the lowest common denominator so that no one was unhappy.
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When I'm playing cards or a board game for fun, no one expects anyone to distribute candies to whoever does well... :D
Oh, but there absolutely is a "candy". You win or lose, absolutely and unambiguously.
Clear win/loss conditions don't exist in D&D because the scenarios are multi-faceted and complex, and different people are playing for different rewards.
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This was prompted by this thread, and I'm sure different people will have different opinions - but I'm curious as to peoples' opinions, not in locking down the "one truth".
It seems to me that we reward Character accomplishment in the game ( except possibly for those DMs who are leveling Characters up by DM fiat, or "1 level per 3 sessions" ).
Even those that are using story based milestones are handing out advancement when the Party reaches a certain point in the Story, and has accomplished something significant.
What I'm pondering is: are we rewarding the effort to get there, or are we rewarding the actual accomplishment?
Consider the scenario of a Party attacking a Dragon.
Party A wades into combat, fights in in the classic style, takes upteen HP of damage, expends half their spell slots, the Bard goes down in the fight ( revived later by the Cleric ), but eventually the Dragon falls.
Party B has the Monk run in, roll well, paralyze it with stunning strike repeatedly, and the Party proceeds to pummel it to death with melee attacks, with almost no damage sustained, or spell slots expended. While the rest of the Party is cataloging the loot, the monk takes a short rest to regain Ki.
Should both groups get the same experience? Would the Characters have learned the same amount from their respective encounters?
Under the "experience for accomplishments" model then yes. Both groups end up with a dead dragon. A dragon is a deadly encounter. The Party gains a set amount of experience. I would argue that not even RAW adheres completely to this model, since a 3rd-level Party and a 20th-level party gain vastly different experience for killing the same dragon. There is an element of reward proportional to effort, even in RAW.
Under the "experience for effort" model, then no. Party A expended way more resources, so they gain more experience. Their victory cost more, therefore it means more. With VTTs and platforms like DnD Beyond, we even have the theoretical means of determining exactly how much resources the Party expended.
The "experience for effort", or "experience for resources expended" has an added bonus to it: we can gauge the experience to be rewarded for social, puzzle, and trap encounters, if we quantify making a skill roll of DC X to be the expenditure of a type of resource.
It's something to think on.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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Depends on the DM.
How I handle experience goes a bit like this. I give experience to the characters for each encounter. The encounter could be violent, it could be turning a violent encounter into a social encounter and talking their way out of it. If the DC is really high I'll give in extra exp if they make it because I want to reward creative thinking and calculated risks that benefit both the character as well as the party.
Sometimes I'll say "take 200 exp for that" to a character who picked a particularly hard lock. Maybe 500 if they picked a lock with thieves tools that was enchanted to be even harder to pick than it already was.
Other times, I may reward less experience to the party if they fall back on tried-and-true methods to kill an npc who I wanted to live. They'll still get exp because, but they may lose out on the rewards and even more exp had they not gone murder-hobo.
Really, it all comes down to the DM and the party.
The milestone method is a good way to keep everyone about the same level, tell a narrative that makes sense for the characters growth and can doesn't punish players for missing a session if they can't help it but it does mean the DM needs to find other ways to encourage creative problem-solving than experience points. At least, that's how it is in my experience. lol.
As a DM:
A challenge is anything that the party encounters that must be “overcome” in some way. It could be monsters, NPCs, traps, natural hazards, whatever.
It does not matter how the party overcomes the challenge, through combat, stealth, social skills, other skills, etc. if they overcome the challenge, they get XP.
To answer your specific question, if they choose to do it the hard way, that’s up to them. If they come up with something tricksy that allows them to overcome the challenge with only a fraction of the risk or effort, bully for them!! Their extra reward is not having had to expend those extra resources.
I also award additional XP (25) per individual PCs for good roleplay in lieu of Inspiration. I find this to be a stronger enticement to actually roleplay their characters. Pretty much everyone tries to do something for the extra 25XP most sessions. All of the PCs in the campaign hover within 200XP of each other from session to session, which for a party of 6 5th level PCs is practically nothing. But they enjoy the feeling of extra personal accomplishments.
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I rather like this, and I've experimented with it in the past. Good roleplay ( that is, making choices as if you were your Character; voice acting doesn't get you XP rewards ), good tactical thinking, creative problem solving, etc. - I think these are worth rewarding.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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Exactly. If the big dumb fighter who loves to bash heads rushes into combat, or if a Good PC uses their Animal Handling to calm a carter’s nervous mule on the side of the road, or the smart Barbarian who got caught without a story when a Bard asked for one (that’s a big deal socially in my campaign world) so he goes to a sage to find a book of rare, forgotten stories so he will always have one to share....
Those are all worth an extra 25XP to me.
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This has been an ongoing divide in experience rewards going back all the way to the 1970s, and has been particularly prevalent since the days of video games and especially MMOs.
The "D&D model" which uses levels and what I call "batch experience," is your "experience for accomplishments" model. A thing in the game (usually an enemy, but possibly a trap, a social encounter, a puzzle) is worth a fixed amount of XP. If the party accomplishes the task successfully, no matter how hard or easy the task was in the moment to the particular party, that fixed amount of XP is awarded. Such games usually also have very coarse advancements of XP -- levels being the typical example. You fight enough orcs, and your abilities jump to the next level, which is a sudden increase in what you can do over last time. Thus the first 18 orcs don't teach you enough to actually get any better at anything, but the 19th orc teaches you enough to suddenly make a 2nd attack in combat every round, cast new spells, and take or dodge a lot more hits before you go down.
More modern codifications of this in computer games have been what I normally call "use-based experience." Your character uses a sword? You get sword XP. You can level up your sword ability, but not cast new spells, from killing things with swords. Star Wars Galaxies did this. As a Marksman, who could shoot pistols, rifles, or carbines, you had to fire pistols to level up pistol, carbines to level up carbine, etc. You could be a "Master Pistoleer" with 20 skill boxes (levels) of Pistol earned, but suck at Carbines because you have no skill at it. When you picked up a pistol, that Rancor on Dathomir might "con green" to you (it was an easy target) while you were standing at a distance looking at it. That's because you could probably 2 or 3-shot it. But switch the pistol for a carbine, and now it cons red (deadly, probably will kill you). Because you are not good at carbine and won't do much damage with your carbine and can't use a high level carbine. So the rancor will probably kill you before you can do enough damage to even make it feel itchy. Killing that rancor with a carbine though, would be worth massively more carbine XP, than killing it with a pistol would be for the same character.
And if you shoot it once or twice with the carbine and then in a panic swap to pistol to finish it off so it doesn't kill you, the XP is split... you'd get the % hp damage you did with the pistol in pistol XP, reduced by how easy it is, and the % of hp you did with carbine in carbine XP, scaled up for how hard it was. So let's say the rancor is worth 1,000 xp with the carbine and 100 xp with the pistol. You did 10% damage with the carbine and 90% damage with the pistol. The game message would say "You get 100 carbine XP. You get 90 pistol XP." (i.e, 10% x 1,000, and 90% x 100 -- and I am completely inventing the XP amounts just to do the example). Skyrim follows a similar type of model.
This is literally the experience for effort paradigm -- it's more effort to kill the rancor with a carbine, so you get more XP for it.
However, tabletop games don't generally follow the "use-based xp" approach, I think for one simple reason, which you have hit on by mentioning VTTs: it's a bear to try and keep track of all that by hand, and who the heck would ever want to? SWG had 33 professions in total, each with 18 skill boxes to track (4 lines of 4 skills plus novice and master) some of which took XP for different things (dancer had 2 types of xp - healing xp and knowledge xp which could be put toward different skill lines and not interchangeable). I would not want to track all that by hand. So this is a way more realistic way to deal with XP -- both how hard it was and which skill you used, and only that skill improves by only how much using that skill in this moment would have taught you. Killing a chuba with master pistol - literally no XP. You learned nothing (chubas con green to a novice). Killing a rancor as a novice, tons of XP - you learned a lot by not dying to it. But again, who wants to track all that, even with a spreadsheet or a VTT to help out?
But there is a third way that might work just fine in D&D. In Champions, there was a table of experience you'd give out at the end of the scenario (=adventure), but xp amounts were awarded post-hoc. That is, after the scenario over, the GM considered things like how long it had taken (+1 for a long adventure with several difficult encounters), how much RPing had been done (+1 for excellent RP, -1 for RPing against character), how much non-combat stuff had been done (another +1), whether the villains had been stronger (+1), about equal (+0), or weaker (-1) than the heroes, and the like. Base XP was something like 2 xp, and a typical scenario (for me) ended up awarding about 3-5 xp, depending on RP. The players could spend the XP, technically, on anything they wanted (+5 pts of Strength; +2 points to one skill and +1 to another; get a new Talent, etc.). The only restriction was that all expenditures of XP had to meet the approval of the GM. And as GM, most of us would demand an in-character reason for why you are getting stronger, more skilled, or what have you. Players could either suggest training... or refer to something that happened in the adventure as a learning experience. Or, if they saved up a bunch of points over many adventures, and wanted to do a big point-buy to radically change their character in some way, they could ask the GM for a "Radiation Accident" for their PC, which usually was an adventure that ended up inside a nuclear reactor or out in space subject to cosmic rays or something, to allow them to turn their Marvel Girl character into Dark Phoenix. This is basically the "experience for effort" model completely abstracted... no one is tracking individual skill XP or power XP or stat XP, but at the end of the adventure if the player can justify using XP to gain a skill or a stat, the GM approves it.
Here I think we can learn a potential lesson for D&D, and I might even think about using it. And that is determining "encounter difficulty." In D&D, they give you an XP amount for the monsters, and from that you determine a priori "how hard the encounter will probably be for the party." This is rife with inaccuracy, because it is impossible to predict, unless it is a stand-alone encounter, how hard the thing will actually be. If the party went down the left branch of the corridor first, by the time they get to this encounter, it'll be super hard. If they went right and hit this first, it's trivial. This is exacerbated by the fact that the easy/hard/deadly etc. rankings in the DMG/MM are based on the assumption of a large # of encounters per long rest which all the data indicates is not remotely representative of how tables actually run the game.
But what if, instead of using the easy/hard/deadly XP amounts that way, we used them the Champions way -- that is, post-hoc? Instead of giving XP for the dragon because that's what the book says, give XP for, at the party's level, how hard the encounter actually was. Your first example, that is a deadly encounter. Literally, someone went down and died and had to be revivified back to life. So for that party, you award them the "Deadly Encounter" level of XP. For the second party, of the same level, the stun-lock dragon-kill no-one-even-took-damage encounter was trivial. That party gets the "easy" XP amount. So at 3rd level, it's 400 xp for party 1, and 75 xp for party 2. Since party 1, using more abilities and seeing more dragon attacks, clearly learned more about the dragon. Party 2 only learned how to beat up a stunned enemy, which even I know how to do and I'm not an adventurer.
Doing it this way would work for traps, puzzles, etc. as well. We've all made up what we thought was a brutally hard puzzle only to have one player who has seen this type of thing before solve it in 30 seconds. Well, that was no deadly or hard puzzle. Award easy XP. We've also made puzzles or traps we thought were easy but takes the party all night to figure out. OK, that was clearly hard, and they used a lot more brain cells, and they all contributed to the solution, so they get hard XP for that one. Etc.
This is how Champions would have done it... don't determine the XP awards at the outset like D&D does (that dragon is worth a fixed amount of XP listed in the book in black and white), but rather, after the encounter is over, decide how hard it actually was for the party, and award XP for that difficulty level.
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Lyxen,
Actually no, I often award player bonus XP for role playing several times per session. But with six player, if one of them get 3 bumps, four of them get 2 bumps and one of them gets 1 bump they’re all right next to each other in the grand scheme of things. I hand out the bumps mid session, so if someone does something well and I say “Take an extra 25 XP.” People know why it happened. I find it encourages people to look for opportunities to do the thing. I don’t mind makin’ it rain gold stars for the classroom so to speak. But I also hand it out for a well-disarmed trap, or a Cleric proselytizing, or all kindsa reasons. These are personal “rewards” for the PCs. The trick is to not award bonus XP for spotlight hogging.
I also don’t tally XP on a by kill basis for combat encounters. If one person kills 3 goblins and another kills 1 goblin it doesn’t matter. The whole party killed X Goblins, so the total XP for the encounter gets divided evenly. If it’s a mystery adventure, the party earns XP for every clue too. These are group “rewards” for the party.
Sure, maybe 3 or 4 PCs level up a session ahead of the other 2 or 3. I try to make sure that everyone gets enough XP that it doesn’t happen often, it’s rare, but it does happens. So what? That really doesn’t affect game balance much after the lower levels. But it encourages everyone to try a little harder for an extra bump or two every session. That encourages the players to work for their characters instead of themselves. By the end of the next session everyone is the same level again, and by the time the next level up happens it’ll likely be different PCs that level up a session before the others.
If it would be an instance where I feel the XP disparity would be too much I tell the players that I haven’t calculated XP for the session and that I’ll roll it into the next session’s XP and give it out all together. Once two sessions worth of XP get compiled the gap closes up again. In the end, it all comes out in a wash.
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The more we kick XP and Player rewards around, the more I like Adam Koebel's idea of Milestone XP being awarded for the accomplishment - no matter how - of Character selected goals.
Especially - as I've been thinking - if you limit Character goals to those that can be justified by past Campaign events, Character Backstory, or Character Concept.
Essentially, story based Milestones, but Player selected, based on role-playing of the Character.
This make actual role-playing ( making choices as if you were your Character, not voice acting ) a pillar of the game ( an element which you cannot reasonably play the game if you avoid this activity ), and gives the Players one hell of a boost in the agency department.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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That doesn't make any sense. If a party messed up, wasted all their fire spells on a red dragon while the other party used superior tactics, I wouldn't award the poorer players more XP.
In 2nd edition I always calculated XP carefully because I wanted to feel like they earned their level advancement, and that it wasn't arbitrary.
But apart from giving DMs a guide as to how fast to level up the party, experience does not matter at all, it is purely to give a sense of achievement and progression.
There is no way I would heavily penalize one set of players because they prefer role play and group interaction over killing monsters. Either way the story needs to move on and they need to level up.
That's always going to be a controversial topic: do we reward Players, or do we reward the Party?
I have no answer - I don't think there's a best answer here.
The cause of the dilemma is that not all Players are the same. If I had a table of all bright-eyed, active, engaged, thoughtful, and clever Players, all engaged in the story, it's not a problem. It's also not a problem if I have a table of "audience members" ( other than the fact that I'd go nuts, and would be forced to resort to railroading just to keep the story in motion; I think there are some DMs who would love a table like that, however ). It's the mix of the types that gets us.
Which pulls me into one of the other topics I'm pondering these days: building tables based on Player compatibility, not on Player availability. It's really only an option in the day of online TTRPG games, and it doesn't work for face-to-face established groups - but it might eliminate all sorts of issues.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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I agree 100% that spelling out expectations clearly is crucial.
I really like the idea both of Session Zero, and putting together a Campaign Pitch document - especially if you're recruiting online: This is the Campaign I want to run;These are the stylistic choices I've made; These are the types of game activities that a Player would need to enjoy for them to like this Campaign ( Player buy-in ).
I'm building one now based on Matt Colville's pitch document.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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Kind of weird to be penalizing players by not giving them rewards. So the loud alpha male gets the rewards for role playing while the timid player falls behind in experience.
The only way I would see some players falling behind in levels is if they were missing sessions, and I would figure out a way for them to catch up.
If "the loud alpha male" ( ow! I strained my eyes I rolled them so hard ) who is contributing little-to-nothing than their personal bluster and self-aggrandizement is getting rewarded over the quiet Player who is actually making the occasional meaningful and useful suggestions, that's the failure of a bad DM.
If a Player - extrovert or not - is actually contributing more, then why should they not be rewarded more?
The presentation of a Player is immaterial; it's all about what they actually contribute.
If you're going to take it upon yourself to "figure out a way for them to catch up" for absent Characters, then why not figure out a way to draw the ideas of your introvert Player out?
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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We learn more from our mistakes and failures than we do from our successes.
Also, in the (admittedly edge case) examples provided, one party had to use teamwork, a full set of spells, and a bunch of actual tactics to beat the dragon. The other party watched as essentially the monk solo'ed it. Clearly there would be more learning from the experience in the first case than in the second.
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I floated this idea to one of my players and he hated it. He wanted me, as the DM, to set the milestones, not the players. I tried to talk him into it but he wasn't having any of it, so I dropped it and did not bring it up to the rest of the party. He was pretty clear he'd be miserable with this method.
I still like it, but, I am not going to sic it on a player who hates it, given that so far everyone is happy with me choosing the milestones.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
As mentioned in a similar discussion ages ago...
I use Milestone mainly because it allows me to be less XP restricted into creating encounters. This is the main reason for me. Simply because my encounters have a lot of elements to them. To the point that I can blow a level's worth of XP in just 1 or 2 encounters. On top of that the way leveling is setup in 5e it means PC's level super fast to begin with. So those two factors combined ... the PC's would progress way to fast for my liking. Ending up at high levels super quickly with a relatively short campaign. I DO NOT want that to happen.
This means that my players will go through various encounters. Accumulating more XP than they would ever need. In that regard I am ok with a player that is absent for 1 session and still level up alongside the others. Especially when drawing the line with real life. We train, practice and our progressive will never be linear to the effort we put into something. Progress happens randomly. You can be stuck at a plateau for a while and then a day later make some surprised massive strides forward. Is it really such a stretch that one PC might need 1 less session then the companions? I'm not going to nit pick over that pointless detail.
In 5e I do not see a level up as a reward. Especially since the upgrades aren't all that great to begin with. In a whole different system this would be different. Some additional HP, an attribute increase, some meh feat....yeah that's not really all that rewarding or interesting to look forward too. The rewards in my opinion are the in-game elements. New loot, new interesting contacts, an amazing boon, a cool base of operations etc. And if players want that... they got to play the game. If a player isn't present during a session then they won't get that cool thing. A player who doesn't put effort into roleplaying won't get the maximized result of the reward either. Sure everyone has different levels of comfort. But at least they should put in effort. If the effort of trying isn't even there they can kiss goodbye to in-game rewards that rely on such interactions. So an introvert who tries to act out will still get recognized for the effort. And over time that player will get better at it.
I'm not someone that gives out rewards to motivate good behavior. I do not believe in participation trophies for just showing up. You play, you put in effort and then you earn the reward.
As for the example of two groups fighting the dragon and one getting a better reward. Beating the dragon is rarely the goal to begin with. The dragon either has something the PC's need for their goal. As long as they achieve that goal they get a milestone. Regardless of whether they killed the dragon. Or they came up with an elaborate idea to hide in a chest that the dragon would take into its lair. When the dragon sleeps the rogue steals the item and sneaks away. Goal accomplished no matter what.
Because the Wizard and the Eldritch Knight both had opportunities to practice.
Remember, XP is at least as much about a quantifiable increase in the Characters’ abilities through “experience” aa it is about rewarding the players themselves.
As a DM I never kill a PC, but the monsters and NPCs may. The players are also divorced from their Characters in much the same way.
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So - we might be getting way off topic here ( shock, surprise ), but what is an advancements system that "makes sense" then?
I'm not saying that we should use it in D&D - I'm just curious as to what does.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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Yeah - this would really only appeal to solid role players.
Players who are in it for the tactical combat, or are audience members, would hate this.
If I was going to pitch this in my next Campaign - and I am - I'd make this clear up front. I suspect it will be a good filter for the type of Player who would enjoy the type of game I want to run.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with other approaches or emphasis, they're just not something I'm interested in running right now. I'd rather run what I want, for Players who want to play in the kind of game I'm trying to run, than take a grab bag of random Players and try to run something that would appeal to the lowest common denominator so that no one was unhappy.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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Oh, but there absolutely is a "candy". You win or lose, absolutely and unambiguously.
Clear win/loss conditions don't exist in D&D because the scenarios are multi-faceted and complex, and different people are playing for different rewards.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.