So, I don't really like the AL changes to leveling this season. I think its lazy and way oversimplifies the leveling expierence. I know this thread will not change the system or anything like that but hopefully someone will pick up on it and maybe elaborate on it and use it as a system for sometime in the future.
Advancement points do not motivate characters to do anything in game. They just exist and level up. I dont think this scales well at higher levels either. I would rather use milestones and just throw out the whole points system all together but I get why they are doing it. The current XP system is just too cumbersome with players playing accross different groups, and the whole thing with AL is to be able to pick up your character and play in another group if you so wanted and continue your advancement. Milestones dont really work for this. So I am trying to find a happy medium, so I came up with Points Based leveling and wanted to get some feedback.
Point based leveling is extrapolated from the original leveling tables. It turns out that 1 deadly encounter in XP is roughly equivalent to 4 easy encounters. That means we can assign a point value to those types of encounters.
Easy: 1 Medium: 2 Hard: 3 Deadly: 4
If we take the number of easy encounters (in XP) and divide that into the amount of XP it takes to level from one level to another we come up with an average of how many easy encounters it takes to get from one level to another. The below chart reflects this:
Level
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Points
12
12
24
30
30
30
30
30
31
32
Level
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Points
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
Judging an Encounter An encounter can be anything from a difficult parley to a tough fight. This will be a subjective thing and I encourage the players to participate in this judging so that they feel rewarded. Perhaps there are a group of Kobolds with fire grenades that made a particular fight difficult for the party. This is where the calculation for XP breaks down because the party should receive more for a fight if it was particularly challenging.
Here are some examples:
A group of 5 level 3 characters comes across a couple of Drow elf rogues. Normally not a difficult fight for the characters but the rogues have invisibility, use cover and get some good shots in. Maybe they kill a character. You might even judge this a hard encounter and grant them 3 XP points a piece (a hard encounter reward).
The same group may come across a couple of goblins minding their own business and kill them in 2 rounds. You can call this easy and give them 1 XP per character. If it's too easy you can opt to give them a half point or even no points at all.
The same group may meet with a guild leader and convince him of their good intentions and you might call that a hard difficulty and grant them 1 point for each character that participated.
The group may figure out a puzzle and grant them the 1 point each.
Maybe there is a deadly encounter with a dragon and they would get 4 points each.
XP points should be granted for as many actions in the game as possible. Anything that evolves the character and moves him/her forward. This gives the DM the opportunity to reward players at every turn and motivates the players to RP and engage the world around them.
For outside of AL i have used this sytem to integrate goals into the characters as well. I Encourage the players to create as many goals for their characters that they would like. These can be short term goals such I want to learn to speak goblin or longer team goals such as I want to know who killed my father. Goals should be assigned a point value of 1 to 4 based on the difficulty. Goals should be insightful, not just i want to kill 10 things. This encourages players to have some goals set aside, they are completely optional but may give some motivation to the players to explore their backstory and help develop them more.
I think players should be rewarded for engaging the world around them. That is the endorphine trigger in D&D. Its fun to RP and have a tactical fight but the reward at the end is like the icing on the cake. Sure the cake is good, but the icing.. oh ya. With just getting an advancement point per hour what does that really do to help evolve the characters at all? Just for sitting there they get XP?
Just wanted to throw this out there and see what people think. Thanks for any feedback.
Given milestones. Figure out xp needed for level to gain. Level 10 to 11 is 15000xp. So if book milestone is from 10 to 11, entire chapter is ,15000 xp. Determine how many sessions needed to finish chapter. Say from running first session is total of 2 3 hour sessions. So each session is 7500 xp. Problem solved.
Reason is that getting to final boss is just as important as beating them. Puts combat and noncombat as even xp
You used to have to train (typically weeks) and spend thousands of gold to advance a level in AD&D 1st Edition. One of the advantages of going Bard after Fighter and Thief was that you could do an instatrain session with a Druid. One of the advantages of being a Thief was constantly pocketing gold, gems, and jewels so that not only your experience points allowed a faster track to leveling, but that also the training (especially since there were known Theives’ Guilds) went smoothly.
The spending decisions for Fighters, Paladins, and Clerics were difficult because they had to balance getting Full Plate Mail Armor with the other, suboptimal choices — and balance all of it with going a higher level. Magic users, Illusionists, and Rangers had a grip of a time trying to scribe their spells to counterbalance leveling and their other priorities as well.
The next edition of D&D will hopefully be more like AD&D 1st. I think I’ll stick it out and wait until it is. There are plenty of other great games to play. I play a lot of Shadowrun (any edition is fine with me). As far as barrier to entry, both Battletech and Call of Cthulhu have brand-new, ~$25-$29 Starter Sets coming out in the next 2 months. I mean, come on and face the music: D&D 5e has become one of those things we will laugh and cry about years from now, much like D&D 4e. The trajectory and path it’s on not only screams that it has lost its way, but that it has soured the rotted roots from which it once stood.
I've so far played a few sessions with the new ACP rules in AL and in general the quality of the games has improved significantly.
Every D&D AL module is created with challenges to overcome in order to achieve the objectives in the module. In theory, in the past, achieving these objectives and dealing with the challenges should have earned XP for the characters. However, the fact of the matter is that it generally didn't. Encounters might reward 25XP for being successfully resolved and 500XP if you killed the creatures in the encounter. There was typically a much reduced reward, sometimes just the minimum XP that can be awarded for the module, for dealing with the challenges in creative ways.
This appears to have changed in the small sample of modules I have played under season 8 rules (CCC's from previous years and ToA HC). The party now generally comes up with many more cool ideas and does not automatically default to killing things to maximize XP. It has resulted in some fun and interesting ways to deal with some encounters. There are still encounters and challenges that are best solved with combat but at least now the party just doesn't resolve everything with combat for the XP.
Finally, from an AL perspective (which is not the same as running an on-going campaign), there doesn't seem to be any issue in player motivation for using the ACP system over XP. It hasn't affected the attitude of players or characters to the game ... it has just cut down on the meta-gaming for XP aspect of things which for the "character" shouldn't exist in the first place.
You say "Advancement points do not motivate characters to do anything in game." Neither should XP. Both XP and ACP are META-GAMING ... neither exist for the character. The character goes through the adventuring day encountering creatures and dealing with situations and challenges. The character grows in knowledge and capability as a result of these interactions. The only difference between ACP and XP is that the ACP system is based on the assumption that the character is doing something worthwhile that expands their horizons or deals with challenges during that time. It does not reward characters only for killing creatures as many AL modules under the current system appear to do since XP wasn't typically awarded unless the creature was killed. Anyway, it also states that a DM can award less ACP if the characters do not achieve the goals of the module or if they do not make progress towards their goals. Thus, the players are motivated to have their characters take actions to deal with the challenges in the module rather than sit in a bar for four hours since they won't receive ACP unless they are making progress.
tl;dr ACP doesn't appear bad so far ... don't really need a new XP system ... XP really should have been awarded for solving challenges not just killing monsters
---------------------
Finally, on the topic of 1st edition training and leveling costs ... this was very DM and campaign dependent. Some DMs required time and money spent, others did not. Some DMs awarded incredible amounts of gold and treasure (remember 1gp=1xp :) ) so if they had to pay the costs it was trivial, while other DMs did not. The only situation where these costs became a role playing element was when the DM required the leveling up expenditures and also limited the treasure received by the characters (the DMG cited some interesting rules on leveling up requirements but it wasn't in the Player's Handbook).
In many ways, I find the play of 5e to be more reminiscent in many ways of 1e than many of the variants in between.
Compared to XP only for killing monsters the AP system is much better, but it does have it's flaws. If doing a hardback and the players fly through content, they will be under leveled. If they take their time on a hardback but still progress, they might over level. DM does not have option to award extra if they do really well, but can take away if they do poorly. I get why as some DM will say they all did extremely well so I gave them 20 AP in that 1 hour session. But this hinders parties who do things well and then run out of content faster. The hard part of this is when taking out all the treasure I have seen parties not explore the who place anymore because gold is not present. They go in kill, boss, leave. Much content lost and as a result insufficient AP awarded. They could go waste their time just to gain AP, but it defeats the point.
Honestly for Hardback, milestone is by far the best.
If doing AL modules it's fine as they get it for completing the module whether they do it slow or fast, they get exactly the same amount.
OP, I really like your system, especially the sliding scale for combat encounters - they could be perceived as easy by the players and even by the DM, while, when played out, they turn out to not be and thus they warrant more XP points. I would also like to pose some questions.
First of all, what do you mean by insightful goals? I am not a native English speaker and while I do understand a great deal of words and phrases, sometimes it happens that I do not and google may not be of much help either, so that is when I need to ask for a clarification.
Also, should we explain what would garner what amount of XP to the players or should we keep that info to ourselves in order to alleviate potential arguing at a later stage? Also, should we let the players know the total number of XP points they have thus far or should we keep that info to ourselves at least until the end of a campaign/one shot/chapter?
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So, I don't really like the AL changes to leveling this season. I think its lazy and way oversimplifies the leveling expierence. I know this thread will not change the system or anything like that but hopefully someone will pick up on it and maybe elaborate on it and use it as a system for sometime in the future.
Advancement points do not motivate characters to do anything in game. They just exist and level up. I dont think this scales well at higher levels either. I would rather use milestones and just throw out the whole points system all together but I get why they are doing it. The current XP system is just too cumbersome with players playing accross different groups, and the whole thing with AL is to be able to pick up your character and play in another group if you so wanted and continue your advancement. Milestones dont really work for this. So I am trying to find a happy medium, so I came up with Points Based leveling and wanted to get some feedback.
Point based leveling is extrapolated from the original leveling tables. It turns out that 1 deadly encounter in XP is roughly equivalent to 4 easy encounters. That means we can assign a point value to those types of encounters.
Easy: 1
Medium: 2
Hard: 3
Deadly: 4
If we take the number of easy encounters (in XP) and divide that into the amount of XP it takes to level from one level to another we come up with an average of how many easy encounters it takes to get from one level to another. The below chart reflects this:
Level
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Points
12
12
24
30
30
30
30
30
31
32
Level
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Points
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
Judging an Encounter
An encounter can be anything from a difficult parley to a tough fight. This will be a subjective thing and I encourage the players to participate in this judging so that they feel rewarded. Perhaps there are a group of Kobolds with fire grenades that made a particular fight difficult for the party. This is where the calculation for XP breaks down because the party should receive more for a fight if it was particularly challenging.
Here are some examples:
XP points should be granted for as many actions in the game as possible. Anything that evolves the character and moves him/her forward. This gives the DM the opportunity to reward players at every turn and motivates the players to RP and engage the world around them.
For outside of AL i have used this sytem to integrate goals into the characters as well. I Encourage the players to create as many goals for their characters that they would like. These can be short term goals such I want to learn to speak goblin or longer team goals such as I want to know who killed my father. Goals should be assigned a point value of 1 to 4 based on the difficulty. Goals should be insightful, not just i want to kill 10 things. This encourages players to have some goals set aside, they are completely optional but may give some motivation to the players to explore their backstory and help develop them more.
I think players should be rewarded for engaging the world around them. That is the endorphine trigger in D&D. Its fun to RP and have a tactical fight but the reward at the end is like the icing on the cake. Sure the cake is good, but the icing.. oh ya. With just getting an advancement point per hour what does that really do to help evolve the characters at all? Just for sitting there they get XP?
Just wanted to throw this out there and see what people think. Thanks for any feedback.
Given milestones. Figure out xp needed for level to gain. Level 10 to 11 is 15000xp. So if book milestone is from 10 to 11, entire chapter is ,15000 xp. Determine how many sessions needed to finish chapter. Say from running first session is total of 2 3 hour sessions. So each session is 7500 xp. Problem solved.
Reason is that getting to final boss is just as important as beating them. Puts combat and noncombat as even xp
You used to have to train (typically weeks) and spend thousands of gold to advance a level in AD&D 1st Edition. One of the advantages of going Bard after Fighter and Thief was that you could do an instatrain session with a Druid. One of the advantages of being a Thief was constantly pocketing gold, gems, and jewels so that not only your experience points allowed a faster track to leveling, but that also the training (especially since there were known Theives’ Guilds) went smoothly.
The spending decisions for Fighters, Paladins, and Clerics were difficult because they had to balance getting Full Plate Mail Armor with the other, suboptimal choices — and balance all of it with going a higher level. Magic users, Illusionists, and Rangers had a grip of a time trying to scribe their spells to counterbalance leveling and their other priorities as well.
The next edition of D&D will hopefully be more like AD&D 1st. I think I’ll stick it out and wait until it is. There are plenty of other great games to play. I play a lot of Shadowrun (any edition is fine with me). As far as barrier to entry, both Battletech and Call of Cthulhu have brand-new, ~$25-$29 Starter Sets coming out in the next 2 months. I mean, come on and face the music: D&D 5e has become one of those things we will laugh and cry about years from now, much like D&D 4e. The trajectory and path it’s on not only screams that it has lost its way, but that it has soured the rotted roots from which it once stood.
Just a couple of general comments ...
I've so far played a few sessions with the new ACP rules in AL and in general the quality of the games has improved significantly.
Every D&D AL module is created with challenges to overcome in order to achieve the objectives in the module. In theory, in the past, achieving these objectives and dealing with the challenges should have earned XP for the characters. However, the fact of the matter is that it generally didn't. Encounters might reward 25XP for being successfully resolved and 500XP if you killed the creatures in the encounter. There was typically a much reduced reward, sometimes just the minimum XP that can be awarded for the module, for dealing with the challenges in creative ways.
This appears to have changed in the small sample of modules I have played under season 8 rules (CCC's from previous years and ToA HC). The party now generally comes up with many more cool ideas and does not automatically default to killing things to maximize XP. It has resulted in some fun and interesting ways to deal with some encounters. There are still encounters and challenges that are best solved with combat but at least now the party just doesn't resolve everything with combat for the XP.
Finally, from an AL perspective (which is not the same as running an on-going campaign), there doesn't seem to be any issue in player motivation for using the ACP system over XP. It hasn't affected the attitude of players or characters to the game ... it has just cut down on the meta-gaming for XP aspect of things which for the "character" shouldn't exist in the first place.
You say "Advancement points do not motivate characters to do anything in game." Neither should XP. Both XP and ACP are META-GAMING ... neither exist for the character. The character goes through the adventuring day encountering creatures and dealing with situations and challenges. The character grows in knowledge and capability as a result of these interactions. The only difference between ACP and XP is that the ACP system is based on the assumption that the character is doing something worthwhile that expands their horizons or deals with challenges during that time. It does not reward characters only for killing creatures as many AL modules under the current system appear to do since XP wasn't typically awarded unless the creature was killed. Anyway, it also states that a DM can award less ACP if the characters do not achieve the goals of the module or if they do not make progress towards their goals. Thus, the players are motivated to have their characters take actions to deal with the challenges in the module rather than sit in a bar for four hours since they won't receive ACP unless they are making progress.
tl;dr ACP doesn't appear bad so far ... don't really need a new XP system ... XP really should have been awarded for solving challenges not just killing monsters
---------------------
Finally, on the topic of 1st edition training and leveling costs ... this was very DM and campaign dependent. Some DMs required time and money spent, others did not. Some DMs awarded incredible amounts of gold and treasure (remember 1gp=1xp :) ) so if they had to pay the costs it was trivial, while other DMs did not. The only situation where these costs became a role playing element was when the DM required the leveling up expenditures and also limited the treasure received by the characters (the DMG cited some interesting rules on leveling up requirements but it wasn't in the Player's Handbook).
In many ways, I find the play of 5e to be more reminiscent in many ways of 1e than many of the variants in between.
Compared to XP only for killing monsters the AP system is much better, but it does have it's flaws. If doing a hardback and the players fly through content, they will be under leveled. If they take their time on a hardback but still progress, they might over level. DM does not have option to award extra if they do really well, but can take away if they do poorly. I get why as some DM will say they all did extremely well so I gave them 20 AP in that 1 hour session. But this hinders parties who do things well and then run out of content faster. The hard part of this is when taking out all the treasure I have seen parties not explore the who place anymore because gold is not present. They go in kill, boss, leave. Much content lost and as a result insufficient AP awarded. They could go waste their time just to gain AP, but it defeats the point.
Honestly for Hardback, milestone is by far the best.
If doing AL modules it's fine as they get it for completing the module whether they do it slow or fast, they get exactly the same amount.
I really like this system and want to try it out during my next campaign!
Makes it very easy both for combat and non combat to award the players.
OP, I really like your system, especially the sliding scale for combat encounters - they could be perceived as easy by the players and even by the DM, while, when played out, they turn out to not be and thus they warrant more XP points. I would also like to pose some questions.
First of all, what do you mean by insightful goals? I am not a native English speaker and while I do understand a great deal of words and phrases, sometimes it happens that I do not and google may not be of much help either, so that is when I need to ask for a clarification.
Also, should we explain what would garner what amount of XP to the players or should we keep that info to ourselves in order to alleviate potential arguing at a later stage?
Also, should we let the players know the total number of XP points they have thus far or should we keep that info to ourselves at least until the end of a campaign/one shot/chapter?