Milestone gives the DM control over levelling, and makes levels feel like something earned as part of the story’s progression. “We did this important thing, we get to level up.” It also is, as you note, far easier on the DM to track - they just need to track “did enough important stuff happen to justify levelling up the players?”
XP levelling rewards players each time they do something, eventually awarding a level up. The gains in XP levelling come from the grind and completion of quests, putting the focus on those elements over story milestones. For DMs who are stingy about handing our milestone levels, this can benefit the players, since it takes the arbitrary decision of the DM out of the picture. It can, however, make levels feel arbitrary - sometimes killing a low level abyssal chicken could be the catalyst for levelling, which isn’t exactly all that exciting.
Having run games with both systems, I personally prefer milestone. I like the control it gives over the story, the lack of random element to levels, and the fact it is not a pain to track. But different people have different preferences, so it is important to figure out what works for you.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
As a GM, I prefer XP because I can use it to encourage the style of play I want to see in the campaign.
If I want to run a game where exploration is important, I give XP every time the characters explore somewhere and bring word of the new place back to civilisation, thus encouraging the players to be explorers.
If I want to run a game where stealth and reconnaisance is important, I don't give XP for random encouters and wandering monsters. The players are encouraged to sneak past random encounters, to use scouting to avoid wandering monsters, and so on.
If I want to run a mercenary game, I only give XP for loot (I did this in a Primeval Thule game).
Depends on whether you're doing homebrew or published adventures.
With homebrew...it's nice to have things so that you level up as important things are completed, which can only really be done with Milestone. Beat that boss? Nice, level up! On the other hand, it's less managing by the DM via XP, they just adjust the encounters as you level up. They don't have to think about when a nice time to level up is, trying to make the beats of the story match up, and so forth. Which is better is subjective since it's a playoff.
With published adventures...milestone, all the way. XP is pretty bad with those. Players are effectively encouraged to murder-hobo in order to get that XP bump, make non-narrative based decisions so they can level up and make things easier/not balanced against them rather than what their characters would do. You can partly homebrew it to fix that, but...why? The writers should have done the hard work of making the beats match the times to level up anyway, and the point of buying published adventures is that you don't have to mess around with it.
So homebrew, you have to balance up what you think is worth it. Published adventures (or prewritten ones), milestone every time. In fact, after my experience, even if they come with XP, I will change it to milestone, I will not run them with XP.
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So, as a I noted earlier, they both have drawbacks.
I split the difference.
At the end of every session of play, I aware those who attended a Milestone point. When they do something that advances the storyline, I award a Milestone point. if they complete a really tough encounter, I might aware a milestone point. If they complete a particular task or close a chapter, I award a milestone point.
It takes a bunch of milestone points to level up. To go from 19th level to 20th level takes 25 milestone points in my current chart, for example. The number gets lower for lower levels, of course, but that's the basic stuff.
I have a peculiar calculation that matches XPs to Milestones for leveling up, as well -- because I need the XP stuff for the CR and Encounter Building (still haven't figured out how to adjust that).
That said, we switched to Milestones ages ago. We also use Hero Points and Inspiration rather liberally.
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
As a DM it's not really your job to track people's XP, your job is to figure how much you owe them based on what they achieved after every session, which you are not wrong is a bit of a pain.
The general rule of thumb is that your players will generally do whatever earns them XP, so if you award XP for killing monsters, they will kill monsters, if you award finding treasure, they will become treasure hunters, you reward them for completing quests they will be focused on completing quests... you get the idea.
Generally, Milestone XP doesn't really offer any direction, so what you can expect is for players to constantly ask you when they will level up because they will have no way to tell.
I think it's a matter of personal preference. I use XP because it's easier for me to remember to give XP after every combat than it is to remember to do it after the important milestones. I think leveling a character after they achieve an important milestone, though, makes it easier for the DM to reward players for things other than combat. That's not to say that you can't do it with XP. It's just that there isn't an easy way to say, "Oh yeah. That puzzle was the equivalent of a Medium encounter and so everyone should get... hang on... what level is everyone again? Level 7? Okay, so a CR 7 creature is a hard encounter, so... umm... hang on a second... I can figure this out." It's just harder.
I think it's a matter of personal preference. I use XP because it's easier for me to remember to give XP after every combat than it is to remember to do it after the important milestones. I think leveling a character after they achieve an important milestone, though, makes it easier for the DM to reward players for things other than combat. That's not to say that you can't do it with XP. It's just that there isn't an easy way to say, "Oh yeah. That puzzle was the equivalent of a Medium encounter and so everyone should get... hang on... what level is everyone again? Level 7? Okay, so a CR 7 creature is a hard encounter, so... umm... hang on a second... I can figure this out." It's just harder.
Its a fair point, but I tried milestone XP in my game for a while and I have also experienced it in games in which I'm a player.
As a DM the issue I found with it is that milestones are usually built into an assumption about something the players need to succeed to earn it. Now the problem is that the players may spend many sessions sidetracking and doing random stuff that isn't related to the milestone so if I stick to it, the intervals between levels can be quite long. Before to long the players started complaining that they never level up and I essentially had to level them up simply because X sessions went by and that was deemed to many, even though the players hadn't really achieved anything. So this is kind of my issue with milestone XP is that it ends up not really being about milestone, it just ends up being about X sessions play compared to Y session tolerance before the players start feeling like they don't level up fast enough. Noteably this all happens without any sort of meter or way for them to measure how close they are.
As a player I found that milestone XP is confusing because I don't actually really know what the milestone is. Like we play one session after another and none of us, myself included were really entirely sure what qualified as a milestone and when we asked... hey what is our goal or milestone? The answer was, well I can't tell you because it would give away part of the story, as the lack of clarity of the goal.. aka the mystery was a part of the game. So we just played and never really knew when we would level up or even really if we were on track to level up. When it finally happened, everyone was surprised because it was like.. ok that was it? We just needed to recover the puzzle box? It was just really wierd.
I think the main point of contention is the lack of clarity so I tried that. I basically told the players, ok to reach the milestone you have to recover this magic ring. Then I realized that because I told them that, its all they cared about. They ignored NPC's, and avoided anything that would slow them down, they were just racing to complete the quest so they could level.
In the end both knowing and not knowing what the milestones are were a problem, it just didn't work either way.
Giving out XP for different activities that can be deemed a success creates a very steady, measured way that the players can answer the question, how do we level up, what are the goals. When you offer XP for a wide range of things, players realize that.. ok, it doesn't really matter what we do as long as we are successful at doing it, so they make their own goals. When they realize, hey certain things give more XP, then they do those things.
So in the end you just have to figure out what things you want to be worth more XP and what things you want to be less XP based on what you want to reward in your campaign.
In mine for example I prioritize completion of quests, building political power, fame and recovering treasure, so those are the things you get the most XP for and I deprioritize fighting monsters, so you get a lot less XP for.
How much you actually give, is just something you feel out. You can create formulas for yourself or you can eyeball it. It doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent.
I think it's a matter of personal preference. I use XP because it's easier for me to remember to give XP after every combat than it is to remember to do it after the important milestones. I think leveling a character after they achieve an important milestone, though, makes it easier for the DM to reward players for things other than combat. That's not to say that you can't do it with XP. It's just that there isn't an easy way to say, "Oh yeah. That puzzle was the equivalent of a Medium encounter and so everyone should get... hang on... what level is everyone again? Level 7? Okay, so a CR 7 creature is a hard encounter, so... umm... hang on a second... I can figure this out." It's just harder.
Its a fair point, but I tried milestone XP in my game for a while and I have also experienced it in games in which I'm a player.
As a DM the issue I found with it is that milestones are usually built into an assumption about something the players need to succeed to earn it. Now the problem is that the players may spend many sessions sidetracking and doing random stuff that isn't related to the milestone so if I stick to it, the intervals between levels can be quite long. Before to long the players started complaining that they never level up and I essentially had to level them up simply because X sessions went by and that was deemed to many, even though the players hadn't really achieved anything. So this is kind of my issue with milestone XP is that it ends up not really being about milestone, it just ends up being about X sessions play compared to Y session tolerance before the players start feeling like they don't level up fast enough. Noteably this all happens without any sort of meter or way for them to measure how close they are.
As a player I found that milestone XP is confusing because I don't actually really know what the milestone is. Like we play one session after another and none of us, myself included were really entirely sure what qualified as a milestone and when we asked... hey what is our goal or milestone? The answer was, well I can't tell you because it would give away part of the story, as the lack of clarity of the goal.. aka the mystery was a part of the game. So we just played and never really knew when we would level up or even really if we were on track to level up. When it finally happened, everyone was surprised because it was like.. ok that was it? We just needed to recover the puzzle box? It was just really wierd.
I think the main point of contention is the lack of clarity so I tried that. I basically told the players, ok to reach the milestone you have to recover this magic ring. Then I realized that because I told them that, its all they cared about. They ignored NPC's, and avoided anything that would slow them down, they were just racing to complete the quest so they could level.
In the end both knowing and not knowing what the milestones are were a problem, it just didn't work either way.
Giving out XP for different activities that can be deemed a success creates a very steady, measured way that the players can answer the question, how do we level up, what are the goals. When you offer XP for a wide range of things, players realize that.. ok, it doesn't really matter what we do as long as we are successful at doing it, so they make their own goals. When they realize, hey certain things give more XP, then they do those things.
So in the end you just have to figure out what things you want to be worth more XP and what things you want to be less XP based on what you want to reward in your campaign.
In mine for example I prioritize completion of quests, building political power, fame and recovering treasure, so those are the things you get the most XP for and I deprioritize fighting monsters, so you get a lot less XP for.
How much you actually give, is just something you feel out. You can create formulas for yourself or you can eyeball it. It doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent.
Something they do in Savage Worlds is just every three sessions is a level. I don't know if that would work for D&D, though. Maybe level divided by 2 number of sessions?
If you've got a specific story you want told and not have it bogged down by random encounters, then milestone is the way to go.
If it's more open world or there is a lot of hidden things that you don't want the players to know they've missed, then experience leveling would be a better way to go. As an example, the milestone is for the players to realize that the mayor has been replaced by a doppleganger and whether or not this is discovered drastically changes the future events. The players do all the tasks in town and then don't get a level, they know that they've missed something.
If you've got a specific story you want told and not have it bogged down by random encounters, then milestone is the way to go.
If it's more open world or there is a lot of hidden things that you don't want the players to know they've missed, then experience leveling would be a better way to go. As an example, the milestone is for the players to realize that the mayor has been replaced by a doppleganger and whether or not this is discovered drastically changes the future events. The players do all the tasks in town and then don't get a level, they know that they've missed something.
You do not need to define the milestone so narrowly as “find the doppelgänger” - you don’t even need to define the milestone in advance at all. If the party did a bunch in the town and missed the doppelgänger, but did enough that a level feels appropriate? Give them the level, backstab them later because they missed the doppelgänger.
It really depends on the campaign and what you are running. D&D 5E is horribad for fast advancement at early levels. Its one reason why 5E has a lot of problems with being too easy. Players are pushed to 4th level a point at which death if you play 5E modules, is highly and I do mean highly unlikely. If you compare AD&D to 5E you see the problem almost immediately. Do you want to run a campaign with goblins, hobgoblins and orcs being the main protagonists but don't want to send hordes of them against the players? That is level 2 and some of level 3 play, you don't get that in 5E, short of you leveling up the goblinoids and orcs to be a higher CR like 1's or 2's for the base monsters.
For my current campaign I had to switch to milestone for the beginning otherwise the players would go through 15% of the content and out level the campaign.
It really depends on the campaign and what you are running. D&D 5E is horribad for fast advancement at early levels. Its one reason why 5E has a lot of problems with being too easy. Players are pushed to 4th level a point at which death if you play 5E modules, is highly and I do mean highly unlikely. If you compare AD&D to 5E you see the problem almost immediately. Do you want to run a campaign with goblins, hobgoblins and orcs being the main protagonists but don't want to send hordes of them against the players? That is level 2 and some of level 3 play, you don't get that in 5E, short of you leveling up the goblinoids and orcs to be a higher CR like 1's or 2's for the base monsters.
For my current campaign I had to switch to milestone for the beginning otherwise the players would go through 15% of the content and out level the campaign.
For AD&D:
Fighter 1 to 2 = 2,000xp, 2 to 3: 4,000xp
Thief 1 to 2 to = 1,200xp, 2 to 3: 2,400xp
Wizard 1 to 2 = 2,500xp, 2 to 3:5,000xp
For 5E:
Level 1 to 2 = 300xp
Level 2 to 3 = 900xp
Level 3 to 4 = 2,700xp
Well, this an entirely different conversation, but yes 5e is designed with a very different approach because of the whole sub-class concept. As a whole, 1st & 2nd levels are essentially "newbie" levels designed to be simple and approachable for new players limiting the choices/decisions players have to make to get started with the game. The real game doesn't actually start until you get your sub-class at 3rd level and as a whole from a design perspective, the assumption of the game is that experienced/veteran players of 5e would skip the first two levels and start their campaign at 3rd level, aka the real 1st level of the game designing their characters based on sub-classes. It's at this point that level progression normalizes, until then it's expedited.
You have to remember and accept the fact that 5e is a high-powered fantasy game using the base rules. Early levels of 5e are not meant to be the "tough early career levels" by design as they were in early D&D, quite to the contrary, they are supposed to be the "easy grace period for new players". You are actually far less likely to die at 1st level than you are at say 10th level assuming you are using the CR rating as a method to balance encounters and standard character creation rules like point buy of 4d6 drop lowest.
There is no early struggle or any meaningful danger to characters in 5e as a design decision at early levels. You can of course change that quite easily by ignoring the CR stuff and increasing the difficulty of encounters at early levels, though this may actually prove to be far too hazardous as the CR spikes really heavily. This is one way to create this struggle, which really you can do at any level but by design, it's not really how the game is supposed to work.
Many people believe the CR system doesn't work as intended, but it actually does exactly what it was designed to do, aka create a power fantasy feel where the player characters always win because they are the central heroes of the story. They are in a word, The Avengers. Bad ass to the bone, undefeatable and they only die at pivotal moments at the heights of a climatic end game story.
If you want the CR rating, difficulty and XP progression to make more sense in a gritty old school way and you want the game to be more of a struggle, the basis for difficulty are the ability scores. It's kind of the secret sauce of the CR system. If you want to have an early survival struggle ala old school D&D and to maintain a high level of difficulty throughout, just alter ability score generation to 3d6 down the chain or 3d6 pick/place and then use the CR rating as designed. You can further increase the difficulty by rolling hit points at 1st level. You will discover that even normal encounters become insanely hard at 1st level and remain quite difficult throughout the levels because players will actually have (comparatively) terrible stats to what you are normally used to and how the game is balanced as a power fantasy, which will result in a much slower progression even if you use the standard XP rules.
Unfortunately, none of this is actually explicitly explained in either the player's handbook or DMG. During the writing/design of the game many of the 3rd party designer contractors wanted to have a whole section of the book dedicated to alternative balance methods because even back then they knew that the game was very modular and could easily be adapted for different styles of play, but most of this material was cut from the book. In fact, the DMG originally was almost twice the page count, according to many inside sources there are entire chapters that were cut from the book that covered a wide range of topics that were simplified down to single paragraphs. Notably these lost chapters and alternative designs actually made their way into 3rd party supplements created by the very 3rd party design contractors that WotC used to develop 5e. See Level Up advanced 5th edition, Shadow Dark, 5th edition Hardcore and 5 Torches Deep. These are the reflections of some of the alternative balances originally proposed to be part of 5th edition.
You have to remember and accept the fact that 5e is a high-powered fantasy game using the base rules. Early levels of 5e are not meant to be the "tough early career levels" by design as they were in early D&D, quite to the contrary, they are supposed to be the "easy grace period for new players". You are actually far less likely to die at 1st level than you are at say 10th level assuming you are using the CR rating as a method to balance encounters and standard character creation rules like point buy of 4d6 drop lowest.
The main levels at which a player in 5E usually dies is 1st to 2nd level in 5E. All it takes is one critical hit and the character is generally dead at 1st level. For instance, a Level 1 Cleric with 14 constitution has 10 hit points and gets critted by a goblin. The player was already hit before by a goblin for 5 points of damage so they are at 5 hit points. The goblin crits for 8 hit points, the player is unconscious and then fails their death saving throw. Or worse, the player is fighting a hobgoblin who has a a friend present and crits, then the level 1 cleric takes 22 points of damage outright dying. At higher levels, the amount of escapes, healing, and bonuses present to saving throws makes it just about impossible to kill a player following CR and the daily suggested XP.
Remember in play testing when the WotC team tried to remove monster crits, this is why they did that. They don't generally like the idea of a player ever dying and monster critical hits give the players that chance at early levels. Its why we have healing word and death saving throws. It greatly cheapens the game and stakes, but its 5E.
The amount of modding I had to do to put death back in and consequences for whack a mole for healing word shouldn't have been needed in the first place, but I still had to do the work to put risk back into the game.
I was just wondering what was better XP or Milestone because I only have experience in Milestone and it's seems hard to track all the players XP!
Neither is better or worse—just different.
Milestone gives the DM control over levelling, and makes levels feel like something earned as part of the story’s progression. “We did this important thing, we get to level up.” It also is, as you note, far easier on the DM to track - they just need to track “did enough important stuff happen to justify levelling up the players?”
XP levelling rewards players each time they do something, eventually awarding a level up. The gains in XP levelling come from the grind and completion of quests, putting the focus on those elements over story milestones. For DMs who are stingy about handing our milestone levels, this can benefit the players, since it takes the arbitrary decision of the DM out of the picture. It can, however, make levels feel arbitrary - sometimes killing a low level abyssal chicken could be the catalyst for levelling, which isn’t exactly all that exciting.
Having run games with both systems, I personally prefer milestone. I like the control it gives over the story, the lack of random element to levels, and the fact it is not a pain to track. But different people have different preferences, so it is important to figure out what works for you.
XP is best for video games, Milestone is best for tabletop
XP is a better system, if you want to incentivize players to show up. Milestones is what most people in 5e use.
Matter of personal preference.
Both have drawbacks, both have benefits.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
As a GM, I prefer XP because I can use it to encourage the style of play I want to see in the campaign.
If I want to run a game where exploration is important, I give XP every time the characters explore somewhere and bring word of the new place back to civilisation, thus encouraging the players to be explorers.
If I want to run a game where stealth and reconnaisance is important, I don't give XP for random encouters and wandering monsters. The players are encouraged to sneak past random encounters, to use scouting to avoid wandering monsters, and so on.
If I want to run a mercenary game, I only give XP for loot (I did this in a Primeval Thule game).
Depends on whether you're doing homebrew or published adventures.
With homebrew...it's nice to have things so that you level up as important things are completed, which can only really be done with Milestone. Beat that boss? Nice, level up! On the other hand, it's less managing by the DM via XP, they just adjust the encounters as you level up. They don't have to think about when a nice time to level up is, trying to make the beats of the story match up, and so forth. Which is better is subjective since it's a playoff.
With published adventures...milestone, all the way. XP is pretty bad with those. Players are effectively encouraged to murder-hobo in order to get that XP bump, make non-narrative based decisions so they can level up and make things easier/not balanced against them rather than what their characters would do. You can partly homebrew it to fix that, but...why? The writers should have done the hard work of making the beats match the times to level up anyway, and the point of buying published adventures is that you don't have to mess around with it.
So homebrew, you have to balance up what you think is worth it. Published adventures (or prewritten ones), milestone every time. In fact, after my experience, even if they come with XP, I will change it to milestone, I will not run them with XP.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Yes
So, as a I noted earlier, they both have drawbacks.
I split the difference.
At the end of every session of play, I aware those who attended a Milestone point. When they do something that advances the storyline, I award a Milestone point. if they complete a really tough encounter, I might aware a milestone point. If they complete a particular task or close a chapter, I award a milestone point.
It takes a bunch of milestone points to level up. To go from 19th level to 20th level takes 25 milestone points in my current chart, for example. The number gets lower for lower levels, of course, but that's the basic stuff.
I have a peculiar calculation that matches XPs to Milestones for leveling up, as well -- because I need the XP stuff for the CR and Encounter Building (still haven't figured out how to adjust that).
That said, we switched to Milestones ages ago. We also use Hero Points and Inspiration rather liberally.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Milestone XP is awarded by the DM
XP is earned by players
As a DM it's not really your job to track people's XP, your job is to figure how much you owe them based on what they achieved after every session, which you are not wrong is a bit of a pain.
The general rule of thumb is that your players will generally do whatever earns them XP, so if you award XP for killing monsters, they will kill monsters, if you award finding treasure, they will become treasure hunters, you reward them for completing quests they will be focused on completing quests... you get the idea.
Generally, Milestone XP doesn't really offer any direction, so what you can expect is for players to constantly ask you when they will level up because they will have no way to tell.
I think it's a matter of personal preference. I use XP because it's easier for me to remember to give XP after every combat than it is to remember to do it after the important milestones. I think leveling a character after they achieve an important milestone, though, makes it easier for the DM to reward players for things other than combat. That's not to say that you can't do it with XP. It's just that there isn't an easy way to say, "Oh yeah. That puzzle was the equivalent of a Medium encounter and so everyone should get... hang on... what level is everyone again? Level 7? Okay, so a CR 7 creature is a hard encounter, so... umm... hang on a second... I can figure this out." It's just harder.
Its a fair point, but I tried milestone XP in my game for a while and I have also experienced it in games in which I'm a player.
As a DM the issue I found with it is that milestones are usually built into an assumption about something the players need to succeed to earn it. Now the problem is that the players may spend many sessions sidetracking and doing random stuff that isn't related to the milestone so if I stick to it, the intervals between levels can be quite long. Before to long the players started complaining that they never level up and I essentially had to level them up simply because X sessions went by and that was deemed to many, even though the players hadn't really achieved anything. So this is kind of my issue with milestone XP is that it ends up not really being about milestone, it just ends up being about X sessions play compared to Y session tolerance before the players start feeling like they don't level up fast enough. Noteably this all happens without any sort of meter or way for them to measure how close they are.
As a player I found that milestone XP is confusing because I don't actually really know what the milestone is. Like we play one session after another and none of us, myself included were really entirely sure what qualified as a milestone and when we asked... hey what is our goal or milestone? The answer was, well I can't tell you because it would give away part of the story, as the lack of clarity of the goal.. aka the mystery was a part of the game. So we just played and never really knew when we would level up or even really if we were on track to level up. When it finally happened, everyone was surprised because it was like.. ok that was it? We just needed to recover the puzzle box? It was just really wierd.
I think the main point of contention is the lack of clarity so I tried that. I basically told the players, ok to reach the milestone you have to recover this magic ring. Then I realized that because I told them that, its all they cared about. They ignored NPC's, and avoided anything that would slow them down, they were just racing to complete the quest so they could level.
In the end both knowing and not knowing what the milestones are were a problem, it just didn't work either way.
Giving out XP for different activities that can be deemed a success creates a very steady, measured way that the players can answer the question, how do we level up, what are the goals. When you offer XP for a wide range of things, players realize that.. ok, it doesn't really matter what we do as long as we are successful at doing it, so they make their own goals. When they realize, hey certain things give more XP, then they do those things.
So in the end you just have to figure out what things you want to be worth more XP and what things you want to be less XP based on what you want to reward in your campaign.
In mine for example I prioritize completion of quests, building political power, fame and recovering treasure, so those are the things you get the most XP for and I deprioritize fighting monsters, so you get a lot less XP for.
How much you actually give, is just something you feel out. You can create formulas for yourself or you can eyeball it. It doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent.
Something they do in Savage Worlds is just every three sessions is a level. I don't know if that would work for D&D, though. Maybe level divided by 2 number of sessions?
If you've got a specific story you want told and not have it bogged down by random encounters, then milestone is the way to go.
If it's more open world or there is a lot of hidden things that you don't want the players to know they've missed, then experience leveling would be a better way to go. As an example, the milestone is for the players to realize that the mayor has been replaced by a doppleganger and whether or not this is discovered drastically changes the future events. The players do all the tasks in town and then don't get a level, they know that they've missed something.
You do not need to define the milestone so narrowly as “find the doppelgänger” - you don’t even need to define the milestone in advance at all. If the party did a bunch in the town and missed the doppelgänger, but did enough that a level feels appropriate? Give them the level, backstab them later because they missed the doppelgänger.
It really depends on the campaign and what you are running. D&D 5E is horribad for fast advancement at early levels. Its one reason why 5E has a lot of problems with being too easy. Players are pushed to 4th level a point at which death if you play 5E modules, is highly and I do mean highly unlikely. If you compare AD&D to 5E you see the problem almost immediately. Do you want to run a campaign with goblins, hobgoblins and orcs being the main protagonists but don't want to send hordes of them against the players? That is level 2 and some of level 3 play, you don't get that in 5E, short of you leveling up the goblinoids and orcs to be a higher CR like 1's or 2's for the base monsters.
For my current campaign I had to switch to milestone for the beginning otherwise the players would go through 15% of the content and out level the campaign.
For AD&D:
Fighter 1 to 2 = 2,000xp, 2 to 3: 4,000xp
Thief 1 to 2 to = 1,200xp, 2 to 3: 2,400xp
Wizard 1 to 2 = 2,500xp, 2 to 3:5,000xp
For 5E:
Level 1 to 2 = 300xp
Level 2 to 3 = 900xp
Level 3 to 4 = 2,700xp
Well, this an entirely different conversation, but yes 5e is designed with a very different approach because of the whole sub-class concept. As a whole, 1st & 2nd levels are essentially "newbie" levels designed to be simple and approachable for new players limiting the choices/decisions players have to make to get started with the game. The real game doesn't actually start until you get your sub-class at 3rd level and as a whole from a design perspective, the assumption of the game is that experienced/veteran players of 5e would skip the first two levels and start their campaign at 3rd level, aka the real 1st level of the game designing their characters based on sub-classes. It's at this point that level progression normalizes, until then it's expedited.
You have to remember and accept the fact that 5e is a high-powered fantasy game using the base rules. Early levels of 5e are not meant to be the "tough early career levels" by design as they were in early D&D, quite to the contrary, they are supposed to be the "easy grace period for new players". You are actually far less likely to die at 1st level than you are at say 10th level assuming you are using the CR rating as a method to balance encounters and standard character creation rules like point buy of 4d6 drop lowest.
There is no early struggle or any meaningful danger to characters in 5e as a design decision at early levels. You can of course change that quite easily by ignoring the CR stuff and increasing the difficulty of encounters at early levels, though this may actually prove to be far too hazardous as the CR spikes really heavily. This is one way to create this struggle, which really you can do at any level but by design, it's not really how the game is supposed to work.
Many people believe the CR system doesn't work as intended, but it actually does exactly what it was designed to do, aka create a power fantasy feel where the player characters always win because they are the central heroes of the story. They are in a word, The Avengers. Bad ass to the bone, undefeatable and they only die at pivotal moments at the heights of a climatic end game story.
If you want the CR rating, difficulty and XP progression to make more sense in a gritty old school way and you want the game to be more of a struggle, the basis for difficulty are the ability scores. It's kind of the secret sauce of the CR system. If you want to have an early survival struggle ala old school D&D and to maintain a high level of difficulty throughout, just alter ability score generation to 3d6 down the chain or 3d6 pick/place and then use the CR rating as designed. You can further increase the difficulty by rolling hit points at 1st level. You will discover that even normal encounters become insanely hard at 1st level and remain quite difficult throughout the levels because players will actually have (comparatively) terrible stats to what you are normally used to and how the game is balanced as a power fantasy, which will result in a much slower progression even if you use the standard XP rules.
Unfortunately, none of this is actually explicitly explained in either the player's handbook or DMG. During the writing/design of the game many of the 3rd party designer contractors wanted to have a whole section of the book dedicated to alternative balance methods because even back then they knew that the game was very modular and could easily be adapted for different styles of play, but most of this material was cut from the book. In fact, the DMG originally was almost twice the page count, according to many inside sources there are entire chapters that were cut from the book that covered a wide range of topics that were simplified down to single paragraphs. Notably these lost chapters and alternative designs actually made their way into 3rd party supplements created by the very 3rd party design contractors that WotC used to develop 5e. See Level Up advanced 5th edition, Shadow Dark, 5th edition Hardcore and 5 Torches Deep. These are the reflections of some of the alternative balances originally proposed to be part of 5th edition.
But it does work.
The main levels at which a player in 5E usually dies is 1st to 2nd level in 5E. All it takes is one critical hit and the character is generally dead at 1st level. For instance, a Level 1 Cleric with 14 constitution has 10 hit points and gets critted by a goblin. The player was already hit before by a goblin for 5 points of damage so they are at 5 hit points. The goblin crits for 8 hit points, the player is unconscious and then fails their death saving throw. Or worse, the player is fighting a hobgoblin who has a a friend present and crits, then the level 1 cleric takes 22 points of damage outright dying. At higher levels, the amount of escapes, healing, and bonuses present to saving throws makes it just about impossible to kill a player following CR and the daily suggested XP.
Remember in play testing when the WotC team tried to remove monster crits, this is why they did that. They don't generally like the idea of a player ever dying and monster critical hits give the players that chance at early levels. Its why we have healing word and death saving throws. It greatly cheapens the game and stakes, but its 5E.
The amount of modding I had to do to put death back in and consequences for whack a mole for healing word shouldn't have been needed in the first place, but I still had to do the work to put risk back into the game.
It's a subjective question. Just like which is better cakes or doughnuts.
Milestone is easier for the DM.
Doughnuts.....Doughnuts are clearly better!