D&D General What do you prefer to give/get XP for?

[Quickleaf]

Next time I run D&D, I'm excited to try Judd Karlman's Bingo Style XP system because it includes a mix of classic/GM-defined goals (e.g. "overcame a challenge with cunning") to player-defined goals (with some guidance on guiding players to develop those, e.g. "Used the wisdom of my comrade’s people, taking a tale they told of their people and applying it").

Original post: Bingo Style Experience Points
Follow-up post mentioning combat/roleplay/exploration balance: Bingo Style Experience Points after a few months of leveling up

However, currently running Frostmaiden 5e in play-by-post, which has some sandboxy elements, so I tried something a bit more defined than milestones, more akin to a video game quest log...

To Level Up to 4th: Complete 4 quests in the Ten-Towns. You may replace (up to 2) Ten-Towns quests with significantly progressing or resolving your individual character quests.

 

[lolsworth]

XP is so interesting because it's changed a lot over the years and 5e does it so poorly that most players these days think they hate XP as a concept and just do milestone aka "GM decides when" levelling

But when done properly XP can be a great tool to drive play. What gets rewarded gets repeated. So with only xp from monsters, the game becomes largely about killing monsters. You don't want to avoid the monster or scare it away or trick it into letting you pass - none of those give you XP. You want to kill it, so XP for killing monsters encourages murderhobo behaviour.

PbtA games ask questions at the end of every session, and the questions depend on what game you're playing. In Monster of the Week it's asking whether you saved someone or learned things because it's a game about monsters and investigating.

When I tried PF2E the XP system was a real eye opener. Every encounter, however you resolve it, gives XP. Monsters, traps, obstacles, people to talk to. And it's based on difficulty so scales to level and avoids the "how much xp is this monster worth" nonsense. A moderate encounter is 80xp - so easy to use and remember. And it's simple to add in xp for other things you want to encourage. So in Kingmaker award xp for discovering new locations.

When done right, XP is great and not only drives play and encourages certain behaviour, but gives players a sense of progression

 

[AnotherGuy]

I put a huge variety but the truest answer is "it depends on the campaign."

While i generally prefer milestone (generally 1 level per mini story arc) when i use xp i use it to help provide a mechanical way to reinforce the type of campaign I want. If I want a campaign focused on monster hunting I'll probably award xp per monster killed with a bonus for certain boss monsters, if its a hexcrawl/exploration campaign I'll probably give no combat xp but give xp for discovering locations and secrets, If i run an adventure path from paizo I award xp for hitting the story beats, if i run a pirate campaign I might reward 1 xp per gold piece, etc.

Xp is generally useful as a way to mechanically tell players "here are the things that are important to this campaign/story.

So I did this for character growth in relation to the TBIF and TBIFs in our campaign increase with level so there is greater chance to lean into that. Gain disadvantage on a check as it relates to one of your TBIFs and earn XP.

 

[Malmuria]

The Dolmenwood RPG (which uses a house ruled b/x as a system) has an option for XP for exploration. I think I will use this when I run it

XP For Exploration

Referees wishing to encourage exploration of Dolmenwood and its mysteries may award XP for a variety of exploration goals.

Awards: A deed award for the party’s average Level (see the Milestone Awards table). Each character in the party receives the award.

Exploration goals: Some example exploration goals arelisted below. The Referee may invent others as desired.

▶ Visiting a settlement for the first time.
▶ Entering a hex for the first time (optionally excluding hexes simply travelled through by road).
▶ Finding a lost shrine.
▶ Finding a nodal stone.
▶ Discovering a hidden location.
▶ Meeting a faction or type of creature for the first time.▶ Confirming the veracity of a rumour.

 

[Lanefan]

I used to do milestone leveling, until my players complained about it. ("So basically we only level-up whenever you say so? DM-may-I have a level?")

When we switched to online gaming, we went back to tracking numerical XP. It's a lot easier to do on Roll20--I've installed a mod that automatically distributes and tracks XP for us. Anytime a monster token is marked "defeated," it looks at each monster's CR, adds up the XP for each one, then distributes it to the party. I can also type in any amount of XP and distribute it to one or more characters with a click of a button. I push that button whenever:

• A trap is successfully disarmed
• A curse is broken
• A downed character is rescued
• A quest is successfully completed
• Exceptional in-character roleplaying
• Certain parts of the map are reached

The mod is called Lazy Experience.

Interesting.

Does it allow you to alter the distribution among individual characters for each encounter or xp-granting event? E.g. characters A, B, and C get full xp for an encounter, character D gets half (contribution consisted ot keeping a lookout and that's it) and character E gets nothing (was somewhere else at the time) - can Lazy Experience handle that?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Whatever XP is rewarded for, I prefer that it is player facing in the game rules.

I can tell you what I don't like giving it for:

• "good roleplay"
• DM-says-so milestones

I don't like XP being at the whims of the GM.

But it's all at the whims of the DM. The DM places the monster, places the treasure, places the obstacles to overcome.

If you have an adventure generated and adjudicated by a DM, everything ultimately is up to them, whether it's "player-facing" or not.

There are lots of good games that have no DM role at all, which would remove the issue for you. But D&D by default isn't one of them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Ideally, leveling happens as a result of players successfully engaging with the game in the way it is meant to be played. Doing that via XP breaks that down to smaller, more intermediary steps than milestone leveling does, but in theory, leveling happens because the players played the game "right" enough times.

So if you want your game to be about getting treasure, you should level people up for getting treasure.

If you want it to be about heroism, you should level people up for being heroic.

If you want it to be about roleplay, you should reward people for roleplaying.

So there's no one size fits all answer, because I think, even in the space of 5E D&D, people don't often all want the same thing. (Ideally, everyone at the table agrees with what their game is about, but even that's probably not happening often enough.)

 

[ezo]

Just pointing out something about my vote for Killing Monsters I am including "defeating" as well as killing. Monsters driven off, surrendering, etc. count as full XP.

Also, monsters encountered but when the characters LOSE and must flee themselves, still grant half the XP as if they had won.

 

[CleverNickName]

Interesting.

Does it allow you to alter the distribution among individual characters for each encounter or xp-granting event? E.g. characters A, B, and C get full xp for an encounter, character D gets half (contribution consisted ot keeping a lookout and that's it) and character E gets nothing (was somewhere else at the time) - can Lazy Experience handle that?

Yep. And you can either do it with a macro (if you're going to be repeating it a lot), or you can do it on the fly by typing the !xp command.

For a while the party had an NPC hireling that was getting half XP, so I configured it to give that character a half-share of XP. I just wrote a macro called "WithHire" and it would toggle on whenever I clicked the button.

 

[Velderan]

Yeah, I just cut all that off by not using XP at all. If the players want to just kill everything (I hope they dont) then its up to them. Im not going to lead them around with XP systems though. That is specifically what I want to avoid.

The issue I had with milestone in the AP I am running is it’s a dungeon crawl with multiple paths through so it is entirely possible they could level up twice quickly by meeting the objective on 2 different levels which then creates a chunk of the adventure where they wouldn’t level up again for a long time while they finish exploring the rest of the levels they have already finished the goal for leveling. It felt like it was going to create severely uneven pacing.

They’re nearing the end of the AP, so I already told them I will stop awarding exp when they hit level 10 and milestone them to 11 when they finish the AP so they’re at the correct level for the start of the 11-20 AP we are following it up with. Undecided if I will do milestone or track exp for that one yet. I am still reading the material.