D&D 5E XP Chart and High-level NPCs

[FormerlyHemlock]

Here's a thought:

I came to 5E from AD&D (2nd edition). In every world I've ever run up until now, high-level NPCs are rare, because even getting from 1st level to 2nd was a nightmare which practically required a doctoral degree and a thousand dead orcs. (I exaggerate, slightly.) Furthermore, the world was deadly enough that trying to gather enough experience to go from 10th level to 20th was extremely dangerous and likely to end in death, whether from a failed save vs. Basilisk gaze or type F poison or simple HP damage. So when I built my first 5E world, I built it with some low-level NPCs, but the idea was that if anybody is going to be a high-level NPC it will have to be the PCs.

After some experience with 5E, I'm no longer sure that that's a logical consequence of the game rules. 5E combats are easy. There are no real save-or-die effects to speak of any more, resurrection is easy and painless (Revivify) with no chance of failure, and many of the worst things that can happen to you are removed with a simple Dispel Magic spell according to Sage Advice (although I don't use that ruling). Furthermore, the XP tables are compressed. Using Tarrasques as a unit of measurement: you no longer have to kill three and a half Tarrasques to get a single PC from 10th level to 11th. Nowadays a single Tarrasque can boost four PCs almost two complete levels--advancement is twenty-five times faster!

Because advancement is so quick and easy, and attrition is set up to be low, I'm starting to think that the default state of the 5E gameworld should resemble the Forgotten Realms: lots and lots of high-level PCs, where a 10th level wizard is as common as a grad student in our world and you can expect him to soon be a 15th level wizard as he defeats greater challenges and becomes capable of safely tackling even greater challenges. He may possibly be a 20th level wizard in less than two years.

That rate of advancement makes me uncomfortable but it seems to be clearly implied by 5E's system. I can think of some ways to prevent that snowballing from occurring, without tweaking the XP table, but the most obvious is to make it nontrivial to find things to safely kill for XP. I.e. completely ignore the "encounter difficulty" table even more than I am doing today and set things up so that if you start harvesting e.g. a kobold tribe for XP, the kobolds will proactively kill you and maybe levy a legal complaint with the local government in the process. "Adventurers" would be disreputable folks who are attracted to trouble spots like flies to manure so they have the opportunity to "justifiably" take lives and harvest XP. For a standard academic wizard, it's easier and safer to putter about at 3rd level for a number of years (perhaps gradually accumulating 100 XP a month from research) than to involve one's self in the world of black ops and fast XP.

Thoughts? Especially from grognards.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Thoughts from a guy that likes 5th edition just slightly more than my previously preferred BECMI and AD&D 2nd edition:

There is no reason, not one, to assume the rules for PC progress during a campaign have anything at all to do with the rate at which NPCs "level up" or with how many NPCs of what level the world might host.

NPCs don't inherently have levels; the butcher in the village isn't "Level 1 fighter" or "level 4 expert" or anything like that, even that wise sage in the tower north of the city isn't "wizard 18" even if using the Archmage NPC stats to represent him if any are ever needed. So if giving them levels and assuming their progress through those levels matches the intended rate of progress through levels for PCs causes problems, just don't do it.

I'm of the opinion that only special NPCs should even be considered for giving PC-class write-ups, and then their level should be assigned to fit whatever purpose they are meant to serve in the campaign, not some arbitrary "well, this guy rules a dominion, so he must be at least 9th level" thing. In my version of Mystara, for example, King Stefan Karameikos is a 13th level fighter not because I think his military career actually involved enough experience to reach that level, but because if any character in a campaign I'm running sees him in battle, that is the level of "jeez, the King is one heck of a warrior" he is meant to be - other kings in the setting that aren't meant to be fierce enough combatants to inspire a cultural belief that they are a reincarnated hero of legend, I just use the Noble or Knight stats for and call it good. Never, in any circumstance, thinking on the topic of how much XP they might or might not have gained.

Separation of "these are the rules so that playing the game is fun" and "this is how the world works" is very, very important to me.

 

[jrowland]

Your assessment is probably accurate. The design goal was roughly level 1-20 in 9 months. But PCs are not the regular Joe Adventurer. 10th level dudes might be grad students, but you may be surprised by how rare a Grad student is, let alone the RHodes Scholar (ie PCs).

 

[TheCosmicKid]

That rate of advancement makes me uncomfortable but it seems to be clearly implied by 5E's system. I can think of some ways to prevent that snowballing from occurring, without tweaking the XP table, but the most obvious is to make it nontrivial to find things to safely kill for XP. I.e. completely ignore the "encounter difficulty" table even more than I am doing today and set things up so that if you start harvesting e.g. a kobold tribe for XP, the kobolds will proactively kill you and maybe levy a legal complaint with the local government in the process. "Adventurers" would be disreputable folks who are attracted to trouble spots like flies to manure so they have the opportunity to "justifiably" take lives and harvest XP. For a standard academic wizard, it's easier and safer to putter about at 3rd level for a number of years (perhaps gradually accumulating 100 XP a month from research) than to involve one's self in the world of black ops and fast XP.

I always took it for granted that this is the way the D&D world works. I mean, "harvesting a kobold tribe for XP"? Who does that? XP is not a concept that exists in-universe, and only a crazy person would willingly venture any nearer than he must to a tribe of devious little flesh-eating psychopaths. For heaven's sake, he could be killed!

Like @AaronOfBarbaria said, PCs are exceptional. I don't even think we have to wave our hands and invoke some out-of-game "They're the protagonists" reason that they're special -- they're special because they're leading vastly more action-packed and dangerous lives than 99% of the characters in the world. Voluntarily! (Usually.) That's what experience points and PC class levels represent, in my mind: the most intense on-the-job "training" humanly possible. NPCs, like those we find in the back of the Monster Manual, don't have many class features because they haven't had to master so many tricks so quickly just to survive. They may, however, have a lot of hit dice just because they've been doing whatever they've been doing for a long time. You're not born an 8-HD Knight.

Separation of "these are the rules so that playing the game is fun" and "this is how the world works" is very, very important to me.

Ideally, the rules would accurately model how the world works. I do want the numbers on the page to have some understandable correlation to what's going on in the fiction. The absence of this correlation was a major problem with 4th Edition creatures and NPCs, for me.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Ideally, the rules would accurately model how the world works.

Either we disagree on that, or we aren't using the same definition of "accurately model how the world works," as accurate modeling would get in the way of the game being fun as a game, involving things like mandatory training times so that a character might learn all the information that a sage has spent decades learning, and more, in a shorter time, but not overnight because they gained enough XP to hit a level that gave them the option to take a feat and they took Skilled and applied it to various fields of knowledge.

Game play first; modeling the world later, and by way of hand-wave if need be.

I do want the numbers on the page to have some understandable correlation to what's going on in the fiction.

So long as you aren't requiring every single number to have direct and universal correlation to the fiction, that is easily achieved. Correlation to the fiction is exactly the means by which I decided upon level 13 and the fighter class for King Stefan Karameikos - but I did not force the number of XP associated with getting to level 13 as a PC to have correlation in the fiction, because that would have meant requiring the war he fought in and the life he lived before, after, and during, to be astonishingly violent and eventful, resulting in those soliders he fought alongside being of similar level (because XP is shared evenly among participants in overcoming challenges) despite their purpose and importance in the fiction not matching his.

 

[Sunseeker]

The XP advancement is likely the easiest I've ever seen in any edition. For the type of combats and games I run, it is not unreasonable for a party to go from 1-5 within a few hours (my combats are always on the dangerous side, which generated more XP). I one charted a game where my players went from 1-5 within 5 hours, they went through 10 difficult+ combats and resolved several local issues (for which they got some bonus XP). I later threw them at level 11 against an adult green dragon, followed by an ancient silver dragon the next in-game day. The total XP gave them 3 levels. Worse, low CR creatures are overtuned and high CR creatures are under-tuned. This tends to result in deadly lower levels with rapid leveling, and not-so-deadly higher levels with rapid advancement.

Honestly I'm thinking of halving all XP in my next game. It's just too darn fast, or simply going back to my traditional way of "you level when I say so."

I do tend to agree that the baseline for 5E seems to be a high-magic world, with lots of powerful adventurers, foes and creatures of myth and legend. That doesn't really surprise me given the built-in Greyhawk lore.

I don't think more "time" passing in-game really addresses the problem, since the passage of in-game time does not mesh up to any standard passage of time out of game, IE: 5 minutes IRL is 5 days in game, always, forever, fixed.

I think the best solution is to reduce early-level XP rewards and increase later level requirements. With the middle being about the same. Why two different approaches instead of simply increasing XP needs or slashing XP rewards across the board? Mind games! Kobolds/Goblins/Orcs/Skeletons rewarding less XP discourages players from grinding them. Higher levels requiring more XP encourages players to seek out new challenges. So, mind games. It's the same tactic video games use to keep people from grinding low-level trash and get them to move on to more challenging content.

 

[Shiroiken]

The core assumptions of 5E are not to my liking either. My current campaign has kept many of the base assumptions, but high level NPCs are still very rare. The next campaign, however, will likely have a much slower rate of leveling and higher deadliness.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Either we disagree on that, or we aren't using the same definition of "accurately model how the world works," as accurate modeling would get in the way of the game being fun as a game, involving things like mandatory training times so that a character might learn all the information that a sage has spent decades learning, and more, in a shorter time, but not overnight because they gained enough XP to hit a level that gave them the option to take a feat and they took Skilled and applied it to various fields of knowledge.

Game play first; modeling the world later, and by way of hand-wave if need be.

"Accurately model how the world works" = "NPC statistics should be determined by their in-universe capabilities and not by what would make them 'fun' or 'challenging' for the PCs". From your King Stefan example it sounds like we're on the same page here.

The XP advancement is likely the easiest I've ever seen in any edition. For the type of combats and games I run, it is not unreasonable for a party to go from 1-5 within a few hours (my combats are always on the dangerous side, which generated more XP). I one charted a game where my players went from 1-5 within 5 hours, they went through 10 difficult+ combats and resolved several local issues (for which they got some bonus XP).

Ten fights in five hours?

Isn't that a little implausible in and of itself?

 

[Sunseeker]

"Accurately model how the world works" = "NPC statistics should be determined by their in-universe capabilities and not by what would make them 'fun' or 'challenging' for the PCs". From your King Stefan example it sounds like we're on the same page here.

Ten fights in five hours?

Isn't that a little implausible in and of itself?

No, they were all low-level fights and we run fast. There's not exactly much to run on a kobold or a guard.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't justify game mechanics with what is actually happening in the campaign world.

Game mechanics are there to make the game a game. A game that the designers have determined to be the most likely to be "fun" for the most amount of people. I personally find it to be a fool's errand to try and justify those game rules with some sort of "truth" about the world the game is set in, because 95% of all game mechanics make no narrative sense.