Remember "Knights of the Dinner Table" with Dave wandering through the woods banging cookpots together to draw wandering monsters to slaughter for XP?  Or Newt hamstringing the horses in the stable as "a safe source of locally available XP?"

That's what "XP for monsters" gets you.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1026917Remember "Knights of the Dinner Table" with Dave wandering through the woods banging cookpots together to draw wandering monsters to slaughter for XP?  Or Newt hamstringing the horses in the stable as "a safe source of locally available XP?"

That's what "XP for monsters" gets you.

Yeah which is why I allowed players to pay for training at a rate of 12 hours for 10 xp.

Quote from: estar;1026915When I started running OD&D campaigns in 2007  I changed from a roleplaying award to a milestone award. Although I didn't call it that back then.  My formula was a base xp award times their level times a factor. The base XP changed to being from 100 xp to 400 xp depending on how fast everybody wanted to level. That only time I go higher than 100 xp as the base is for when I run campaigns with time constraints like once or twice a month at a game store, or once a week two hours in the late evening. The factor is based on the significance of the goal. One for when it is a ordinary evening with some progress, up to four for achieving something major. In my old system 3 was the typical factor but I found "punishing" player with a 1 or 2 rarely worked as intended. So I just increased the base award and dropped the default factor to 1. Now I only reward.

I like this.

Thanks!

I been going with XP amount based on difficulties of quests, regardless of how characters worked/pushed through them.

Quote from: S'mon;1026809Been running 5e D&D both online & tabletop for just over three years now. A few thoughts. Feedback/abuse welcome.

The monster creation rules are garbage, I just have to do it 3e style and eyeball a CR.

Agreed...I don't even bother. CR is just a number that gives the player XP. It doesn't give a meaningful scale in a rigorous system, though.

QuoteThe encounter-building rules are also garbage, I do it 1e style and ignore them, which works great in 5e.

Same here.

QuoteThe rapid advancement from 1st to 3rd is one of those 5e things that works much better in practice than on paper, and has significant potential gameplay benefits when combined with 'bounded accuracy'.

What it doesn't work with is old-school modules. I ultimately found it easier to revise 5e's experience tables than to try and figure out how to jigger the Temple of Elemental Evil so that the party isn't level 15 by the time they hit the nodes.

QuoteXP - Been playing around with this a lot. The 5e XP system is over-focused on monsters I think, and tends to make wandering monsters a source of welcome XP rather than a threat.

The crazy thing is even 4e had encounter formulae for traps & challenges. I grafted in 1e's advancement rather than try to mess with things on a granular basis. The PCs all level up using the Thief table, and 1gp = 1xp. It has taken players a while to adjust to the fact that killing every monster they find is the slowest possible way to level up, but they finally seem to be coming around. It's kind of fun to watch them debate whether to sell an Elven Cloak or keep it.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1026973What it doesn't work with is old-school modules. I ultimately found it easier to revise 5e's experience tables than to try and figure out how to jigger the Temple of Elemental Evil so that the party isn't level 15 by the time they hit the nodes.

I mostly run conversions of OSR stuff; I haven't noticed this to be a huge problem but yes default advancement is faster esp post level 10. But 5e PCs are relatively weaker, esp post level 10, so being high level matters less.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1026973It's kind of fun to watch them debate whether to sell an Elven Cloak or keep it.

Today I saw the party trade a +1 warhammer for the raising of a dead 1st level Druid, which was cool. :cool: I think they regretted blowing most of their cash on excess healing potions when they lost 2 PCs in one fight & needed raising.

I often award pcs training paid for by their patron.  Magic items are more likely to be awarded than found because I want them to be special.  I also require gold to be spent on training at a rate of 10gp / day to turn it into experience.

I'm with Gronan when it comes to xp for killing monsters turning the game in a somewhat nastier direction.  Though, if you do Rolemaster kill stealing becomes a problem because you get awarded for what you do, there's your experience and other people's experience and it can make things a bit hostile.

Another way to curb level gain is to adapt older editions of D&Ds system where the challenge of the encounter effects the EXP. So if you are level 10 and kill a kobold thats probably 1 to no EXP even if you killed a bunch of them. 5e actually has something like that in the rules. But it is a bit too convoluted.

I've been running or playing 5E since the Next playtests.

Positives:

* Supports theatre of the mind.
* Takes the best parts of the 3.x rationalization of the game systems and discards the worst of the fiddly parts.
* Easy to convert traditional D&D adventures.
* Fixes a lot of little issues with earlier editions (ie tracking durations of spells and effects, imbalanced spells, etc.)
* Offers lots of options for customized PCs without going full char op.

Negatives:

* Ranged attacks are overpowered. I've had to houserule disadvantage on firing into melee or through combatants.
* On a related issue, I don't think I'll ever get used to Rogues being death-dealing strikers. The 5th level Rogue in my current group routinely does 20-30 damage per round with a hand crossbow.
* Looking up spells is still a big pain in the ass. Spell cards at the table are almost mandatory.
* It's really tough to challenge a party with a single monster. A party of five can focus so much fire in a single round that a solo monster doesn't stand a chance. This weekend I thought a Gorgon (AC 19, 114 HP, petrification attack, etc) would pose a tough challenge to the party of five 5th level PCs. Nope. They used summoned creatures to prevent it from charging or reaching petrification range and dropped it in two rounds with ranged attacks.
* The move-attack-move capabilties, along with attacks of opportunity, means combat is still vulnerable to annoying and gamey tactics.
* There's enough vulnerability in the PC options that we still have players doing using cheesy optimization. Maybe some guys will do that no matter the edition.

Quote from: Haffrung;1027062* It's really tough to challenge a party with a single monster. A party of five can focus so much fire in a single round that a solo monster doesn't stand a chance. This weekend I thought a Gorgon (AC 19, 114 HP, petrification attack, etc) would pose a tough challenge to the party of five 5th level PCs. Nope. They used summoned creatures to prevent it from charging or reaching petrification range and dropped it in two rounds with ranged attacks.

I observed as well. Luckily most of the big bads have minions, but for the truly solo monsters I beef them up to where I think they ought to be. I don't do scaling. I rather populate things to how I think people would find them if it existed. I have a sense about how experienced a party should be to take on various creatures and locale and when it is a lair of a solo monster I learned to beef them up a bit when using 5th edition to run the Majestic Wilderlands.

Quote from: Haffrung;1027062* It's really tough to challenge a party with a single monster.

Once the Monk gets Stunning Fist a solo non-legendary monster IMC rarely even gets an action!

As far as XP for other than killing monsters, they did put out that "3 pillars" leveling system that really allowed for a shift in focus (although it ultimately left it up to the GM to decide whether they wanted all the pillars to matter or not). There are also some optional leveling systems in the DMG and adventures. I was quite a fan of XP for gold but I have to admit I often run without using XP these days, a lot of players just don't care about it and would rather just trust the GM to decide when they level.

We level every 2-3 sessions. Haven't used XP in years.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1026917Remember "Knights of the Dinner Table" with Dave wandering through the woods banging cookpots together to draw wandering monsters to slaughter for XP?  Or Newt hamstringing the horses in the stable as "a safe source of locally available XP?"

That's what "XP for monsters" gets you.

I remember a blog posts talking about nobles etc. being high level because of them doing a lot of hunting with lots of servants to make things easy for them as they had a constant stream of XP coming in. Which makes a certain amount of sense for some settings...