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15 level 1 combat encounters would have been mentioned in the Geneva Convention if they'd had D&D back then.
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Feb 6, 2023 01:56
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Azathoth posted:15 level 1 combat encounters would have been mentioned in the Geneva Convention if they'd had D&D back then. Side-note: This is an excellent post to start off the new page 
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Feb 6, 2023 02:03
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In all seriousness, I know you're not actually putting your players through a bad experience, but man... that's rough.
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Feb 6, 2023 02:05
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If you want your players to get to the next level faster you can always just hand out more XP for combat or social actions, or give it earlier than the milestone, whatever. No one's gonna call the cops.
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Feb 6, 2023 02:09
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Oldsrocket_27 posted:If you want your players to get to the next level faster you can always just hand out more XP for combat or social actions, or give it earlier than the milestone, whatever. No one's gonna call the cops. this is true too. lmop does xp a la carte but i think i'm gonna switch to milestone based and literally just level the players up when i feel it's time
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Feb 6, 2023 02:11
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The thing is that 15 encounters giving exp even assuming the enemies are weak should bring a party to level 3 at least. It’s only 300 xp to get to level 2 after all.
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Feb 6, 2023 02:31
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Maybe they keep fighting rats and chickens
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Feb 6, 2023 02:44
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This is the problem with exp leveling instead of milestone. One rat or one chicken is 10 exp a pop. Anyone killing 30 rats on their own over any period of time gets them to level 2, plus another 60 rats gets you to level 3. There are local exterminators or farmhands in moderately sized hamlets that should be walking around with Archetype skills. The first step to starting your career at the Arcaneum is to go slaughter 90 rats so you can access 2nd level spells because that is waaaay faster than actually studying. If you take 15 encounters to hit level 2, even assuming you are dividing exp between players but never doing the large mob exp bonus, that means you've spent a few in-game days constantly getting jumped by 2-3 rats or a small flock of chickens and just leaving piles of dead animals in your wake. That being said, it sounds like this is clearly milestone leveling and there was just a shitton of content available at level 1. At some point it would have been better to give them 2 at session ~5 and then buff everything available a bit. Zurreco fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Feb 6, 2023 |
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Feb 6, 2023 03:08
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Yeah it's Milestone based. It's the Escape from Old Redwick one-shot from the XP to Level 3's Quest-o-nomicon. Basically it's a horror spooky themed one shot where vision is limited to 20 feet due to a dark fog layering the town, i.e Silent Hill. Part 1 is them getting stuck in the town, gathering supplies, and finding information. The problem was I didn't properly convey the information they needed to know where to go to get information to escape which I think contributed to a lack of sense of danger and didn't really feel pressured that they needed to escape, and got easily distracted by abandoned shops and banks to rob instead.  Like if it was done I think as intended as Theatre of the Mind, I think you could easily do each part in a single session each; and have a lot less encounters. But because we're using foundry and the maps I made interpreting the scene descriptions were too big and gave maybe too many options for exploration which opened up other big maps which I filled with additional enemies this dragged things out.
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Feb 6, 2023 04:02
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Zurreco posted:This is the problem with exp leveling instead of milestone. One rat or one chicken is 10 exp a pop. Anyone killing 30 rats on their own over any period of time gets them to level 2, plus another 60 rats gets you to level 3. There are local exterminators or farmhands in moderately sized hamlets that should be walking around with Archetype skills. The first step to starting your career at the Arcaneum is to go slaughter 90 rats so you can access 2nd level spells because that is waaaay faster than actually studying. Well of course, don't you know how you defend a Ph.D thesis? The principle is the same.
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Feb 6, 2023 04:07
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Something about milestone leveling has never sat right with me. I can't put my finger on it. XP handed out for completing tasks and defeating monsters makes more sense in my opinion. It gives encounters some kind of value. You may have spent resources and lost HP, but at least you're a bit closer to leveling up.
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Feb 6, 2023 15:43
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I give xp for showing up to the table, for talking at npcs, for exploring new places, for completing quests and personal goals, and of course, for murdering monsters. But...since the GM is determining what xp to hand out when, you might as well just use milestones, it works out about the same as carefully nurturing the party's xp total. It just feels better to hand out xp, IMO.
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Feb 6, 2023 15:57
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Pvt.Scott posted:I give xp for showing up to the table, for talking at npcs, for exploring new places, for completing quests and personal goals, and of course, for murdering monsters. But...since the GM is determining what xp to hand out when, you might as well just use milestones, it works out about the same as carefully nurturing the party's xp total. It just feels better to hand out xp, IMO. That's how I feel as well. The GM is ultimately figuring out when to give XP, but at the very least by handing it out in small bits it feels more earned by the players. It also gives players that excited feeling of "I'm about to level up after this fight!" that gets completely lost with milestone leveling. The choice can also be taken away from the GM entirely when they're running a module, which I appreciate.
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Feb 6, 2023 16:00
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I'd argue premade modules passively encourage milestone leveling since going off of the milestone path means that the DM is going to necessarily need to start adjusting encounters more and more the deeper in the players get into the module or else they're gonna start having boring encounters as they roflstomp them or stressful encounters as they start having every random encounter become deadly. If the DM is prepping and building their own stuff, then it's basically down to how much tolerance the DM has for XP bookkeeping. I don't like it personally, but I can see how tables would like it and find it enhancing to the overall fun of the game.
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Feb 6, 2023 16:05
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I strongly prefer milestone leveling because I can work it into the narrative and it makes more intuitive sense to me. It just feels wrong to me to have a character be in the middle of a dungeon crawl and suddenly, right after killing a bunch of goblins, they *ding* and get new abilities that they didn't have a couple of minutes before. Having them level after a big achievement allows for the idea that the wizard took some time studying and thinking about those scrolls while resting and it finally clicked, so now he knows how to cast fireball or whatever. This is entirely personal preference, though. I totally get that some people enjoy racking up those points and I can imagine some tables/campaigns where I'd prefer that too.
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Feb 6, 2023 16:27
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Taeke posted:I strongly prefer milestone leveling because I can work it into the narrative and it makes more intuitive sense to me. It just feels wrong to me to have a character be in the middle of a dungeon crawl and suddenly, right after killing a bunch of goblins, they *ding* and get new abilities that they didn't have a couple of minutes before. Having them level after a big achievement allows for the idea that the wizard took some time studying and thinking about those scrolls while resting and it finally clicked, so now he knows how to cast fireball or whatever. The first 5e game that I sat in on as a player used milestone leveling and it worked pretty well. The PCs leveled up every session or two (4-6 hours per session), in part because we all wanted to explore the edition's high-level play. To the DM's credit, level-ups came after important story beats, and as the levels got higher there were longer and longer periods of downtime where the players pursued their own goals off-screen while gaining their new powers. The party would get together for an adventure or two, then spread out to do their own thing and then some new crisis would emerge and we'd get the band back together. It was a fun time, even if it felt a bit rushed. There was never a lot of time to get familiar with your new toys
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Feb 6, 2023 16:54
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My style as GM has gone from XP to milestone to reward cards back to XP. I plan to stick to using XP from now on. The frequent reward of XP is powerful because 1) it means the players are feeling mechanical character progression happen every session (reducing feelings of stagnation) and 2) the players get faster feedback on their behavior, steering them towards desired system behaviors faster (i.e., for D&D, going into dungeons and killing monsters). My latest campaigns with XP have just felt much better for the players, and so that's what I'd always recommend.
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Feb 6, 2023 17:22
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One thing that seems to have helped alleviate some of the issues of it taking several sessions is Loot. We used the Item Pile module which seemed to have had a lot of added fun value to the experience of looting because the players will huddle around the Loot Pile and spend the end of the session drafting their loot picks discussing the loot and so on. There's also been funny moments where one player who went first got a little greedy and passed over a more valuable gem for a less valuable gem because he say the less valuable gem first and just went for it.  I've probably been excessively generous with loot, probably partially to try to compensate for them not leveling yet, but also because its a one shot and I think the player largely intend to roll new characters for the next one shot so I don't think its a big deal, I do curate some of the entries in the loot table I'm using but I'm largely just learning and getting a feel of what are appropriate but still exciting items for a low level party to get.
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Feb 6, 2023 17:36
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HOMOEROTIC JESUS posted:My style as GM has gone from XP to milestone to reward cards back to XP. I plan to stick to using XP from now on. The frequent reward of XP is powerful because 1) it means the players are feeling mechanical character progression happen every session (reducing feelings of stagnation) and 2) the players get faster feedback on their behavior, steering them towards desired system behaviors faster (i.e., for D&D, going into dungeons and killing monsters). My latest campaigns with XP have just felt much better for the players, and so that's what I'd always recommend. This is why I appreciate the XP system in Warhammer. Every session players get a handful of XP for playing, and then bonus XP for roleplaying, doing heroic things, exploration, and completing objectives. The players can then spend this XP in small, incremental ways, cementing the progression of their character to the story of the game. I also let them take points in certain skills they wouldn't normally have access to if they have a good RP reason for it. For example, if one PC knows the melee (two-handed) skill, they can teach someone else the melee (two-handed skill) so long as they have downtime and both PCs are willing. It opens up a lot of cross-group RP and makes journeying from one location thematic and interesting. You can also use XP as a bonus to encourage other good player behaviors. For example, I've started awarding players bonus XP for taking good notes and finding certain rules in the book. It's a small bonus, but since implementing it I've noticed a stark increase in player awareness of the game world as well as a greater understanding of the rules. Verisimilidude fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Feb 6, 2023 |
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Feb 6, 2023 17:54
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I've been turned off of EXP ever since the party paladin noticed they were really close to leveling up and put the plot on hold to climb into a sewer and fight giant rats. I'm not sure what behavior it fosters other than wanton murder for high score. Maybe in a much more open-ended campaign.
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Feb 6, 2023 18:50
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Taeke posted:. It just feels wrong to me to have a character be in the middle of a dungeon crawl and suddenly, right after killing a bunch of goblins, they *ding* and get new abilities that they didn't have a couple of minutes before. This is why when I did XP, I also included training downtime. You don't ding the minute you accumulate enough XP; you ding after you've spent the training downtime. Now that everyone levels at the same pace, though, I prefer to just do milestones. The way some of y'all are describing XP is a little too transactional for my taste. I don't want leveling up to feel like a goal in and of itself. I prefer it to feel like a nice side-effect of going on adventures.
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Feb 6, 2023 18:52
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Bigsby's Hand is pretty interesting, but I also notice its pretty vague. Is it a creature? A Construct? Does it have immunities? If it grapples a target can it do anything with the grapple/like can it shove the target prone on the next turn? Its very flexible spell but also has a lot of uncertainty?
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Feb 6, 2023 19:03
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It's an object, so definitely not a creature of any type. I think it can do the actions in the spell description, no more or less. So if it's grasped somebody, your options are to inflict the crush damage or let go and use the forceful hand option to push them.
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Feb 6, 2023 19:11
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HellCopter posted:I've been turned off of EXP ever since the party paladin noticed they were really close to leveling up and put the plot on hold to climb into a sewer and fight giant rats. I'm not sure what behavior it fosters other than wanton murder for high score. Maybe in a much more open-ended campaign. Metagaming is the issue here, not XP.
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Feb 6, 2023 19:15
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Verisimilidude posted:Metagaming is the issue here, not XP. I don't think it's fair to blame players for responding to perverse incentives. If the game's systems encourage players to do weird things, then it's the systems at fault, not the players. The real answer is that if it's trivial to kill rats, they shouldn't reward any XP at all. The paladin isn't learning how to paladin better by slaughtering some animals. Good XP systems based on killing things can have a minimum level of enemy below which no XP is rewarded, and another option is to give the GM explicit permission to cut XP for encounters that proved to be trivial and cost the PCs no resources. Although that might feel bad for the players. Another option is to not reward XP for killing things, because it's kind of gross that our default paradigm for "adventure" is "violence", and that's one advantage of milestone leveling; players can feel free to skip encounters by sneaking around them or whatever without fear of losing out on rewards. (I assume encounters you explicitly defeat by nonviolent means probably pay out XP in 5e, right?) Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Feb 6, 2023 |
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Feb 6, 2023 19:18
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if i were dm of that campaign i would simply say "no you don't get xp for this bullshit"
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Feb 6, 2023 19:19
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Leperflesh posted:I don't think it's fair to blame players for responding to perverse incentives. If the game's systems encourage players to do weird things, then it's the systems at fault, not the players. I 100% disagree. Systems by their nature will always be exploitable. It's unavoidable. Because of that, you have to establish what is and isn't acceptable behavior at the table. I also wasn't directly blaming the player, but both the player and GM are at fault here (assuming this is something the table had an issue with).
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Feb 6, 2023 19:31
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The reason I use milestone leveling is because it removes any incentive from players to do anything besides what is most fun for them. If I've got a boss coming up and they're .25 of a level away from level up, I don't want them to then backtrack and do exploration they're not into because it'll help them on the big fight. And if I'm looking for ways to reward XP to them so they they're at the right level for the fight then I'm already doing milestone leveling only I'm adding some unnecessary bookkeeping to obfuscate it. If the table likes that bookkeeping, great go nuts as a DM, but be sure that the work actually justifies it. I signpost for my table when level ups are gonna happen, so they get just as much of the joyful anticipation from milestones as they would from counting XP, only without the tedious math.
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Feb 6, 2023 19:34
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Raenir Salazar posted:Yeah generally they're pretty happy and having fun; they were definitely excited/relieved to finally get their level up though and the next two parts are much more contained/straight forward/faster so they'll get through the next part probably in just 1 session, max 2. Level ups are a part of pacing a campaign, but yes, the “big maps with too many features” is a common part of the problem, and I think VTTs make it worse because you aren’t always using purpose-built maps. As always, if everyone’s having fun it’s all good, but I’ve come to appreciate constricted combat areas and the very anti-5E design of fewer, longer combats over many short ones. Kind of campaign makes a big difference. I think milestone levels work best in very unidirectional campaigns where PCs have clear purposes, and break down badly in megadungeons or anywhere where the PCs have meaningful choices about where to go (though a megadungeon could have milestones based on “clearing” a level if every level is fairly small). Mission-based campaigns lend themselves to milestones, as do campaigns about achieving a specific goal where the milestones reward progress towards that goal. I experimented with a quest-based milestone system where 1 major quest or 3 minor quests equalled a level and players could propose quests (I’d then decide if they were major, minor, or too trivial to qualify). It might work well with a different group of players, but mine have pretty much beelined toward the campaign goal quests and ignored anything else. The very slow-leveling campaign I’m in is very open and XP is almost all about getting valuables back to town or a hideout; monsters are worth 10% of their normal XP. In theory that should make us less murder hobo-y, but in practice it means the GM either faces us with an overpowered foe and we have to think our way around, or he gives us conventional combats and we kill everything. I suppose we are slightly more likely to negotiate or accept surrenders, but in practice that happens very rarely. As has frequently been observed, D&D expects combat and many of its systems are in support of that. Running a pure social or exploratory campaign probably calls for a system that better supports those approaches.
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Feb 6, 2023 19:45
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Verisimilidude posted:I 100% disagree. Systems by their nature will always be exploitable. It's unavoidable. Because of that, you have to establish what is and isn't acceptable behavior at the table. Exploitable isn't the issue. The issue is what kinds of activities get incentivized by the game systems. That is a completely different discussion. If you say something is not acceptable when the game mechanics outright incentivize it, then you should probably just change games. Your players will hate you and/or the game itself if you keep telling them not to do the thing that the game encourages them to do.
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Feb 6, 2023 20:11
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Finster Dexter posted:Exploitable isn't the issue. The issue is what kinds of activities get incentivized by the game systems. That is a completely different discussion. The game system also encourages players to max out particular stats, choose particular races, choose particular upgrades, rest as frequently as possible, etc. Some groups will have no issue with players exploiting these particular functions, others will. The problem isn't with the systems themselves but how players and GM choose to interact with them. The second you add rules to something, players will find a way to beat them and use them to their advantage. That's the nature of rules. XP may incentivize a particular mode of play, but so do all rules. That's why as a GM you have to establish ground rules with your players.
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Feb 6, 2023 20:20
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"Level 1/2 rats are worth 1000000000 experience, all other enemies are worth 1 experience." "The problem is with the players exploiting rat-slaying, not the system."
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Feb 6, 2023 20:23
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No that's just metagaming in the most obviously dumb and blatant way. The character has no reason to club rats to death. The only reason it's happening is because the player is aware of things the character can't be. You can't blame metagaming on the system, and you can't expect the system to account for metagaming. That's just dumb.
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Feb 6, 2023 20:25
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this is just the same old argument as always. "the game system is practically forcing me to be a gimmicky powergaming monkeycheese troll! i don't want to be like this but i'm practically obligated to maximize my damage output, per the ruels of the game!"
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Feb 6, 2023 20:27
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Only in this argument do we find people white knighting for D&D rules.
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Feb 6, 2023 20:35
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My DM has been having us use a bingo card for level ups. We fill the bingo tiles with character goals (e.g. save some peasants, defeat an evil monster, find an item/person relevant to my backstory) and at the end of each session we choose a tile to cross off: “hey DM, convincing that NPC to help us counts as bringing a noble house into the alliance right?” “Yeah mark it off.” When you get a bingo we have a scheme for replacing part of the used tiles with new ones so you can keep accumulating them but it becomes harder to race ahead of the rest of the party in levels. It’s been working well mainly because we have to come up with the goals. There’s a risk of saying “I need to learn gardening this session because it will make me complete the row”, but it hadn’t been a problem for us so far. Since the goals tend to matter there’s definitely no “go in the sewer and kill rats” type of incentive.
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Feb 6, 2023 20:40
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It feels like a lot of people have very little faith in their players and are not cultivating a gaming atmosphere they want to be a part of. All games are frameworks. If players are taking part in negative behavior that the game encourages, as the GM it's up to you to say "stop doing that" in a socially acceptable and understandable way. If a player gets mad at that then that sounds like a player problem and not a rules problem.brap posted:My DM has been having us use a bingo card for level ups. We fill the bingo tiles with character goals (e.g. save some peasants, defeat an evil monster, find an item/person relevant to my backstory) and at the end of each session we choose a tile to cross off: “hey DM, convincing that NPC to help us counts as bringing a noble house into the alliance right?” “Yeah mark it off.” When you get a bingo we have a scheme for replacing part of the used tiles with new ones so you can keep accumulating them but it becomes harder to race ahead of the rest of the party in levels. This seems great. It gives players a mechanical reason to pursue things they want to do.
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Feb 6, 2023 20:40
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I get the argument, but if you say "That's metagaming, the party should only be getting EXP for meaningful fights", and I am the DM who puts the meaningful fights in the world, then I'm essentially doing milestone leveling aren't I?
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Feb 6, 2023 20:41
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HellCopter posted:I get the argument, but if you say "That's metagaming, the party should only be getting EXP for meaningful fights", and I am the DM who puts the meaningful fights in the world, then I'm essentially doing milestone leveling aren't I? If you're keeping careful track of the XP players are getting from certain fights, yes. If you're putting encounters into a world organically and players are interacting with them organically, then not really. I personally never look at the XP my players are getting from an encounter or a group of monsters. Verisimilidude fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Feb 6, 2023 |
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Feb 6, 2023 20:43
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Pillars of Eternity did a thing where you get experience for the first (some integer) number of times you kill or otherwise defeat a particular monster, but past that they're only worth whatever loot they drop because you have nothing new to learn from them.
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Feb 6, 2023 21:15
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