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Tracking XP made more sense when different races/classes leveled at different rates. Now? It's an atavism.
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Jul 11, 2023 11:48
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cowboy
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FFT posted:Tracking XP made more sense when different races/classes leveled at different rates. Now? It's an atavism. That's incorrect. It's also important for sandbox play, like the opening half of Tomb of Annihilation. God, talking about D&D rules with 5e players sometimes feels like the metaphorical Dark Ages in so far as so many reasons and explanations for why parts of the game are they way they are have just been completely forgotten.
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Jul 11, 2023 11:50
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FFT posted:Tracking XP made more sense when different races/classes leveled at different rates. Now? It's an atavism. Agreed, "you level at the end of each adventure/a narrative point that makes sense" is way easier and more effective than having to divvy up XP after every single encounter (even non-combat ones). We did XP for the first session of TOA and then our DM immediately ditched it. Arivia posted:That's incorrect. It's also important for sandbox play, like the opening half of Tomb of Annihilation. The official modules all have level guidelines for each section so you don't have to use XP
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Jul 11, 2023 11:51
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change my name posted:The official modules all have level guidelines for each section so you don't have to use XP That doesn't make it any less important. XP accounting is incredibly crucial in a sandbox (hexcrawl, in this case) because it's a direct feedback loop for diffuse actions that are not necessarily contributing to an overall goal. Otherwise you're going to end up with the degenerate play that's already been discussed in this conversation, with players skipping enjoyable/narratively relevant opportunities solely to focus on the thing that gets them a level up. Sandbox games are far more than Tomb of Annihilation, I just gave it as an example to demonstrate how this model exists in 5e. And even in Tomb, having a level guideline can still result in that degenerate play if XP rewards aren't included and the DM just makes explicit main plot milestone progression.
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Jul 11, 2023 12:05
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You’re assuming players know where the milestones are, which they don’t. They DO however know they’re just 5 more rats away so let’s take a detour to go rat hunting no I don’t care how important the macguffin is cmon it’s just 5 more rats.
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Jul 11, 2023 12:07
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Arivia posted:That doesn't make it any less important. XP accounting is incredibly crucial in a sandbox (hexcrawl, in this case) because it's a direct feedback loop for diffuse actions that are not necessarily contributing to an overall goal. Otherwise you're going to end up with the degenerate play that's already been discussed in this conversation, with players skipping enjoyable/narratively relevant opportunities solely to focus on the thing that gets them a level up. I don't see how these two things connect at all. The DM says "You'll level up when you hit certain points of the module/adventure/a certain number of sessions. I'm not telling you when that is." The players are encouraged to not just go out of their way to murder things. Maybe the people I play with just aren't mega power gamers or whatever, but I've never seen players skip out on side quests and narratively important moments just because they're racing to level up.
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Jul 11, 2023 12:09
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History Comes Inside! posted:You’re assuming players know where the milestones are, which they don’t. That's what "DM just makes explicit" means, yes. And yes, that's why I'm pointing out it's important in a sandbox, not the narrative railroad you're suggesting.
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Jul 11, 2023 12:09
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change my name posted:I don't see how these two things connect at all. The DM says "You'll level up when you hit certain points of the module/adventure/a certain number of sessions. I'm not telling you when that is." The players are encouraged to not just go out of their way to murder things. Maybe the people I play with just aren't mega power gamers or whatever, but I've never seen players skip out on side quests and narratively important moments just because they're racing to level up. Again, we had lots of people talking about explicitly having that play experience where they felt like skipping things that didn't level them up wasn't worth it in the last page of this discussion. There's already people participating with different experiences from you.
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Jul 11, 2023 12:10
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If they don’t know where the milestones are in the sandbox then they’re incentivised to go crawling all over it, there’s nothing for them to make a beeline for to just hit whatever they assume will guarantee a level up.
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Jul 11, 2023 12:11
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Maybe a good balance is for the DM to take XP into account when planning encounters so that they can place the milestones roughly around the time the players have earned about the right amount of XP? So then you get the benefits of milestones while also avoiding the 'nipping off to kill 5 rats' problem.
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Jul 11, 2023 13:25
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Variable leveling rates in older D&D didn’t really do anything after the first few levels due to XP requirements increasingly geometrically and character power being tied much more to magic items.
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Jul 11, 2023 13:27
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I love so much the feeling "we already covered three narrative arcs, we should be level up this time, right? No? well, I guess we are stuck at a level 8 for at least another arc..." that milestones give. /s
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Jul 11, 2023 14:55
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YggdrasilTM posted:I love so much the feeling "we already covered three narrative arcs, we should be level up this time, right? No? well, I guess we are stuck at a level 8 for at least another arc..." that milestones give. /s If you're covering three arcs and not leveling, your DM doesn't understand milestones, arcs, or leveling, holy poo poo.
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Jul 11, 2023 15:07
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You can kind of combine the two. Milestone leveling, but DM uses their personal notes of XP earned as a guideline for pacing.
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Jul 11, 2023 15:07
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Yeah, if everyone levels up at the same rate / has the same number of XP, the DM can keep track (even in a general, casual manner) and tell the players when they level up. On the other hand, in the campaign I'm running right now, I just fling out (casually estimated) XP totals at the end of each session and let the players keep track, which is one less thing for me to worry about.
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Jul 11, 2023 15:15
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nelson posted:You can kind of combine the two. Milestone leveling, but DM uses their personal notes of XP earned as a guideline for pacing. That's basically what I do. Rough track of xp and then levelling at the next appropriate story beat.
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Jul 11, 2023 16:13
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whydirt posted:Combat being a fail state is actually very true to old school D&D where its XP was tiny relative to gold XP in most campaigns. I mean, that's life generally. Direct conflict is always a fail state for at least one party, and before it starts you never actually know which party that will be. Arivia posted:This is because combat is the only thing 5e actually has good rules for and therefore the game incentivizes it above everything else. That's also fairly true. At root d&d is a combat game.
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Jul 11, 2023 16:34
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Arivia posted:This is because combat is the only thing 5e actually has good rules for and therefore the game incentivizes it above everything else. Totally right, I wish I had understood that when I first started playing the game. disaster pastor posted:If you're covering three arcs and not leveling, your DM doesn't understand milestones, arcs, or leveling, holy poo poo. What a player thinks is an arc might not be what the DM thinks is an arc. If the players take more sessions to hit a milestone than the DM expects, it can happen quite easily. nelson posted:You can kind of combine the two. Milestone leveling, but DM uses their personal notes of XP earned as a guideline for pacing. This is IMO best practice for milestones if you do them. It doesn't have to be exact but the DM needs to have a record of player activity since the last level up. I'll remember what the players have done, but I will 100% forget what the timeline of level ups was without such a record. What I like about the default XP system is that I don't really need to remember, the players do it for me.
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Jul 11, 2023 16:41
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You can easily do milestones in a sandbox. You just set those milestones to the goals of sandbox play instead of the plot points of an overarching narrative. The easiest versions of this is "gain a level after discovering X locations in area A, gain another level after fully exploring Y of them," "gain a level for surviving X days/sessions of travel in dangerous place" or Rime of the Frostmaiden's "get level X after completing Y of the quests in this section." You can also do stuff like "gain a level for establishing an organization, gain a level for establishing an organization's dominance in an area" or "gain a level for having a significant and durable effect upon the politics/religion/trade/underworld of area A" or just have the players talk about their overall goals and assign milestones to those.
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Jul 11, 2023 18:20
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I am currently running Strahd which is a standard sandbox. I am also using milestones for leveling. The trick is to give non-exp rewards for doing sidequests (magic items, feats, and alliances mostly) and to scale the later encounters in the game to whatever level the players end up being at the time. Level breakpoints then feel like they are tied directly to the plot and I also get to tinker with the difficulty of homebrew/scenarios/battles in a way that feels rewarding to everyone. The hardest part about PCs deserving to be rewarded for resolving plot points without violence (and they should, IMO) is that it is really hard to make it feel rewarding for either the players or the DM. There is a huge difference between fighting off a mob vs one player making one good argument to the mob leader and backing it up with a nat 20 Persuasion check because one of them can take a whole session and the latter is potentially 45 seconds of game time. The only way to stretch that kind of stuff out is to forecast the confrontation well in advance and have the players actually want to pre-empt it so that they are putting in the work to unlock the option for peaceful resolution. I am sure a better DM than I would handle it better but the alternative to deflating the situation is to railroad them into combat or whatever.
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Jul 11, 2023 23:37
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I'm currently running Descent into Avernus with the actual Avernus portion working as a hexcrawl, and the players knew exactly what they needed to do to level up--they need four parts for a machine they need to repair and gain a level per part collected. This hasn't led to them single-mindedly focusing on collecting those parts; in fact, almost a year ago to this day they were making plans to visit one of the locations they'd received as a lead one one part, before ending up on a year long detour of ping-ponging from place to place just visiting locations because they could see them from where they were or were on the way to a place marked on their map they'd decided they wanted to visit. That's not to say there were no rewards for their exploration, some locations they explored yielded treasures or powers that granted them abilities not available through XP levelling, others offered players lore and history on the world, some gave them the chance to make new allies to help achieve their goals, and yes, some offered a level increase because they stumbled into a location keyed to have a part, whether they'd received a lead to it or not. I think it's worked rather well. On the flip side, until a few months ago I was also a DM in a multi-DM West Marches style game. I was doing much the same thing as in my Avernus game, make a bunch of locations, fill them with items and lore, players find leads in one location leading them to others., Much like with Avernus, I had a background mystery which was intended to drive players forward, make them interested in working out what had happened in this land they were exploring. I worked with other DMs to give players other goals they might choose to engage with, stronghold construction, development of the town they lived in, etc. And I was pretty much ready to lean into and help support any self-directed goal the players could come up with, if the mystery element or the development aspects didn't appeal to them. But sadly it became quite apparent that the only things most of the players were interested in were XP and magic items--nothing else mattered unless it had a direct and near-immediate impact on combat effectiveness. Maybe my mystery stuff was just crap, but it was just soul destroying feeling like my purpose as the DM was to be this evening's XP dispenser. When the campaign eventually collapsed under the weight of the DMs getting burned out, the only part which survived was one DM who'd recruited a few of the players to run a side campaign...using milestone levelling. Some of those players were the most single-minded of the bunch when we were using XP, but on milestone levelling they chilled out--once the pressure was off to optimise your "XP/hour". I don't think this was the fault of XP levelling--I've run an XP based campaign with that first group and it had none of those problems. What I think matters is the type of players you have--every player is an individual and every group is unique, and what works for one group won't work for another. But I've come to personally prefer milestone levelling for my main group, and I don't hesitate at all to tell them what they need to do to reach the next level, because I know reaching the next level isn't the top priority for any of them.
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Jul 12, 2023 01:12
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We recently moved from xp to milestones because the levels were coming in too fast with exp. At level 11 the exp needed for a level drops, and combined with not really being able to challenge a high level party (especially with magic items) while staying within the exp budget just made them speed through levels.
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Jul 12, 2023 01:24
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I have, however, deliberately done a sequence break in the longest-running game I'm currently in. We're on a quest to get five keys, and each of the three we've gotten normally took 3-9 months irl of the three years we've been playing. Each key acquired gets us two levels. Some legendary aberration was trying to gently caress with us by offering basically a pseudo-wish, and my character's desire was to get the Dragon Key. Suddenly my character found himself on the Draconic Plane next to the pedestal with the key on it, so he snatched it, admired all the dragons flying around, and hopped in his bag of planar travel that the DM had forgotten about lmao Now we're on the last and probably hardest because we're trying to get the Celestial Key and my character is carrying around a book of apocalypses that hosts a major demon, and had been converted (with consent) to a warlock with that demon as patron a while back. But hey, saved us months and got us two levels in the process~ stringless fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 06:53
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In Savage Worlds it pretty much worked out to an Advancement every other session. Don't sweat just giving out a level every X sessions because while players can sandbag, that just means more time for the villains to do things off screen.
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Jul 12, 2023 10:43
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Capfalcon posted:To me, the only merit in individual XPs is to allow for them to diverge and allow different levels of players in the game. I also like that it would incentivise some people to be less flakey. Only the guys who show up get XP, which can create a fear of missing out for Flakey Dave. If you miss an occasional session it won't matter, everybody has to miss sometimes. But if one guy misses more than average his character is going to start falling behind.
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Jul 12, 2023 11:33
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Facebook Aunt posted:I also like that it would incentivise some people to be less flakey. Only the guys who show up get XP, which can create a fear of missing out for Flakey Dave. If you miss an occasional session it won't matter, everybody has to miss sometimes. But if one guy misses more than average his character is going to start falling behind. So this is actually a big downside. What actually happens is that someone has a reason where they just won't make it....whether they get sick or family issues or whatever. Then they know next time they come in they are behind everyone and unlikely to ever catch up. So now because they have missed something to real life they are playing at a negative compared to everyone else, which acts as a disincentive to show up. Meaning they are more likely to flake again, and again...until they just stop coming. Don't penalize people in-game for the stresses of the real world.
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Jul 12, 2023 13:05
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Yeah, the game I'm running has two mothers with very young children as players. They sometimes have a tough time getting away even playing online, and I don't want to disincentivise them playing at all.
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Jul 12, 2023 13:44
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I guess if you have a group with a known guy who just flakes on stuff the EXP method could help, but most of the time when people don't show up, they actually can't. It would have to be a known flaker. We had a guy who kept flaking and making up excuses and it turned out he just wasn't that into D&D but was afraid he would upset us if he quit. Eventually my DM just talked to him out of the game and the player said he didn't want to quit to let everyone down. Something about how social D&D is makes players feel like they are letting down their friends if they bail out of a group, but life happens and not everyone likes D&D.
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Jul 12, 2023 14:12
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Do not institute in-game penalties for IRL behavior. Jesus gently caress what is wrong with y'all??? Just talk to your players like people.
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Jul 12, 2023 14:46
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Yeah, I don't want my example of an alternate XP to be used to punish players with busy lives outside of the game. I was just hypothesizing a way to keep the original outcome of "different levels in the same group and incentivizing characters to take risks to advance quicker" without tacking on a monster/treasure accountant simulator at the end of every session.gurragadon posted:I guess if you have a group with a known guy who just flakes on stuff the EXP method could help, but most of the time when people don't show up, they actually can't. It would have to be a known flaker. GeekSocialFallacies.txt
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Jul 12, 2023 14:50
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Toshimo posted:Do not institute in-game penalties for IRL behavior. For real. The person who is unreliable might become more reliable with that approach but that approach will eventually lead them to abandon the game entirely. If their life is busy and that's the problem, they're not going to get more reliable because of that. They're just going to fall further and further behind with no catch-up mechanic until eventually they stop showing up altogether because the group has moved on without them. If they're just unreliable, you might get them to show up more for a while but very few people enjoy being compelled to do things socially for fear of the consequences, so I'm guessing that this eventually leads to the flakey person just straight up ghosting the group because that is some bullshit way to treat friends.
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Jul 12, 2023 15:19
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If attendance is super important to you as a person, so very important that you're willing to try to solve it with the rules packaged in a game that is not about correcting the social faux pas of your friends, then why the gently caress did you invite Flaky Dave to play D&D anyway? Curate your drat table! Honestly the last two pages have been bullshit armchair psychology, this is just the silliest outgrowth of it. Milestone vs. XP and how they can affect the engagement of your players? Talking to your players about what they want from the game is also a form of engagement, and it doesn't involve anyone describing endorphins as doled out by an RPG book chart!
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Jul 12, 2023 16:13
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theironjef posted:Honestly the last two pages have been bullshit armchair psychology, this is just the silliest outgrowth of it. Milestone vs. XP and how they can affect the engagement of your players? Talking to your players about what they want from the game is also a form of engagement, and it doesn't involve anyone describing endorphins as doled out by an RPG book chart! lol yeah. i swear sometimes rpg players forget that they're playing a game of their own volition with their friends for fun
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Jul 12, 2023 16:22
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I think you’ll find I’m playing a game because ~3-4 years ago my friends put an event in a shared calendar for every other Tuesday night and that’s a binding contract
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Jul 12, 2023 16:29
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The in-game benefit of showing up is listening to all my dumb NPC voices
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Jul 12, 2023 16:56
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whydirt posted:The in-game benefit of showing up is listening to all my dumb NPC voices Who could resist my allure of "Cockney Guard" and "Nasal Noble who will drift to Cockney three sentences in"?
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Jul 12, 2023 20:44
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Just run a one-shot or something like Honey Heist if someone can't make it to a session.
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Jul 12, 2023 20:49
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Destrado posted:Who could resist my allure of "Cockney Guard" and "Nasal Noble who will drift to Cockney three sentences in"? Samwise Gamgee Farmer, that's a good one. Growling Malevolently Until It Becomes Too Difficult To Keep Up And I Stop, that's another
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Jul 12, 2023 22:26
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PeterWeller posted:Just run a one-shot or something like Honey Heist if someone can't make it to a session. I have a lower limit in terms of number of people I'll run the proper game with. I have a six person party. If five are there we run as normal. If four are there I'll ask if people want to run or do something else. Below that and I'll break out Lasers And Feelings or You Awaken In A Strange Place.
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Jul 12, 2023 22:54
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grobbo posted:Samwise Gamgee Farmer, that's a good one. This is why I refer to my DMing style as “narration”…so my friends can’t make fun of me when my Orcs and Elves and pet cats all sound like the same monotone guy.
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Jul 12, 2023 23:23
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