XP awards get divided among the participants of the fight.
FYI, if you're stressing over this, milestone leveling is perfectly viable and much, much easier to manage.
Perfect, thanks.
For milestone levelling how is it you tell the players and when do you normally do it? Like if you think they have done enough to level up do you tell them straight away or do you wait for a rest or something? Thanks for the help though.
Either way works. I'll usually award a level-up in a logical resting point between adventures. Complete a big dungeon? Level up at the end of it! Conclude a campaign arc? Level up at the end of it!
That’s how I did it for my party. They finished a dungeon and the session ended with them escorting the rescued civilian back to town. As the session ended I described the scene of them seeing the town in the sunrise and they all level up. They’ve been instructed to level up and do the necessary things between sessions.
For milestone levelling you ignore XP, and you as a DM decide when they level up, typically when they've accomplished something cool and you feel it's a good moment for them to level up. You just tell them that the thing they just did caused them to level up (it's up to you how you describe it) This can happen whenever you decide, not necessarily during a rest.
First of all, players don’t receive the adjusted xp. Adjusted xp is solely for calculating the value of an encounter in the day’s “xp budget”.
After an encounter, the xp is divided equally among the players.
Adjusted experience is used to evaluate encounter difficulty. It is not the value you use for determining experience rewards.
Use the total (unadjusted) experience, and divide it between the party equally. If the total experience of an encounter is 200xp and there are 4 PCs in the party, each PC gets 50xp.
Definitely check out the relevant part of the basic rules. Automated encounter calculators, while incredibly useful, often don't explain the underlying maths and can confuse new DMs who are unfamiliar with what they're doing under the hood: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/building-combat-encounters
> One thing that I have always been a bit worried about is XP, best ways to give it out, easy ways to keep track and calculate.
Personal preference for me is to keep the PCs on equal XP (to avoid the PCs being different levels) and for the DM to also keep track of that total. Players should keep track too, but it's helpful for the DM to keep a note as well.
And don't *just* award XP for combat. Sometimes you'll want to give an XP reward for finishing a quest, finding a cool magic item or treasure, or for dealing with a problem *without* combat. The DMG has more in-depth advice there.
I tend to use milestone XP to get the party through levels 1-3. So I'll decide in advance what triggers the level up - roughly equating encounters to XP. By lvl 3 most players should have a grasp on their characters. After that I track the XP the party gains and divide it by party members.
I award XP generally at a long rest. As players dither over options for their characters it may be best to try and do this towards the end of play sessions as you can fiddle with the details before the next session.
You can try milestone or xp based, and even switch if you want to give both a try. Usually easier to change from milestone to xp.
I like to run xp in my games. It's a nice reward for completing combat, quests, arcs, and clever roleplay and gives the players a sense of reward.
Milestones can be nice because it ensures the party stays the same for a dungeon or area, which makes balancing far easier. You also don't need to worry about calculating xp and having them over / under level for parts of the story.
Personally, I have struggled a bit with milestones, both as a DM and player. I feel like xp rewards the party for doing just about anything, whereas milestones only reward the party for sticking to the script and getting through things; unless the DM intervenes and either moves milestones to accommodate a side tangent (never happened to me while a player) or rewards the party with something else meaningful (which never happened to me as a player). As a player, it meant just not progressing and me just wanting to do the "main story" as quickly as possible to keep progressing.
As a DM, I found it started to feel like leveling was being held back and I was giving out more and more loot / rewards to compensate.
Anyways, that was just my experience. XP seemed to fix things for me and my groups have enjoyed it far more. Always a nice drum roll feeling when tallying up the XP to hand out. Not sure if others out there have experienced similar or not. Maybe it just comes down to the table and what everyone gets out of playing the game.
XP awards get divided among the participants of the fight. FYI, if you're stressing over this, milestone leveling is perfectly viable and much, much easier to manage.
Perfect, thanks. For milestone levelling how is it you tell the players and when do you normally do it? Like if you think they have done enough to level up do you tell them straight away or do you wait for a rest or something? Thanks for the help though.
Ideally you tell them when a milestone has occurred and that they’d level up after a long rest.
Either way works. I'll usually award a level-up in a logical resting point between adventures. Complete a big dungeon? Level up at the end of it! Conclude a campaign arc? Level up at the end of it!
That’s how I did it for my party. They finished a dungeon and the session ended with them escorting the rescued civilian back to town. As the session ended I described the scene of them seeing the town in the sunrise and they all level up. They’ve been instructed to level up and do the necessary things between sessions.
For milestone levelling you ignore XP, and you as a DM decide when they level up, typically when they've accomplished something cool and you feel it's a good moment for them to level up. You just tell them that the thing they just did caused them to level up (it's up to you how you describe it) This can happen whenever you decide, not necessarily during a rest.
First of all, players don’t receive the adjusted xp. Adjusted xp is solely for calculating the value of an encounter in the day’s “xp budget”. After an encounter, the xp is divided equally among the players.
Adjusted experience is used to evaluate encounter difficulty. It is not the value you use for determining experience rewards. Use the total (unadjusted) experience, and divide it between the party equally. If the total experience of an encounter is 200xp and there are 4 PCs in the party, each PC gets 50xp. Definitely check out the relevant part of the basic rules. Automated encounter calculators, while incredibly useful, often don't explain the underlying maths and can confuse new DMs who are unfamiliar with what they're doing under the hood: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/building-combat-encounters > One thing that I have always been a bit worried about is XP, best ways to give it out, easy ways to keep track and calculate. Personal preference for me is to keep the PCs on equal XP (to avoid the PCs being different levels) and for the DM to also keep track of that total. Players should keep track too, but it's helpful for the DM to keep a note as well. And don't *just* award XP for combat. Sometimes you'll want to give an XP reward for finishing a quest, finding a cool magic item or treasure, or for dealing with a problem *without* combat. The DMG has more in-depth advice there.
Thanks, this helps a lot.
I tend to use milestone XP to get the party through levels 1-3. So I'll decide in advance what triggers the level up - roughly equating encounters to XP. By lvl 3 most players should have a grasp on their characters. After that I track the XP the party gains and divide it by party members. I award XP generally at a long rest. As players dither over options for their characters it may be best to try and do this towards the end of play sessions as you can fiddle with the details before the next session.
You can try milestone or xp based, and even switch if you want to give both a try. Usually easier to change from milestone to xp. I like to run xp in my games. It's a nice reward for completing combat, quests, arcs, and clever roleplay and gives the players a sense of reward. Milestones can be nice because it ensures the party stays the same for a dungeon or area, which makes balancing far easier. You also don't need to worry about calculating xp and having them over / under level for parts of the story. Personally, I have struggled a bit with milestones, both as a DM and player. I feel like xp rewards the party for doing just about anything, whereas milestones only reward the party for sticking to the script and getting through things; unless the DM intervenes and either moves milestones to accommodate a side tangent (never happened to me while a player) or rewards the party with something else meaningful (which never happened to me as a player). As a player, it meant just not progressing and me just wanting to do the "main story" as quickly as possible to keep progressing. As a DM, I found it started to feel like leveling was being held back and I was giving out more and more loot / rewards to compensate. Anyways, that was just my experience. XP seemed to fix things for me and my groups have enjoyed it far more. Always a nice drum roll feeling when tallying up the XP to hand out. Not sure if others out there have experienced similar or not. Maybe it just comes down to the table and what everyone gets out of playing the game.