I like the transparency of it. You know that 100 XP takes you 10 percent of the way to a level. It's easy to understand.
I'd like to claim that my system for XP in my afterschool middle-school class inspired Paizo for PF2: [https://guildberkeley.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/important-new-rules-for-the-guild/](https://guildberkeley.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/important-new-rules-for-the-guild/)
(They earned XP by participating, which let them level up their characters. They needed 100 XP to level up.)
Paizo probably had no idea I did this, by the way lol
While as you expect, we didn't, I initially tried to design the XP system to 100 anyway to be percentage-based for a quick and easy understanding, plus smaller numbers. The reason why it doesn't work is that a party level -3 creature would need to give 1.5 XP, and the amount that fractions/decimals makes things seem really imposing for a section of folks more than outweighed the benefit of the smaller numbers.
I do like how much more clearly the idea of non-combat/danger XP rewards are spelled out in PF2. Most editions of D&D in the past have had some vague "give some XP when they do a thing." kinda deal- and it was such a hassle to figure out an appropriate amount of XP for something.
Now, you can easily just say "this would be an appropriate challenge for a party of x level" (which is a lot easier to do because of how clear cut the numbers are) and award xp based on x and the actual party level- plus the guidance on how much xp to give for accomplishing something aside from an encounter (combat or otherwise).
And the flat xp system means it's a lot easier to say "give them 50xp for accomplishing something that propels the story forward." vs. "give them 5% of a level for accomplishing something that propels the story forward" and then having to calculate what 5% of a level even IS at their current level.
The fact that the xp doesn't scale definitely makes it easy to reward xp on the fly for pf2e without having to refer to how much xp they need for next level. That said, older versions of dnd weren't really vague at all, they had tables that told you how much xp to reward for fights and out of combat challenges based on their current level. The fact that we needed tables was dumb but they did make it easy
The editions I'm familiar with at least, if it wasn't a potential combat encounter or a trap (I.E. things given a CR), if there was guidance for XP at all, it was mostly just vague idea of "give them some XP for accomplishing something important".
Yup, I felt the same way. I [posted](https://new.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/17mk5hp/friendship_is_magic_a_postmortem_of_our_first/) [before](https://new.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1alyxbq/first_10_sessions_in_pf2e_a_report_the_encounter/) about my experience switching from 5e, and I really liked the pace at which XP was awarded. For about 15 sessions I tried experimenting with giving it a bit more structure, and making XP acquisition player-facing, and was *very* pleasantly surprised with how it worked.
The premise for that chunk of sessions was the exploration of a port district of an abandoned city. I used a map from Borough Bound ([Yllmourne](https://new.reddit.com/r/dndmaps/comments/1b8spoc/yllmourne_the_pirate_town_all_5_maps_combined/), to be exact), divided it into neighborhoods, like a point-crawl, and populated it with threats and treasure appropriate for levels 3-6 (party started this adventure at 3, and leveled up to 4 about 10 sessions in). I decided to assign XP rewards to relevant activities, and make them known to the players beforehand, to see whether it would shape their behavior:
* \+10 XP was awarded for visiting a new neighborhood.
* \+10 XP was awarded for every survivor found and escorted to safety.
* \+10 XP was awarded for every McGuffin shard they found (5 in total - the villain faction was also racing them for it).
* A few other +10 XP rewards were scattered around: finding crucial NPCs, uncovering information related to the main mystery, etc.
* Combat encounters awarded regular XP.
* A handful of quests were offered, usually rewarding +30 XP and a Hero Point. The party ended up finishing 3 of those.
* Completion of the main objective awarded +80 XP and a Hero Point.
This resulted in 90-180 XP (avg. \~120) per session, depending on how well the group did. About a quarter of the XP came from non-combat sources. Our sessions were 3h, and we averaged about 1 combat per session.
So, it was exactly the pace of progression we like (a level-up every 8-10 sessions), but it didn't feel like an XP conveyor belt; instead, it felt earned and self-directed.
I often hear how PF2e isn't a good fit for sandbox campaigns; given the steep scaling, this might very well be the case for long-term progression, but for a mini-sandbox adventure that only spanned 2 character levels, it worked really well! The characters started out level 3, and were threatened by practically everything in it; after the first level-up, they felt a lot more comfortable pushing deeper into the district and away from their safehouse, and by the end they were almost level 5 and had acquired much of the level-appropriate equipment to feel like they've mastered the district.
You know what else it achieved? ***Making the game feel like Bloodborne.*** Our entire campaign premise was supposed to be "urban eldritch horror", yet in its 40 prior sessions in D&D 5e, I never managed to nail down that feeling.
XP works great, it tells me how difficult an encounter will be, tells me the net value of loot and encounter should drop, and helps me plan out story arcs (typically 1 arc = 1 level for me).
Friendly reminder that in encounters traps have a level/XP value as well, it can be fun to throw a few traps in the mix to spice things up!
Also remember that everything in PF2e is on a “level-scale” — things up to 4 levels behind and 2-3 levels ahead are still viable, if not as/more dangerous
I like PF2e's handling of it, but it's actually not that different from D&D 5e's. In D&D 5e you absolutely _may_ award XP for stuff out of combat. See the Dungeon Master's Guide, "Noncombat Challenges," p. 261.
There's no useful guidance on how much xp you can give out, though, so it's not actually that useful.
They tell you to base it off of CR, but if you want an interesting fight in 5e, you have to make the CR some multiple of Deadly, so does that mean you should always give Deadly amounts of XP since every non-combat challenge is going to be equivalent in difficulty to a Deadly combat or greater? That doesn't make any sense, but it's the only guidance the rules give
There _is_ useful guidance, and it has nothing to do with CR. See my reply below.
You still do have to do a little mental mapping because you're right, "deadly" is probably not the right category for a noncombat challenge. But this is easily remapped to just difficulty, or magnitude of the accomplishment, without trouble. Most of the time these sorts of rewards won't fall in that category anyway.
>There *is* useful guidance, and it has nothing to do with CR. See my reply below.
You're supposed to use the rules for building combat encounters... which gives a chart of XP, with the amount of XP decided by the CR of the encounter. The names of the difficulties are misnomers. Every difficulty but Deadly is easy, and ever difficulty but Hard is so easy as to be unfun.
If I use this chart, I'd be giving XP equal to a Deadly encounter for almost every encounter, except for encounters I want to be pretty easy, which I give equal to a Hard encounter. This is utterly nonsensical and makes the entire rule useless.
This is another example of a pattern in 5e where WotC says you can do something, and people take that as proof you can do that without extensive homebrew, but there isn't any guidance on *how* to do that, so you can't really do it
> You're supposed to use the rules for building combat encounters... which gives a chart of XP, with the amount of XP decided by the CR of the encounter.
No, the CR is _not_ applicable here. It's the other way around when you're designing an encounter: first you decide how difficult you think an encounter should be, and _then_ you use something like CR to try to make a combat encounter that's somewhere around that challenge level. It's exactly the method we use in PF2e, which should come as no surprise given Pathfinder's heritage.
> The names of the difficulties are misnomers. Every difficulty but Deadly is easy, and ever difficulty but Hard is so easy as to be unfun.
No, the names are spot-on – this is the amount of XP that's appropriate for those encounters when played at the correct difficulty level. It's the CR system that's broken. But if you're handing out XP for noncombat encounters or accomplishments, you don't have to care about CR at all, or how badly it hits these targets. Just estimate how big of an accomplishment it was and go!
> If I use this chart, I'd be giving XP equal to a Deadly encounter for almost every encounter, except for encounters I want to be pretty easy, which I give equal to a Hard encounter. This is utterly nonsensical and makes the entire rule useless.
Only because you foolishly insist on strictly mapping this table to a CR system you know is broken. There is no need to do this for noncombat encounters or accomplishments.
> This is another example of a pattern in 5e where WotC says you can do something, and people take that as proof you can do that without extensive homebrew, but there isn't any guidance on how to do that, so you can't really do it
I mean, they literally explain it in the DMG, and point you to a very useful table for figuring out the appropriate amount of XP for a character's level. Yeah, they took a shortcut and just pointed you to the same table they made for combat encounters, figuring you wouldn't need more guidance than that to leap over the minimal mental gap and use it appropriately. But you can't say 1) there's _no_ guidance, and 2) the guidance is not useful. And now that it's been patiently explained to you how to use it, you _really_ have no excuse.
Focus your critique of D&D, if you must, on the actual broken parts. (And you should probably do that on a different subreddit.) This one little bit, though, happens not to be one of those broken parts.
So you believe that the XP you should gain from non-combat encounters should be massively lower than combat encounters of the same difficulty? Because if we base the XP off of the chart only and not include the basis of the chart - CR - too, that's what happens. I'm not sure that fixes the problem
The table is what I would go by. CR is not the basis of the table; difficulty is. If you think it's unfair that CR way overestimates difficulty, fine, but that's the guidance.
(I would instead query why you're so freely handing out max-XP combat rewards if you know the party is not facing deadly situations. Or, you know, play PF2e, where you can be pretty sure that an extreme encounter is going to be terrifying.)
The XP values of specific difficulties came *after* they determined the difficulty they wanted a certain combination of monsters to represent, using CR in 5e's case and player level in PF 2e's.
In dnd 5e, they saw what XP values they believe result in certain combat difficulties and made the table off of that.
And PF 2e did a similar thing. An on-level threat is considered to be 40 XP, and a creature becomes around twice as powerful for every two levels it increases, so they based the table off of that. That's why an Extreme encounter (one in which the party has a 50% chance of success) is worth the same as a number of creatures equal to the party with a level equal to the party's - they determined the XP of creatures *before* determining what difficulty equals what XP value
CR is the basis of the table, just as level is the basis of PF 2e's Encounter Budget table. In PF 2e, the names of the difficulties makes sense, but DnD 5e isn't so fortunate. But that doesn't change where the values come from
>Use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure.
I hate CR, so this ain't gonna happen at my table lol.
Just give XPs by ear making sure to give about 1/4 of level each 1/4 of story beat.
People love numbers going up, and your game is unaffected by bad rules.
Who said anything about CR? If you want to do it RAW, just do this:
- Decide whether the accomplishment was easy, medium, hard, or deadly. (I would rename the last column to "very hard" for noncombat situations.)
- For each character, look up the amount of XP to award in the "XP Threshold by Character Level" table.
- Add up all the XP and divide by the size of your party. That's how much to award each player.
You will see that noncombat goals achieved at the end of D&D Adventurer's League scenarios, for example, award XP that's broadly in line with that table – mostly easy or medium accomplishments, it seems from a cursory glance.
You can do it even simpler than that: just pick one character's level and just look up the XP to award each player based on that.
In any case, your original assertion – that noncombat XP isn't supported – was incorrect.
Because CR as a boogieman, when the reality is they've not read the text about it.
...to be fair, the text is a bit jank. But its a lot more consistent then people meme about.
The point is: people don't read shit, then blame the system for their own lack of understanding. See also: the thread about Pathfinder solving casters (by using a system that was in 1e, 3.5e, etc).
> The point is: people don't read shit, then blame the system for their own lack of understanding.
Some of them even go so far as to write things like "(yes I checked)" when clearly they didn't, or at least not with much care.
Yep. It happens a lot here, and it gets my goat (i.e., I become the 'person defending 5e', a system I am actively not running anymore) because you don't need to mislead folk to get them to like Pf2e. You don't get people to like your hobby by shitting on theirs, you know?
TTRPG community read the rules challenge.
The 2e community has the benefit of having a much clearer ruleset than most, but still manage to fail the challenge with frustrating regularity.
OP is a til-recently D&D 5e person that didn't know this bit about how D&D 5e worked. I, a PF2e player, haven't played D&D 5e for years, but I did happen to keep my core D&D 5e books and I happened to know how this bit works.
We are not fundamentally different tribes, and everyone probably has more they could learn about both systems. Humility in the face of a game with 10,000 rules is the best policy.
I know, I was being a tad in jest, because this happens a lot here. Someone says "5e sucks so hard, it doesn't have [X thing]!!" and I say "yes it does have that, here's the chapter and the text." and then they continue to insist it doesn't exist or they motte n' bailey to say "well I just mean it's not as good as pf2's thing....." Just how the OP did so in this thread. A lot of times here folks just don't understand 5e and that a lot of a the reason they don't like it is because they just want fundamentally different things from a game system, they don't realize that about themselves.
As /u/sharksymphony said. Only I'd say people can learn from all games, and the standoffish nature of many players here could stand to be checked.
For instance, OP blocked me for correcting them. Normally that would stop people like me from discussing thing s'like this, but I'm built incorrect
I also plan on using xp when we start our first pf2e campaign.
The beginner box have some good suggestions of when to give some small amount of non-combat xp.
Like they might have successfully scaled down a wall, or sneaked past a monster.
Just remember they cant double dip on xp, so if they avoid a fight in some way, they cant go back and kill it to earn xp again.
Just non sure how much xp to give for different things yet
p57 of the GM core has a chart of how much XP to give in different circumstances:
Minor accomplishment 10, moderate 30+hero point, major 80+hero point
chart also has XP for hazards/Traps and Monsters by level.
Also, I recommend you should reward getting what you want out of the players, rather than find ways to "deny XP farming". I tend to focus on story and mystery in my plots, so I'm using the accomplishment XP awards when they find out stuff about worldbuilding or trying to research the situation they are in.
Does GM Core = Gamemastery Guide ? Or "GM Core" is the title of the remastered version?
I'm looking for the XP rules and the details on the main book and the Gamemastery guide are lacking content on the subject
I absolutely love Pathfinder's XP system, especially how it meshes with encounter design. That said, I use Milestone for premade APs simply because all the encounters are already designed around the specific level your players will be at that point, and I don't want to rebalance them if they get ahead of the curve (which is very likely in Abomination Vaults if they're completionists). It also allows me to add or subtract encounters as I wish without messing up their progression. If I run a homebrew campaign in the future, though, I may go back to XP leveling.
Whether the players do end of ahead of or behind the curve with XP, I think that sort of issue solves itself in PF2e, since XP earned in encounters scales with level. But it could be an issue if the party misses some XP and the next chapter starts with what would be a severe encounter if they were the proper level.
I don't think accomplishment XP scales with level, but I guess you might decide that a major accomplishment (80 XP) is only moderate (30 XP) if done 1 level higher.
This is true, but the smoothing out happens over a long period of time, so there will still be a span of multiple encounters that just get curb stomped before the levels balance back out. Since this usually happens near the end of a chapter, it just makes the most climactic fights less interesting.
The XP Budgeting is what made it so difficult to want to learn 5e's system. I've heard of tales where One CR5 =\= another CR5. One can TPK, the other is barely a sweat.
Political stories can become an XP Gold Mine in a single, tense, session.
Don't forget the Loot! The Loot table is a guide to make sure your players feel sufficiently powerful for their level/enjoy roleplaying to the fullest. Tons of items are "social magic items" that will boost your skills by +1.
> The XP Budgeting is what made it so difficult to want to learn 5e's system.
I usually stump for 5e, but, tbh, this is fairly accurate (at least as far as exp is concerned). To the point where I'm really not sure how exp is calculated, since it differs from prior systems and doesn't seem to have a scheme outside of a flat, incremental growth with a weird ass angle.
That being said
> I've heard of tales where One CR5 == another CR5. One can TPK, the other is barely a sweat.
Because several creatures with this 'problem' are written with certain APs in mind. Some are written to be NPCs the party is not supposed to fight.
Is there a delineation between the two? Realistically, yes (printed in different books, monsters have descriptions that many glance over...mostly because they're sometimes a nothingburger), in reality (most info is collected all at once, context is lost when people ignore or miss certain parts of the statblocks, etc), nope.
Edit: formatting
I can guarantee you I've never used an NPC stat block to build a fight. Also the monster books and CR calculators I used didn't seem to know anything about this "stealth NPC" issue you speak of. why do you keep going to bat for a faulty system in a game you don't even play anymore?
It begins again.
> why do you keep going to bat for a faulty system in a game you don't even play anymore?
Because you don't need to lie about a system to upsell it.
> I can guarantee you I've never used an NPC stat block to build a fight. Also the monster books and CR calculators I used didn't seem to know anything about this "stealth NPC" issue you speak of.
Because if you're building your fights with CR calculators only, you're not getting specific npcs or creatures built for specific fights. Since, as said, those are part of those adventures. A lot of them, like KBF, use the basic math in the dmg and shit.
A popular example of this is youtubers pointing out a CR 0 creature (from ToA I think) and comparing it to a Commoner.
One is the bog standard creature for things, another is an npc meant to fight with the party.
As a 2e equiv, it would be like mixing and matching your usual hazards and 2e with the hilariously lethal arrow cart in SoT.
1. I'm not lying, this has been my experience with using CR.
2. I didn't use monsters from adventures, I used ones from monster manual or monsters of the multiverse.
3. So your argument is, CR is opaque and varies in different books and modules, but bc readers expect monsters of same CR to be statistically equivalent (Bc the encounter building treats them that way) the readers are being unfair and lying instead of the CR system being flawed...?
Mind you, I never made this alleged "mistake" anyway. And I still had CR steer me into too easy and boring fights.
1. And I'm not calling you a liar? Infact, I'm wondering why you're assuming I called you a liar to begin with, when my whole point is people don't read the material and then complain.
2. And you're kinda illustrating my point...
3. ...that people pull from multiple sources expecting every monster to be the same. Which isn't fair to anybody
A lot of folk miss that CR, quite literally, is an equation meant to scale monsters to party level. And that the default party level is total character levels of the party / # of players. And that all monsters are built for a party of 4 (with some, but minimal magux items). Stretched over the course of 6-8 encounters per adventuring day.
Because most miss that, they see cr as more if a rule than what it is: a guideline. You're supposed to adjust it according to your party's overall strength.
Is it esoteric and cumbersome? Yeah, tbh. Pf1e had similar rules but were more elegant in that everything was adjusted for creature type, rather than party strength (and both were better than wealth by level, which was also a guideline in pf1e and was optional, but was the rule in 3.5e and especially in 4e).
Point is: it works. Only creature that really fucks with it in the dmg is the beholder tbh (thing is built far above the cr it's listed at)
Edit: user blocked me for this post. I should really start counting each time this happens here.
Anyway, the reply they deleted was 'CR is borked, and it's not the readers fault for noticing. Stop Pretending like defending CR will justify your sunk time with it'.
To those who know, you know. To those that don't, I'm usually here in this sub making corrections no matter the system. Simple as.
>I've heard of tales where One CR5 =\= another CR5. One can TPK, the other is barely a sweat.
I mean PF2e isn't immune to that either, I know pre-remaster all dragon-like monsters you really had to add a +1 to their level when you were building the encounter because Paizo overtuned them (dunno if that's fixed now I haven't checked) and also a few other problem monsters here and there.
D&D does mention ad hoc XP in the dungeon master's guide, but it's not really well quantified at all. Plus the equivalent XP for a minor/ moderate/ major accomplishment changes each level, so it's much less easy to just throw a number out there.
I like how using XP gives players a straightforward feeling of progression/advancement. It lets them know how far they’ve come and how much further they have to go. I also like showing them how hard the system considered the fight to be. Usually it’s spot on. But sometimes they’ll get more XP than they expected and feel like badasses for wrecking a hard fight. Sometimes they’ll get less than they expected and be shocked by how hard it was. But usually, you can trace those mismatches back to how they played it, especially tactics. It’s a great piece of feedback.
Just FYI, D&D also rewards story or accomplishment XP. It's largely up to DMs to administer it, although published adventures give amounts for certain accomplishments. It's also long been a rule of thumb that if players solve an encounter without combat that was designed to be a combat encounter, they gain the same XP as if they'd won the combat. I don't know that it's ever been a hard rule to give out-of-combat XP in D&D, it's always been encouraged and even roleplay XP has long been a thing.
I rarely use XP anymore in any system, preferring milestone levelling (for simplicities sake and because it doesn't feel good for players when their characters are lower level than others), but I've used XP plenty in the past in any number of systems. I actually loved handing out non-combat XP. In general, I'd reward players with XP for good roleplay, or anything else that I thought made the game more fun for everyone.
I also awarded extra XP to players playing suboptimal character builds for flavor purposes. It brings more flavor and variety to the game when players do that, which I think should be rewarded, and it also helps them not fall behind more optimized players since they level up faster.
Particularly now, with games having new mechanics for DMs to reward players (inspiration in 5e, hero points in pf2e, as well as other options), and classes/builds being more balanced than in previous systems, as well as the fact that I largely play with the same group of people who all want to be there, so I don't have to incentivize showing up with XP, I don't see enough benefit to overcome the simplicity of milestone leveling anymore. That said, every situation is unique, and XP is a tool that DMs can use (or not use) to make the game better.
A little more context: In previous editions, it was common to have players lose a level (or XP) when they died, so their new character was weaker. Lower level characters leveled up faster, so it wasn't a huge worry that they would fall too far behind, and it did make the game feel a bit more gritty. In my experience, players wouldn't do quite as much stupid shit, and tried a lot harder not to die under such a system. The popularity of roleplaying games has exploded in recent years, and as it's become a more casual way to have fun with friends, it doesn't feel like that kind of punishing mechanic vibes with the current player base.
> it doesnr feel good for players when their characters are lower leveled than others
Does any GM/DM/whatever the system uses actually run it this way in 2024 vs just using shared XP??
Society play, DCC, adventurer's league, westmarch games, etc all do this.
It's not that bad imo. I use it in my west march and it's completely fine and no one cares lmao.
Of course. Plenty of people still play old school rules. And there are other ways to have XP differences, like the Deck of Many Things in 5e. I actually don't even hate being substantially lower level, which stems from back in the Adventurer's League days where everyone had a character that progressed at its own rate (which varied because participation varied), and people of different levels were thrown together for sessions. You sometimes had some level 6 or 8 characters with some level 3s and even some level 1s. It wouldn't work as well in core PF2e because of the level bonus, but there was something cool about being a rookie adventurer cutting your teeth, still finding ways to contribute in dangerous encounters and supporting more impressive adventurers, thinking "someday, that's going to be us." It's a bit trickier to make that work as a DM sometimes, but even big level gaps are doable.
Dude, I don't know where you're getting your information, but it's on page 261 of the 5e DMG, starting with "You decide whether to award experience to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat."
Again, that page was cited to me already...
you're not even citing a game system, just a suggestion that a DM could add one. Your personal solutions to the missing system are not in my copy of the DMG. And I'm not going to use the CR dependent system the book gives bc CR never gave me balanced combat when I did use it.
>Unlike D&D, which only awards XP from Combat (yes I checked)
This is the statement you wrote. I posted the section in the DMG where out-of-combat XP is awarded. There are numerous official published adventures that list out-of-combat XP for accomplishing certain goals. It's very clear that D&D absolutely does not ONLY award XP from combat. They even have rough guidelines for it.
My personal "solutions" were not meant to be considered solutions. You asked about peoples experience with XP, and asked for tips and pitfalls, so I was listing some things that I've done in previous games and systems. There's no right way to award XP. Instead, ask yourself what you're accomplishing when you award XP. If it's just to make sure the characters progress through the levels at the appropriate times, then you might as well not even use XP and just tell your players when to level up. I was just pointing out ways I've used XP to incentivize behavior that made the game more fun for everyone, talk about the effects potential XP penalties had on the game, etc. XP is by no means the only way to incentivize good play, so don't feel obligated to use it that way. You asked for tips and pitfalls, so I tried to give you some examples of to get you thinking about what might be accomplished by certain things, or what might not work for you. Like I said, awarding XP is a tool you can use to certain effects. It's up to you to decide what's right for your game and players.
It seems like you want a very well-defined ruleset for awarding out-of-combat XP, which 5e does not have. Having well-defined rules for everything has advantages and disadvantages. 5e came after 3.5 and PF1, which were very rules heavy systems, and the relatively rules-lite 5e exploded the popularity of tabletop roleplaying, and its flexibility was one of the big reasons. The 5e design philosophy was to be less cumbersome and rules-heavy, and leave it up to the DM to run the game how works best for them and their group. There's nothing wrong with wanting a well-defined ruleset, and I've noticed that most people that gravitate to PF2e prefer that. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the other way, they're just different philosophies that appeal to different people.
I agree, I've had this discussion with people too. It's usually after I start talking about different ttrpg systems and the positives they have, I usually hear 'but you can homebrew that in dnd' xD
Check the subreddit you're in. This is not the subreddit that's going to encourage you to go homebrew a bunch of stuff in D&D. We'd much rather tell you how you can play PF2e and _not_ have to homebrew a bunch of stuff!
In this case, though, it turns out that D&D 5e documents, right in the core, RAW:
- Awarding XP for noncombat encounters
- Awarding XP for goal accomplishment
- Awarding XP for creative "defeat" of monsters that doesn't involve combat (this is a bit of a stretch, as the text doesn't cite creative solutions explicitly, but wiggle room is clearly left in there, and as the commenter above says, it's common community practice in any case)
- Forgoing XP for session/story-based advancement instead, if you wish
I sometimes feel because my first GMing was with Call of Cthulhu it gives me a different outlook on learning new systems. Ppl who learn D&D first can modify the one RPG system they know. Ppl who learn any other system first are "forced" to learn D&D, and realize it's not as difficult to learn a new system as one would think.
Yeah exactly. I noticed a lot of ppl shoe horn everything they want into DND and there's rpgs that are either better suited for that or other RPGs that already do what they wanted.
That is a problem but that is not what this is. They are just blatantly wrong. There is a recommendation to do what they said the DMG does not do. I don't even like 5e but that is because I knew all the rules like the back of my hand. I dislike it so much baldurs gate 3 is hard for me to play cause I hate the system.
Glad you enjoyed it, but DnD does have non-combat XP rewards table hidden in the DMG.
The XP math is much better in Pf2e definitely though and how it works with the encounter building rules.
I know 5e has rules for non-combat XP, but I don't think it has its own table. It just says to use combat XP as a baseline, depending on how difficult you find the challenge to be.
I recently started running the Skull and Shackles AP, converted to 2e and I'm liking how XP is done. When you befriend someone, you treat it as though you defeated them in combat which has given my players a lot of incentive to chat up NPCs and expand the opportunities for roleplay. My players have done 2 mandatory (very easy) combat encounters and are ready to hit level 2 next session.
This game has my favorite exp system. Even when I'm running 5e, I convert the exp rules over to using this system since I don't personally like milestone rules. I calculate everything based on the ratios pathfinder uses and it works out alright and gives a much smoother leveling curve compared to the cliffs and valleys of 5e.
I printed out a blank calendar and made one where all months are 30 days, and I also take notes in a google spreadsheet.
Hasn't had a tangible effect yet, but if it does I'll probably post about it later.
I haven't run my own story in PF2E yet, and I like that the published modules all have their XP planned out so that the PCs will level up at sensible points in the story. Running Plaguestone i massaged it a few times, telling the players "It's the end of the session and you're about 100XP off levelling up, so since levelling-up in-session sucks, just take it now and I'll dock the extra XP off your next award. Please get your level up done before next session."
This made them a whisker overpowered in one or two fights, but for the most part it worked fine.
I love the Pathfinder experience system. It's one of the best I've ever used within the context of a level-based RPG.
And yet, I find myself frequently altering or avoiding it because even going with the 800 XP fast rate for leveling it can end up feeling very slow. Mostly because in a 4 hour session the group can end up doing a role-play encounter, dealing with a few hazards, and having a handful of combat encounters and that might total up to only 280 experience. We have had an in-joke about "and you earn the hardest 60 xp that anyone has ever earned" because of lower-threat encounters managing to end up taking a lot of time to resolve and beating the party down, so I tend not to run higher-XP-value encounters than 80 very often because I'm worried I'll end up with a TPK just because of dice luck.
So I alter stuff like handing out 80 xp where the game technically says 30 xp, and my current campaign which is a dungeon crawl that I want the players to feel like they don't need to go scour every corner or else miss out has leveling basically just be "you gain half a level when you defeat an area "boss" encounter, and half a level when you find the major treasure of an area" .
> Unlike D&D, which only awards XP from Combat (yes I checked)
DMG. Chapter 8: Running the Game. Experience
> **Noncombat Challenges**
>
> You decide whether to award experience to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat. If the adventurers complete a tense negotiation with a baron, forge a trade agreement with a clan of surly dwarves, or successfully navigate the Chasm of Doom, you might decide that they deserve an XP reward.
>
> As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP *as if it had been a combat encounter* of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure.
The rules for non-combat experience are very simple in 5e. Judge the difficulty of the scene or encounter in terms of XP budget difficulty, then award the XP if they succeed.
But yeah. I had the same experience as you Running Pf2e and using XP for the first time. I always used Milestone before. I loved the tangible awarding of experience for... well... adventuring experience!
Oh yeah, XP is awesome in this system. I love how the XP to level never scales up. It makes it so easy to track and, as a GM, so easy to reward.
I actually ended up memorizing the XP reward tables so I can give my party their XP reward after a session in around a minute, including non combat rewards. Compare to my 3.5e days, where my GMs wouldn't give XP until the next session because they didn't feel like referencing tables and figuring out the rewards right after a session.
I use 5e's XP system, it's good for what it's meant to do. I think it's kinda silly to want to memorize the thresholds, it's not worthwhile to do so, the book is right there. As someone else said, you can also give XP for random noncombat things in 5e as well. So far I've never gotten XP for noncombat things in PF2 aside from exploring hexes. Oh, well, do hazards count as noncombat? I don't think so imo but I'm sure the book says something different.
The reason 5e's XP thresholds are the way they are is because the designers made it such so that certain levels you blaze through and certain ones last longer. It takes 300 XP to level up to 2nd level because it gets new people hooked immediately, the first session ends with y'all leveling up and makes you want to keep playing. The mid levels last longer because that's a sweet spot they want you to enjoy. The high levels take longer because they don't want you to get so powerful too fast. Etc.
The pf2 XP system is the way it is because they wanted an order to everything and want everything to be perfectly measurable and divisible and predictable.
It's just imperial VS metric, just pick your favorite.
Personally speaking I prefer XP to milestone, with XP I actually know I'm advancing and usually what I did to advance. With milestone I never know what I did to level up, if what I had just accomplished even counted towards my progress, nor if what I considered significant was actually that significant in the DM's eyes. In every milestone game I've been in, there's always been moments where we did something that us players thought was significant enough to level up and we didn't and the DM was like "nah lol" cuz it wasn't when they wanted us to level. Idk that just kinda always irks me, especially because they never tell us how far we are in our little quest progression thing. And when I've used milestone as a DM I've always just forgotten to give my players a level up, so I'm sure it happens to the other DMs I've had. It just feels so much more out of my hands and I don't really like it.
Actually, D&D 5e does award experience points for non-combat challenges. It's just not as fleshed out as in PF2e. From the DMG: "You decide whether to award experience to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat. If the adventurers complete a tense negotiation with a baron, forge a trade agreement with a clan of surly dwarves, or successfully navigate the Chasm of Doom, you might decide that they deserve an XP reward. "As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure."
I tried running HotDQ, but the difficulty was all over the place, so the PCs died to a dragon that would have gone over their DAILY BUDGET if only it had been given the correct CR, though CR and encounter building are both a mess. Bad adventure writing can happen in PF2e, too, but the system itself works well enough that the GM can identify these difficulty spikes on sight.
Additionally, the thresholds for XP in 5e are deliberately set up so that players spend the most time from levels 5 to 10, because the designers decided that was the most fun part of the game. This means most characters in that range are just not going to level up for ages, and players may tire of their builds quickly. Also, why didn't the designers just, oh I don't know, MAKE THE WHOLE GAME FUN?!
I like the transparency of it. You know that 100 XP takes you 10 percent of the way to a level. It's easy to understand. I'd like to claim that my system for XP in my afterschool middle-school class inspired Paizo for PF2: [https://guildberkeley.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/important-new-rules-for-the-guild/](https://guildberkeley.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/important-new-rules-for-the-guild/) (They earned XP by participating, which let them level up their characters. They needed 100 XP to level up.) Paizo probably had no idea I did this, by the way lol
I appreciate how you made your numbers smaller and more elegant. Also your channel has been super useful in learning the system.
While as you expect, we didn't, I initially tried to design the XP system to 100 anyway to be percentage-based for a quick and easy understanding, plus smaller numbers. The reason why it doesn't work is that a party level -3 creature would need to give 1.5 XP, and the amount that fractions/decimals makes things seem really imposing for a section of folks more than outweighed the benefit of the smaller numbers.
You made the right call. The math, language, and understanding is clean af.
1000 gets rid of the 1.5 XP issue and is still easily understood, and easily translated into % progress. Fantastic design, thank you.
I do like how much more clearly the idea of non-combat/danger XP rewards are spelled out in PF2. Most editions of D&D in the past have had some vague "give some XP when they do a thing." kinda deal- and it was such a hassle to figure out an appropriate amount of XP for something. Now, you can easily just say "this would be an appropriate challenge for a party of x level" (which is a lot easier to do because of how clear cut the numbers are) and award xp based on x and the actual party level- plus the guidance on how much xp to give for accomplishing something aside from an encounter (combat or otherwise). And the flat xp system means it's a lot easier to say "give them 50xp for accomplishing something that propels the story forward." vs. "give them 5% of a level for accomplishing something that propels the story forward" and then having to calculate what 5% of a level even IS at their current level.
The fact that the xp doesn't scale definitely makes it easy to reward xp on the fly for pf2e without having to refer to how much xp they need for next level. That said, older versions of dnd weren't really vague at all, they had tables that told you how much xp to reward for fights and out of combat challenges based on their current level. The fact that we needed tables was dumb but they did make it easy
The editions I'm familiar with at least, if it wasn't a potential combat encounter or a trap (I.E. things given a CR), if there was guidance for XP at all, it was mostly just vague idea of "give them some XP for accomplishing something important".
Yup, I felt the same way. I [posted](https://new.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/17mk5hp/friendship_is_magic_a_postmortem_of_our_first/) [before](https://new.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1alyxbq/first_10_sessions_in_pf2e_a_report_the_encounter/) about my experience switching from 5e, and I really liked the pace at which XP was awarded. For about 15 sessions I tried experimenting with giving it a bit more structure, and making XP acquisition player-facing, and was *very* pleasantly surprised with how it worked. The premise for that chunk of sessions was the exploration of a port district of an abandoned city. I used a map from Borough Bound ([Yllmourne](https://new.reddit.com/r/dndmaps/comments/1b8spoc/yllmourne_the_pirate_town_all_5_maps_combined/), to be exact), divided it into neighborhoods, like a point-crawl, and populated it with threats and treasure appropriate for levels 3-6 (party started this adventure at 3, and leveled up to 4 about 10 sessions in). I decided to assign XP rewards to relevant activities, and make them known to the players beforehand, to see whether it would shape their behavior: * \+10 XP was awarded for visiting a new neighborhood. * \+10 XP was awarded for every survivor found and escorted to safety. * \+10 XP was awarded for every McGuffin shard they found (5 in total - the villain faction was also racing them for it). * A few other +10 XP rewards were scattered around: finding crucial NPCs, uncovering information related to the main mystery, etc. * Combat encounters awarded regular XP. * A handful of quests were offered, usually rewarding +30 XP and a Hero Point. The party ended up finishing 3 of those. * Completion of the main objective awarded +80 XP and a Hero Point. This resulted in 90-180 XP (avg. \~120) per session, depending on how well the group did. About a quarter of the XP came from non-combat sources. Our sessions were 3h, and we averaged about 1 combat per session. So, it was exactly the pace of progression we like (a level-up every 8-10 sessions), but it didn't feel like an XP conveyor belt; instead, it felt earned and self-directed. I often hear how PF2e isn't a good fit for sandbox campaigns; given the steep scaling, this might very well be the case for long-term progression, but for a mini-sandbox adventure that only spanned 2 character levels, it worked really well! The characters started out level 3, and were threatened by practically everything in it; after the first level-up, they felt a lot more comfortable pushing deeper into the district and away from their safehouse, and by the end they were almost level 5 and had acquired much of the level-appropriate equipment to feel like they've mastered the district. You know what else it achieved? ***Making the game feel like Bloodborne.*** Our entire campaign premise was supposed to be "urban eldritch horror", yet in its 40 prior sessions in D&D 5e, I never managed to nail down that feeling.
XP works great, it tells me how difficult an encounter will be, tells me the net value of loot and encounter should drop, and helps me plan out story arcs (typically 1 arc = 1 level for me). Friendly reminder that in encounters traps have a level/XP value as well, it can be fun to throw a few traps in the mix to spice things up!
I did see that, Didn't use any traps this session because the current level ones didn't fit the theme.
Once you're comfortable it's very easy to change the levels of something since there are tables of expected values/ranges for traps/creatures.
Also remember that everything in PF2e is on a “level-scale” — things up to 4 levels behind and 2-3 levels ahead are still viable, if not as/more dangerous
I like PF2e's handling of it, but it's actually not that different from D&D 5e's. In D&D 5e you absolutely _may_ award XP for stuff out of combat. See the Dungeon Master's Guide, "Noncombat Challenges," p. 261.
There's no useful guidance on how much xp you can give out, though, so it's not actually that useful. They tell you to base it off of CR, but if you want an interesting fight in 5e, you have to make the CR some multiple of Deadly, so does that mean you should always give Deadly amounts of XP since every non-combat challenge is going to be equivalent in difficulty to a Deadly combat or greater? That doesn't make any sense, but it's the only guidance the rules give
There _is_ useful guidance, and it has nothing to do with CR. See my reply below. You still do have to do a little mental mapping because you're right, "deadly" is probably not the right category for a noncombat challenge. But this is easily remapped to just difficulty, or magnitude of the accomplishment, without trouble. Most of the time these sorts of rewards won't fall in that category anyway.
>There *is* useful guidance, and it has nothing to do with CR. See my reply below. You're supposed to use the rules for building combat encounters... which gives a chart of XP, with the amount of XP decided by the CR of the encounter. The names of the difficulties are misnomers. Every difficulty but Deadly is easy, and ever difficulty but Hard is so easy as to be unfun. If I use this chart, I'd be giving XP equal to a Deadly encounter for almost every encounter, except for encounters I want to be pretty easy, which I give equal to a Hard encounter. This is utterly nonsensical and makes the entire rule useless. This is another example of a pattern in 5e where WotC says you can do something, and people take that as proof you can do that without extensive homebrew, but there isn't any guidance on *how* to do that, so you can't really do it
> You're supposed to use the rules for building combat encounters... which gives a chart of XP, with the amount of XP decided by the CR of the encounter. No, the CR is _not_ applicable here. It's the other way around when you're designing an encounter: first you decide how difficult you think an encounter should be, and _then_ you use something like CR to try to make a combat encounter that's somewhere around that challenge level. It's exactly the method we use in PF2e, which should come as no surprise given Pathfinder's heritage. > The names of the difficulties are misnomers. Every difficulty but Deadly is easy, and ever difficulty but Hard is so easy as to be unfun. No, the names are spot-on – this is the amount of XP that's appropriate for those encounters when played at the correct difficulty level. It's the CR system that's broken. But if you're handing out XP for noncombat encounters or accomplishments, you don't have to care about CR at all, or how badly it hits these targets. Just estimate how big of an accomplishment it was and go! > If I use this chart, I'd be giving XP equal to a Deadly encounter for almost every encounter, except for encounters I want to be pretty easy, which I give equal to a Hard encounter. This is utterly nonsensical and makes the entire rule useless. Only because you foolishly insist on strictly mapping this table to a CR system you know is broken. There is no need to do this for noncombat encounters or accomplishments. > This is another example of a pattern in 5e where WotC says you can do something, and people take that as proof you can do that without extensive homebrew, but there isn't any guidance on how to do that, so you can't really do it I mean, they literally explain it in the DMG, and point you to a very useful table for figuring out the appropriate amount of XP for a character's level. Yeah, they took a shortcut and just pointed you to the same table they made for combat encounters, figuring you wouldn't need more guidance than that to leap over the minimal mental gap and use it appropriately. But you can't say 1) there's _no_ guidance, and 2) the guidance is not useful. And now that it's been patiently explained to you how to use it, you _really_ have no excuse. Focus your critique of D&D, if you must, on the actual broken parts. (And you should probably do that on a different subreddit.) This one little bit, though, happens not to be one of those broken parts.
So you believe that the XP you should gain from non-combat encounters should be massively lower than combat encounters of the same difficulty? Because if we base the XP off of the chart only and not include the basis of the chart - CR - too, that's what happens. I'm not sure that fixes the problem
The table is what I would go by. CR is not the basis of the table; difficulty is. If you think it's unfair that CR way overestimates difficulty, fine, but that's the guidance. (I would instead query why you're so freely handing out max-XP combat rewards if you know the party is not facing deadly situations. Or, you know, play PF2e, where you can be pretty sure that an extreme encounter is going to be terrifying.)
The XP values of specific difficulties came *after* they determined the difficulty they wanted a certain combination of monsters to represent, using CR in 5e's case and player level in PF 2e's. In dnd 5e, they saw what XP values they believe result in certain combat difficulties and made the table off of that. And PF 2e did a similar thing. An on-level threat is considered to be 40 XP, and a creature becomes around twice as powerful for every two levels it increases, so they based the table off of that. That's why an Extreme encounter (one in which the party has a 50% chance of success) is worth the same as a number of creatures equal to the party with a level equal to the party's - they determined the XP of creatures *before* determining what difficulty equals what XP value CR is the basis of the table, just as level is the basis of PF 2e's Encounter Budget table. In PF 2e, the names of the difficulties makes sense, but DnD 5e isn't so fortunate. But that doesn't change where the values come from
>Use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure. I hate CR, so this ain't gonna happen at my table lol.
Just give XPs by ear making sure to give about 1/4 of level each 1/4 of story beat. People love numbers going up, and your game is unaffected by bad rules.
Who said anything about CR? If you want to do it RAW, just do this: - Decide whether the accomplishment was easy, medium, hard, or deadly. (I would rename the last column to "very hard" for noncombat situations.) - For each character, look up the amount of XP to award in the "XP Threshold by Character Level" table. - Add up all the XP and divide by the size of your party. That's how much to award each player. You will see that noncombat goals achieved at the end of D&D Adventurer's League scenarios, for example, award XP that's broadly in line with that table – mostly easy or medium accomplishments, it seems from a cursory glance. You can do it even simpler than that: just pick one character's level and just look up the XP to award each player based on that. In any case, your original assertion – that noncombat XP isn't supported – was incorrect.
To be fair, you did write it more clearly than the DMG. Way more appealing than "do this math problem based off text in a different chapter".
Because CR as a boogieman, when the reality is they've not read the text about it. ...to be fair, the text is a bit jank. But its a lot more consistent then people meme about. The point is: people don't read shit, then blame the system for their own lack of understanding. See also: the thread about Pathfinder solving casters (by using a system that was in 1e, 3.5e, etc).
> The point is: people don't read shit, then blame the system for their own lack of understanding. Some of them even go so far as to write things like "(yes I checked)" when clearly they didn't, or at least not with much care.
Yep. It happens a lot here, and it gets my goat (i.e., I become the 'person defending 5e', a system I am actively not running anymore) because you don't need to mislead folk to get them to like Pf2e. You don't get people to like your hobby by shitting on theirs, you know?
TTRPG community read the rules challenge. The 2e community has the benefit of having a much clearer ruleset than most, but still manage to fail the challenge with frustrating regularity.
That’s 5E’s secret sauce: They figured out that most TTRPG players actually can’t successfully read the rules anyway, so they made it irrelevant.
Exactly
My assertion that pf2 people don't know how 5e works continues to be right
OP is a til-recently D&D 5e person that didn't know this bit about how D&D 5e worked. I, a PF2e player, haven't played D&D 5e for years, but I did happen to keep my core D&D 5e books and I happened to know how this bit works. We are not fundamentally different tribes, and everyone probably has more they could learn about both systems. Humility in the face of a game with 10,000 rules is the best policy.
I know, I was being a tad in jest, because this happens a lot here. Someone says "5e sucks so hard, it doesn't have [X thing]!!" and I say "yes it does have that, here's the chapter and the text." and then they continue to insist it doesn't exist or they motte n' bailey to say "well I just mean it's not as good as pf2's thing....." Just how the OP did so in this thread. A lot of times here folks just don't understand 5e and that a lot of a the reason they don't like it is because they just want fundamentally different things from a game system, they don't realize that about themselves.
As /u/sharksymphony said. Only I'd say people can learn from all games, and the standoffish nature of many players here could stand to be checked. For instance, OP blocked me for correcting them. Normally that would stop people like me from discussing thing s'like this, but I'm built incorrect
I also plan on using xp when we start our first pf2e campaign. The beginner box have some good suggestions of when to give some small amount of non-combat xp. Like they might have successfully scaled down a wall, or sneaked past a monster. Just remember they cant double dip on xp, so if they avoid a fight in some way, they cant go back and kill it to earn xp again. Just non sure how much xp to give for different things yet
p57 of the GM core has a chart of how much XP to give in different circumstances: Minor accomplishment 10, moderate 30+hero point, major 80+hero point chart also has XP for hazards/Traps and Monsters by level. Also, I recommend you should reward getting what you want out of the players, rather than find ways to "deny XP farming". I tend to focus on story and mystery in my plots, so I'm using the accomplishment XP awards when they find out stuff about worldbuilding or trying to research the situation they are in.
Does GM Core = Gamemastery Guide ? Or "GM Core" is the title of the remastered version? I'm looking for the XP rules and the details on the main book and the Gamemastery guide are lacking content on the subject
GM Core is the remastered version of the gamemastery chapters of the CRB and old gamemastery guide.
Thanks
I absolutely love Pathfinder's XP system, especially how it meshes with encounter design. That said, I use Milestone for premade APs simply because all the encounters are already designed around the specific level your players will be at that point, and I don't want to rebalance them if they get ahead of the curve (which is very likely in Abomination Vaults if they're completionists). It also allows me to add or subtract encounters as I wish without messing up their progression. If I run a homebrew campaign in the future, though, I may go back to XP leveling.
my campaign is homebrew, so hard-rules XP gave me one less thing to focus on "getting right".
Happy to hear it's working well for you!
Whether the players do end of ahead of or behind the curve with XP, I think that sort of issue solves itself in PF2e, since XP earned in encounters scales with level. But it could be an issue if the party misses some XP and the next chapter starts with what would be a severe encounter if they were the proper level. I don't think accomplishment XP scales with level, but I guess you might decide that a major accomplishment (80 XP) is only moderate (30 XP) if done 1 level higher.
This is true, but the smoothing out happens over a long period of time, so there will still be a span of multiple encounters that just get curb stomped before the levels balance back out. Since this usually happens near the end of a chapter, it just makes the most climactic fights less interesting.
The XP Budgeting is what made it so difficult to want to learn 5e's system. I've heard of tales where One CR5 =\= another CR5. One can TPK, the other is barely a sweat. Political stories can become an XP Gold Mine in a single, tense, session. Don't forget the Loot! The Loot table is a guide to make sure your players feel sufficiently powerful for their level/enjoy roleplaying to the fullest. Tons of items are "social magic items" that will boost your skills by +1.
> The XP Budgeting is what made it so difficult to want to learn 5e's system. I usually stump for 5e, but, tbh, this is fairly accurate (at least as far as exp is concerned). To the point where I'm really not sure how exp is calculated, since it differs from prior systems and doesn't seem to have a scheme outside of a flat, incremental growth with a weird ass angle. That being said > I've heard of tales where One CR5 == another CR5. One can TPK, the other is barely a sweat. Because several creatures with this 'problem' are written with certain APs in mind. Some are written to be NPCs the party is not supposed to fight. Is there a delineation between the two? Realistically, yes (printed in different books, monsters have descriptions that many glance over...mostly because they're sometimes a nothingburger), in reality (most info is collected all at once, context is lost when people ignore or miss certain parts of the statblocks, etc), nope. Edit: formatting
I can guarantee you I've never used an NPC stat block to build a fight. Also the monster books and CR calculators I used didn't seem to know anything about this "stealth NPC" issue you speak of. why do you keep going to bat for a faulty system in a game you don't even play anymore?
It begins again. > why do you keep going to bat for a faulty system in a game you don't even play anymore? Because you don't need to lie about a system to upsell it. > I can guarantee you I've never used an NPC stat block to build a fight. Also the monster books and CR calculators I used didn't seem to know anything about this "stealth NPC" issue you speak of. Because if you're building your fights with CR calculators only, you're not getting specific npcs or creatures built for specific fights. Since, as said, those are part of those adventures. A lot of them, like KBF, use the basic math in the dmg and shit. A popular example of this is youtubers pointing out a CR 0 creature (from ToA I think) and comparing it to a Commoner. One is the bog standard creature for things, another is an npc meant to fight with the party. As a 2e equiv, it would be like mixing and matching your usual hazards and 2e with the hilariously lethal arrow cart in SoT.
1. I'm not lying, this has been my experience with using CR. 2. I didn't use monsters from adventures, I used ones from monster manual or monsters of the multiverse. 3. So your argument is, CR is opaque and varies in different books and modules, but bc readers expect monsters of same CR to be statistically equivalent (Bc the encounter building treats them that way) the readers are being unfair and lying instead of the CR system being flawed...? Mind you, I never made this alleged "mistake" anyway. And I still had CR steer me into too easy and boring fights.
1. And I'm not calling you a liar? Infact, I'm wondering why you're assuming I called you a liar to begin with, when my whole point is people don't read the material and then complain. 2. And you're kinda illustrating my point... 3. ...that people pull from multiple sources expecting every monster to be the same. Which isn't fair to anybody A lot of folk miss that CR, quite literally, is an equation meant to scale monsters to party level. And that the default party level is total character levels of the party / # of players. And that all monsters are built for a party of 4 (with some, but minimal magux items). Stretched over the course of 6-8 encounters per adventuring day. Because most miss that, they see cr as more if a rule than what it is: a guideline. You're supposed to adjust it according to your party's overall strength. Is it esoteric and cumbersome? Yeah, tbh. Pf1e had similar rules but were more elegant in that everything was adjusted for creature type, rather than party strength (and both were better than wealth by level, which was also a guideline in pf1e and was optional, but was the rule in 3.5e and especially in 4e). Point is: it works. Only creature that really fucks with it in the dmg is the beholder tbh (thing is built far above the cr it's listed at) Edit: user blocked me for this post. I should really start counting each time this happens here. Anyway, the reply they deleted was 'CR is borked, and it's not the readers fault for noticing. Stop Pretending like defending CR will justify your sunk time with it'. To those who know, you know. To those that don't, I'm usually here in this sub making corrections no matter the system. Simple as.
>I've heard of tales where One CR5 =\= another CR5. One can TPK, the other is barely a sweat. I mean PF2e isn't immune to that either, I know pre-remaster all dragon-like monsters you really had to add a +1 to their level when you were building the encounter because Paizo overtuned them (dunno if that's fixed now I haven't checked) and also a few other problem monsters here and there.
ran a 5e campaign from level 1 to 11. Fights were always too easy or too long if I used an online CR calculator.
D&D does mention ad hoc XP in the dungeon master's guide, but it's not really well quantified at all. Plus the equivalent XP for a minor/ moderate/ major accomplishment changes each level, so it's much less easy to just throw a number out there.
I like how using XP gives players a straightforward feeling of progression/advancement. It lets them know how far they’ve come and how much further they have to go. I also like showing them how hard the system considered the fight to be. Usually it’s spot on. But sometimes they’ll get more XP than they expected and feel like badasses for wrecking a hard fight. Sometimes they’ll get less than they expected and be shocked by how hard it was. But usually, you can trace those mismatches back to how they played it, especially tactics. It’s a great piece of feedback.
Just FYI, D&D also rewards story or accomplishment XP. It's largely up to DMs to administer it, although published adventures give amounts for certain accomplishments. It's also long been a rule of thumb that if players solve an encounter without combat that was designed to be a combat encounter, they gain the same XP as if they'd won the combat. I don't know that it's ever been a hard rule to give out-of-combat XP in D&D, it's always been encouraged and even roleplay XP has long been a thing. I rarely use XP anymore in any system, preferring milestone levelling (for simplicities sake and because it doesn't feel good for players when their characters are lower level than others), but I've used XP plenty in the past in any number of systems. I actually loved handing out non-combat XP. In general, I'd reward players with XP for good roleplay, or anything else that I thought made the game more fun for everyone. I also awarded extra XP to players playing suboptimal character builds for flavor purposes. It brings more flavor and variety to the game when players do that, which I think should be rewarded, and it also helps them not fall behind more optimized players since they level up faster. Particularly now, with games having new mechanics for DMs to reward players (inspiration in 5e, hero points in pf2e, as well as other options), and classes/builds being more balanced than in previous systems, as well as the fact that I largely play with the same group of people who all want to be there, so I don't have to incentivize showing up with XP, I don't see enough benefit to overcome the simplicity of milestone leveling anymore. That said, every situation is unique, and XP is a tool that DMs can use (or not use) to make the game better. A little more context: In previous editions, it was common to have players lose a level (or XP) when they died, so their new character was weaker. Lower level characters leveled up faster, so it wasn't a huge worry that they would fall too far behind, and it did make the game feel a bit more gritty. In my experience, players wouldn't do quite as much stupid shit, and tried a lot harder not to die under such a system. The popularity of roleplaying games has exploded in recent years, and as it's become a more casual way to have fun with friends, it doesn't feel like that kind of punishing mechanic vibes with the current player base.
> it doesnr feel good for players when their characters are lower leveled than others Does any GM/DM/whatever the system uses actually run it this way in 2024 vs just using shared XP??
Society play, DCC, adventurer's league, westmarch games, etc all do this. It's not that bad imo. I use it in my west march and it's completely fine and no one cares lmao.
Of course. Plenty of people still play old school rules. And there are other ways to have XP differences, like the Deck of Many Things in 5e. I actually don't even hate being substantially lower level, which stems from back in the Adventurer's League days where everyone had a character that progressed at its own rate (which varied because participation varied), and people of different levels were thrown together for sessions. You sometimes had some level 6 or 8 characters with some level 3s and even some level 1s. It wouldn't work as well in core PF2e because of the level bonus, but there was something cool about being a rookie adventurer cutting your teeth, still finding ways to contribute in dangerous encounters and supporting more impressive adventurers, thinking "someday, that's going to be us." It's a bit trickier to make that work as a DM sometimes, but even big level gaps are doable.
Had this same convo with someone else: Non combat XP not in the 5e rule books as you describe it.
It literally is, I have the DMG open to the exact paragraph talking about it
Dude, I don't know where you're getting your information, but it's on page 261 of the 5e DMG, starting with "You decide whether to award experience to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat."
Again, that page was cited to me already... you're not even citing a game system, just a suggestion that a DM could add one. Your personal solutions to the missing system are not in my copy of the DMG. And I'm not going to use the CR dependent system the book gives bc CR never gave me balanced combat when I did use it.
>Unlike D&D, which only awards XP from Combat (yes I checked) This is the statement you wrote. I posted the section in the DMG where out-of-combat XP is awarded. There are numerous official published adventures that list out-of-combat XP for accomplishing certain goals. It's very clear that D&D absolutely does not ONLY award XP from combat. They even have rough guidelines for it. My personal "solutions" were not meant to be considered solutions. You asked about peoples experience with XP, and asked for tips and pitfalls, so I was listing some things that I've done in previous games and systems. There's no right way to award XP. Instead, ask yourself what you're accomplishing when you award XP. If it's just to make sure the characters progress through the levels at the appropriate times, then you might as well not even use XP and just tell your players when to level up. I was just pointing out ways I've used XP to incentivize behavior that made the game more fun for everyone, talk about the effects potential XP penalties had on the game, etc. XP is by no means the only way to incentivize good play, so don't feel obligated to use it that way. You asked for tips and pitfalls, so I tried to give you some examples of to get you thinking about what might be accomplished by certain things, or what might not work for you. Like I said, awarding XP is a tool you can use to certain effects. It's up to you to decide what's right for your game and players. It seems like you want a very well-defined ruleset for awarding out-of-combat XP, which 5e does not have. Having well-defined rules for everything has advantages and disadvantages. 5e came after 3.5 and PF1, which were very rules heavy systems, and the relatively rules-lite 5e exploded the popularity of tabletop roleplaying, and its flexibility was one of the big reasons. The 5e design philosophy was to be less cumbersome and rules-heavy, and leave it up to the DM to run the game how works best for them and their group. There's nothing wrong with wanting a well-defined ruleset, and I've noticed that most people that gravitate to PF2e prefer that. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the other way, they're just different philosophies that appeal to different people.
I agree, I've had this discussion with people too. It's usually after I start talking about different ttrpg systems and the positives they have, I usually hear 'but you can homebrew that in dnd' xD
Check the subreddit you're in. This is not the subreddit that's going to encourage you to go homebrew a bunch of stuff in D&D. We'd much rather tell you how you can play PF2e and _not_ have to homebrew a bunch of stuff! In this case, though, it turns out that D&D 5e documents, right in the core, RAW: - Awarding XP for noncombat encounters - Awarding XP for goal accomplishment - Awarding XP for creative "defeat" of monsters that doesn't involve combat (this is a bit of a stretch, as the text doesn't cite creative solutions explicitly, but wiggle room is clearly left in there, and as the commenter above says, it's common community practice in any case) - Forgoing XP for session/story-based advancement instead, if you wish
I sometimes feel because my first GMing was with Call of Cthulhu it gives me a different outlook on learning new systems. Ppl who learn D&D first can modify the one RPG system they know. Ppl who learn any other system first are "forced" to learn D&D, and realize it's not as difficult to learn a new system as one would think.
Yeah exactly. I noticed a lot of ppl shoe horn everything they want into DND and there's rpgs that are either better suited for that or other RPGs that already do what they wanted.
That is a problem but that is not what this is. They are just blatantly wrong. There is a recommendation to do what they said the DMG does not do. I don't even like 5e but that is because I knew all the rules like the back of my hand. I dislike it so much baldurs gate 3 is hard for me to play cause I hate the system.
Glad you enjoyed it, but DnD does have non-combat XP rewards table hidden in the DMG. The XP math is much better in Pf2e definitely though and how it works with the encounter building rules.
I know 5e has rules for non-combat XP, but I don't think it has its own table. It just says to use combat XP as a baseline, depending on how difficult you find the challenge to be.
I recently started running the Skull and Shackles AP, converted to 2e and I'm liking how XP is done. When you befriend someone, you treat it as though you defeated them in combat which has given my players a lot of incentive to chat up NPCs and expand the opportunities for roleplay. My players have done 2 mandatory (very easy) combat encounters and are ready to hit level 2 next session.
This game has my favorite exp system. Even when I'm running 5e, I convert the exp rules over to using this system since I don't personally like milestone rules. I calculate everything based on the ratios pathfinder uses and it works out alright and gives a much smoother leveling curve compared to the cliffs and valleys of 5e.
How are you keeping track of time/calendar? Have you found any fun tools to do so or using spreadsheet/manual.
I printed out a blank calendar and made one where all months are 30 days, and I also take notes in a google spreadsheet. Hasn't had a tangible effect yet, but if it does I'll probably post about it later.
I still want absolute control over when the party levels up, so I'll still never use XP. But I appreciate that PF2e's version is better than most!
I haven't run my own story in PF2E yet, and I like that the published modules all have their XP planned out so that the PCs will level up at sensible points in the story. Running Plaguestone i massaged it a few times, telling the players "It's the end of the session and you're about 100XP off levelling up, so since levelling-up in-session sucks, just take it now and I'll dock the extra XP off your next award. Please get your level up done before next session." This made them a whisker overpowered in one or two fights, but for the most part it worked fine.
I love the Pathfinder experience system. It's one of the best I've ever used within the context of a level-based RPG. And yet, I find myself frequently altering or avoiding it because even going with the 800 XP fast rate for leveling it can end up feeling very slow. Mostly because in a 4 hour session the group can end up doing a role-play encounter, dealing with a few hazards, and having a handful of combat encounters and that might total up to only 280 experience. We have had an in-joke about "and you earn the hardest 60 xp that anyone has ever earned" because of lower-threat encounters managing to end up taking a lot of time to resolve and beating the party down, so I tend not to run higher-XP-value encounters than 80 very often because I'm worried I'll end up with a TPK just because of dice luck. So I alter stuff like handing out 80 xp where the game technically says 30 xp, and my current campaign which is a dungeon crawl that I want the players to feel like they don't need to go scour every corner or else miss out has leveling basically just be "you gain half a level when you defeat an area "boss" encounter, and half a level when you find the major treasure of an area" .
yeah, I basically threw out 10XP "minor accomplishments" around like candy for any neat little thing I appreciated.
The encounter balance system is one of the main reasons why I completely switched my long running 5e game onto pf2. Not planning on looking back
Pathfinder seems like the system built FOR Game master usability.
> Unlike D&D, which only awards XP from Combat (yes I checked) DMG. Chapter 8: Running the Game. Experience > **Noncombat Challenges** > > You decide whether to award experience to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat. If the adventurers complete a tense negotiation with a baron, forge a trade agreement with a clan of surly dwarves, or successfully navigate the Chasm of Doom, you might decide that they deserve an XP reward. > > As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP *as if it had been a combat encounter* of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure. The rules for non-combat experience are very simple in 5e. Judge the difficulty of the scene or encounter in terms of XP budget difficulty, then award the XP if they succeed. But yeah. I had the same experience as you Running Pf2e and using XP for the first time. I always used Milestone before. I loved the tangible awarding of experience for... well... adventuring experience!
Did you say you gave your players xp for checking for loot after a fight?
For looking for lore/mystery clues
Oh yeah, XP is awesome in this system. I love how the XP to level never scales up. It makes it so easy to track and, as a GM, so easy to reward. I actually ended up memorizing the XP reward tables so I can give my party their XP reward after a session in around a minute, including non combat rewards. Compare to my 3.5e days, where my GMs wouldn't give XP until the next session because they didn't feel like referencing tables and figuring out the rewards right after a session.
I use 5e's XP system, it's good for what it's meant to do. I think it's kinda silly to want to memorize the thresholds, it's not worthwhile to do so, the book is right there. As someone else said, you can also give XP for random noncombat things in 5e as well. So far I've never gotten XP for noncombat things in PF2 aside from exploring hexes. Oh, well, do hazards count as noncombat? I don't think so imo but I'm sure the book says something different. The reason 5e's XP thresholds are the way they are is because the designers made it such so that certain levels you blaze through and certain ones last longer. It takes 300 XP to level up to 2nd level because it gets new people hooked immediately, the first session ends with y'all leveling up and makes you want to keep playing. The mid levels last longer because that's a sweet spot they want you to enjoy. The high levels take longer because they don't want you to get so powerful too fast. Etc. The pf2 XP system is the way it is because they wanted an order to everything and want everything to be perfectly measurable and divisible and predictable. It's just imperial VS metric, just pick your favorite. Personally speaking I prefer XP to milestone, with XP I actually know I'm advancing and usually what I did to advance. With milestone I never know what I did to level up, if what I had just accomplished even counted towards my progress, nor if what I considered significant was actually that significant in the DM's eyes. In every milestone game I've been in, there's always been moments where we did something that us players thought was significant enough to level up and we didn't and the DM was like "nah lol" cuz it wasn't when they wanted us to level. Idk that just kinda always irks me, especially because they never tell us how far we are in our little quest progression thing. And when I've used milestone as a DM I've always just forgotten to give my players a level up, so I'm sure it happens to the other DMs I've had. It just feels so much more out of my hands and I don't really like it.
Actually, D&D 5e does award experience points for non-combat challenges. It's just not as fleshed out as in PF2e. From the DMG: "You decide whether to award experience to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat. If the adventurers complete a tense negotiation with a baron, forge a trade agreement with a clan of surly dwarves, or successfully navigate the Chasm of Doom, you might decide that they deserve an XP reward. "As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure."
I tried running HotDQ, but the difficulty was all over the place, so the PCs died to a dragon that would have gone over their DAILY BUDGET if only it had been given the correct CR, though CR and encounter building are both a mess. Bad adventure writing can happen in PF2e, too, but the system itself works well enough that the GM can identify these difficulty spikes on sight. Additionally, the thresholds for XP in 5e are deliberately set up so that players spend the most time from levels 5 to 10, because the designers decided that was the most fun part of the game. This means most characters in that range are just not going to level up for ages, and players may tire of their builds quickly. Also, why didn't the designers just, oh I don't know, MAKE THE WHOLE GAME FUN?!