Once upon a time, players gathered around a table and delved into a dungeon. They slew and avoided monsters, and they came out with treasure. For this, they were awarded XP. Most of the XP was for the treasure they gained, but a small amount (one-fifth according to some advice) was for the slaying of monsters.
In a recent session of Dungeons of Dragons, a group of players gathered around a table and explored the cursed land of Barovia. They saved people and solved problems, and they came out of it with no gold and no XP, because they slew no monsters.
This latter situation, one that some of my friends experienced, indicates a problem with how rewards could work in the D&D Adventurers League. There’s been a shift in how we play the game, but it hasn’t always been reflected in the rules of Organised Play.
If you ask the D&D designers how they handle advancement, you may find they don’t say “XP”. Jeremy Crawford tells his players when they advance, doing so when it feels right for the story. Mike Mearls uses milestones. Some published adventures don’t have enough XP to gain levels needed by the adventure.
One solution that has been tried is including story awards – awards for overcoming challenges or completing goals. They’re a great idea, but it’s something of a pain to design them. Do they replace monster XP? Do they scale based on the level of the PCs? How much is this trap worth? What happens if the adventure doesn’t list an award?
The milestone system is simpler but causes problems when players miss the session where the milestone is awarded – a definite problem in Adventurers League play. Also, awarding a milestone for a 2-hour adventure is a bit much, but not advancing when you play one of those adventures isn’t great.
Even when the XP system works in a DDAL adventure, the tiering of the adventures has unfortunate side-effects. A first-level character in a home game faces first-level challenges and brings home first-level XP. In a DDAL adventure, the scaling of monsters means they face first-level challenges… but XP is not scaled in the same way, and they bring home third-level XP. A four-hour adventure for Tier 1 characters might take a brand-new PC from level 1 to 3! This is a little faster than the designers intended. And then players can languish for very long times at level 4. This is the effect of a set XP award for tiers of play, rather than adjusting for the level of the PCs – and the way the XP tables work.
What did the D&D designers originally intend for advancement? The comments I read indicated characters should advance as follows:
- Level 1 and 2: 4 hours per level.
- Levels 3+: 8 hours per level.
The new system for the D&D Adventurers League, which goes live on August 30th, is very close to this. Characters gain 1 advancement checkpoint per hour spent progressing (gainfully) through an adventure, regardless of the method. They can negotiate, explore or fight. It takes four advancement checkpoints to gain a level if you’re Tier 1, or eight advancement checkpoints if you’re Tiers 2 to 4.
Stated otherwise:
- Level 1 to 4: 4 hours per level
- Level 5+: 8 hours per level
This puts the new system more in line with the original intent.
Here is one change to the system from what was originally described in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything: Characters can advance at half-speed, and double the amount of time to gain levels. You can use this to allow lower-level characters to catch up to players who are higher level. If your friends missed a couple of sessions, you can still play with them, but you can slow your advancement as they catch up. Alternatively, other players enjoy taking their time through the levels. That also works!
One interesting wrinkle in the new system is that it allows the gaining of checkpoints to be linked to the success of the players in an adventure. As DDAL adventures stand at present, you get 75%-100% of the experience available based on what you fight and how you succeed. This calculation is often poorly structured – many players can tell you about times when they’ve done everything and haven’t gained full XP. If a four-hour adventure gives 3 or 4 experience checkpoints based on your success, then you’ve got the same effect, and probably more accurately.
The part of the new system that is going to affect me the most concerns the play of hardcovers. I run them quickly. I’m very efficient at running combat, and we don’t spend a lot of time in interactions. There’s roleplaying, but it’s not our strongest point. So, an adventure rated as 8 hours might take us 4 hours to finish. I’m sure you can see the challenges I’ll have. Players who take significantly longer can use the half-reward scheme; I don’t have that option.
This is only one of the changes that has been revealed to how the Adventurers League works. Magic items are also changing, as well as gold awards; the last is causing a lot of discussions. I’ll return to these topics over the next few days.
I’m in favour of this change to advancement, despite how it’ll make hardcovers more challenging for me to run. Not having the Curse of Strahd problem where a great session led to no awards? Brilliant!
I am thinking that Hardcovers will not be run by me anymore.
Conversely, although I’m still processing these changes, I think they’ll make it more likely that I run hardcovers at the store I organise things for, and find it easier to make other DMs’ hardcover tables work well.
The problem I see with hardcovers in the new system is when a new player shows up and wants to join the group. They start at level 1, your party is say, 6-7. In the current system, they would catch up to 4-5 fairly quickly, and always be a level or two behind. In the new system, they will pretty much never really catch up, they just fight harder encounters comparative to their level. I really don’t understand why they specifically removed the ‘catch up exp’ part from the XGE system that was designed for just this issue.
And that’s not even accounting for the higher cost of death, as the consistently lower level player is likely to die more, going into TP debt to keep playing, and never being able to afford items the help them not die, creating an ugly cycle. Overall, its just a much worse idea to include a new player into an existing hardcover group in the new season, and I feel that it is a change in a bad direction. Anything that makes inclusion a bad idea is a bad direction.
I also run hardcovers in AL, and I expect those to become far less popular for this and other reasons. I would rather have seen them give more detailed guidelines on hardcovers by chapter, although that’s probably only easy to do for the earlier books (Hoard of the Dragon Queen vs Tomb of Annihilation).
Even so, this is the easy and (relatively) uncontroversial bit. As you note, it’s the treasure and gold that are the real concerns.
The Content Guide will have a bunch of advice for the hardcovers, from what I gather. I’m writing the magic item article now; gold article will follow afterwards!
They also banned pretty much any hardcover legendary as well as saying to be LE you have to give up your background.
Thanks for your vision of the game, Merrick : always intelligent, always balanced. I strongly support the change and I^m happy to see an article as yours from a person with your influence.
I think the revised XP system looks pretty good. However, I have some concerns about the treasure system.
1) Existing characters have a random number of magic items as a result of the number of modules played, how many dice rolls they won or had a chance to roll on, and many other factors. Existing characters with below average magic item count are penalized by the new system since the character will only ever receive a certain number of treasure points. An existing level 7 with no magic items ends up penalized compared to a new level 7 character that will have 16 treasure points to spend by that point in time. This is at least two decent magic items. I think the AL Admins need to come up a system to bring existing characters up to speed.
2) The gold costs for spell casting services need to be adjusted or removed since they make no sense given the new gold accumulation rates. I realize that treasure points can be spent to obtain services to restore your character to a playable state .. including incurring a debt (True resurrection is explicitly mentioned … though they don’t mention Greater Restoration if needed to recover from an intellect devourer attack for example) .. but the table still lists true resurrection as costing 50,000gp which is more than any character will make in their entire career under the revised gold rules. The costs are so high compared to the revised income that they are pretty meaningless.
3) Wizards have to pay to copy scrolls and it is a significant cost that can’t be covered under the new gold rules.
4) NPC spell books are relatively common in AL modules (they list spells that can be copied from the book) but there is no guidance on what happens to these in the new system. So far, it looks like they would be treated like all the other items in the module and would be unavailable for use. This then makes one wonder where wizards are expected to acquire the spells and the funds to copy them?
Anyway, there appears to be a surprisingly large fraction of the treasure system that doesn’t appear to be thought out at all and would appear to require significant clarification and/or revision.
Actually I tink the HC rules are really about the best thing there is in the new rules.
Your players run through a HC quiickly? Run something else for them!
Or retrain them to stop and smell the roses.
The milestone or encounter exp both rewarded rushing through content for maximum rewards per hour.
Im glad thats gone.
Oh and I wikll be preferrentially playing hard covers.
This is why I really thin k WOTC should have allowed DMs and players to opt to eiher system on all content.
Some kinds of players are better served by one, some by the other.
One of the biggest meta-issues with AL is its inflexability in letting indvidual groups adapt the game to their preferences, which was always a big asset of D&D.
So… My players usually take it fairly slow. I think it’s great that they don’t rush through, and spend a fair amount of time on the role-playing parts.
As a result, a 2-hour adventure generally takes them a whole 4-hour session, and often I have to split a 4-hour adventure into two sessions.
So would they get the advancement points per hour played, or per hour that the adventure is supposed to take?
For a hardcover, it’s based on time played. For a DDAL or CCC, it’s based on the time the adventure is written for. I think, in season 8 DDAL adventures, goals give advancement checkpoints instead of time.