I have recently been thinking about why I prefer using Experience Points to Milestones.
There are a few reasons, and this article covers my thoughts on the benefits and problems encountered by both approaches. I do believe, very strongly, that there is no one right way, but – in the main – Experience Points are superior for my campaigns.
And the reason for that derives a lot from the formats of those campaigns.
There are several definitions of milestones out there, but for the purposes of this discussion the default is “you gain a level when you complete one or more significant achievements”, which is how they are represented in recent Dungeons & Dragons adventures from Wizards of the Coast. There are other implementations, which I will touch on in the article.
Quests and the Open World
Rime of the Frostmaiden begins with the players able to visit any of the Ten Towns and undertake quests found in those towns. Dragon of Icespire Peak has a similar structure: the players start in a location and have the option of pursuing various quests.
Each of those quests has a difficulty. It might not be stated, but on further analysis, you could say “this is a level 1 quest”, “this is a level 4 quest”, “this is a level 7 quest”, where the challenges are appropriate for a party of that level. Balance is never perfect, but that is near enough for most purposes. (The intersection between notions of balance and how play proceeds is where much enjoyment comes as you see how the players deal with each new challenge).
Under the Experience Point system, a party completing a quest receives XP dependent on the difficulty of the challenge. And it is important to recognise that XP is not a flat progression. If we say that a level 1 quest is worth 300 XP and a level 3 quest is worth 1800 XP, then it is obvious that a first level party that somehow completes a level 3 quest gains more – enough to gain two levels – while the third level party that completes a level 1 quest only gets 300 XP and only progresses partially to the next level.
Under the Milestone system, in its most basic form, a party completing a quest gains a level, regardless of its difficulty. Obviously this has problems. Why should a level 10 party gain a level for completing a level 1 quest they didn’t complete at the start of the campaign?
And so, in an open world where the players can choose the order of quests, designers have to modify the Milestone system to deal with this. And this is especially true of campaigns where there are more low-level quests available than a party would complete.
Rime of the Frostmaiden is like this. Eleven quests for level one to four characters. And, as I describe later, uses a modified Milestone system.
Milestones and the Linear Adventure
In contrast, there are adventures like Tyranny of Dragons that function on a more linear flow. While Tyranny allows a lot of player agency within each of its chapters, the links from chapter to chapter are set in stone.
At the beginning of each chapter, you have a goal. When you complete that goal, you move on to the next chapter and challenge.
It is in this sort of format that milestones shine. The players have a predictable progression from one challenge to the next. And, because you use milestones, you do not need to make sure there are enough monsters to fight or traps to disarm so the players get the required amount of XP.
You can see this in many Adventure Paths from Paizo and other 3E adventures. Some seem to be absurdly padded for their plot content. Why are there so many combats? Because they are making up the XP total you need for the next level!
XP in these situations tends to be a drag. The adventure doesn’t care about how many challenges you have completed to complete your goals, it only cares that you have.
The Uncompleted Quest Problem
One drawback that milestones have is that they do not reward partial completion of a quest. If you enter a bandit lair to rescue some captives and slay some bandits, you receive no reward if you must retreat ahead of time. Especially in an open world, where challenges may not be scaled exactly for you level, this situation is not unlikely.
If then, you have partially completed three quests, then you have a group of adventurers who have done a lot of things, but haven’t gained a reward for it. Must they then continue until they find a quest they can complete?
And yes, they might gain a few pieces of treasure or other benefits, but, especially at low levels, they are insignificant next to the importance of a level gain.
In an XP system, the players gain partial rewards. They get XP for all the challenges they did overcome, even if they haven’t completed the overall quest. And so they may gain a level from their experiences.
I can very easily see how some players would prefer the milestone system, where you only gain levels for successful accomplishments. As I said at the outset, there isn’t one advancement system that is perfect foreveryone and in every situation.
Milestones in Icewind Dale
Milestones in Icewind Dale presents a variation of the milestone mechanic. It works like this:
- Become 2nd level when you complete one quest
- Become 3rd level when you complete three quests
- Become 4th level when you complete five quests
- Once you reach 4th level, you can’t level-up using quests in the first chapter.
The intention is that you gain second level for completing one quest, and then another level for each two quests you complete thereafter.
As a structure, this works. It is pretty simple for most DMs to adjudicate, and you reach fourth level with a sense of accomplishment.
Of course, it then runs afoul of some issues:
- Random encounters in the wilderness do not reward the party for overcoming them
- Incomplete quests present no rewards for work done
- You get no rewards for helping once you reach level 4
- The rewards do not vary based on the challenge of the quest
Are these problems? The answer is “it depends”. Even if you use XP, you have situations where instead of “no reward” you have “insignificant reward”. A quest that awards 300 XP each is of not much use for a level 5 character.
Milestones get away from meaningless rewards, but runs into the other problem where the players do not feel rewarded for incidental actions and challenges.
Partial Rewards and Checkpoints
One solution to the “all or nothing” nature of milestones is to break each milestone into three or more “checkpoints”; you can consider it a hybrid of XP and Milestones. That way, you can reward partial achievements.
This system is used by the Pathfinder Society, was used in the D&D Adventurers League for a while, and is sort of used in Rime of the Frostmaiden. Effectively, you get one checkpoint for each quest you complete, and you need a total of one, three or five to gain a level.
The Pathfinder Society version is to gain 1 checkpoint (called, confusingly, XP) for each adventure you complete. You gain a level for every 3 checkpoints.
Perhaps a more useful version is that described in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and implemented for a while in the DDAL: you gain one checkpoint for every hour played, and need four checkpoints to gain a level at Tier 1 and eight after that. If you replaced “hour played” with “significant challenge overcome”, then you have a way of getting partial rewards without needing to complete a quest.
Catching Up
There is one area where Experience Points provide a definite advantage over Milestones, and that is in a campaign where characters are of different levels.
In a checkpoint or milestone system, if you miss a session or two, without DM intervention you are permanently behind by however milestones or checkpoints you missed, unless other players then miss sessions
You might think that this is also true of Experience Points. If you missed 2000 XP in a session, however do you get it back? Well, you do not. However, the XP system is not flat like the Milestone system.
If a first level character joins a group of fifth level characters, then by the time the higher level adventurers reach sixth level, the first level character will be in the early stages of fifth level!
This is one of the best features of the XP system in a campaign where characters drop in and out of the group.
The Joys of DM Fiat
Of course, with a milestone system, just as with any advancement system, the DM can just override things and tell a player, “Your character has gained a level”.
Such is recommended in those situations when the players have adventured for some time and still have not gained a level for one reason or another.
Still, it is something that sits poorly with me. I like it more when the PCs are advancing based on their actions (and concrete rules beforehand) rather than just on DM whim. These things can go very badly, with one player lagging behind because their DM punishes them for missing sessions.
And then there is also the player side of things, where the 3000 XP you get for defeating a dragon is more than the 100 XP you get for defeating the kobolds, and it feels right: it was a bigger foe!
Experience Points for Completing Goals
Funnily enough, the Milestone system as described in the Dungeon Master’s Guide begins with the assumption that you still use XP! Rather than giving XP for each monster defeated, you then give XP based on the overall difficulty of a quest when you complete it.
What I like about this is that it allows for smaller advancements than the rough-and-ready milestone system – and more nuanced ones than the checkpoint system. It also allows for players to catch up to higher-level characters.
The drawback is that it still requires completed quests. And it requires more tracking than a simpler milestone or checkpoint system.
Historical Drawbacks of Experience Points
Experience points were originally awarded for defeating monsters and gaining treasure – with the common split being 20% from monster-slaying and 80% from treasure acquisition. With the release of AD&D 2nd Edition in 1989, the XP for treasure acquisition was made an optional rule, and by D&D 3rd Edition in 2000, XP was primarily gained from defeating challenges.
The problem was that no-one really quite knew how many XP to award for non-combat encounters. The books gave suggestions, but there was nothing definitive about it.
Experience points also occasionally give rise to the situation where players want to hunt down some orcs for XP, because they are only a few kills away from a new level. Many DMs have problems with that.
There is also the ongoing problem that XP are fiddly. It is easier to deal with checkpoints or milestones rather than totalling up the value of every monster and working out the value of goals achieved or other non-combat encounters overcome.
These are real issues people have with XP. And they are very valid.
Is there a solution? What should I do?
So, is there are perfect solution to the Experience Points vs Milestone debate?
Of course not! Each of us want different things from our games!
My home campaigns tend to have the following features:
- Characters of wildly different levels
- Characters joining and leaving at different times
- Exploration of wilderness and dungeons without a definite quest in mind
- Small and longer quests
- An emphasis on combat, but many other types of challenges
If I were to run Rime of the Frostmaiden, then some of these features would remain true. The first few levels are a lovely open-world sandbox with quests providing goals for the characters. However, the players can do partial explorations and the character pool might be more than just who comes for that night – and new characters might be necessary due to character death from time to time.
I need to do a better job of defining XP for non-combat situations. Often, use the powers of GM Fiat to give out what seems right. Mind you, I think that for a significant encounter that takes the same time as a combat encounter (30-60 minutes), XP equal to what the PCs would have gained from an appropriate-level combat encounter seem about right. Likewise for traps and tricks, although reduced if the time spent was less.
When you are selecting the advancement system you use, consider what you will do if some of the issues I mention come up. And, I hasten to add, there are more solutions than just Experience Points and Milestones! Many have been tried, many more will be invented!
I like XP, but then, I’m pretty old school. I’ve just come off five years of running a homebrew megadungeon campaign in B/X where as you mention, treasure is the main source of XP. It creates an immediate incentive for the players to become treasure-hunters, not necessarily “hack and slashers”.
As a player, I like XP because it’s the closest thing D&D has to a score. I like seeing my score get closer and closer to leveling up. In an old school game, I like the tension of playing it safe on a lower level of the dungeon for lower rewards, or delving deeper and more dangerously for the potential of higher rewards.
Now I am running Curse of Strahd in 5e. The book recommends a milestone leveling system, but I don’t like the “DM said so” aspect of this. So I am using a hybrid of combat XP and XP for player and story goals, using the ideas in the DMG. For minor goals (meeting important NPCs, accomplishing “side quest” goals, etc.) I award the XP equivalent of an easy encounter, and for major goals I award the equivalent of a hard encounter. (For the biggest “milestones” of the campaign, like finding the three treasures from the tarokka reading, I will award two hard encounters’ worth of XP.)
I want to keep the role of XP as a way to incentivize players. The trick is to align the source of XP with the goals you want them to focus on.
I’ve been having success running a campaign where each session is a milestone. The players know they have a time limit (the end of the night) to get to the point or shit resolves without them. This reformed an entire party of murder hobos. They now talk to people because they get a level either way and solving the problem gives them more control over the outcome than killing everything they see. They also have some new ability every session to play with. with levelling effectively linear they might actually get to use some lvl 20 abilities and I can just skip any padding fights or make them easier.
Normal XP feels like reading War and Peace. Milestone per session feels like a good TV show.
Caveats
We only play once per month
One shots reward gear, connections, and abilities not levels.
I haven’t had a player miss a mainline session yet, but I’d probably flip a coin on leaving them or not.
No deaths yet, but I’m leaning to make a new character one level lower than your last one which is also what I’d do if somebody just wanted to play a different class. Maybe let them have a choice to start at level 1 and advance at double the rate until they catch up if they want to get used to playing the new class.
Newish DM. My first game I ran with XP and the players would out level encounters leaving me to scramble to make the challenges harder. Going with milestones I was able to keep power creep a little better in check. So instead of getting a level a session it became more a level every few, usually tied to a story arc rather than just to a quest, with rewards other than just XP for exploring or small quests. And if we had people come and go (yeah finals and life) they had a chance to write about what their character was doing while they weren’t at the session so no one got left behind in levels.