Leveling: Points vs Milestones, Part 1

I believe this is the first installment of a three part series on leveling.  The parts are expected to be:

1. Experience per RAW
2. Issues and Benefits
3. How I Want to Handle Leveling

The follow on posts may change, or never exist, but that is my thought as of today.

Leveling per RAW (DMG)

RAW provides quite a bit of guidance about leveling.  The section on Experience Points discusses how to handle non-combat XP awards, missing characters as well as milestones, both as a source of XP points and as a method in an of itself. RAW offers three methods to handle character level advancement:

1. Experience Points (XP)
2. Session Count
3. Story-Based (Milestone)

Most discussions pit XP against Milestone often with religious zeal and ignore the Session Count method.  Old time D&D was always XP based.  The DMG spends quite a few pages on how to calculate Challenge Ratings (CR) and build encounters all heavily laced with the term Experience Points.  Milestone seems to be favored by Wizards in their modules.  Session count may be a dark horse contender as players are often more aware of how many weeks they have played without leveling than the other factors.

But, XP points is pretty much the presumed default based on hiostory and quantity of rules, so I will delve into it first.  It has a lot of good (and bad) features, but I want to restrict myself in this article to delving into the RAW treatment of it.

A lot of the guidelines in the DMG relevant to this topic are built around the assumption of encounters per day and the concept of easy, medium, hard, encounters.  In games I have played in and observed, there are no where near the assumed encounters per day, but I'm going to work with the RAW assumption a bit and see what RAW tells us.

Experience Needed to Level

The DMG's section on Combat encounter difficulty spells out the expected XP points for each encounter difficulty per character.  The XP points are used essentially as a pool to buy opposition creatures and later (theoretically) used as an award to the players.

The table of XP per encounter is in the DMG it is combined with the experience required for each level in the table below.

The section to the left, with the grey bars shows the increase in experience granted by encounters as the level increases.  I added a column titled Encounter XP Delta that gives the change in XP granted per encounter with each level.  This column highlights the extremely uneven growth of experience granted per encounter. Second level grants twice as much as first level encounters.  Eighteenth level encounters grant only 8% more than seventeenth.

The three right hand columns, with green bars, gives the experience point totals needed to level for each level as well as the "new" XP required (that is the additional needed for each level) and the Leveling XP Delta or change in XP needed for each new level.  Once again, the requirement to level changes considerably between levels.  Level 3 requires adding twice what level 2 needed, while level 11 requires 29% less experience than level 10.

From reading tweets, Wizard's is quite aware of these inconsistencies.  They appear to be design decisions that impact the amount of effort or time to achieve the next level. 

Encounters Needed to Level

The above information allows for the derivation of an encounter to level metric that seems more informative as it combines factors and translates them into a meaningful metric:  How many encounters are needed to reach each new level.

  

This table shows the number of each encounter difficulty needed to acquire enough experience to reach the next level at each level. As an example, 6 medium encounters completed by a level 1 character will earn them level 2.

This table makes the number of encounters needed to level very explicit.  It varies between 6 and nearly 18 with a heavy weighting of encounters and possibly time played between levels 3 and 10.  The numbers suggest a player should expect to take nearly twice as long to achieve level 10 as any higher level.

Seemingly the game designers expected more game play in that level 3 to 10 bracket, or at least, the system is designed to encourage campaigns to linger in that level range. Following is bar chart that shows the encounters needed at each level to advance a level.

This really makes the focus on level 3 to 10 range clear.

Adventuring Days to Level

The DMG has a section that discusses how much can be typically done in an adventuring day. They assert that a party can handle 6 to 8 medium or hard encounters per day.  Given this and the other data presented in the DMG already highlighted above, the number of adventuring days to level can be calculated.

One bit of data that can be teased out of what is presented is the implied  encounters per day. They do come out to mostly in the 6 to 8 range as expected, though it is a specific number per level.  Six per day expected at levels 1, 2, and 14. Eight expected at level 3. Other levels prescribing different encounters per day for no reason that I can see.

The bottom line conclusion being that according to RAW, a character that is actively adventuring for 34 days will be level 20 if he/she dealt with the target number of encounters per day.  This strikes me as a bizarre result.

I just can't picture a D&D adventurer going from the moment of inspiration to the pinnacle of power in just a bit over a month of real time.  This just doesn't work for me.

RAW gives very brief treatment to the other two methods.

Session-Based Advancement

 

Here is the RAW snippet:

A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.

Milestone (Story-Based) Advancement

RAW  gives even shorter shift to what has become known as Milestone leveling:

When you let the story of the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

That is all I found in RAW that relates to my topic.  I'll work on more analysis in subsequent posts to this topic.