XP Budgets vs Rewards

One of the things that really annoys me about recent WotC and Paizo Adventure Path offerings is that they include lots of 'filler' encounters. These are, as the name implies, encounters that add absolutely nothing to the adventure being presented but which exist for the sole purpose of giving the PCs enough XP to get to the next level, so that they're ready to face the next batch of bad guys. My understanding is that much of this is driven by customer feedback: the customers don't like 'milestone XP' or similar, viewing it as somehow 'cheating', and so they insist that PCs must 'earn' those levels. Which is fine for them, but poison for my games, especially in systems where a mid- or high-level encounter might well take the better part of a session to run through.

Worse, one of the consequences of a strict "XP by killing things" policy is that the reward is tightly coupled to the encounter difficulty, which means that as system mastery goes up and the players learn to beat monsters more easily, the game just gets faster and faster - to challenge the players you need tougher encounters, which means more XP, which means faster levelling, which means you need tougher monsters, which means...

I've been pondering this for some time, and I think the conclusion that I've come to is that while XP budgets for encounters are a good thing, and while XP rewards for encounters are also a good thing, they probably aren't the same good thing - that is, it would be better to divorce the XP budget for building an encounter from the reward you gain from overcoming it.

In D&D 5e, the game is designed assuming that PCs will face roughly 4 'hard' encounters for each of 1st and 2nd level, then 8 'hard' encounters at 3rd level, 10 for each level from 4th to 10th, and then 6 for each level thereafter. I'm not sure exactly why those numbers were arrived at, but there they are.

Consequently, a 'hard' encounter for a 1st level party has an XP budget of 75 per PC - that way, once the group has faced 4 such encounters they'll have earned 300 XP per character and so reach 2nd level. All of which makes some sense.

What I'm proposing is this: leave the encounter building rules exactly as they stand currently: a 'hard' encounter for a 1st level party should continue to have a budget of 75 XP per PC. However, the number of experience gained from an encounter should be handled very differently.

In particular, encounters should be split into 'incidental', 'milestone', 'pivotal', and 'climactic'.

An 'incidental' encounter is one that has no bearing on the party's progress in the adventure. So if the party goes out and picks a fight, that would be an incidental encounter, as are encounters with wandering monsters, random groups of mooks, and so on and so forth. If the encounter could be removed from the adventure without noticably affecting the plot, it's an incidental encounter. And incidental encounters are worth no XP whatsoever.

A 'milestone' encounter is the common-or-garden encounter that will be faced most of the time - in order to progress through the adventure, the PCs have to deal with this encounter. (Note that milestone encounters don't have to be, and indeed shouldn't be, only those encounters on the 'critical path' through the adventure. If the PCs divert from Path A to Path B, and complete the adventure that way instead, the encounters along Path B are still milestones.)

A 'pivotal' encounter would typically be a sub-boss or end-of-chapter encounter - it's one that has especial significance to the adventure. And, similarly, a 'climactic' encounter would typically be the end-boss or end-of-adventure encounter.

I would argue then that incidental encounters should not give XP at all, milestone encounters should give a tenth of the XP for the next level, pivotal encounters should give two tenths, and climactic encounters three tenths. (Except at 1st and 2nd level, where it should be a quarter or a half - at that level you probably want to treat pivotal and climactic encounters as the same thing.)

Of course, there's a neat side-effect of doing this: it makes it easy to award XP on the other two pillars of play also. It's fairly easy to see how a social interaction or exploration step could be described as being incidental, milestone, climatic, or pivotal, and XP awarded accordingly.

(And this also has the effect of encouraging PCs to avoid, rather than seek out, wandering monsters - since these are incidental encounters they no longer award XP and so serve only to soak up resources, resources that would be better saved for more important encounters later. Conversely, it means that the DM no longer needs to worry about a wandering monster giving out "too many" XP and consequently skewing the game.)

One final thing (before the numbers): I think I'd be inclined to also have some other XP awards. In particular, I'd be inclined to use 4e's notion of Quest Awards, where the PCs are issued a quest that they may or may not want to follow up on, but where completing the quest was worth a milestone XP award (ideally, an adventure would have several quests available, potentially including some mutually-exclusive goals). And I think I'd also include a "default activity" that was worth a quarter-milestone. (In D&D, that would be "finding treasure" - in a standard dungeon crawl I think I wouldn't give XP simply for moving from room to room, but would instead include several hidden, and unaccompanied, caches of treasure. If the PCs find and loot one of these caches, they get the XP. But you don't get the XP for looting the corpses of monsters you kill - that's already handled with the XP award for the encounter itself!)

And so, the numbers to go with this:

Level	'Hard' Encounter Budget	Milestone XP	Pivotal XP	Climactic XP	Quarter-Milestone
1	75	75	150	150	20
2	150	150	300	300	35
3	225	180	360	540	45
4	375	380	760	1,140	95
5	750	750	1,500	2,250	185
6	900	900	1,800	2,700	225
7	1,100	1,100	2,200	3,300	275
8	1,400	1,400	2,800	4,200	350
9	1,600	1,600	3,200	4,800	400
10	1,900	2,100	4,200	6,300	525
11	2,400	1,500	3,000	4,500	375
12	3,000	2,000	4,000	6,000	500
13	3,400	2,000	4,000	6,000	500
14	3,800	2,500	5,000	7,500	625
15	4,300	3,000	6,000	9,000	750
16	4,800	3,000	6,000	9,000	750
17	5,900	4,000	8,000	12,000	1,000
18	6,300	4,000	8,000	12,000	1,000
19	7,300	5,000	10,000	15,000	1,250
20	8,500	5,000	10,000	15,000	1,250