XP vs milestone advancement (plus an easy way to calculate XP for roleplaying )

You have to be some kind of supergenius to calculate XP, right? Well, hang on a minute.

My most recent D&D campaign isn't really a campaign at all — I'm calling it a series of one-shots. It's an open-world setting based on a post-apocalyptic version of my hometown. It's handy, because then the map and the setting are already pretty familiar to locals. I want people to drop in and out, to just come when they'd like and not worry that they're missing some monumental battle or plot twist.

But that "one-shot series" structure means that I can't really use milestone advancement, which is my go-to progression variant in 5th Edition. But luckily, the 5e rules provide some handy tools for awarding XP — even if they don't always spell out how to use them outside of killing monsters (more on that later!).

Milestones vs. story-based advancement

It seems like most people are using "milestone advancement" to mean awarding the party a level advancement for major plot-based accomplishments. That's the way I'm using the term, as well, but the DMG actually calls it "Story-Based Advancement" on Page 261. A little higher up on the page, there's a "Milestones" header, but that's talking about awarding XP when PCs reach minor and major plot points, not throwing XP and advancing the party whole levels at a time. But again, just so everyone's on the same page, when I talk about milestones in this article, I'm talking about a system without XP.

I <3 Milestones

Before I get too far, let me say: I love milestone advancement, and I'm not alone in that. It seems to be very popular with the DMs I encounter in forums, and even D&D Lead Designer Mike Mearls says it's his preferred method. It's described on page 261 of the Dungeon Master's Guide (not under "Milestones," ironically, but under "Story-Based Advancement"). Here's the quick version: Throw XP right out the window and level up your party every few sessions when you feel they've accomplished something level-worthy.

It's a great system because it's simple and it can reinforce the feeling that you've accomplished something at the end of a chapter. There's a lot less tallying kills and adding up XP at the end of an encounter or a session. It gives the DM more control over how fast the party levels, and at the same time it's a good way to avoid the feeling that players sometimes get that XP is arbitrary. Players can especially feel this way when DMs balance their games to award XP for combat but not for successful roleplaying or exploration encounters.

The wisdom of XP

Milestone leveling has its drawbacks, though. One of the beauties of 5th Edition's "bounded accuracy" design philosophy is that mixed-level parties aren't as problematic as they used to be. But milestone leveling works best when the party is kept at the same level regardless of how many sessions individual players attend — otherwise, if one player can't make it to a milestone session, they'd be stuck behind the rest of the party even if that's the only week they'd ever missed.

Some players prefer playing for XP, as well — milestones can feel arbitrary to players if it takes the party two sessions of RP to reach one milestone but six sessions of a grueling dungeon crawl to reach another. With XP, a goblin is worth 50 XP regardless of plot shenanigans like how quickly you're able to guess which NPCs are secretly werewolves plotting to overthrow the kingdom. (OK, that's a bad example. PCs are notoriously good at guessing which NPCs are secretly evil.)

A built-in feature of the XP system is the ability to for characters to catch up with higher-level companions. Since higher levels are worth way more points, lower-level adventurers are going to advance more quickly than higher-level adventurers getting the same XP.

The upshot? As long as you're running a long campaign where the party roster's not really changing, milestone advancement is great. But if you want to plan drop-in drop-out adventures for people who can only attend when the babysitter's available or when they're not putting out house fires, XP has some clear advantages. Now you just have to learn how to use XP without also needing to learn how to use a slide rule.

EZ XP

While the DMG gives detailed instructions on how to award XP for combat encounters, it's not super clear on how to do it for roleplaying and exploration challenges. It basically just says to use the the combat guidelines as a starting point. But it's easy — you just take a look at the "XP Thresholds by Character Level" table (DMG 82, also included at the bottom of this article). Pick how hard you think the encounter was and grant each player the XP listed for the highest-level character (or the party's average level, but I like using the highest level because it's less math and increases the XP catch-up effect). That's it.

You can also use this skip-some-steps approach for combat situations, and I recommend that you do. If you only have a few hours to prepare for a session, an hour spent tweaking an encounter so it's exactly the right XP is an hour you can't spend on something your players are going to enjoy more than that kind of precision. And even when you add up all the monsters' XP and crank it through the encounter multiplier and determine the difficulty threshold for the players who are probably going to be there that night, you're still only just inside the ballpark. There's a host of things like terrain, tactics, creature abilities and synergies that the rules-as-written method for creating encounters and awarding XP don't account for. It's a worthwhile effort to learn how to build encounters using XP, but once you have a feel for the process, it's better to spend less time trying to fine-tune a system that's built for variety and happy accidents, not precision.

My one-shot approach

For my one-shots, I'm just taking the XP it will take the highest-level character to advance an entire level and dividing it by the number of sessions I want it to take players to reach that level. For example, if my highest-level character is Level 4, I'd award 950 XP for the one-shot, because it takes 3,800 XP to advance from Level 4 to Level 5 and I want it to take characters four sessions to advance from 4 to 5. I can adjust that XP reward up or down depending on how much they accomplished, or since I'm structuring most of my one-shots around the 5-room dungeon model, I can divide the 950 by 5 to get XP per encounter. I don't want to do this math every time I sit down, so I made my own table.

Or, if you don't want to screw around with individual encounters and just award XP whenever the party takes a long rest, use the "Adventuring Day XP" table listed under the Modifying Encounter Difficulty section in the basic rules compendium or on DMG 84 (I've put this table at the end of the article, as well). The rules recommend averaging out player levels to determine per-day XP, but if you want to increase the XP-catch-up effect I mentioned earlier and keep the party closer together level-wise, award each player the per-day XP listed for the character with the highest level.

So it takes a little bit of prep and maybe printing out some tables, but using XP isn't quite as daunting as it may seem. And it does have clear advantages when you want characters to advance independently.

XP Thresholds by Character Level

Character Level	Easy	Medium	Hard	Deadly
1	25	50	75	100
2	50	100	150	200
3	75	150	225	400
4	125	250	375	500
5	250	500	750	1,100
6	300	600	900	1,400
7	350	750	1,100	1,700
8	450	900	1,400	2,100
9	550	1,100	1,600	2,400
10	600	1,200	1,900	2,800
11	800	1,600	2,400	3,600
12	1,000	2,000	3,000	4,500
13	1,100	2,200	3,400	5,100
14	1,250	2,500	3,800	5,700
15	1,400	2,800	4,300	6,400
16	1,600	3,200	4,800	7,200
17	2,000	3,900	5,900	8,800
18	2,100	4,200	6,300	9,500
19	2,400	4,900	7,300	10,900
20	2,800	5,700	8,500	12,700

Adventuring Day XP

Level	XP per Day per Character
1	300
2	600
3	1,200
4	1,700
5	3,500
6	4,000
7	5,000
8	6,000
9	7,500
10	9,000
11	10,500
12	11,500
13	13,500
14	15,000
15	18,000
16	20,000
17	25,000
18	27,000
19	30,000
20	40,000