Ok, perhaps I'm missing something here. I am currently halfway through The Bullywug Gambit with my group of 4 players and I am seeing them fly up through levels, so I started up a spreadsheet and started entering all of the encounters to date and through issue 141 to see where my players would be if they continued as is. This has left me confused.
According to the magazines, There is no Honor should take pc's from 1st - 3rd lvls. Bullywug is for a group of 4th lvl pcs and Wyverns wake is for a group of 5th lvl pcs...
Halfway through Bullywug and with only 2 filler encounters, my pc's are just about to hit lvl 5? If they complete all encounters by the end of 141 they will be half way through 7th lvl.
What am I doing wrong? I have calculated every EL through the exp calculator and it jives with the dmg. Are my pc's not supposed to be taking on all the encounters in each mag?
Please help me understand....
The Magehound
Are you including even things they don't fight/get XP for? Like Havill... Javiss... Mamba Jamba... whatever the name of the obscene leveled pirate capatian woman is?
Are you including even things they don't fight/get XP for? Like Havill... Javiss... Mamba Jamba... whatever the name of the obscene leveled pirate capatian woman is?
No, I did not include Harliss Javell. That counter was an EL 4 for my party as they were smart enough not to tangle with her. On the other hand, they did outright cream Rowyn and Gut Tugger before she could escape (though this seems rather common). I'm not sure what other things they "would'nt gain xp for"...
At the end of No Honor, I have them tracked at 6,113 xp ea. And by the end of Javell's standoff they are at 11,013 xp ea. The only gross encounter that my group took on and barely escaped victorious from was the slave pen EL9 at lvl 5, and that only accounts for 1300 or so. Now that was a skin of the teeth fight.
I'd be happy to share the excel spreadsheet with anyone that thinks they can spot the problem... Thanks again
The Magehound
Creative Director
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XP in the first few adventures is plentiful. This is on purpose, since PCs are fragile when they're low level and when one dies you can't afford to resurrect him. Also, in most adventrues there are encounters that can be avoided; we don't assume that the PCs will defeat each and every encounter in an adventure, so we put in a few more encounters than necessary as a general rule. Running the adventure with more or less than 4 PCs also changes the XP handout. And of course, characters who spend XP to craft items are going to fall behind as well.
If your PCs go through "There Is No Honor" and do everything, I wouldn't be surprised to see them hit 4th level by the end. Likewise, I wouldn't be surprised to see PCs hit 5th level before the end of "Bullywug Gambit." The 3rd Edition rules are designed to catapult you through these initial levels, for better or for worse.
In "Sea Wyvern's Wake" and "Here There Be Monsters," the XP haded out is a bit tighter, so things should come to a happy equilibrium.
we don't assume that the PCs will defeat each and every encounter in an adventure.
Ah... so I'm right when I tell these guys that they are over-achievers and that they don't need to go through the dungeons with a fine tooth comb. I'll try not to be so hesitant to let one or two get whacked either.
I just got worried when I saw mention of plot hooks in case your PC's needed extra xp before the next mod. I don't want to be too far out of the reccomended range. I also have to say that I was dissapointed to see that the scaling the adventure side bar in Wyvern's Wake only gave options for scaling down, not up. Was that just a space issue?
The Magehound
Magehound, are you awarding xp by the EL or the CR of the creature? There's a difference. EL is a quick gauge for difficulty level that factors outside things into it such as enviroment, special gear, etc.
I apologize if you already know this, but some DMs don't. I've seen it done and it isn't the method Dungeon magazine uses for awarding xp. Award by indidividual creature CR.
Also, you definitely shouldn't let your players mop up every single creature in the adventures. There is No Honor states that after mowing down about 1/4 of the rogues in the Lotus Dragon Guildhall that the rest will flee. If you let your players face every single one of them AND they took out Rowyn Kellani & Gut Tugger that is probably where your xp totals starting getting too high.
To answer your question from your last post (unless James beats me to it), here's a quote from the Dungeon Writer's Guidelines...
Scaling the Adventure (Mandatory)
All adventures in DUNGEON include a “Scaling the Adventure” sidebar. This sidebar contains suggestions the DM can use to modify the adventure’s antagonists and encounters for PCs of higher or lower level.
You should provide tips for a spread of two character levels in either direction from the level for which the adventure is designed, except in cases where this would move the adventure out of its designated challenge level (above 5th level for low-level adventures, below 6th level or above 12th level for midlevel adventures, and below 13th level for high-level adventures). If your adventure is for 18th level or higher, you should include some notes on how to scale the adventure into the epic realm (level 21 and above).
Magehound, are you awarding xp by the EL or the CR of the creature?
I have been awarding xp by cr, not el. I calculated el and xp with the el calculator today, seperate from in game, just for my spreadsheet.
after mowing down about 1/4 of the rogues in the Lotus Dragon Guildhall that the rest will flee. If you let your players face every single one of them AND they took out Rowyn Kellani & Gut Tugger that is probably where your xp totals starting getting too high.
They did go a bit hog wild down there, though they did split it up with a day of rest, thus letting the guild members rest up and re-fortify.
What I think it really boiled down to is that no one has died so far, and no one has been doing any crafting, not to mention that they have been really good at sniffing out all the baddies. I will be making some adjustments as I go from here on in though.
except in cases where this would move the adventure out of its designated challenge level
This makes total sense. Thanks.
Glad I could help. To add one more comment, I believe that the first adventure is the only one in which there was a surpluss of encounters in which if a DM decided to have his players face every one of them, it would end up allowing them to gain too much XP. From what James Jacobs wrote about a big portion of the guild thieves bugging out if faced with death or arrest at the hands of the PCs after 1/4 were done in, I think he probably didn't intend for every one of them to be encountered.
But, it's handy having all of the extra enemies down there for cases like my own group which is a bit bigger (6 characters at the time). By allowing them to face more, it means they'll keep up with the pace of appropriate XP earned.
Right now we're in Kraken's Cove in the The Bullywug Gambit and by the time they finish up there next session at least half of them will be hitting 5th level. Becuase we now have 7 players the slight jump they have on getting there shouldn't affect things in The Sea Wyvern's Wake. But we shall see...
I estimate one or two will have enough xp for 8th level by the end of "Sea Wyvern," but because I know full well they'll want to craft a slew of magic items, I'm holding off awarding that level, and will let them use the excess for items. This will (hopefully) keep gear in line with level, and avoid me having to scale the adventure to boot.
all this without the players heading for some extra gladiator fun at the arena..
I have a distinct feeling one player having a Feral Orc Barbarian, might go for some solo butchery. (fast healing + being fast = infinite hp -lol- )
"yeah went for some extra fun for the evening, and now im level 8.. you all are still level 2?". Ofcourse the arena shoulnt have more available than one fight a evening..
all this without the players heading for some extra gladiator fun at the arena..
Good point. I'll also make the mistake of adding the side-trek against the redcaps, and I plan on taking Pett at his word when he says to throw as many vine horror waves at the party as they can possibly stand! ;)
Just so I know that I'm awarding XP correctly for my group, could someone please explain to me the difference between awarding XP by EL and awarding XP by CR. Which one tends to end up awarding more XP?
Thanks,
Olaf the Stout
But, it's handy having all of the extra enemies down there for cases like my own group which is a bit bigger (6 characters at the time). By allowing them to face more, it means they'll keep up with the pace of appropriate XP earned.
I am running "there is no honor" for a party of 5 players. Should I just leave the encounters as is, or should I add in more baddies to adjust for the 5th player? I'm always horrible at trying to gauge when they'll hit which level I need them to be at.
If you allow your players to encounter about half of the 22 Lotus Dragon thieves before the rest decide to flee for safer ground, you should be right on the money. A 5th player shouldn't change things much. When you run the other installments you can throw in an extra bad guy every couple of encounters and keep your group on pace.
Just so I know that I'm awarding XP correctly for my group, could someone please explain to me the difference between awarding XP by EL and awarding XP by CR. Which one tends to end up awarding more XP?
Thanks,
Olaf the Stout
Olaf, the xp awards table on pg. 38 of the DMG lists CRs for rewards, not ELs. Now, you wonder what's the difference. If I calculate xp for 2 CR 1 creatures, it comes out to the same xp as if I awarded for an EL 2 (using the EL in place of the CR on the table) encounter. They are both 600 xp for a 1-3 level group. That's true about half of the time, but here's why it's best not to award by ELs.
EL is a gauge for how difficult an encounter will be for an average group of 4 players. Let's say you have an encounter where 4 PCs are crossing shark-infested waters in a small rowboat. There are 3 large sharks in the water, which begin ramming the boat forcing Balance checks, which on average half of the group are going to fail, knocking them into the water where they must fight the sharks at an extreme disadvantage.
OK. For such an encounter the EL should be about 2 higher than normal to account for the handicap the PCs have and the extreme advantage the sharks have.
Now, let's change it a bit. The PCs in the rowboat happen to be races that can breathe underwater and have swim speeds, as well as having weapons that are more effective than others underwater. Suddenly, this encounter isn't quite so difficult. It has nothing to do with PC foresight. The PCs simply are suited for this type of thing. Should they get as much xp as the first example group? No.
This is how the table at the bottom of pg. 39 of the DMG helps you adjust xp for your group.
Now, having said all that. If you have the generic group that Dungeon adventures and most WotC products are designed for, then by all means award xp using the EL figure if it is an accurate measure of difficulty for your group. Or even if it isn't. It's your game.
I should add an addendum to my last post... I have been known to be completely wrong before ;) There, now I'm covered.
I was curious about the XP progression as well. I am using DM Genie and it calcuates XP fairly accurately, and the party just hit 2nd level after the the Vanderboren vault (they figured out the combination on their own, so I awarded the suggested 2CR XP). This is with 4PCs.
I'll see how things go as they venture into Parrot Island.
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Creative Director
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I was curious about the XP progression as well. I am using DM Genie and it calcuates XP fairly accurately, and the party just hit 2nd level after the the Vanderboren vault (they figured out the combination on their own, so I awarded the suggested 2CR XP). This is with 4PCs.
I'll see how things go as they venture into Parrot Island.
That actually sounds about right. The adventure assumes that by the time you're in the Parrot Island section, you're about to or have already hit 2nd level. Likewise, your group is likely to hit 3rd level by the time they reach the end of the adventure, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're well on their way to fourth.
If your group does Every Single Encounter in an adventure path adventure, and you award XP by the book... they'll progress more quickly than the adventure path expects. Why? Because we design them to hand out about 125% of the necessary XP, to make up for the fact that some groups are going to skip or miss encounters or fail at some of them.
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that all makes perfect sense to me. i am all for having "spare" xp available for circumstances in which stuff is skipped or whatever.
however, i do have an issue with what people were saying about enemies escaping and so on. i was always under the impression that experience was earned by defeating the challenges, not necessarily killing all the bad guys. in other words, you should get experience for the enemies who fled, because for the purposes of the adventure, they have been "defeated".
in addition, experience should be awarded when players wisely circumvent frivolous combat, tey still acheive the same goals. in other words, if you are able to negotiate with the dragon instead of killing him, you should get the same xp. and so on. to me, this is best because it rewards smart play and does not promote the "kill em all!" attitude that often pervades rpgs in which the eeps are based solely on kills.
it's still improvement over the "killing blow" eeps system, in which the guy who jabbed the dragon with a toothpick when he was at 1hit point gets all the experience for it, and people are accused of "stealing my kill" and that sort of nonsense. but nonetheless i think xp should be awarded when the foe is subdued or circumvented by whatever means, not necessarily "killed".
also for what it's worth, i'm pretty sure my adventuring party, when savage tide starts, is going to be 7 or 8 strong, so naturally i will have some upward adjustment to do, but i'm used to that. i often run larger games.
Am I missing something here? I just ran the first portion of There Is No Honor with 5 PC's and each of them only has about 690 XP after completing the vault portion. I calculated the experience as follows:
Soller Vark CR 2 = 600 XP
Vark's Thugs 7xCR 1/2 = 1050 XP
Rhagodessa CR 2 = 600 XP
Iron Cobra CR 2 = 600 XP
Vault Puzzle CR 2 = 600 XP
Even if I only ran it with 4 PC's the group would still not be 2nd level before heading to Parrot Island (although they would be close).
Soller Vark CR 2 = 600 XP
Vark's Thugs 7xCR 1/2 = 1050 XP
Rhagodessa CR 2 = 600 XP
Iron Cobra CR 2 = 600 XP
Vault Puzzle CR 2 = 600 XP
Oh well this may be why. I made the thugs CR 3/4 by making half of them Rog 1 instead of War 1. I guess this is my extra XP. --
So...
Soller Vark CR 2 = 600 XP
Vark's Thugs 7xCR 3/4 = 1575 XP
Rhagodessa CR 2 = 600 XP
Iron Cobra CR 2 = 600 XP
Vault Puzzle CR 2 = 600 XP
RP Bonus for 2 game sessions = 150x2 = 300XP
Comes out to 1069 each. That's how things went.
... nonetheless i think xp should be awarded when the foe is subdued or circumvented by whatever means, not necessarily "killed".
I am with you on this too.
I also agree with the "killing != experience" rule. My group killed the rhagodessa, soller vark got criticalled to death, and they solved the vault puzzle extremely fast. For Vark's thugs, they killed 3 on the Nixie, 1 below decks while she was starting fires, and 3 thugs attempted to flee after being injured or seeing all their friends taken down. The evil warlock in our group with eldritch spear on his blast killed 2 of the 3 swimming thugs, watching as they sunk below the waves with glee. The third he threatened to kill if he didn't come back to the ship, so he did :)
The group didn't even damage the iron cobra and during the 4th round against it, they made their Spot checks and noticed its reaction to Lavinia. So they told her to approach it cautiously while they stood around the snake in case it attacked her and sure enough, the ring shut it down and the fight ended.
So in all these cases, the challenges were solved or defeated, and hence, I awared full experience points for all of them.
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 32
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**thread resurrection**
I'm glad I found this!
My group met each other when one hired the rest to defend his dad's pet store from wannabe lotus dragons. That got them about 400xp in total. After doing the Nixie (amazingly well) they get another 450 for combat and a good 150 for the role-play, information gathering, recruitment of NPCs and top class planning. So - after the Nixie they're second level.
Last night I was worried, now I'm not. Thanks, November-James!
I'm glad to read this thread. I was starting to think that my group was advancing too quickly. They hit 4th level at the end of TiNH, and will likely see 5th halfway through Bullywug gambit. I've been using the "Scaling the Adventure" guidelines, but I was starting to get concerned that they were going to outpace the adventures. I'm thinking that I might boost some of the encounters to make them more challenging, but award the normal XP for them. For example, I'm planning on adding levels of rogue to Brissa Santos, but only awarding XP for her base CR. Has anyone tried this? Does it work in reining in XP awards, or should I just let them level quickly? We use a houserule for level loss that doesn't actually involve losing XP, so death isn't an XP issue in my game.
PCs view XP as a 'right' not a privilege, and will whine like b7tches if you don't award full XP. And if you scale... you risk having to continue to scale EVERY adventure as the party stays ahead of the curve. If you don't scale so much, the party will eventually settle into the proper power level for each adventure.
I agree with those who say that if the lotus dragons run, that's XP gained.
My problem with my players is that they claim that the adventure paths are way too stingy with gp and they whine like b7tches because they can't afford to buy +2 weapons at 2nd or 3rd level. Give them the gold for too much gear, combined with powergamer players, and you have a perpetually unbalanced game.
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I'm glad my party's not like that Darren. My party is lvl6 mostly, and not all of them even have magic weapons yet. I've left the treasure mostly the same throughout the adventure, and my party has 8PCs, so it's about the same gear, and only slightly more loot, spread over twice as many people as planned by the adventure.
To counter, though, one of the PC's has some sweet mercantile feats and abilities, and they've made some side deals and such. For example, they sold some glass to a randomly encountered patrol of locathah for 10x market value, because locathah don't have much access to glass, and all kinds of access to pearls, which the PC's were happy to take as payment. :)
I'm glad to read this thread. I was starting to think that my group was advancing too quickly. They hit 4th level at the end of TiNH, and will likely see 5th halfway through Bullywug gambit. I've been using the "Scaling the Adventure" guidelines, but I was starting to get concerned that they were going to outpace the adventures. I'm thinking that I might boost some of the encounters to make them more challenging, but award the normal XP for them. For example, I'm planning on adding levels of rogue to Brissa Santos, but only awarding XP for her base CR. Has anyone tried this? Does it work in reining in XP awards, or should I just let them level quickly? We use a houserule for level loss that doesn't actually involve losing XP, so death isn't an XP issue in my game.
Careful with the "scaling the adventure" material. Doing this just ups the amount of XP the players are getting which just makes the problem worse. Your probably better advised to just leave well enough alone and let the fact that they are now getting less XP bring them back in line with the adventures.
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If you think your PC's are a little behind on their level progression, due to not getting enough XP, you could always throw in a few side quests, instead of just trying to find ways to buff the baddies in the AP.
Our party has been (nominally at least) playing in Sea Wyvern's Wake for over a month, and they're only about 3 weeks into the voyage. :)
YOu need them to be level X for adventure Y. If they're short of that, just toss them free XP to get them there. Don't hold you game hostage to the XP system.
^^^^ I agreee ^^^^
One could feasably just do away with XP on a construced AP like this. Just advance the pc level to match the module. Call it story awards.
"You wake on the IoD, nice voyage guys - everyone makes level 7"
The only place that would get sticky is with crafting and XP awarding spells, but how much have you really seen a wiz fall behind from this? One level?