How to distribute XP for players? I don't get it yet

[ForomirDeAlioth]

Hello.
I have an issue on how to distribute XP.

For example: I create a moderate threat (80 XP budget), then I pick one Party Level Creature and 2 Party Level - 2 creatures, totalizing 80XP and 3 creatures. The players successfully win the battle.

Now, they earn 80xp (for moderate threat), 80x3 = 240XP (for the numbers of creatures multiplied for the threat level) or each creature gives an XP from the table 10-8: XP Awards? In this case, 80xp (for one party level creature [40] plus two party level-2 creatures [also 40]?
The XP earned will be EVER the same as the threat level?

Can someone help me? I didn't understand very well this section.
Sorry for bad english, I'm not an native english speaker.

Thanks!

PS: Pages for reference are 489 and 508.

[Cydeth]

In your example, the party would earn 80 xp. Your 'XP Budget' is the amount each player earns. If you have a larger or smaller group, you add or remove monsters (the 'Character Adjustment' column on 489 is how many xp of creatures you add or remove), but you don't change the amount of xp awarded.

[ForomirDeAlioth]

Thanks! I was completely confused in this part haha.

Thanks a lot!

[Cydeth]

Not a problem! It definitely takes some getting used to, and it took me a while to realize what the encounter levels in the adventures meant.

[TomParker]

It's probably also worth pointing out that the XP budget is for a 4-person party. So in your example, if the party was 4 players, each person earns 80 XP.

If you had 5 players, you would add 20 XP worth of opponents (based on the character adjustment column from the table on page 489) but each party member would still get only 80 XP. The extra XP is only for adding monsters and increasing the difficulty to keep it a moderate encounter for more than 4 players.

I know some people in other threads have found this new method confusing, but I find it a lot easier to adjust difficulty on the fly when I have a larger number of players.

[krazmuze]

The reason for budgeted vs. as written XP is so that XP leveling will track with the milestone leveling in prewritten adventures - every chapter you will level regardless of which way you do it and how many players you have.

Of course open ended sandbox then it is just XP, there is no adjusting to be harder than the booked value when there is no book!