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Experience Point System: Final Version

This is the text of the Experience Point section of the Rewards chapter from the upcoming Dungeon Master’s Guide. You’ll notice portions of it are very similar to the previous system, while others are very different.

Mialee and Tordek stand within the treasure chamber, surveying the riches before them. To get there, they slew three savage trolls, bypassed several devious traps, and solved the riddle of the golden golem before it crushed them. Now they are not only richer, but through their experiences they have grown in knowledge and power.

Experience points are a measure of accomplishment. While they partially represent training and learning by doing, they mostly illustrate the fact that, in fantasy, the more experienced a character is, the more power he or she possesses. Experience points allow a character to gain levels and are thus at the center of two of the most important concepts of the game: level advancement and character improvement. Gaining levels keeps the game moving and heightens the fun and excitement.

Experience points can also be spent by spellcasters to power some of their most potent spells—communing with deities, calling for a miracle, creating permanent spell effects, and invoking powerful wishes. When a caster chooses to do this, the loss of experience represents the terrible toll that using such powerful magic takes on his or her inner power. Experience points also represent the personal puissance that a character must imbue an object with in order to create a magic item. Every such item contains within it some fraction of its creator’s power.

In addition to experience, characters also earn treasure on their adventures. They find gold and other valuables that allow them to buy bigger and better equipment, and they find magic items that give them new and better abilities.

EXPERIENCE AWARDS

When the party defeats monsters, the DM awards them experience points (XP). The more dangerous the monsters, compared to the party’s level, the more XP the characters earn. The PCs split the XP between themselves, and each character increases in level as his or her personal XP total increases.

Standard Awards

In order to give PCs experience points, you need to break the game down into encounters and then break the encounters down into parts. If you’re using monsters from the Monster Manual, some of the work has already been done for you. Each monster there has been given a Challenge Rating (CR) that, when compared to party level, translates directly into XP awards.

A Challenge Rating is a measure of how easy or difficult a monster or trap is to overcome. Challenge Ratings are used in Chapter 4: Adventures to determine Encounter Levels (EL), which in turn indicate how difficult an entire encounter (often with multiple monsters) is to overcome. Of course, overcoming the encounter can take many forms. A monster is usually overcome by defeating it in battle, a trap by being disarmed, and so forth.

As the DM, you must decide when a challenge is overcome. Usually, this is simple to do. Did the PCs defeat the enemy in battle? Then they met the challenge and earned experience points. Other times it can be trickier. Suppose the PCs sneak by the sleeping minotaur to get into the magical vault—did they overcome the minotaur encounter? If their goal was to get into the vault and the minotaur was just a guardian, then the answer is probably yes. It’s up to you to make such judgments.

Only characters who take part in an encounter should gain the commensurate awards. Characters who died or were incapacitated before the encounter earn nothing, even if they are raised or healed later on.

To determine the XP award for an encounter, follow these steps:

1. Determine the party level (average level of the party members).

2. For each monster defeated, determine that single monster’s Challenge Rating.

3. Use Table 7–1: Experience Point Awards (Single Monster) to cross-reference the party level with the Challenge Rating to find the XP award.

4. Add up the XP award for each monster defeated to find the party’s award.

5. Divide the total XP among all the characters who started the encounter. (Even if they are knocked unconscious, everyone who took part in an encounter gains experience for that encounter.)

Do not award XP for creatures that enemies summon or otherwise add to their forces with magic powers. An enemy’s ability to summon or add these creatures is part of the enemy’s CR already. (You don’t give PCs more XP if a drow cleric casts unholy blight on them, so don’t give them more XP if she casts summon monster IV instead.)

Example: A party of five 4th-level PCs defeats two ogres. An ogre is Challenge Rating 2, so the party earns 600 XP per monster, for a total of 1,200 XP. There are five characters in the party, so they each get 240 XP (1,200 _ 5 = 240

For monsters with CRs above 20, double the reward for a CR two levels below the desired CR. Thus, a CR 21 reward equals double the CR 19 reward, CR 22 is double the CR 20 reward, CR 23 is double the CR 21 reward, and so on.

Bold numbers indicate the amount of XP that a standard encounter for a party of that level should provide.

*The XP chart doesn’t support XP for monsters that individually are eight Challenge Ratings lower than the party level, since an encounter with multiple weak creatures is hard to measure. See Assigning Ad Hoc XP Awards.

**The XP chart doesn’t support awards for encounter eight or more Challenge Ratings above the party’s level. If the party is taking on challenges that far above their level, something strange is going on, and the DM needs to think carefully about the awards rather than just taking them off a chart. See Assigning Ad Hoc XP Awards.

Similar to the previous system, the things player characters might encounter are rated to show what sort of encounter would be an appropriate challenge for those PCs. Unlike the previous system, the experience points are awarded per monster rather than for a group of monsters. Also, now you don’t adjust the difficulty based on the number of PCs -- their rewards are increased or decreased simply based on how much of the share of the Challenge Rating’s XP value they get.

Mathematically, you’ll notice similarities between the progression of a given CR’s worth in this system and the previous system’s Challenge Level reward progression. That’s because the amount of XP needed to gain a level did not change between these two systems, nor did our desired advancement rate (gaining a level about every four sessions, or every 13 to 14 encounters appropriate to your character). A 1st-level character in a group of four players is going to get 75 XP per level-1 encounter, just as in the previous system.

Monsters Below CR 1

Some monsters are fractions of a Challenge Rating. For instance, a single orc is not a good challenge for even a 1st-level party, although two might be. You could think of an orc as approximately CR 1/2. For these cases, calculate XP as if the creature were CR 1, then divide the result by 2.

Challenge Ratings for NPCs

An NPC with a PC class has a Challenge Rating equal to the NPC’s level. Thus, an 8th-level sorcerer is an 8th-level encounter. As a rule of thumb, doubling the number of foes adds 2 to the CR. Therefore, two 8th-level fighters are an EL 10 encounter. A party of four NPC 8th-level characters is an EL 12 encounter. A creature with character classes, such as a medusa sorcerer, adds its base CR from the Monster Manual to its class levels to get its final CR.

An NPC with an NPC class (see Chapter 2: Classes) has a Challenge Rating of the NPC’s level minus 1. Thus, an 8th-level adept is a 7th-level encounter.

Some powerful creatures are more of a challenge than their level would suggest. A 7th-level drow, for example, has spell resistance and other abilities, so she counts as a CR 8 creature. In general, if a creature’s base CR is less than 1, then its character level equals its CR. If the creature’s base CR is 1 or more, add its base CR to its total class levels to get its overall CR. For example, a centaur is CR 1, so a centaur who’s also a 7th-level ranger is CR 8.

Challenge Ratings for Traps

Traps vary considerably. Those presented in this book (see Chapter 4: Adventures) have Challenge Ratings assigned to them. For traps you and your players create, assign +1 CR for every 2d6 points of damage the trap deals. For magic traps, start at CR 1 and then assign +1 CR for every 2d6 points of damage the trap deals or +1 for every level of the spell. No trap should probably ever have a Challenge Rating above 10.

Overcoming the challenge of a trap involves encountering the trap, either by disarming it, avoiding it, or simply surviving the damage it deals. A trap never discovered or never bypassed was not encountered (and hence grants no XP award).

Modifying Encounter Levels

An orc warband that attacks the PCs by flying over them on primitive hang gliders and dropping large rocks is not the same encounter as one in which the orcs just charge in with spears. Sometimes, the circumstances give the characters’ opponents a distinct advantage. Other times, the PCs have an advantage that makes the encounter much easier. Adjust the XP award and the EL depending on how greatly circumstances change the encounter’s difficulty.

Circumstance XP Award Adjustment EL Adjustment
Half as difficult 1/2 XP –2 EL
Significantly less difficult 2/3 XP –1 EL
Significantly more difficult 3/2 XP +1 EL
Twice as difficult 2 XP +2 EL

ELs of 2 or lower are the exception. They increase and decrease in proportion to the change in XP. For example, an encounter that’s normally EL 1 but that’s twice as tough as normal is EL 2, not EL 3.

You can, of course, increase or decrease XP by smaller amounts, such as +10% or –10%, and just eyeball the EL.

See Chapter 4: Adventures for examples of the sorts of factors that make an encounter easier or more difficult.

Modify all ELs and experience rewards as you see fit, but keep a few points in mind:

• Experience points drive the game. Don’t be too stingy or too generous.

• Most encounters do not need modifying. Don’t waste a lot of time worrying about the minutia. Don’t worry about modifying encounters until after you have played the game a while.

• Bad rolls or poor choices on the PCs’ part should not modify ELs or XP. If the encounter is hard because the players were unlucky or careless, they don’t get more experience.

• Just because the PCs are worn down from prior encounters does not mean that later (more difficult) encounters should gain higher awards. Judge the difficulty of an encounter on its own merits.

Assigning Ad Hoc XP Awards

Sometimes the XP chart doesn’t quite cover a given situation adequately. If two orcs are an EL 1 encounter, four orcs EL 3, eight orcs EL 5, and sixteen orcs EL 7 (maybe), are thirty-two orcs an EL 9 encounter? A party of 9th-level characters almost certainly can wipe them out with ease. By 9th level a character’s defenses are so good that the standard orc cannot hit him or her, and one or two spells cast by a character at that level could easily destroy all thirty-two orcs. At such a point, your judgment as the DM overrules whatever the XP table would say.

An encounter so easy that it uses up none or almost none of the PCs’ resources shouldn’t result in any XP award at all, while a dangerous encounter that the PCs defeat handily through luck or excellent strategy is worth full XP. However, an encounter in which the PCs defeat something far above their own level (CRs higher than their level by eight or more) was probably the result of fantastic luck or a unique set of circumstances, and thus a full XP award may not be appropriate. As the DM, you’re going to have to make these decisions. As a guideline, the minimum and maximum awards given on Table 7–1: Experience Point Awards (Single Monster) for a group of a given level are the least and most you should award a group. Circumstances in your campaign may alter this, however. You might decide that an EL 2 encounter is worth at least a little to your 10th-level party since it caused them to waste some major spells, so you give them half the amount an EL 3 encounter would have garnered, or 125 XP. Or you might judge that a vast number of CR 1 monsters are indeed an appropriate equal challenge for the same 10th-level party because the group had lost all their equipment before the fight started.

Sometimes, you may want to estimate experience point awards for actions that normally don’t result in XP under the standard system. These are called story awards (see below) and should only be used by an experienced DM.

Variant: Faster or Slower Experience

You control the pace of character progress, and the easiest way to do that is through experience point awards. Obviously, if you want the characters to progress faster, simply make every award 10%, 20%, or even 50% larger. If you want characters to progress more slowly, give awards that are some suitable fraction of the original award.

When modifying awards in this way, keep track of the amount of change you impose on the PCs’ progress. You need to balance this with the pace of treasure awarded. For example, if you increase the amount of experience earned by the characters by 20% across the board, treasure also needs to increase by 20%, or the PCs end up poor and underequipped for their level.

Modifying Challenge Ratings

The other way to modify character progress is to modify the Challenge Ratings of monsters encountered. If you increase the CRs, you increase the experience awards and speed up advancement.

Of course, whether or not you want to change character progress, you may decide to modify various Challenge Ratings. If you think that a certain monster is worth more (or less) than its Monster Manual rating, feel free to change it. Keep in mind, however, that just because the PCs in your campaign happen to all have bane weapons useful against aberrations, that doesn’t necessarily make beholders actually a lower challenge overall. It just means that your party is well equipped to deal with their challenge.

Variant: Free-Form Experience

Instead of calculating experience points, just hand out about 75 XP times the average party level for each character in the party per balanced encounter. Hand out more for tough encounters: 100 XP per level per character, or even 150 XP. Award less for easy ones: 25 to 50 XP. Alternatively, you could give out 300 XP times the average party level for each character per session, modified slightly for tough or easy sessions.

It’s very simple to track how quickly characters gain levels using this system. The drawback is that it generalizes PC rewards, rather than granting them based on specific accomplishments. You risk players becoming dissatisfied by gaining the same reward every session.

Variant: Story Awards

The PCs have rescued the constable’s son from the troll lair, a heroic and impressive feat. They leave the lair and stop their current quest so they can return the young boy to his home and parents. Do they get experience points for this?

Some DMs want the answer to be "Of course they do." In order to accomplish this, you need to set up a system in which you can award XP for accomplishing goals and for actions and encounters that don’t involve combat.

In the finished version of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, we employed the use of "Variants" to show that there were different ways of doing things, and you could choose the one you liked best for when you play.

Challenge Ratings for Noncombat Encounters

You could award experience points for solving a puzzle, learning a secret, convincing an NPC to help, or escaping from a powerful foe. Mysteries, puzzles, and roleplaying encounters (such as negotiations) can be assigned Challenge Ratings, but these sorts of awards require more ad hoc ruling on the DM’s part.

Challenge Ratings for noncombat encounters are even more of a variable than traps. A roleplaying encounter should only be considered a challenge at all if there’s some risk involved and success or failure really matters. For example, the PCs encounter an NPC who knows the secret password to get into a magical prison that holds their companion. The PCs must get the information out of her—if they don’t, their friend remains trapped forever. In another instance, the characters must cross a raging river by wading, swimming, or climbing across a rope. If they fail, they can’t get to where the magic gem lies, and if they fail spectacularly they are washed away down the river.

You might see such situations as having a Challenge Rating equal to the level of the party. Simple puzzles and minor encounters should have a CR lower than the party’s level if they are worth an award at all. They should never have a CR higher than the party’s level. As a rule, you probably don’t want to hand out a lot of experience for these types of encounters unless you intentionally want to run a low-combat game.

In the end, this type of story award feels pretty much like a standard award. Don’t ever feel obligated to give out XP for an encounter that you don’t feel was much of a challenge. Remember that the key word in "experience award" is award. The PCs should have to do something impressive to get an award.

Mission Goals

Quite often an adventure has a mission or a goal that pulls the PCs into the action—rescuing a prisoner, recovering a lost artifact, shutting down an infernal machine, and so forth. Should the PCs accomplish their goal, they may get a story award. No Challenge Ratings are involved here: the XP award is entirely up to the DM.

Such rewards should be fairly large—large enough to seem significant when compared to the standard awards earned along the way toward achieving the mission goal. As a general rule, the mission award should probably be more than the XP for any single encounter on the mission, but not more than all standard awards for encounters for the mission put together (see Story Awards and Standard Awards, below). Potentially, you could give out only story awards and no standard awards. In this very deviant sort of game, the mission award would be the main contributor for XP.

It’s possible that in a single adventure a party can have multiple goals. Sometimes the goals are all known at the outset: Unchain the gold dragon, destroy or imprison the two black dragons, and find the lost staff of healing. Sometimes the next goal is discovered when the first one is accomplished: Now that the illithid is dead, find the people who were under its mental control and bring them back to town.

Some players will want to set up personal goals for their characters. Perhaps the PC paladin holds a grudge against the night hag from when they encountered her before. Although it’s not critical to the adventure at hand, it becomes his personal goal to avenge the wrongs she committed by destroying her. Or, another character wants to find the magic item that will enable her to return to her home village and stop the plague. These are worthy goals, and the individual character who achieves them should get a special award. "I want to get more powerful" is not an individual goal, since that’s what just about everyone wants to accomplish.

Remember: A goal that’s easy to accomplish is worth little or no award. Likewise, goals that merely reflect standard awards (such as "Kill all the monsters in this cavern complex") should be treated as standard awards.

Roleplaying Awards

A player who enjoys playing a role well may sometimes make decisions that fit his or her character but don’t necessarily lead to the most favorable outcome for that character. Good roleplayers might perform some deeds that seem particularly fitting for their characters. Someone playing a bard might compose a short poem about events in the campaign. A smart-aleck sorcerer might crack an in-game joke that sends the other players to the floor laughing. Another player might have his character fall in love with an NPC and then devote some portion of his time to playing out that love affair. Such roleplaying should be rewarded, since it enhances the game. (If it doesn’t enhance the game, don’t give an award.)

Roleplaying XP awards are purely ad hoc. That is, there is no system for assigning Challenge Ratings to bits of roleplaying. The awards should be just large enough for the player to notice them, probably no more than 50 XP per character level per adventure.

Story Awards and Standard Awards

You can handle story awards in one of two ways. The first is to make all awards story awards. Thus, killing monsters would earn no experience in and of itself—although it may allow characters to achieve what they need to do in order to earn the story awards. If you follow this method, you should still pay attention to how many experience points the characters would be earning by defeating enemies so that you can make sure the PCs’ treasure totals are in line with what they should be earning.

The second way is to use standard awards for defeating enemies but award only half the normal amount for doing so, making up the other half through story awards. This method has the virtue of keeping the treasure earned at about the same rate as XP.

Don’t simply add story awards to standard awards (even if you compensate by giving out more treasure as well) unless you want to speed up character progression.

Coming up with a way to handle this took us a surprisingly long time. While we all liked the idea of story awards, we realized they were difficult for new DMs because they were completely subjective. The real problem came when we realized that we needed a way for Dungeon Masters to award XP for monsters and give out story awards without simply advancing their characters faster than a DM who didn’t give out story awards.

Experience Penalties

Characters can lose experience points by casting certain spells or creating magical items. This allocation of personal power serves a specific game function: It limits and controls these activities, as well as making them interesting choices for players. In general, however, you shouldn’t use experience penalties in any other situation. While awards can be used to encourage behavior, penalties don’t serve to discourage bad behavior. They usually only lead to arguments and anger. If a player behaves in a way you don’t want him to behave, talk to him about it. If he continues, stop playing with him.

Death and Experience Points

If a character takes part in an encounter, even if she is incapacitated or dies during the encounter, that character gets a share of the experience points. If a character dies and is raised, the awarded experience points are granted to her after she comes back from the dead (and after she loses the level from death, if appropriate).

Sidebar -- Behind the Curtain: Experience Points

The experience point award for encounters is based on the concept that 13.33 encounters of an EL equal to the player characters’ level allow them to gain a level.

Thirteen to fourteen encounters sometimes seem to go by very quickly. This is particularly true at low levels, where most of the encounters that characters take part in are appropriate for their levels. At higher levels, the PCs face a varied range of Encounter Levels (more lower than higher, if they’re to survive) and thus gain levels somewhat more slowly. Higher-level characters also tend to spend more and more time interacting with each other and with NPCs, which results in fewer experience points over time.

With this information in mind, you can roughly gauge how quickly the PCs in your game will advance. In fact, you can control it. You are in charge of what encounters happen and the circumstances in which they occur. You can predict at what level the characters will reach the dark temple and prepare accordingly. If it turns out that you predicted incorrectly, you can engineer encounters to allow them to reach the appropriate level or increase the difficulty of the temple encounters as needed.

Published adventures always provide a guideline for which levels of characters are appropriate to play. Keep in mind that this information is based on character power as well as expected treasure. Chapter 5: Campaigns gives a guideline for about how much treasure a character of a certain level should possess. This guideline is based on the (slightly more than) thirteen-encounters-per-level formula and assumes average treasures were given out. If you use a published adventure but tend to be generous with experience points, you might find that the characters in your group don’t have as much treasure as the scenario assumes. Likewise, if you’re stingy with experience points, the characters will probably gain treasure faster than levels. Of course, if you’re stingy or generous with both treasure and experience points, it might just all even out.