How To Use Milestone Levelling In Dungeons and Dragons 5e 

I would expect this level of wholesomeness on no D&D channel except for Dungeon Dudes.

Maybe the real milestones are the undead the party necromancer made along the way

NO experience is more important lol

I think I have to throw yp

@@short7440 "You raised the bard?! I missed his beautiful music." *The skeleton starts playing Gangsters Paradise on his bagpipes*

What's its charisma modifier though? 😁

GameNinjaD you made me laugh. I was drinking coffee at that exact moment. It wasn’t pretty. Not sure why I laughed, your answer is clearly the logical answer.

Takes playing "got your nose" to the next level

Wholeheartedly agree. I especially love giving a level-up not just after boss combat-but during big PC story moments. Oh you overcame your tragic backstory or discovered your role in an ancient prophecy? Levelllll up! I think it's a pleasant surprise for players who would otherwise expect level-ups to always be after a big boss fight or something along those lines

Or I'm bad at math and..... your lvl 3, woohoo!!! I also dragged lvl 4 out for 3 long rests lol, you don't get extra attack yet, 😈 not till I say so

I agree with everything you said except that it is exactly the reason why I don't like milestone leveling. Numbers should be impartial as so the narrative, I believe players have a reasonable amount of responsibility on moving the story forwards. Milestone leveling leaves the most important sign of accomplishment (mechanically speaking) in the sole hands of the DM. I don't find it either fair or appropriate to engage everybody in the creation of the story.

Victoria Amat that makes total sense. I just never have groups who focus on XP. I would love to do it that way, and at some point I will, but I guess since I found my dnd group in a writer’s club, we like narrative. Also, I play with ALWAYS beginning players, so they’re always so intimidated by XP (poor babies)

Randy Koney HAHAHAHA I started a campaign doing xp but I forgot to do my first xp add, and going through the process of doing MATH in DND (yucky) made me toss the whole thing.

there's no rule that states that just because you use XP that encounters, combat or otherwise, can't, or shouldn't, advance the narrative. All encounters can and should be used to either advance the narrative or give the PC's a more comprehensive feel for the campaign world. Be they combat or social encounters, regardless of the levelling system that's being used.

@@subduedpotato7216 YASSSS please preach. Now you can always reward EXP when a player do something with thier Personality traits or backstory elements . your players can have goals and plans they want to achieve and you reward them EXP that way.

@@optimus2200 yes. absolutely. There's so many options for awarding XP. With milestone, there's just the objectives

@@subduedpotato7216 also remember that EXP isnt the only thing to reward , Magical Items, Charms boons and feats are all good things to award. and the best reward there is .... the friends made along the way XD XD XD but seriously Creature companions like beasts or other things are an excellent addition that players would love.

@@optimus2200 you are correct. the only limit on what you can reward your players with is your imagination

But then it creates problem of wanting your character stuff done before others or else lose out. Not saying can't work but would depend on type of players.

@@MrHarshverdhan Sure, you’re right. It works very well with me and my players because I know them for a very long time and they don’t do this kind of thing. However, it might not be the best choice for you to do it with people you don’t know enough and with certain personalities.

personal side quests should not be rewarded...unless the whole party agrees to do them, they are just distractions from the rest of the table. we need players who cooperate to set and achieve common goals, not individuals who domineer the table's attention/game-play time by running around doing whatever comes to mind with the excuse of "that's what my character would do." These characters are professional adventurers at work trying to make enough money to pay the rent, and they work for a little company called "the party" who takes contract gigs or goes out looking for treasure.

personally i love using milestone, and most of my group does too. my big issue with an XP system was previously, i had to leave about 90 minutes before the rest of the group called it. well, i fell 5 levels behind even people who were not there every week, even though i was, because i wasn't there for the end of each encounter, so i got none of the rewards, even if i had participated in the fight. a level 11 sorcerer in a level 17 campaign is really vulnerable

I gotta admit, I never used xp. It just feels better to go Okay you just killed the demon lieutenant after running the gauntlet. You are celebrated heroes and you get a much deserved rest. You gain a level and use the rest time to work on new skills, spells etc. and meet again at your favorite tavern.

Steal-kills as in one PC stealing all the XP by landing death blows? I'm pretty sure they covered that in the "Terrible House Rules" video. "No one falls behind" in XP levelling if you're spreading it out to the whole team because they worked together to earn it, unless they're skipping sessions.

Milestone is nice, but I would have the players level up separately, when each of them does something big or interesting.

Vagus 😂

Ye

I am doing the same. Just with random numbers. Sometimes they get more, sometimes they get less. I am giving them plus exp as well. So we count in exp but have mile stone.

It's a great system. I use it as well, though in a more free-form version. I really like XP because it gives the players a concrete sense of progression. In too many intrigue or exploration games, the milestones are so fuzzy that as a player I just felt like I was spinning my tires, with no clear sense of progression.

There are cons, you can't use exp to reward role-playing and/or creative problem solving. There is also encouraging players to "beat the game" rather than live in the world you created. Still prefer milestone though.

@@jakeand9020 you could still award xp to players and have them use it for things like minor feats, knowledge, ability score increases, stuff like that

@@timothymanuel9197 I honestly never thought of a system like that, that's definitely something to think about.

Pros: reduces murderhobos

@@jakeand9020 I reward my players with hero points for that.

yes, that is correct

@@mathyoutoo1200 interesting, thank you. 😊

Make achievable goals. Reward the player when the advance the plot. Its way more intuitive than adding up EXP.

Glad to help!

Yeah me too, that's how I run my milestones. After the arc is over I give them a level. Sometimes I give my players a milestone in the middle of the arc if they do something to deserve it.

I do the same thing.

@@daemon_otaku8367 yep so your players can givr the mcguffin to the enemy make friends with them qnd completely derail your plans give them q level up and take a session off to figure out the atory again lmao

You earn those at level 5.

The links were actually there, you failed your perception check.

Only visible for players with the Detect Embedded Links Feat

There's more than one way to "beat" an encounter.

I find that the only thing milestone incentivises the players to do is complete the objectives that need to be completed in order to level up. It limits exploration if they already know what their next objective is. Sure, XP encourages murderhoboism but in my game they tend to be more free form with exploration. It might just come down to the player's play styles, not the levelling system used.

I mean that's easily solved as a DM by properly rewarding your players with XP for proper roleplaying, puzzle solving, and creative solutions to problems. XP is calculated by encounters, not just monster killing. It really only becomes a problem if the campaign is poorly planned or options are poorly communicated so the players feel like it is always optimal to just kill everything.

@@subduedpotato7216 my players have learnt that the side quests and extra stuff rewards them with other things, magic items, money, an npc that might help in future but my players also don’t play to level up, they play for the fun of the experience so they are happy taking a side quest that may give them nothing at the end as long as the story is fun.

​@@Ginric99 i agree that xp isn't the most important, but honestly it's way more fun to get some sort of reward for doing something. like yeah, it's not a huge issue if i don't benefit from doing this side quest, but it's still way more satisfying if i do benefit from it. the fact that so many people claim milestone is flat out better is astonishing to me, as i always thought a compromise between the two is the way to go. my DM runs it as "you get X amount of xp from this encounter," giving everyone a base amount for combat encounters, and giving a bonus to one person if they stood out a lot. for example: in one encounter (lost mine of phandelver, new players, new dm) our party (cleric, rogue, sorclock, ranger) was fighting a young green dragon. the cleric was downed in the first round, and the ranger used her turn to pick up the cleric and get out of there, leaving just the sorclock and me, the rogue. i rolled a nat 20 with a long bow, added sneak attack (swashbuckler) and did like 40 damage (we were level 4). sorclock gets a nat 20 for scorching ray and does another 60. at this point the dragon attacked the sorclock and flew away. i asked the dm if i could opportunity attack since it came within melee range. at this point he realized he had forgotten to disengage and watched in horror as me and the sorclock both opportunity attacked and demolished the rest of its hp. the cleric got i think 500 xp, the ranger 525 for saving the cleric, and me and the sorclock each 600 for singlehandedly killing the dragon in less than 2 rounds. he would also award xp for roleplay encounters, and would often make roleplay encounters based on who was lagging in xp. for example he made some sort of side encounter for the cleric and the ranger where two sketchy guys tried to flirt with the cleric. the cleric refused their advances for a bit, and when they got more insistent the ranger stepped in to help. after they diffused the encounter, the dm gave the cleric 100 xp and the ranger 75, catching them up to me and the sorclock. if there were ever an instance of a character being behind in xp, the dm would try to shape combat encounters around things that pc was good at, so throw more undead at the party if the cleric is behind so she has a better chance of being the "hero" and catching up. if everyone contributed equally to a victory, we'd all get the same xp. finally, he also implemented narrative "timeskips" so that if we were ever very close to leveling and there was a thematic reason for us to have some downtime, we would spend about a month doing something and then level up. he would have us describe what we were doing during that time and what we would like to gain from it as well, so if my character wanted to multiclass wizard or something i'd say "i spend the month researching magic and gaining a rudimentary understanding of it," and then i'd gain my level in wizard. however, if i reached a rogue ASI level and wanted to take magic initiate or something, i might say "i spend the month running a shell game in the town square, collecting gossip. whenever spellcasters come by, i make sure to talk to them about their magic, trying to glean some knowledges about its workings." i'd then gain a rogue level, maybe some gold, and the magic initiate feat. i say all this to say, milestone and xp are both flawed systems RAW, so i think compromising between them or at least deciding what's best for your group is better than just saying one is flat out better than the other. i personally like xp progression a bit more, but i like the idea of being able to bestow levels on people for important story moments. this can simply be accomplished by not always following the RAW for xp gain, and remembering rule 0. tl,dr: compromise between xp and milestone, or discuss the pros and cons of each with your players before deciding one is better than the other.

funny you said that. The game I'm running has that. Free food/lodging, trinkets, etc. In fact, when the party is in a majer city, there's a chance they could get mobbed, just like a celebrity in our world

the way I do it at least is by completing one task for every level. one task for 1st level, 2 tasks for 2nd, etc. that might help but idk

also my tasks are planned to be one session long

Hey, that sounds very interesting! As a DM planning to run Curse of Strahd, I would *love* to see that milestone reference document ;) Regardless, thank you very much for the tip :)

I’m literally contemplating this same issue in my CoS campaign. I wanted to use XP to give the game an old school feel (my party are older folks) But most of the encounters are kind of done and the characters are just now getting to level 8. I’m adding a Strahd’s wedding scenario in the game and I think I’ll be adding a lot of XP for that. The party has done many clever things ahead of time so I think it’s deserved. Thanks for your thoughts!

@@braulioservodedeus there you go www.dropbox.com/s/ebmpv7qsvdb3l8c/CoS%20Experience%20Draft.docx?dl=0

I use a similar, although usually more improvised, version of this as well for most of my campaigns. CoS was also the campaign that made me start using it! I've run it a few times and neither a standard XP model nor the suggested milestone systems work well at all for the pacing. This kind of a system allowed so much greater control over the pacing and is the only way I'd do it going forward.

@@MrRaposaum brilliant work

@@JediNiyte TY

@NoBoringChars i'm not sure if you are being ironic :P ( that is a compliment my liege)

@NoBoringChars sounds fine. Wht table where i ralk with players about lvling is a compleatly homebrew, so its very easy for me to adapt it to the lvl they are in at the time they get to an encounter ( most encounters i just have 1 or 2 creatures fixed and a kind of monstera to fill. Like. There is one yuan-ti priest.( i use a guardian naga statblock) and some other yuan ti. Bif they get there. At lvl 5. They find there are aome extra malisons. If they are lvl 6 a few malisonz. And a pit master. Lvl 8? great there is an anathema too. So i got lots of flexibility without breaking the campaign

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This can happen, thankfully most good groups care more about enjoying the game then gaining all the levels. at least all my groups have felt that way. Been using milestone since 5e launched and still had the past 2 sessions be complete side stuff having fun exploring the world not too worried about when they'll level up. .

@@joshua1201 I didn't care much about leveling, but I can say that most player (roleplayers or not) some time are wishing for X class feature or spell lvl and when they are close to that particular level unintentionally they want to push forward to level up and get that cool class feature or spell that they make the class for... And the story tailed encounter can be done with xp system. I use the shared XP system and work incredible fun, and the things PC do it matter even if they do not advance the main plot. They made an ally (or an enemy) and get xp for it I do not worry much about the exact xp reward value because if they do something amazing or unexpected (be the good reason) they will receive more XP... If I think they are having to much xp I will dial down the xp they receive

Awesome! Thank you!

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Glad to hear it!