Reply To: D&D help wanted: Milestones variant and how much should I tell the players?

[kiranamida 5791xp 1]

The advantage of Milestone advancement is that you get to decide when they happen as the GM so you have the advantage of being able to fudge things if they get a bit out of hand.

For my players they blasted through levels 1 through 6 in about six months because they happened to focus on the campaign goals, then spent 6 months at level 6 because they went side questo g through a new city and I award levels when they complete a narrative arc.

Now, it sounds like your going for a somewhat more by-the-numbers campaign so you still want to track xp in some way.

As a thought experimemt: could you class the quests by level bands? Perhaps a easy starting quest is level 1 – 2, and tougher one is 1 – 3 and the first campaign quest could be 2 – 4 or something like that. If the quest is level appropriate then they get exp for it. If they pass out of the level band for it then it’s not worth exp as it is beneath them. Perhaps the NPC who manages the quest giving comments that “Isn’t that sort of thing a little beneath adventurers of your skill.” or “Oh, those goblins? Yeah another party came through and took the job whilst you where busy dealing with the trolls.”

My point is, if you offer a wide selection of quests to the players and don’t expect them to do all of them then you can find narrative reasons for them to fade away once they become irrelevant. Adventurers all have to eat after all.

I don’t know what your back of the napkin maths are but this would be what I would look at for this kind of campaign.