Welcome, brave adventurers…
… to the eighty-fourth entry into our chronicle, recorded on Saturday August 10th, and released Wednesday August 14th over at heroesrisepodcast.com.
In this week’s Adventurer’s Pack, Ryu gets all ‘cor blimey guv’nah on us! Next we check out some D&D News as we uncover:
- What we predict Kate Welch is working on for 2020
- And some changes to the Adventurer’s League that may or may not be happening
After that we’ll take a Short Rest and open our Adventurer’s Journal and discuss blending your backstory into the DM’s story, before finally heading over to the Scrying Pool to see what you have to say.
Links
- IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive)
- Kate Welch writes adventures with Marisha Ray and Deborah Ann Woll
- DDAL S9 Milestone and Magic Item Changes
- DDB Homebrew Monsters in Encounter Builder
A Short Rest: Adventurer’s Journal: Blending Your Character’s Story Into the DM’s Story
This Week’s Community Questions
Do you have any ideas what Kate, Marisha and Deborah are working on? Is it about time 5e had some smaller adventure modules to run just like 3rd and 4th editions had?
Are the Adventurer’s League changes a step in the right direction, or is it more like one step forward, two steps backwards?
How is your table leveling up? Do you milestone your way through the levels, or are you climbing the XP ladder? Did you break the mold and come up with something different? Tell us about it!
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Your discussion of experience, milestones, and treasure really resonated with me.
First, I’ve only played 0th Edition and a campaign which was a random (to me) mishmash of 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0 rules. I could never figure out why they chose one rule over another. Nevertheless, XP (eXperience Points) is all I’ve ever known (but that’s not why I prefer them).
The main reason that I prefer XP over milestones (even though in 5th Edition using XP may not be evenly distributed over later levels of any character (as you pointed out in your discussion)) is that experience is supposed to be a reward for the things that you’ve done in the campaign. Rewards need to be tied to the behaviors that they’re rewarding otherwise they’re just random benefits. Employment bonuses are like this: if you give the bonus a year after the work was done, the employee won’t associate the bonus with the behavior that its trying to reward because they’ve moved on and forgotten that project.
Milestones occur at the end of a module, 4, or 8 hour session (if I understood you correctly). If there were a number of encounters during the session/module, I don’t see how getting a milestone is in any sense a reward for how the party acted during those encounters. In addition, dividing up any “loot” (magical weapons, etc.) is deferred; I’d rather divvy up the loot early so that the characters can take advantage of them as soon as possible.
I didn’t understand the comment that seemed to say that if one character gets a “+2 sword” every character gets a “+2 sword”. This seems so Oprah and so modern youth sports where everyone on the team gets a gold trophy even if they can’t hit/throw the ball. This may be related to the Adventurer’s League which I’ve only participated in once (and it was enough).
I wish I were actually playing a 5E campaign right now because XP would be a problem I’d have to solve (and I would).