Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
LEVEL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT XP
SESSION-BASED ADVANCEMENT
A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.

STORY-BASED ADVANCEMENT
When you let the story o f the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

P263

Might as well quote the book at this point and get everyone on the same page. Using Level Advancement Without XP and the Session-Based Advancement option means advancing every 2-3 sessions! each 4 hours, after level 4.

Despite what it says this in no way mirrors standard advance,ent. That is actually much faster than rewarding creature XP, unless you make the mistake I did and reward encounter difficulty adjusted XP as a reward . The average pace of advancement based on adventuring days and creature XP for 3-6 creature encounters, and having all combat encounters, would be on average would be roughly 4-5 sessions per level. The only way to get 2-3 adventuring day sessions per level is for them all to be solo creature encounters or non-combat challenges.

Also note that in addition to not understanding their own adjust XP for encounter difficulty vs creature XP for adventuring days system (easy mistake IMO ), the designers pretty clearly expect a 4 hour session to be roughly an adventuring day's worth of encounters, combat or non. Given how often people complain about that clearly it's a problem for a fair number of folks.

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Also in 5e "Milestone XP" is a way of awarding XP. Ya'll need to get yer terminology right.
I also want to get this out of the way. Because people get it wrong, including me.

Nowhere in the DMG does it say that 6-8 encounters is recommended for an adventuring day. 6-8 encounters is a hard maximum to what they believe players can handle before needing a long rest.

For 1st level players, they can only really handle 4 hard encounters between a short rest. The encounter difficulty threshold is continuous so it's possible to have a medium encounter without the adjusted xp being exactly 200 for a medium encounter. As long as it is lower than 300, it still counts as medium. This means that 6 encounters a day is a cap, not a baseline, unless you put in easy encounters in-between.

I believe LMoP's first fight is 4 cr1/4 creatures. It's interesting because that is definitely a "deadly" encounter for 1st level players and it's infamous for making the players seem weak at first level. It's actually funny that they claim the PC's defeat to be "unlikely" with such a deadly encounter. Especially with supposed newbies.

Despite the encounter being "deadly," it's not tpk-worthy since deadly encounters could be lethal enough to lead to 1-2 character deaths. The party does risk defeat, though.

I don't think an adventuring day is actually supposed to be 6-8 encounters. You're still playing "correctly" or RAW if you have less or don't even hit the XP threshold. Session-advancement is probably too fast even at first level but I can start to see it being reasonable past 3rd-4th level since it's generally the pace I go with adventuring day exp.

With adjusted exp, it usually does go roughly 2-3 adventuring days to get a level up and I can eek an adventuring day's worth of exp in a single day.