Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 TiaNadiezja Aug 28, 2014 15:00:57	Hey, me again, splitting a question from another thread into a seperate one.   I played in a session of Encounters last night, and had a blast. At the end of the session, rewards were given out - XP, gold, a magic item I didn't get, et cetera. That was neat.   But the XP reward was 50 points for about 3 hours of play, including two hard encounters (we were outnumbered in both, piles of kobolds, two ambush drakes, all kinda of fun stuff - I burned down all my spell slots between those encounters and I'm pretty sure someone would have died if I hadn't; as it was, four characters dropped to 0). Based on my estimates of the math, the kobolds alone, divided among the players we had, were worth more than 50 XP.   I want to keep any home game I run using organized play relatively synced with Encounters for the moment, so people can use play with me as a jumping off point to play at stores. Is there some sort of reduced XP reward I should know about?
#2 Suzume_Stjohn Aug 28, 2014 16:00:58	I had a similar thought last night. Specially with the encounter balance rules and xp rewards listed in the basic dm guide. Our group got 216xp, and when I went through and added it up it should have been closer to 500 each. Was going to bring it up next week, as its not urgent, I was just curious as well!
#3 CdrcJsn Aug 28, 2014 16:19:26	There are adventure caps in play for Hoard of the Dragon Queen.  Max of 300xp for Episode 1, 600xp for Ep 2, 1800xp for Ep 3.   For the OP, your DM is probably planning on taking 6 weeks to run the entirety of Ep 1, so just awarded you 1/6th of the max reward.  There are different ways to handle it.   I know our local store awards xp as normal and just caps it, allowing newcomers to also reach max xp for future episodes.
#4 Noon Aug 29, 2014 2:59:54	Yeah, I think they should give some advice in the material for this.   300xp is level 2. Giving paltry XP each time doesn't make anyone think "Oh, that's just how much you get!". We all know it's not how much you get.   May as well let people hit 300XP and get no XP from following adventures. Why? Because they'll be level 2, atleast.     At this rate it'd be smarter to not join the first few sessions.   So as is it's acting as an incentive to not play in the start of an adventurer league season.
#5 SublimeBW Aug 29, 2014 8:37:56	At first I was a little erked as DM about the XP cap. But after thinking about it, it gives the players a chance to take a night or two off without falling behind the rest of the party. We even had a few people switch to another chacter once they hit cap with their first. It worked out well RP wise because the players that switched were pretty Chaotic Neutral and felt that since there wasn't anything really for them in saving a town they cared little about they would just wait out the battle in the keep.
#6 IxidorRS Aug 29, 2014 9:12:19	My DM didn't even give me experience... I was a little confused. Had to run, though, going to ask about it next week.
#7 nightwalker450 Aug 29, 2014 9:36:35	I'm DMing a table at my local store, and the way we're doing it is rewarding standard experience, but once they hit level 2, they won't gain anymore until the next episode starts. We're a week behind though due to needing character creation first session, and we were short one of our DM's (and realized we were going to need a 4th DM).   But for my table, they had earned 110 xp in the first session, which just got them to the keep (of note for time sake, I had turned one of the patrols into an ambush and left out the last patrol). So it was 15 kobolds, 1 winged kobold, 6 cultists, plus retrieving 5 villagers, at a table of 9 (Next week our 4th GM will start hopefully).   Anyways we weren't given precise instructions on how to handle experience, just to cap the first episode at 300 xp, and it should take 5-6 sessions. So some GM's might have interpreted that as 300 xp / 6 sessions = 50 xp per session. But we liked the option of allowing people who had missed to catch up easily, without doing arbitrary "everyone should be level x now" that we'd been doing for previous seasons. This way people are gaining exp, those that attend more often spend more time with a level up on those that attend fewer, but overall they won't start outstripping people.   Talk to your organizer, and ask how they're handling experience as a conversation starter, then you could mention how you've heard other places have been handling experience. Though I'd probably talk to them before or after session, don't bring it up as he's rewarding experience at the table. Before I even started my sessions I explained it to my table and I'll probably reiterate it once some start to hit that 300 xp target.
#8 shivafang Aug 29, 2014 10:36:35	@nightwalker - if you are playing for AL play you need to be handing out experience at the end of each session.  That way if the player wants to play at another location they have all the information they need and the logged rewards to back it up.   Players can hop between HotDQ, LMoP and Expeditions.  They may also go to a convention where an Epic is being run.  If you don't give them the experience each session they have no idea how to propertly manage each of these events.  That's what the log sheet is for.   If I brought my Level 2 character to your table, it sounds like you'd be telling me I won't earn experience because I'm already level 2.  That's not the case.  I'd still earn 300 total experience (max) from the first Episode, we'd just have to make sure that my HotDQ logs only total 300 (even if they are interspersed with alternating LMoP play)   If you can not or will not do this - don't advertise you are running Adventures League.  You are effectively running a large completely separate home game.
#9 cave2626 Aug 29, 2014 11:15:16	A follow-up to this question is when do PCs level up? If a PC hits 300XP before the end of episode 1 do they play the last session or two as level 2 but earn no XP? Or do they remain level 1 for the full episode?
#10 shivafang Aug 29, 2014 11:33:21	cave2626 wrote:
#11 CdrcJsn Aug 29, 2014 13:49:29	shivafang wrote:
(Reply to #11) Womba	CdrcJsn wrote:
#13 TheBreen Sep 02, 2014 16:01:00	Womba wrote:
#14 CdrcJsn Sep 02, 2014 16:15:09	Womba wrote:
#15 VinceP Sep 03, 2014 5:20:50	What if the person's character dies during the game? Do they get XP? Does the next character they make start with the same XP their last character had? I've told my player Yes to both these last 2 questions. Was this the correct thing to do?
#16 Blade2718 Sep 03, 2014 9:42:35	VinceP wrote:
#17 CdrcJsn Sep 03, 2014 10:47:13	VinceP wrote:
#18 CdrcJsn Sep 04, 2014 18:04:37	Womba wrote:
#19 Oraibi Sep 05, 2014 7:43:32	The way I'm reading it is that after you hit 300 xp, you probably should swap out to a different character so that you can start leveling that character, right?   That's assuming that you are getting like 200 xp or so each go, and hitting the cap early, and not getting 1/6 of the 300 xp or whatever.   Does that logic make sense? I got like 190 xp from the single session I played in, so I am figuring after two such sessions I switch to a different class and race (or, at least, a different name).
#20 Uthrac Sep 05, 2014 8:26:45	Oraibi wrote: