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Random832
2009-07-08, 12:01 AM
At first this was just an experiment to see if I could figure out the mathematical formula behind XP awards

Then I thought of something - why make just one table when i could make infinitely many - The function I'd defined was easy enough to tweak to make both the "13" and "2" (13 as in encounters per level, 2 as in 2 CRs = double/half XP) parameters.

This way you can choose to have more or fewer encounters per level (to make a campaign go slower or faster)... or change the value of fighting a CR outside your level, though this isn't necessarily recommended

And so, the formula:

=4000/13*Level*(2^((CR-Level)/2))

Easy enough to turn into an excel table with cell references.

Compared to the official table, this tends to overvalue monsters with a CR below the party's level, and undervalue monsters with a CR above it, by about 6%, but only when the difference is an even number (this is a side effect of using an even sqrt(2)-based exponential progression where the real table alternates 3/2 and 4/3. The "13" is actually 13.333333 in the official table. At level four it consistently overvalues these cases due to an inconsistency in the official table (using 4/3 twice in a row)

This formula does suffer the same breakdown as the official table below level 3, so level 3 awards should be used for level 2 and level 1.

For reference, the official table is available free legitimate online at http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnD_DMG_XPFinal.asp