Experience Points (XP) fuel level advancement for player characters and are most often the reward for completing combat encounters.
Each monster has an XP value based on its Challenge Rating. When adventurers overcome one or more monsters—typically by killing, routing, capturing, or cleverly avoiding them—they divide the total XP value of the monsters evenly among themselves. If the party received substantial assistance from one or more NPCs, count those NPCs as party members when dividing up the XP, since the NPCs made the challenge easier. (See also “Nonplayer Characters” in chapter 3.)
You decide whether to award XP to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat. If the adventurers complete a tense negotiation with a baron, forge a trade agreement with a guild of surly smiths, or safely navigate the Chasm of Doom, you might decide the characters deserve XP.
As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 4 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty.
You can also award XP when characters complete significant milestones. When preparing your adventure, designate certain events or challenges as milestones, as with the following examples:
When awarding XP, treat a major milestone as a high-difficulty encounter and a minor milestone as a low-difficulty encounter.
Other Milestone Rewards. If you want to reward your players for their progress through an adventure with something more than XP and treasure, also give them small rewards at milestone points, such as the following:
Some DMs let characters gain the benefits of a new level as soon as the characters have the required XP, which gives the players the joy of using the new features and spells they gain immediately. Other DMs prefer to wait until the characters take a Long Rest or until the end of a session before letting characters level up, which keeps the adventure flowing smoothly and lets players pore over their new options during a lull in the action or between sessions. Do what works best for your group.
If a character levels up outside a Long Rest, the character’s current Hit Points and Hit Point maximum both increase by the appropriate number for the new level, and the character gains access to additional abilities and spell slots (if appropriate) without regaining any that are already expended.
As a variant rule, you can require characters to spend time between adventures training or studying before they gain the benefits of a new level. This variant slows the passage of time in the game world, which can help support a more realistic or gritty tone in your campaign.
If you choose this option, after earning enough Experience Points to attain a new level, a character must train for a number of days before gaining any class features associated with the new level. You can decide whether the character can train independently or requires a trainer.
The training time required depends on the level to be gained, as shown on the Training to Gain Levels table. The training cost is for the total training time.
| Level Attained | Training Time | Training Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 2–4 | 10 days | 20 GP |
| 5–10 | 20 days | 40 GP |
| 11–16 | 30 days | 60 GP |
| 17–20 | 40 days | 80 GP |
You can do away with XP entirely and advance characters based on how many sessions they play or when the characters accomplish significant story goals. This method of level advancement can be particularly helpful if your campaign doesn’t include much combat or includes so much combat that tracking XP becomes tiresome.
A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach level 2 after the first session of play, level 3 after another session, and level 4 after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. Above level 10, you can speed the rate of advancement so the characters gain a new level every one or two sessions. This assumes your sessions are about four hours long and include encounters of varying difficulty, ending with a significant milestone as described above. You can adjust the rate if you prefer significantly shorter or longer sessions and to account for how much your group accomplishes in a typical session.
Rather than having characters gain a level after a certain number of sessions, you can instead tie their advancement to accomplishing particular goals in the campaign. When the characters achieve those goals, they level up. Try to plan significant campaign goals so the characters gain levels at about the same rate as for session-based advancement.