Temple of Elemental Evil 5E Style - Experience Points

 

I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to check how much XP is actually available under 5E style rules (technically ToV but they are the same). Some of this is to help me figure out where the party should be as they make their way through the adventure in case I need to make adjustments. It's also to give me some idea of where they might be when they finish it up. 

This analysis will be from the Goodman Games two-book version of the adventure. 

A couple of other notes: 

• I am assuming the party will "defeat" all of the monsters in a given area or level. There are hidden areas in this adventure but I don't think there is a point to trying to calculate the chance they will or will not enter a given area. Let's assume they figure it out and go after everything and if they come up a bit short, well, that's on them. 
• I decided not to count wandering monsters in this exercise because you never know how much they are going to show up in play. I know some people use them and others don't. I do intend to use them but since both the frequency and composition of those encounters is tied to random chance I decided it was better left as potential bonus XP rather than counted as part of the fixed stuff. This applies to both the wilderness random encounters and the dungeon ones. 
• I am not including the fixed wilderness encounters either. The GG team added some interesting side treks in the area and I am sure a few of them will come up but I'm not sure how easily my players will be distracted from the Moathouse and the Temple so I don't want to assume which ones - or that all of them - will be investigated. My suspicion is that many of these will come into play when we are short most of the party. Again, I'll treat these as bonus XP.
• As a hopefully unnecessary note I am not tallying up Hommlet either. It's not that kind of campaign and I don't have that kind of player group.
• Finally I decided not to tally up money and magic items as part of this - yet. For one, Bullgrit did an excellent summary of this years ago and the treasure is not greatly changed in this version. Secondly I don't care that much how much treasure they pick up as it's not XP in this version and they aren't likely to be crafting magic items with it in this version either. I will look at magic items in a separate post as I may end up tweaking those too but for now I don't want to post up a "loot list" where my players might see it if they remember I have a blog where I talk about this stuff.

 So our first area is The Moathouse:

• The upper level of the Moathouse totals out to about 1,350 XP. If we figure a party of six  - I expect 5-6 to be my average - we can see that we're a few points short of the 300 needed to get to second level as we are coming in at 225.
  
  Now this is close enough that a random wilderness encounter might put them over the top. I also expect that some of them will not be at 0 XP as there are several ideas out there for "things that happen on the way to Hommet." I may also be running some prelude adventures with the part of the crew that is not tied up for the rest of the month. Outside of a raw new character coming in at 0XP and heading straight for the Moathouse I think it's safe to assume most of the party should hit 2nd level after this. Fifth edition and similar games are set up to make 1st and 2nd levels go by pretty quick.
• The Moathouse Dungeon totals out to 5,450 XP based on creatures and then there is some opportunity for a little more depending on rescuing prisoners etc. Assuming a party of six again that should be more than enough to get us to 3rd level (900 XP), even for a totally new character. 
  
  Prior XP, side encounters, wandering monsters ... all of that still nets out to a party at level 3 here. I do not see any real way anyone gets to 4th and that's fine. I think hitting 3rd as they finish up the Moathouse is perfectly fine. 5E/ToV doesn't really have an official "Quest XP" element like 4E did but I will likely award some kind of bonus here for clearing out the Moathouse which is the closest den of evil to the village. It's a big deal and hey - for years this was as much as you could do to fight the temple!

Technically the expected next area is the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Nulb. There are things that can happen here but it's not really expected that the party is going to start clearing out the village - even this awful village. It's more about schemes and interaction and discovering clues. So I'm not going to assign a value here. There is likely XP to be earned but it could go in any number of directions or the whole place could be skipped entirely - who knows? We will just have to see.

Then we finally get to the temple proper!

The Upper Works:

Between the various spread-out encounter areas in this chapter there is 4,150 XP to be found here. All of this is concentrated into 3 main areas and bad tactics in any of those could turn into  a real challenge for the party. If we assume an average of six PC's at 3rd level by this point then they will still not make 4th at roughly 1600 total XP.

With a bunch of enemies in a small divided area - this area's theme for sure - the trick I think is to draw them out and not get pulled into a crushing melee where a small group could be overwhelmed. Smart use of barriers like pools of flaming oil could be important here too. That's my pregame assessment anyway - we will see how it goes. If my guys have eight 3rd-level characters when they hit one of these we may just see a brute-force collision as they try to simply plow through the opposition and it may work. This will be an interesting time. 

First Dungeon Level:

It is a big dungeon level, really big. There are 53 marked rooms and it adds up to just over 24,000 XP. Given a party of six that's going to put them at 5600 XP total which is 4th level (2700) headed for 5th (6500). There are two main areas on this level that look particularly dangerous - if you're familiar with the adventure then you probably know what I'm talking about:

• One involves an area with multiple groups of dangerous undead that could hit the group in waves and drain their ability to overcome the negative effects. I suspect we will see how tough ToV characters really can be here. I can see a range of results here from "that was a little sweaty" to "TPK". A cleric will definitely help here - maybe bring two! 
• The other is a group of fairly tough creatures in what amounts to their home environment that pretty much have to be dealt with to accomplish certain goals. This one has a lot of good treasure but it's not all obvious and getting it over their dead bodies will be something to brag about. Analyzing the opposition and playing smart will be important. 

Now that said one of the knocks on 5th edition is that characters are too powerful and the threat of death is rarely present. That may be true but it will be tested here and that is one of the beautiful things about running an old-style adventure with no apologies or concessions to balanced encounter design. They will be at least 3rd and possibly 4th by the time they hit these so they will have experience with what their characters can do.

Second Dungeon level:

This one has 46 marked areas and yields about 49,000 XP. For a party of 6 that's another 8000 XP each which puts our party at 10,700 or 5th level, halfway to 6th. I don't see as many potential problem areas on this level - it feels like things are a little more broken up. There are a lot of humanoids but there are also a lot of named NPC's running the show here and creating opportunities to get involved with some factional warfare. 

Third Dungeon Level:

This level is a little weird as it is setup differently than the others. There are 52 marked areas and if the party fights through all the critters on this level it adds up to about 48,000 XP. So, 8000 each for our hypothetical party which puts them at 14,700 or just over the line for 6th (14,000). 

Now what I left out of that total is that the major opponent of the adventure is on this level and if defeated awards from 33k-50k XP - there are things the PC's can do to affect the toughness of this fight and the easier the fight the less XP we get. Now this confrontation may not happen at the same time as much of the rest of the level so I've broken it out separately but that is a big chunk of XP hat could push the party to almost 7th. Let's track that separately for now. 

Fourth Dungeon Level:

There are only 35 marked areas on this level. Now on this one especially my numbers may be off a bit as there are a lot of notes on creature X is here unless an alert is sounded in which case they go to X and these other creatures move from Y to here. So I may have not counted enough of one thing and counted too many of another but I think it's pretty close. The number is right about 54,000 XP or 9000 each for our party. This would bump them to 23,000 XP or right at 7th (which is achieved at 23000). 

Now that's not accounting for the big bad thing which could add another 5500-10K which would put them at the halfway point or more but not all the way to 8th.

Conclusions:

We're going to pause here and tackle the nodes in tomorrow's post but this covers all of the set encounters from the Moathouse down through the 4 conventional dungeon levels and gets our hypothetical 6-man party to 7th level. 

This does not include wandering monsters (some of which are accounted for in fixed location numbers and some of which are not) or wilderness locations out in the countryside around Hommlet, Nulb, and the temple. It also does not encounter for any side treks the DM decides to drop in as I will likely do when attendance is low for a session. There is enough XP out there for the taking to potentially make a difference on when your PC's level but I think the total is still going to top out around 7th.