You have the right answer in your choices.
Being a DM isn't about writing a script and continually nullifying player choices to keep them "on script". If you want to write a story without much outside input, then write fiction. Nothing wrong with that.
A DM is only one participant of the story when role-playing. Sure, typically the DM will set up the initial scenario and make certain decisions that will constrain choice. But you have to accept that once you turn the PC's loose on "your" world, they are likely to take your carefully crafted story, and fold/spindle/mutilate it (or all three!).
You can of course plan an overarching story for the campaign. It can a great idea to do so, it provides direction and focuses the campaign. But if the players make the story no longer possible and you can't come up with a satisfying way to "fix" it, then it's time to adjust.
If the party goes off of the rails, it is likely due to one of three things
- They notice the rails and want off! Whether by boredom or active malice they've decided to go left instead of right. Either way, you're getting feedback that your story is not as entertaining to them as you might have thought. Time to make changes!
- Player discovery - The players have discovered something cool about your campaign or their characters that you might not have thought about and want to explore it! This is awesome, it will mean that your story should go on the back burner for a bit. When the players show an active interest in the setting, nurture that, don't shut them down. Let it play out, it usually won't be a long detour and the players will rejoin the main plot-line with renewed vigor.
- Player Agency - One or more players has their own story that they want to explore. Quite often a player will build a backstory for their character that has some hooks in it. If you don't grab the hooks and work with them (I think we're all guilty of this at some point!) the player may still want to explore their half-dragon ancestry, or why they got kicked out of Star Fleet Academy. Let them run with it, rein them back in if it becomes excessive. In the same way that your story cannot dominate the table you can't allow one player to continually dictate what happens next. However there should always be room for each player to shine for a session now and again.
The last two are sides of the same coin. Both involve letting players "run the show" to a certain extent. One problem that I've seen multiple times is for the GM to plan one scenario after another after another, never giving the players a chance to catch their breath. Instead of plotting things so extensively, ease up occasionally. Let the players know that after the current big boss is killed that there are no immediate plans for the campaign and ask, "What will you want to do?" This can serve as a release valve and free up any building tensions.
Understand it is a Rule of Thumb
So, 6 encounters is a rule of thumb, not a hard and fast "you must make level X after 6 encounters." Also, keep in mind that when it comes to balance and leveling some of the advice in the DMG is hard to follow to the letter. I for instance, have never been able to get the "6 to 8 encounters a day" -- so instead I only use "hard" or "deadly" encounters, which I find my players seem to manage too easily most of the time. They aren't minmaxed, they just play to their strengths in the actual fight.
Likewise for your group, changing the way XP is totaled, or ignoring XP for level purposees might make sense. Let talk about this though.
Not all Encounters are Combat
The books don't talk about the proper amount of XP to give to social encounters, trap encounters, puzzle encounter, etc. But the books and game designers do state that XP should be awarded for them. The reason there aren't charts for them is because they are hard to judge without actually being there. So, if you keep battle XP calculated the same, but start giving XP for these other types of encounters, you might reach the suggestions in the DMG.
For Battle Encounters
The battles your players face will have various numbers of foes. Fewer foes mean larger monsters. This means lower or no multiplier, so the split is better for the players. So, throw in a solo "boss" monster here and there. Or a boss monster with "squishy" minions.
Another option is to look at the published adventures, even if you don't plan to run them. For example Lost Mine of Phandelver, it tell you how many monsters will be in each area. It is calculated that if you run the option first quest the average party should gain one level, before you begin the main story arcs.
How they do manage this? They do a few encounters with a lot of goblins, but by the end you are basically in a mini-boss fight. They've done the math for each encounter ahead of time, and know that running that part will grant X XP for this encounter with a part of Y players.
"Would it be ok if I started adding the multiplier to the actual experience gained?"
Yes. The beauty of the game is that the rules are a guide post. If you do start adding the multiplier, it won't break anything -- but it will make your characters level faster, which will change the feel of the game as character progression would be sped up, but some people like that. If you do, just keep in mind to balance encounters so that they are on the harder side.
Another Option: Milestones
I personally don't use XP. I use milestones. It is more subjective, but it feels more natural to me. With XP, a big boss fight might put you a few points away from the next level, and end up leveling on a random goblin -- might feel anti-climatic. Where with milestones, you kill the dragon -- welcome to the next level.
This also allow the DM to control the pace of the leveling. If you need them to be a certain level for a certain encounter, you can get them there before they reach it.
Question in the title: How to get from 1 to 2 in 6 encounters.
Assume party size of 4 players:
Each player has to get 300 XP. 300 X 4 = 1200 XP.
(using Kobld Fight Club for ease) I generate 6 random encounters... Say 1 easy, 2 medium, 2 hard and 1 deadly. I get:
- 1 Ape (easy) 100XP
- 1 spy (medium) 200XP
- 1 Cultist, 3 Lizard, 2 Mule (medium) 105XP
- 1 Blue Faerie Dragon (hard) 450XP
- 1 Merrow (hard) 450XP
- 1 Carrion Crawler (deadly) 450XP
Total 1,755 XP. Well over the needed 1200 XP. In fact enough XP that a party of 5 players could all make level 2.
Best Answer
I often have that problem, though not to quite the degree you describe. I often stall on how to develop a basic idea into a meaningful adventure scenario. I can do it, but I get some really nasty Blank Page syndrome some days and need a kick to actually get down to work.
The most reliable tool I use for painlessly expanding an idea into a larger amount of playable material is…
Dr Rotwang's Adventure Funnel
Not to be confused with a “funnel adventure” which is entirely different, the Adventure Funnel is a GM preparation method for taking a seed idea and expanding it out into many ideas. The key practical effect it achieves is giving you obstacles and details to make your scenario more involved. The method it uses is a structured brainstorming exercise. I find structured brainstorming methods far more usable than just kinda trying to think of ideas without a structured method.
This is helpful because the more involved your scenario becomes, the more time it takes for the players and their PCs to step through its parts, and the more stuff happens during games. It might not seem like that should make much difference, but when you mix more stuff with a bunch of unpredictable people around the table making choices, you get a multiplicative effect, and the result is satisfying gameplay.
Making an adventure using the Adventure Funnel
Before you start, know that what you'll get out of this process is not a full adventure, but a pile of pieces that are designed to fully enable you to improvise a fun adventure out of some or all of them (to be determined during play), or enough pieces that you can shove them together and write out a pre-planned adventure outline without any major creative blocks to overcome, just polishing work and slotting in stats and names and such details.
The basic process is well-described in Dr Rotwang's original blog post, but can be summarised as three steps:
Write down your basic idea at the top of a page. You've already got that, so this is easy.
Write down 5 obstacles to achieving that goal. Not even a sentence for each, just a basic idea, short like your top-level original idea is.
This shouldn't be that hard. If it is, you're overthinking it. Just throw down whatever you can think of. Get it done, don't try to get it perfect.
Don't worry if you think an idea is bad — write it down anyway. You're writing down five of these: not every one of them has to be a winner or will necessarily get used.
Ha ha, you already have enough material for an adventure without even doing step 3! Good for you. You could be done now, if you want. But if you want, using that material will be easier at the table if you…
Note down some details. Do this numbered point-form again, just like step 2. Details are anything that fleshes out things you're interested in from previous steps. Don't force it, but instead go for the things you've already started thinking about or wondering about while you were getting down the basic idea and obstacles. Basically, you should already have some things you're itching to note down — this is where you do it, instead of cluttering the steps above.
Details are things like names, motivations, scene-setting notes, people involved, objects, why or how exactly a step 2 thing is an obstacle, locations, etc. These are your notes for interesting details (literally). They need not be long either: a sentence or sentence fragment.
Now you're really done. You could run a whole session or three with the material you've got now. And introducing your material during play will lead to the players doing things that take up time and are interesting to narrate, resolve, and springboard off of, so it will actually turn into much more material than you actually prepared.
Optionally, add:
A worked example of using the Adventure Funnel
Dr Rotwang's post not only describes the method, but gives a worked example I urge you to read.
But I also have a Dungeon World dungeon/adventure front I should be writing instead right now so, I'm just going to Adventure Funnel that right here and now. If it seems oddly non-fantasty in parts, that's because we're playing a Final Fantasy inspired game, so there's magitech and stuff in our world.
(My players, if you're so unlikely as to be visiting RPG.se, stop reading here if you don't want to be spoilered! Can't spoiler-block this much formatting. Also, you'd trip over anything that changes between here and actual play…)
A few notes on my thought process are in italic parentheses.
Pros and cons
The biggest pro of using the Adventure Funnel is that it's quick and can be used either to lay the groundwork for writing up a detailed adventure, or for improvising during a session.
I find it particularly good for generating material I could fall back on during improvised GMing, since I'm not obligated to use a particular idea if it doesn't end up fitting the way the session goes. I can pick and discard bits on the fly.
Another pro of using the Adventure Funnel is that it can be used as an input to other GM preparation methods, instead of using it directly as input to a game session.
The biggest con of using the Adventure Funnel is that you will often generate material you don't end up using. If you don't force yourself to stop with a few details and get carried away like I did above, that can take a lot of time. You can recycle that material for another adventure though, so I like to consider it a bonus, not wasted effort, and using the Adventure Funnel generates material fast enough that it's at least an efficient use of time. Your mileage may vary regarding how you feel about that though.
Now though, I'm off to think about a sandwich, and let this settle and age a bit, so I can distill it into a proper Adventure Front, or perhaps a Perilous Wilds Dungeon Record, later today or tomorrow.