[RPG] My party is leveling far too quickly in Thunderspire Labyrinth

campaigncharacter-levelsdnd-4eexperience-points

My friends and I have recently decided to take up playing D&D after a 4-5 year hiatus and have started by making level 4 characters and jumping into Thunderspire Labyrinth (H2) (Only campaign I had left from so long ago)

By the end of the module, they were only a few hundred away from level 10 (party of 3, bumping it up to my making a 4th for one encounter where it was absolutely needed) and that's not including any random encounters or sidequests other than Paldemar for the Mages of Saruun (Which I felt were pretty necessary).

Considering this is a campaign meant to take them from 4 to 6 (maybe 7), something seems seriously off about the amount of exp per encounter. We had planned to play through Pyramid of Shadows next, but at this point we're better off just starting on P1 rather than H3. I know the common solution is to just not use experience as a lot of people choose to do, but I really don't like that idea. My friends and I are hardcore video game RPG fans (mmo and otherwise) so experience points are pretty much a necessity in all the party's eyes.

The module gives me the amount of collective experience the encounter gives based on the experience per monster. So as an example, Encounter H8: Murkelmore's Chamber has 2 level 6 brutes, 1 level 5 controller, and 1 level 7 Elite soldier. The encounter has a total of 1300 experience collectively. I deal out the experience by splitting it 3 ways for 3 party members

I should say that even being level 9 on the final encounter, the party still almost died, but I don't want to start H3 now and end up being mid-late paragon by the time we finish. So I'd really appreciate it if you guys could help me discern a solution to this problem.

What can I do to decrease the rate of levelling without removing experience points from the game?

Best Answer

It appears from your example that you've been playing the adventure with a group of 3 characters, without tuning down the encounters.
If you do so, faster leveling is expected.

Rationale

D&D 4e's adventures use encounters that have been balanced against a party of 5, which is the expected number of players. If you have a party of 6 or a party of 4 (or, like in this case, a party of 3), you're supposed to add or remove monsters from the encounters so that the XP parcels scale accordingly.

Your 1300 XP budget encounter should be worth 1300/5=260 XP per character and your characters got 1300/3=433 instead. You should have built an encounter worth 260*3=780 XP

I know this almost nullifies the book's utility. Your statblocks are not that useful when you need to remove almost half the monsters from any encounter.


My personal suggestion

Modify the encounters so that your group is comfortable with their difficulty and then deal out less XP than the encounter is worth (e.g. the example encounter still gives people 260 XP each, even if the rules say otherwise).