I'm running the Lost Mine of Phandelver module with my players, and I've been using monster and reward XP as the book says so far. I have 5 players and they're all level 2 and have just cleared the Cragmaw Hideout.
However, I've been throwing in quite a bit of homebrew stuff I made, new plot points and enemies. I don't want to throw the level balance included in the base module away though. I'd rather stay with it so that I don't need to worry about balancing the encounters too much and I can base the difficulty of the stuff I add on what they're currently doing in the story.
I'm thinking of going with the milestone leveling system, so that they're all at level 5 by the time we're at the finale of the story. The book only seems to call one quest/dungeon as a milestone and that's the Hideout.
What other dungeons, quests, or story points in the module would make suitable level-up milestones to give them the level ups they need?
Best Answer
Award about one level per part of the adventure
Doing this will roughly match the progression from gaining individual XP from encounters in the adventure, and will allow you to add in additional side adventures. Not using milestone progression and adding additional adventures would likely make the PCs a level higher than what the adventure is balanced for.
Technolskald tallied up all the encounter and story award XP from the module. By this analysis, if you have a party of five characters, and they win a good chunk of those XP, they should be gaining about 1 level per major chapter. (There are a few more XP in each, probably because not all the encounters are mandatory). If they do nearly all the side quests, they could get to level five early or in the middle of the last part.
Using this, they are
So at the end of the adventure they will be level 5, matching the adventure's claim that: