Bounded XP?

As a general rule, I don’t like XP, and have moved to using milestones in 5e games. There are a bunch of reasons:

• It strongly encourages combat solutions to encounters.
• Managing missing players is harder.
• It’s a pain to keep track of, especially for non-combat encounters, where it feels especially arbitrary.
• Being 7 XP from leveling up is frustrating. Where’s a rat I can go kill??

That’s not to say milestones are perfect. Not knowing when the next level is coming is its own type of frustrating. Identifying milestones is still ultimately arbitrary, or might lead to railroading.

Recently, a group of tabletop friends decided to try out Pathfinder 2e, playing through some of the Age of Ashes module. PF2e seems like an attempt to bring a layer of polish and refinement to PF1e, and, as far as I can tell, having only read some PF1 rules, seems like it succeeded. I’ll go deeper into my take on it another time, but for now I just want to focus on the way it handles XP:

Every level is the same 1000 XP. Clearing any encounter, whether via combat or not, rewards XP, occasionally with extra XP for accomplishing things especially well. XP isn’t divided among PCs.

A friend—who actually convinced me to move from XP to milestones—is considering borrowing this for 5e. No matter what, everyone knows that 200 XP is 20% of a level. It means the numbers are meaningful in isolation, regardless of character level.

Which made me realize: that’s much more like the Bounded Accuracy principle in 5e! A DC 15 is medium difficulty, and a DC 20 is hard, regardless of character level. PCs bonuses grow over time (a Rogue with Reliable Talent probably can’t roll below a 23 on relevant ability checks) but not that much, there’s always (except for Rogues) a chance of failure on a Hard task, even if that chance is low. The numbers are meaningful in isolation, regardless of character level.

PF2e isn’t built on Bounded Accuracy. Numbers keep going up. So a DC 35 check might be impossible for low-level Trained characters, but having a +28 to Acrobatics is not unreasonable for mid- to high-level characters. Which means to set a DC you do have to take into account character level. But not to award XP!

I’m probably not going to switch back to XP for my games, but if I were going to, I would strongly consider stealing the PF2e XP system. Just like a “hard” DC doesn’t change, let a “hard” encounter reward the same XP.