This. I have a player who constantly wants to split the party to do stuff like this. Milestone level gain immediately removes most of their motivation for doing this.

I modified the edit slightly since the book does refer to it as a milestone, and the bracketed portion explains there is a clear difference.

A natural evolution of this is also to award XP at the end of each session based on how much has been accomplished.

It seems to me that the party might start trying to avoid combat, which is a major part of the game. Have you noticed this happening? If so, has it been detrimental to the gameplay experience?

@7Nate9 I use the milestone method in my campaign, and it seems to work fine. It might just mean that they may opt to talk out the issue as opposed to killing everything (although I believe a good DM rewards peaceful resolution as well). They still have a desire to fight in order to take loot etc.

@7Nate9 -- 5e calls out XP for overcoming challenges, not merely for combat

@7Nate9 They indeed try to avoid combat if it's not necessary for their goal. Combat for combat's sake has never really been the point of an RPG. That's the tabletop wargames domain. So our game has seen an improvement that combat is no longer something that is rewarded by out-of-character reasons and only initiated for in-character reasons. There is still plenty though. Sometimes, violence seems to be the easiest solution.

And if this is too big for you, award XP based upon accomplishing objectives. Look at the MMORPG version of D&D: DDO. You get XP for completing quests, sometimes for optional objectives in quests and the XP is modified by party and personal performance. (For example, +10% if you don't have to be brought back from the dead.) The only benefit from killing monsters is a small % on the party performance based on the total number killed.

"suddenly a random encounter actually is something to avoid to not waste resources, instead of a XP farm happening." While I don't disagree with your answer, isn't this specific example a problem caused by the DM not awarding XP correctly? Avoiding the encounter should be worth XP and scrapping the concept entirely just indirectly solves that problem.

@Lilienthal A "random encounter" is something the DM did not plan. He just rolled it on a table. It's random. For example the random table may read "1-5 nothing, 6-10 an orc, 11-15 an ogre, 16-20 a dragon". Would you award the dragon's XP because the DM rolled a 3 on the random encounters table?

@nvoigt How is that relevant? The point is that if the DM rolls a 20 and the party escapes or evades the dragon they get experience for that. Is your argument that the fewer challenges the party has to go through to reach the next milestone, the more they can conserve resources while the reward is the same? I suppose that makes sense but you could argue that the party who didn't go for a encounter slugfest but moved quickly and stealthily through the jungle deserves bonus XP. Perhaps the milestone concept is more suitable for very tightly run campaigns.

@Lilienthal I don't see the relevance to the OPs problem statement. The problem statement is about a guy forcing random encounters so he can get more XP than the rest of the party. And I say: don't award XP for random encounters. Regardless of how they are solved.

@Lilienthal @7Nate9 @Superbest @BaseHobo @Shalvenay @nvoigt @LorenPechtel a serendipitously-timely post from AngryGM on how much XP to give for random encounters, how frequent to make them, how/when to award XP, &c..

I don't know how much extra context might be useful--he does reference in the "Teaching People How..." section the overall structure of the Megadungeon. If you're interested in a catch-up see the first few posts in that series. (Note post dates carefully.)

hm, apart from the fact that the writer treated me as a reader and my players like 5-year-olds and called me names, I could not take away any wisdom. Precalculate XP. Every good adventure does that already. I could not find any other advice despite it being about 6-8 pages of text.