XP in pre-set campaign encounters (noob DM)

[Bruxy]

Hey guys. I'm running my first ever session as a DM this weekend, using the official Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign pack. I think I'm pretty well-prepared ("ha, so naive!" I hear from the crowds) and have managed to answer most of my own questions so far. However, one thing is still puzzling me and that's the allocation of XP after encounters. My usual group's GMs don't tend to bother and will level people up at appropriate times, but I'd like to be more traditional.

The campaign pack has all of its pre-built encounters, including their XP values, ready to be dragged into the party screen. I've been reading through the "Basic Rules - DM" module for clarity and note the table regarding calculations of difficulty, multiplying total mob XP by the number of enemies and so on. I'll take the very first encounter as my example to demonstrate my confusion:

4x goblins, each worth 50XP so 200XP total. As a "group of 3-6", the encounter XP should be double the total so 400XP overall. In the encounter's entry, though, it lists 200XP.

This could be read two ways:

1) When the party is done, they gain only the 200XP from the encounter entry - which I have prepared in the party sheet and can automatically set as awarded when I need to.
2) The party earn the 50XP per goblin, then get the additional 200XP from the encounter on top of that for 400XP total.

I feel like it's the second option and the rules text, with its calculations, seems to make this pretty obvious. It also makes sense when you consider that the players could lose, fail to complete the encounter, but still be awarded XP for the odd enemy they took down in the process. I'm after clarification, though, because if I'm wrong I'm likely to be awarding XP twice as fast as the recommended pace!

So, thoughts: Option 1 or option 2?

Cheers!

[Zacchaeus]

XP calculation for determining encounter difficulty doesn't impact on how much XP the Party gets for defeating the encounter. If the party defeat 4 Goblins they get 200xp divided between them no matter how many there are in the party.

[Bruxy]

So you're saying it's option 1, then?

There is definitely a section in the basic DM rules, however, that points to the multiplication of XP values based on encounter size. It has a table and everything!

Edit to clarify: I'm happy that XP is independent of party size and split equally. My original post didn't intend to factor that in at all. The extra XP I refer is based on number of mobs, not players.

[Zacchaeus]

Yes, there is such a table but that is used to calculate encounter difficulty. It's used by the DM to determine based on the number of monsters/level of monsters/number of PCs how difficult an encounter is for the level and number of PCs. It doesn't determine what actual XP the encounter is worth.

It will tell you for example that 4 Goblins will represent a medium encounter for a party of 4 PCs?

[Bruxy]

Ah, that makes sense. So from the same example, those four goblins aren't 4x harder than a single goblin they're actually 8x the challenge - but still only worth the 200 XP.

I assume, then, that the provided encounters simply present the total XP from the mobs involved rather than any additional bonus, to save the DM doing maths and manual input?

[Zacchaeus]

I think you may be misdirecting yourself a bit here. The calculation you are referring to is a means of working out what the Challenge of an encounter will be. It enables a DM to work out how difficult a particular encounter will be for the party members. So, for example, if you have a party of 4 1st level characters then a deadly encounter would be one where the total XP in the encounter was 200XP. If there are 6 members of the party however then the difficulty of the exact same encounter drops to Medium. The adjusted XP factor is used to compute a difficulty factor. In your 200xp encounter with 4 characters you multiply the 200 by 2 to get an adjusted XP of 400 which according to the table in the DMG is a deadly encounter whereas if there are 6 party members then the factor is 1.5 making the adjusted XP 300 which is a medium encounter. This adjusted XP is only used to calculate the difficulty of the encounter. It has no bearing at all on how much XP the party gets for overcoming the encounter.

So, taking the same example of the 4 Goblin encounter wirth 200xp, if there are 4 members in the party they'll each get 50xp; if there are 6 members in the party they'll get 33.33xp each. As a DM runing a published adventure you can either accept the encounters as they are or you can, if you feel and encounter is too hard or easy for your particular party, adjust the number of beasties in the encounter using the guidlines in the DMG. So for this encounter with the 4 Goblins if you only have 4 party members it's going to be a potentially deadly encounter; so you might want to drop the number of Goblins to 3. If your party consists of 6 members it's going to be a medium encounter so you might want to make it more difficult by adding another Goblin.

Generally I'd suggest running the encounters as published until you get your own feel for how difficult or easy the players find particular encounters before you go into the minutia of messing with the numbers.

[Bruxy]

Right, got you. I assumed the "group size" referred to the number of mobs, not the players.

I'm not planning on messing with the encounters. I'm solely concerned with awarding the right XP once they're done. That takes me back to my previous point, that I should simply be awarding the XP value listed in the pre-set encounter and assuming it already accounts for the value of each mob within it. There's no need to manually allocate 50XP per goblin as if I did, I'd be double-accounting. Right?

Basically, after encounter one of LMoP the party should be 200XP better off (divided amongst the players), not 400.

[Zacchaeus]

Correct. Give the party the XP shown on the encounter. FG will automatically share it amongst the players. If you do change the number of NPCs remember to click the recommit button to update the XP in the encounter.

[Trenloe]

XP is distributed by adding the encounter to the party sheet and then distributing to the PCs in the party sheet. More info here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/5E_Party_Sheet#XP_Tab

[Bruxy]

XP is distributed by adding the encounter to the party sheet and then distributing to the PCs in the party sheet. More info here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/wiki/index.php/5E_Party_Sheet#XP_Tab

Yeah got that, but originally I was planning on adding extra XP per NPC on the assumption that said encounter XP was like an additional bonus. Thanks to Zacc's calm persistence I now realise that was wrong and I have a better understanding of how to weight encounters for party size and level - so cheers for that, Z :D