Hmm ... I think we may be talking past each other.ishy wrote:My bad, I thought we were talking about 4th edition.
In 4th edition experience points are not just for "when you overcome a challenge or otherwise achieve a goal" or when PCs level up, they also have a different function, the XP budget.
In 4th you sum the XP values for everything in an encounter to judge the difficulty of the encounter.
Now whether that works or whether that is a good idea is something you can debate and yes, this is not how 2nd edition does things.
When I griped about "xp budgets", I was indeed talking about 4e (and apparently 5e, too). The difficulty of the encounter seems like it should come from the encounter level (whatever nomenclature happens to be used: CR, EL, whatever). That EL/CR is what should determine how much XP you get - to do it the other way around seems counter-intuitive. And thus dumb.
When I brought up 2e, I was making a bit of an analogy - in 2e, there was no really rubric for judging whether or not a particular encounter was "level appropriate"; so, after a while, you could kinda-sorta get a feel for "level appropriate" based on how many xp the thing was worth. There was never any guidance given by the game in that regard; that was just one of the things you kinda figured out and hoped you guessed right. My point being that xp-value was the only thing you had at your disposal to gauge difficulty (and again, that was very sketchy .... IDK, maybe I was the only one who did that, but it made sense to me at the time).
To invent the term "xp budget", that seems like saying "okay, I've only got *this many* xp to award for this adventure/encounter/whatever - how do I get there". It implies that you are predetermining how much xp PCs are allowed to have for any given instance of play. And that's dumb (with the caveat being that it is reasonable if you are a company that is publishing a series of interconnected adventures; because modules). And in this respect, anything resembling sandbox play doesn't seem to be supported under this paradigm.
Again, dumb. Because I know that 4e (and now 5e) does indeed have a CR/EL # attached to each monster; and that's the # that should be able to be used for determining whether or not something is level-appropriate. XP should be a function of that; but you seem to be suggesting in your post that it is the other way around. And that makes me sad.
Alternatively, I could just be yelling incoherent ramblings at the wind. It's been known to happen from time to time.