Do PCs receive XP for Strahd when encountering (but not killing) him?

Question

I've been running Curse of Strahd for about 25 sessions now. The party just encountered Strahd in combat for the first time on top of Yester Hill. It was an intense fight where only two out of six PCs remained standing (the rest were stabilized) by the time they were able to stop the ritual.

I had Strahd riding Beucephalus watching the fight from above until the party started attacking the statue and druids. At that point, Strahd started flinging down spells and really messed up the party. The PCs caught on that they needed to stop the druids, so they generally ignored Strahd and didn't engage him. During the last turn when Strahd was about to leave because the druids were all killed, the druid in the party decided to move his moonbeam on Strahd and his nightmare, causing them some damage, although Strahd's was absorbed by the Heart of Sorrow.

Right after that sequence, Strahd left the scene and the battle was over.

My players love XP, so at the beginning of our campaign, they asked that I use that for leveling, as opposed to milestones. So I've come up with a pretty solid XP system that they've enjoyed. Strahd throws a little bit of a wrench in that system though. His XP worth is 13,000. That is a lot.

My question is: do the players gain the full XP for Strahd since he technically retreated? I'm torn about this though because if Strahd really wanted to, he could have easily finished them off - only two PCs were up at the end, both under 10 HP.

According to the book, Strahd doesn't want to kill off the PCs early, which is why I stayed his hand. So this was more of Strahd being disappointed in the ritual being thwarted and being somewhat impressed the party survived the ambush.

I'm also a bit concerned that if I do give them the full 13,000 XP, that I will need to do this for every encounter with Strahd that they survive.

Answer 1

No xp for Strahd. They did not defeat him.

But you might increase xp for the druids given the adverse environment.

The DMG explains when to award experience points on page 260, emphasis mine:

Each monster has an XP value based on its challenge rating. When adventurers defeat one or more monsters-typically by killing, routing, or capturing them-they divide the total XP value of the monsters evenly among themselves.

The goal of the ritual is to

Awaken Wintersplinter so that it goes to destroy the Wizard of Wines Winery

This is the druids' goal. The PC's should get full xp from all of the druids and berserkers, whether they were slain, captured, or ran away, for by interrupting the ritual, the PC's have defeated them and their goal.

However, the completion of the ritual and destruction of its target is not Strahd's goal. Had Strahd wanted to achieve this end, he could have done so long ago; he could easily do so still. The PC's have done nothing to frustrate his plans, and should get no xp for defeating him.

In fact, this dust-up with the players is part of Strahd's plans. He wants to learn their abilities and assess their power. If they are too easy for him to beat in battle, he will be disappointed. If they actually challenge him, he will find them far more interesting. Whether he withdraws from the fight or not, he has gotten what he wanted from it. In no way have they frustrated his goals or defeated him.

From time to time, strangers from faraway lands are brought to his domain, to play the vampire’s game of cat-and-mouse. Strahd savors these moments, for though these strangers offer him no lands to conquer, they aren’t so easily destroyed and therefore provide a welcome diversion.

As a DM in this situation, you should respond as narrowly as possible to the players' questions:

Player 1: "Why didn't we get any xp for beating Strahd?"

DM: "You get xp only for defeating opponents."

Player 1: "But we did defeat him - he had to flee."

DM: shrugs

Player 2: "Are you saying he chose to withdraw? Or that he wanted us to win?"

DM: "I'm saying you did not defeat him."

Player 1: "This is like Vallaki all over again - what does Strahd really want?"

One of the grand themes of Curse of Strahd is that Strahd has very complicated, intricate plans that involve the PCs, but they don't know what those plans are. They spend most of the module trying to figure out why he brought them here and what he wants from them, when it is obvious that he could simply kill them if he wanted. Denying them xp when he strategically retreats emphasizes the theme that they really don't know what is going on.

Update: One Eye (the OP) states in their self-answer that "the encounter was significantly harder because of Strahd" but agrees that they did not defeat him. The DMG covers this in the section on "Modifying Encounter Difficulty":

An encounter can be made easier or harder based on the choice of location and the situation. Increase the difficulty of the encounter by one step (from easy to medium, for example) if the characters have a drawback that their enemies don’t...Situational drawbacks include the following:...The characters are taking damage every round from some environmental effect or magical source, and the enemy isn’t.

In the battle as described in the OP, Strahd is not actually an enemy the PC's are trying to defeat ("The PCs caught on that they needed to stop the druids, so they generally ignored Strahd and didn't engage him"). Rather, he exists as an environmental effect that is making their encounter with druids and berzerkers more difficult, because he is damaging the PC's but not their enemies. Although the DMG does not specifically say that an encounter designed to be more difficult merits more xp, it seems reasonable that rewarding PC's with more xp because of an environmental effect is akin to rewarding them with more xp by adding monsters to the encounter, so some sort of bonus may be appropriate if not RAW. However, this bonus should not be tied to Strahd's xp value, because, again, the party did not defeat him. Rather, it should increase the xp they obtained from the druids and berserkers, the actual enemies in the encounter.

Answer 2

Yes, I think you should give the players XP--they fought a hard battle and survived it. That being said, the should absolutely not gain the full amount of XP for Strahd. I would give them somewhere between 1/8 to 1/2 XP depending on how much they generally engaged Strahd. They should gain some XP for every encounter, but recall that as the GM you have the ability to determine how much for each individual encounter. If your PC's want a scientific method, you could say they gain XP proportional to how much damage they deal to him (be careful here though--this may encourage metagame thinking and doesn't represent the whole picture of how tough an encounter is).

Quite a while back I played in a campaign where the PCs fought the main boss several times. Each time, the main boss would use more of his abilities, making each successive encounter harder. In the campaign, the idea is that the MB was trying to make the players powerful so he could lure them to his side, so it made sense. We got XP at the end of each encounter with. I believe the DM simply made multiple version of the MB at different levels and when we "killed" him (i.e. dealt the number of HP on his stat sheet) is the point that he'd decide he'd challenged us enough to help us grow. (kind of similar to defeating a boss in a video game only to be met with a cutscene). Obviously this isn't a parallel case, but you could apply the concept here.

You could still go the other way with this and not give them XP. That's entirely within the rules of the game and your privileges as GM, and it would make things simpler and easier for you, but it could also make your PC's frustrated that they're not gaining XP proportional to the effort their characters are putting in to survive.

Answer 3

So after giving this much thought, I think there are three options:

1. Award the PCs Strahd's full 13,000 XP
2. Award the PCs none of Strahd's XP
3. Award the PCs some portion of Strahd's XP

Although the rules in the DMG would indicate that option 1 is the route to go, I don't think this makes sense. The PCs didn't defeat Strahd per se. If Strahd wanted to finish off the PCs he easily could have. The only thing the PCs did accomplish is they ruined the ritual, which caused Strahd to lose interest and leave. If we did choose this option though, each PC would receive 3,133 XP.

What about option 2? While I agree thematically with one of the other answers that the PCs should be awarded no XP for having a combat encounter with Strahd, mechanically it doesn't hold up. The encounter was significantly harder because of Strahd and to not reward them as such seems unfair. If Strahd was removed from the encounter, this would have been pretty straightforward and I don't believe anyone would have been downed. If we did choose this option though, each PC would receive 958 XP.

Look at that enormous difference: 2,175 XP!

So do we split the difference and choose option number 3? This seems to the fairest way to go since the party didn't defeat Strahd but they did survive an encounter with him.

The question among you seems to be how would you even go about that? Well, I have an idea.

My party is six level 5 characters. According to DMG p. 82, this encounter was deadly, even using raw, not adjusted, XP. However, if I subtracted Strahd's XP from this total, the encounter would drop down to hard.

I think that's the rub. Awarding XP for this encounter and for it deemed to be only hard is what's a bit of a joke. The sorcerer in the party went down four times and every else went unconscious once, except one of the barbarians. As noted in the question, when the dust settled, only two PCs were up and the rest were bleeding out. This was 100% a deadly encounter and I think they should be rewarded for surviving it.

My idea for bridging the gap here is this: award the deadly XP threshold for their character level per character. This would boost the XP granted from 958 to 1,100. Not a huge difference, but it at least recognizes that the encounter was more difficult than hard.

I think I might actually integrate this into my XP system. If the party has a combat encounter where granting XP isn't straight forward, I'll add up all of the XP from sources they'd definitely receive and make a note of the encounter difficulty based on the raw XP. Then I'll add the XP from the sources that I'm not so sure if the party should receive or not. If the "extra" XP boosts the encounter to another difficulty, use that XP threshold; otherwise, stick to the XP from the sources they deserve.

Here's this method listed as steps:

1. Add up XP from definite sources
2. Compare this raw XP against table in DMG p. 82 and note encounter difficulty
3. Add up XP from questionable sources
4. Add together the two sources of XP
5. Compare this raw XP against table in DMG p. 82 and note encounter difficulty
6. If the encounter difficulty is the same regardless, use the XP from step 2; otherwise, use the XP threshold associated with the encounter difficulty from step 5