Let me summarize: You have a group that prefers Milestone XP, but isn't interested in creating any new stories. And you don't seem interested in making a story of your own unrelated to the characters.

The Session 0 option

The best option might be to go back to a session 0 and tell them "Why do you want to play? I don't want to make up a story unrelated to your characters, I'd rather it come from one of you. You can roll new characters if the current ones don't inspire you".

Maybe they will tell you they want to start fresh with a new kind of story, maybe they'll say they want to go along with what you have to tell. Either way, it's your turn to see if you want to GM for that game. Either way, letting someone else GM for a while is an option. So is just dropping the group (But it usually is the least happy one).

Or, why not roll with their idea?

They said their goal is to get stronger. Make them work for it, literally. Since you run Milestone, they litterally can't argue that they want to farm easy fights for experience. So they have no choice but to chase bigger and bigger beast.

You asked: "So what now?"

They answered: "We don't know... Get stronger?"

Ask them: "Since the wildlife here is not challenge for you, where do you go looking for trouble?"

Let them be monster slayers, wandering the land in search of bigger and bigger game. Solving problems because they happen to want to kill the source of the problem. You seem to have the perfect group for it. If you want to tell a more classic story as the GM, let the environment and the NPC's action tell it. Maybe one of your player will catch on to it and change the story again.

If you want to push the strategic game further. Or if you want to push the storytelling aspect of fighting epic monsters. Or if you were looking for a way to use the bigger monsters in the book: the Elder Red Dragons, the ArchDemilich or the godlike monsters at the end of the Monster Manual.

You have the perfect opportunity.

Killing things in the wilderness is one milestone

tl;dr Set the expectation for how milestones will be used and support your players with more plot hook to drive the story.

Using milestones

I recommend reading my answer to a related question on how to use milestones leveling. In it I explain how I use it in my games to prevent situations like this.

Basically I require each milestone to be larger and more impressive than the previous one. If the players choose to spend the entire campaign hunting in the wilderness, then I hope they enjoy being at level 2. From my other answer:

At each level the size and difficulty of the achievement required increases. By doing this my players feel rewarded for accomplishing major goals. It also encourages them to take on bigger and more dangerous adventures. By requiring each achievement to be bigger than the last the players can't spend months going around completing side quests in order to out-level the main campaign. Saving a small town was a level 2 quest, it is no longer a big enough achievement to gain advancement.

Set expectations

You need to make it clear to your players that you don't count killing random creatures as a significant milestone. Instead encourage them to seek out bigger adventures, and more meaningful combats.

Possibly you need to go back and have another session 0 and reset the campaign expectations. How leveling works and the style of the campaign should be discussed there. I find the session 0 checklist and the same page tool very useful for doing this.

Provide more story hooks

It seems like your players aren't the kind to drive an exciting adventure all on their own. You can help them out by providing more story hooks. Instead of having unlimited open-ended options the party can choose between a set of discrete quests. Having too many options may mean they feel like they have no direction.

A sandbox game doesn't mean that you don't have quest lines, it just means that the players are free to pick and choose which ones they want to deal with at any given time.

Why do they think they need to be stronger to complete a plot point?

This is based on your comment:

... their goal is specifically to get stronger to go back and complete a plot point. They don't want any story in the meantime, they just want to "get enough experience" without actually keeping track of experience points.

This is the crux of my answer; if their reason for wanting to get stronger is because they don't feel they are able to complete the story at their current level of strength, then I don't think this is actually a problem with XP levelling vs. milestone levelling, or them not being interested in the story they are currently half-way through.

This seems to be an issue of trust.

They don't seem to believe that they can survive the next chunk of story you have prepared for them. In which case, during the second session 0 that other answers are suggesting (which I agree with), it might be worth mentioning to them that you want them to succeed and that you aren't putting story challenges in front of them that they can't complete yet.

Of course, this is me making a lot of assumptions; I don't know what you've told them is coming next, I don't know if you actually do want them to succeed, and I don't know whether or not you are actually tailoring the next section of story to match their current level.

But my understanding of milestone levelling is that the challenges presented in the story will scale to the party, so if they think they need to be stronger (i.e. gain another level), then the challenges will get harder to compensate, so I don't think they'll be achieving the easier time that they think they will.

There is also an expectation mismatch here. "Let's go into the wilderness to grind XP" sounds like MMORPG mentality to me. This is not an MMORPG, and I can tell because you're using milestone levelling. They need to embrace the story, sure, but they also need to trust that you are making the challenges in the story scale to their level to still actually challenge them but at the same time not wipe them out, and that "power levelling" isn't going to work to allow them to dodge or survive the challenges (depending on what their motivation is).

Those are just my thoughts on this, anyway...

There is a simple solution for this:

Yup. Old-school MMO quest givers.

Hear me out.

Your players want both to grind and to level up at landmarks. They want you to simultaneously pace their leveling experience while letting them kill a bunch of weak mobs over, and over and over, or sometimes some larger mobs that need some brain, or sometimes a boss battle that gives a buttload of XP but needs some preparation to do.

They want to play a tabletop version of a modern MMO - which is pretty fine, honestly. I had a bunch of fun with those games, and I don't see why you can't, too.

When my players visit a city, the first thing they usually do is to visit the Town Hall. There, they usually find an adventure board with all sorts of requests for adventurers. At this point, I hand my players a small list of quests - with rewards, difficulty measured in "stars", and a very brief description of it on small hand-out cards:

With some pens, you can make them a little bit fancier:

I then let them pick whatever they want. Every star on the quest difficulty scale gives them a point when they complete it, and when they stack five points, they level up.

By making the quests brief and their descriptions very vague, I can amp or lower the difficulty as needed, and as such they are never really too easy or too hard - maybe the swamp lords have the nasty habit of blowing up entirely when killed, making hard for the players to get their proof-of-kill, or maybe the direwolf that was eating the farmers isn't a wolf at all, but a very, very pissed off druid that is fed up with people destroying her woods.

Those simple starting points can quickly become far more complex quests, and.. as it often happens on MMOs, what starts as picking mushrooms on the Monday may very well turn into beating up eldritch gods by Thursday.

And then back again to picking up mushrooms the very next day.

For anyone interested in making those cards - I make then with hard paper, usually pre-cut. I pay around a buck for 20 units. Once they are written down, I cover then with transparent Contact paper and store then away on a card holder, for re-use later on with different groups.

Personally, I like the "homemade" look of the hand-draw ones, but you can always print them out instead.

Ask more questions to figure out where to put landmarks

It sounds like your players are having trouble communicating to you the kind of game they want to play (or they don't understand it, themselves). That makes your job harder, but it's not an impossible problem.

The trick is to ask questions to find out their real motivations.

Start with "Why do you want to get stronger?"

A good answer would be something like, "We want to get stronger because a demon razed our village and we want revenge." They probably won't give you an answer like that right away - but you might be able to tease it out of them from what they do give you. If you get to that point, write your campaign around that reason, with "getting stronger" as the first step in the journey.

If they can't (or give you only circular answers), move on to the next question.

Then "How do you want to get stronger?"

Keep them in-character here. Their characters know nothing about levels or experience points, which will force them to be creative about what sorts of training regimens they're going to have. Are they looking for mentors? Going on a vision quest to the wilderness? Joining the town guard?

Then, if all else fails, make up your own answers based on what they've given you.

Write their own backstories if you have to.

"Get stronger" as a motivation sounds to me like a coming-of-age story.

So you all come from a village where children of a certain age are expected to have started their careers. All of you, for your whole life, have been saying that when you want to be adventurers. In fact, you made a promise when you were very little that you would one day all become an adventuring party, together. Well, the day has come, and all the village elders are very worried that you still haven't picked out a "real" career. No one is taking you seriously when you say you're going to be adventurers because you're all too weak - so one night, you all decide to sneak out and prove it. You're going to become adventurers, whether they believe in you or not.

Start them in their village. Have someone see them trying to sneak out and have them have to explain themselves, or this person will wake the grown-ups to come wrangle them. Give them a milestone for successfully running away from home.

Your next few milestones would then revolve around things like, "Get paid for killing a monster for the first time," "Find food in the wilderness for the first time," or "Clear out a den of monsters, for the first time" etc. Cap off their "firsts" with them killing their first dragon.

Once they've got a few levels under their belt, you can tie things back - winning their village elders' approval. Rubbing their childhood bullies' faces in their success. Maybe even put their village on the path of a band of gnolls or something and make them save it.

Then ask them what their new goal is.

I would suggest you make some heavy plothooks. I realize you want them to take initiative, but it sounds like they're not there yet

This could be because:

• They're new.


• They're simply not that type of player/person.


• They're a little confused about the campaign and not sure where it will go.


• They're unsure where to start everything off

I'd suggest simply pushing them out into an adventure and see what it does to the game and their attitude.
I've had players who had so much initiative that they I didn't plan too much ahead, because I knew they'd go their own way.
I've also had players who really just wanted a "Theme park adventure" where different fun quests were presented to them and they pick the one that sounded the most fun.
Both are valid play styles and you shouldn't try to combat it.

Either consider resetting expectations or make time a variable

Session Zero and game expectations

Based on your question, there seems to be a mismatch in expectations for what folks are looking for out of the game. It's unclear if you had a session zero where the game was discussed and agreed on, but if you haven't, I recommend looking into that and getting an idea of how to run it successfully.

It's never too late to get everyone on the same page - but be aware that it may end up that the players want one thing and you want another. If you can't reconcile, then it may be time to find a new group or them a new DM. And that's okay! The goal here is to have fun and enjoy the table experience.

I've run a session zero before we started and then another a few sessions in because it seemed like we weren't on the same page. And you know what? We've had another session and I'm still not sure. I'm going to continue to try and solve the table issues, but I'm also aware that the group just may not be the right fit.

Moving forward - actions have consequences

Let's say that everyone generally agrees - but there is still a bit of a disconnect between desire for side-quests/XP-farming and following the milestone story.

One thing that I've employed is explaining at Session Zero (or reminding at the table), that time continuously flows. The world doesn't stop just because the main story lines aren't being pursued. If they delay on a storyline by travelling around doing their own thing, they can still gain experience, but they may make things much harder on themselves.

As an example, I've had the BBEG build up strongholds, increase their army size, have lookouts finding and harassing the players, etc.

In addition, the world also responds to the PCs. Maybe killing off what they thought were just 'beasts' were actually someone's pets? Or those animals had an important role in the ecosystem? Or it's as simple as the players tried to rob/investigate a wagon that wasn't theirs right in front of town guards. Yes, they can choose to do those things. And yes, the world will react appropriately.

Actions have consequences, and if they see that what they do, or when they do it, will impact the world around them and the story, they may alter how they approach things.

Of course, they may not alter their actions

And then you're back at a Session Zero or trying to decide if the group/DM dynamics and desires mesh.

Put landmark events in the wilderness

The simple solution is that if you level up on landmarks, and the players decide to adventure in the forest, put a major questline out in the forest. It may relate to the existing plot, or a new plotline which will have relevance to the main story later on.

It sounds like your players don't know what they want, and my advice is going to reflect that. In brief, use your pull as Dungeon Master and switch to the XP model, at least as a trial basis to get some buy-in.

There is a reason XP is built into the RAW.

I'm going to be controversial and say that Milestone Advancement is not good for a game. Sure, it's simple and easy, but it comes with a host of other non-obvious problems, such as what you're coming across here.

Advantages of XP

• XP tells your players what the game is about. You can award more XP for obstacles handled diplomatically and less for murderhobo solutions if you want to focus on an intrigue campaign. Wandering monsters can be worth less XP if you want to encourage purposeful dungeon exploration. You can award XP for discovering new or significant locations in an exploration heavy campaign.


• It paces the game. The D&D design team put quite a bit of thought into play experience, learning what your character (or players, if you're behind the screen) can do, and how often you should be able to get new abilities without overwhelming you. That's all built into the XP system.


• It give concrete advancement security to you and your players. Both you and your players know that whenever they see the XP tracker tick up enough, they'll be next level start of the next session. This means that storyteller GMs can't screw their players out of an honestly earned level, the GM doesn't have to worry about defining landmarks events every other adventuring day, and the GM has time to prepare for slightly more powerful players the next session.

Disadvantages of XP

• You have to write down the XP earned after every encounter, total it up for you players at the end of the session, and tell them how much XP they earned overall.

For good measure, here's a link to The Angry GM and his thoughts on XP.
Warning, much anger and swearing: https://theangrygm.com/how-to-xp-good/

Response to comments: I'm not going to defend my policy of owning the table as DM. I'm not a tyrant at the table, I have never been accused of being overbearing as a DM, nor do I defend those who abuse the DM's screen to exercise power over others.

I'm saying it is the DM's job to step up and act for the good of the game. Based on the problem as stated, the players of the OP don't know what they want, haven't put any serious though into what they want or the consequences thereof, and they're leaving their DM to deal with the consequences.

• In matters of play, give your players as much leeway as possible;




• In matters of game administration, it's your job as DM to captain the
  ship.

It's not different than being an umpire or referee; sometimes you're going to make an unpopular call, but its the one that needs to be made for the good of the game.

If we look at the Dungeon Master’s Guide page 261, it has this to say:

You can do away with experience points entirely and control the rate of character advancement. Advance characters based on how many sessions they play, or when they accomplish significant story goals in the campaign. In either case, you tell the players when their characters gain a level.
This method of level advancement can be particularly helpful if your campaign doesn't include much
combat, or includes so much combat that tracking XP becomes tiresome.

As your players want to level up but do not want to track experience points, they are essentially describing this system. The DMG details two methods of levelling without using experience:

Session-based Advancement

A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.

Using this method, you can simply state that, after X amount of sessions, the players level up. This way allows you to get past the circular argument and simply state that “okay, its been enough time, you’ve levelled up”.

This may be a better method as, by levelling players up based on how many sessions they’ve been playing for, you allow for the game to flow easier. Your players no longer would need to feel they have to grind XP to be able to advance to the next stage, they would know that next session, they are guaranteed to level up. This may encourage them to do something else to advance the story as it is clear that nothing will allow them to advance, beyond waiting a week to play again. Rather than wasting several hours, your players may instead try to advance the story despite feeling under-levelled, simply because there would be nothing else for them to do for the next few hours if they did not try and advance the plot or find something else to do.

Personally, i wouldn’t recommend you use this method as it seems that you want them to move on as quickly as possible, not spend several sessions killing monsters to fulfil the required number of sessions to level. Instead, i would recommend using the method below:

Story-based Advancement

When you let the story of the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

Whilst this explanation is very brief, it offers you the possibility of levelling up the players as the story demands it. Your players will not leave until they have gained a level, so simply give them a level. You could state that “after days of slaughtering the denizens of the forrest, your characters feel more experienced and confident that they can face more dangerous challenges - you have gained a level”. This allows you to progress and continue your story, rather than getting bogged down with the players grinding for experience points that don’t exist.

To put this into movie terms, what you have done is described a training montage. Rather than showing every fight and acting it out, you have simply stated that “X has happened, now we’re at this point”. This is similar to a travel montage in how, rather than describing every hour in excruciating detail, potentially grinding the game to a halt, you have shortened the sequences down to keep to momentum and flow of the game going.

To prevent this from being abused, such as the players saying “do a montage until we reach level 20”, you could again use the story-based levelling system to your advantage. “After a while you find that the creatures no longer pose a threat to you and simply flee rather than attempting to fight - you do not level up”. There was no story-based reason for them to gain a level so they have not gained one, they did not try to earn it and wanted to instead skip to it.

Milestones

Whilst you mentioned milestones, I believe what you’ve actually described is Levelling Without Experience. My interpretation of Milestones is that they are like XP rewards for completing a quest objective. So, for example, by “obtaining the sword of Rafaam”, in whatever way you chose, be it through combat, social encounters or exploration, you have completed that objective and are rewarded with XP. This is as opposed to only gaining experience for killing monsters and no XP is granted for avoiding them or dealing with then in a non-combat way.

Using milestones, in the way I interpret the rules, players could gain a large chunk of experience for completing the objective “slay the monsters of the forrest to hone your skills”, allowing them to level up (or get closer to levelling up). This would help you to advance the story as players know they don’t need to always accomplish great feats in order to gain a level, smaller successes build up and eventually lead to gaining a level, though this is a much different style of gaining experience than what your players may be familiar with.

Your players may be more willing to accept this type of gaining experience as it focuses on the completion of objectives, which is what they seem to want, but it also allows you as the DM to give them smaller level-based rewards, rather than giving them an entire level each time and trying to come up with a plausible scenario or reason for them to gain a level.
Additionally, your players may be more familiar with this style of gaining experience as this is what many games employ. One example being The Witcher 3, when you complete a quest or a contract, you are given a large chunk of experience points. This rewards you for completing the objectives of a quest and seeing a quest line through to its completion.

My interpretation of milestones, detailed above, seems to be in the minority. It appears that most people interpret the rule to be very similar to Story-based Advancement - I however see the two as distinctly different methods. However, you could combine the two methods to create Story-Based Milestones:

Story-based Milestones

This method combines my interpretation of milestones with the idea of story-based levelling. Rather than gaining experience points at each milestone, players gain a tally mark. Minor milestones would only give 1 tally mark, major milestones might give 5 (or you as the DM might state how many tally marks a quest is worth). You might need, for example, 30 tally marks to get a new level, which is equivalent to 30 minor milestones or 6 major milestones.

A major milestone could be awarded for finishing a main quest objective, such as “slay the dragon”, “remove the archmage’s power”, “obtain the magical artefact” etc. A minor milestone might awarded for completing side quests or optional objectives or even completing main objectives using out-of-the-box thinking, for example “this cave entrance is littered with traps, the kobolds can’t possibly use this passage everyday, there must be another way in”.

This way, players might try and complete objectives which grant them many minor milestones, allowing them to get the “XP grinding” aspect they’re after, but it retains the idea of completing objectives to level up. Additionally, they might feel more compelled to complete main quest objectives as they allow them to level up faster, allowing them to get stronger which was their initial aim.

TLDR: Give them something to care about. Even their means to do that is going in the wilderness and bashing things.

So your players want to mindlessly kill things, and get milestone progress.
Tricky situation.

So, since some people have addressed the options where you sit down and have a family talk with the PCs I am going to try to help you from a sole narrative standpoint.

Refusal of the call

Taking a page from the hero journey

Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or 'culture,' the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved.

Now players need not to feel punished.
Imagine your world as something alive, independent from players.

Whoever they are after in the plot line will continue to pursue their agenda.
From their point of view this just might mean monsters are getting stronger, might seem you're only playing along their idea at first, but things will get out of hand.

They are all merry while hunting giant frogs but OH SHIT WHAT IS * THAT * DOING IN THESE LANDS ?

They level up upon fighting the big enemy, but some social damage was already done. This gives the players a sense of advancement while at the same time a sense or urgency. What will the next level up cost the kingdom ?

The Drill Monkey

Another way to go about this, or maybe even foreshadow the plots going on is make them learn how to properly do combat.
Do they just stick to wizards in the back, swingers in the front idea ?
Set some situations you would like them to learn how to deal with.

• Surrounded, wolves in a pack get them by surprise;


• Divided, a bear trap stops a stranded player, make them deal with friendly fire, unconventional team pairs or conflicting combat decisions;


• Out of range, enemy does hit and run, make them deal with faster enemies;

Each situation can be scaled throughout 1-2 sessions, up to you, starting with simple versions of the issue like surrounded in a circle of creatures, up to a ambush where they get stuck inside a fire circle with arrows flying in.
Make them prepare, rather than just roll dices.

When they can successfully answer to these situations, consider it a milestone.

These combat situations might come in play further down the line, making it a somewhat useful part of their background.

Way too powerful Already

Since you haven't told us how strong they are already, if they are actually fairly strong and maybe are just pursuing more power, give them some responsibilities. They might come into the graces of the people for clearing the woods of nasty animals, give them rule over some land and throw landlords issues upon them.

Milestones here could become

• Land expansions where they need to fight creatures or wage war with a neighboring society;


• Getting through a famine where their hunting efforts directly impact
  upon the people;