Thread:JeielYozama/@comment-28144855-20190428220007/@comment-27950421-20190603012257

You level by just progressing the story. Do things, get XP. Simple as that. The most direct method is to fight things as the Monster Manual has allotted XP for everything, but it also comes with doing pretty much anything that is of interest.

Think of it less like vidoe game XP and more life experience. It's just structured in a quantifiable manner to make it easy to organize.