Topic: Experience: What to award it for?

Using the Opera Browser, I don't seem to be able to post on blogs that don't allow anonymous commenting, so I'll post my comment here instead.

Some systems are far more generous in their monster XP awards than others; for example, C&C compared to BECMI D&D. I actually like the idea of 100XP per hit die for monsters, provided that monsters that are not a significant threat to the party give no XP. The XP gained would be more significant to low level characters than high-level ones, which feels right, because it's the characters with low hit points that are risking the most by tackling monsters.

I like Jeff Rients' idea of XP for spending treasure, rather than getting treasure. I think this idea was in the First Fantasy Campaign supplement too, which listed different things characters could choose to waste their money on.

GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri gives a variable XP system for MUs, under which they would probably get most of their XP from studying arcane tomes. Of course, this means they have to get hold of such tomes first. Adventures which include libraries would be popular with MUs under this system! In general, I like the idea of different character classes getting XP for different things, but I don't think XP should be awarded for things that are too easy (e.g. casting spells) or that already provide in-game benefits (e.g. magic items). I was thinking Fighter types might get full XP for monsters and treasure, Rogues no XP for monsters and double XP for gold, MUs 1/2 xp for monsters and gold, but 500xp for each tome studied and retained in their library (so they have to have a residence with a library too . . . they are going to need a lot of gold!).

The Dying Earth RPG allows players to select their own goals before or during a game session. XP is then awarded if the player made significant progress towards their goal in the face of adversity, or if they tried hard to achieve their goal but were thwarted by circumstances. I quite like the idea of this as an alternative to "story" awards. Maybe allow PCs the option to change their goal once per session, to take into account new circumstances arising during the adventure.

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

I do plan on using an alternate XP system for my game.  I just haven't decided on what it's going to be yet.  Good thing I won't start until at least November.

I like story awards for accomplishing certain plot goals.  I like awarding experience for OOG stuff, like keeping an in-character journal or as a reward for coming up with a James T. Kirk "How the heck did you think of that?" solution to a problem.

And of course, for defeating or bypassing monsters.

IMHO, treasure should be its own reward.

Last edited by poolboy (2010-09-05 01:46:26)

Dennis Higgins, The Higgipedia.
So mellow, he's probably not REALLY a grognard.

Check out Gaming All Over The Place: http://gamingallover.blogspot.com/

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

Akiyama wrote:

I like Jeff Rients' idea of XP for spending treasure, rather than getting treasure. I think this idea was in the First Fantasy Campaign supplement too, which listed different things characters could choose to waste their money on.

I think it's genre-appropriate for PCs to be rewarded for blowing their treasure back in the city. So I'll be awarding XP for spending treasure as well. There will be limits as to what sort of spending would constitute an XP worthy expenditure.

Buying a Potion? No. Not unless it specifically relates to some story-goal and not a mechanical enhancement.

Wasting it all on booze and brothels? Hell yeah. I think Conan would reach out of the pages of LotFP:WF itself and slap me with his sword hand otherwise.

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

It's a thorny thing.

XP for treasure works best in pure sandbox games.

If you're going on a railroady adventure path, perhaps "story awards" work best.

In all cases, I think it's important to have some sort of objective metric. I despise "You role-played pretty good today, have an extra 500xp!" awards. I also don't like the idea of combat issues being a significant source of XP.

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

I'll play with the rules as written before trying any house rules. Cash and killing is easy.

It's not the years, it's the mileage.

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

This XP business is probably the most fundamental question to setting the tone for the campaign!

In a story-driven system like 4E, the players are going to go where the quests are and battle the monsters the DM sticks in front of them, because they get XP for quests and monsters.  The DM controls the direction of the game by setting the quests.  This would be fine for adventure paths, epic quests, and other lead-players-by-the-nose styles.

If you want the players to have the narrative control and have total freedom to choose what to do and where to go, XP for treasure is really the best.  It abstracts all the work that goes into getting that treasure (which might include fighting or outsmarting the previous owners).  This is best for wilderness sandbox, megadungeon, and exploration style games.

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

So, an all-powerful wizard ensures all dangers come with proportional gold?

Treasure is its own reward: buying adventuring tools, investing in land, building a stronghold, social climbing.  While it's a useful measure for treasure-hunting games, in other genres a lot of effort and learning doesn't lead to more money.  (As in real life.)  One of my problems with conventional D&D is the idea that every character gets better at his specialty by killing things and taking their stuff.  Granted, fighters get better at fighting by killing things, and thieves get better by taking things, but how does a cleric or magic-user learn to cast more and higher-level spells?  Story-based awards, or Chaosium's "improvement through practice" mechanic, always made more sense to me.

I'm contemplating starting a campaign, and I'll probably award XP for a mix of hit dice, treasure, "story achievements", entertaining role-play, and extra-game activity (e.g. character background).  Or maybe I'll just fudge it.  One of the best GMs I've ever played with shared XP equally among all attending party members -- however he calculated it -- with a few individual awards for outstanding contributions.

Last edited by fmitchell (2010-09-08 05:19:24)

Frank Mitchell
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." -- Anatole France

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

A Paladin in Citadel (http://apaladinincitadel.blogspot.com/) has been posting a lot of alternate XP systems from other games lately.  Might be worth a look!

Dennis Higgins, The Higgipedia.
So mellow, he's probably not REALLY a grognard.

Check out Gaming All Over The Place: http://gamingallover.blogspot.com/

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

I used to give XP awards for roleplaying, but in the long run I noticed that this sort of strange "carrot & stick" methodology does not really work, those who don't get the award tended to grow more detached from the game and those who do tend to mechanically repeat what they did when they got the award expecting same result. I finally got rid of trying to do the whole roleplaying XP award with sense and have only used it as a joke "You get 1 XP roleplaying award!" after that.

Story awards I have had trouble using if trying to think them up while game is running, if used there needs to be clear list of goals that give the rewards so players can strive towards them.

XP for gold is kind of story award for games where PC's are tombrobbers, looters and mercenaries.

Experience for combat is obvious, because everyone should pause to think what improves when your character goes up a level? His or her combat abilities of course! Of course you get XP for stuff that you could reasonably assume makes you better at killing things and surviving combat, and I would assume fighting makes you better fighter.

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

Dungeon #94 includes "Omega World", a minimalist d20 take on Gamma World, and that game includes a Free-form Experience system, based on what happened in the session: Nothing, Mediocre Adventuring, Standard Adventuring, or a Spectacular Success or Failure.  Apart from scaling XP down to old-school levels, I might just adopt that.

Frank Mitchell
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." -- Anatole France

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

It is kinda funny (here) to have all these ideas for abandoning XP for Gold bandied about... after all, these are the LOTFP boards!  I'd expect the whole, 'OD&D, AD&D, B/X, BECMI et al need fixing...' over on RPGnet.

I knew Mr Raggi had made a post about it somewhere in the blogosphere, so it's clear why WFRP maintained the same approach as all the other rules systems:

http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2009/01/xp-for-treasure.html

I can understand the reasons to wanting to tinker (I've been there - giving class bonus XP for doing class things...) but its a big headache.  I think this excerpt sums it better than I could:

"Experience for gold is sublime in its effectiveness in taking everything involved with the playing of the game and abstracting it to an easily trackable game mechanic. You can't think of it literally - "Oh gee, I found a gold coin in the street, so I'm a little bit better at what I do!" - but the placing of gold in places that require role-playing, or mission-solving, or dealing with monsters, or exploration, or characters using their class abilities, effectively summarizes and rewards those activities. And all you have to do is keep track of how much money is gained during adventuring."

Last edited by Beedo (2010-09-08 16:15:04)

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

"Experience for gold is sublime in its effectiveness in taking everything involved with the playing of the game and abstracting it to an easily trackable game mechanic. You can't think of it literally - "Oh gee, I found a gold coin in the street, so I'm a little bit better at what I do!" - but the placing of gold in places that require role-playing, or mission-solving, or dealing with monsters, or exploration, or characters using their class abilities, effectively summarizes and rewards those activities. And all you have to do is keep track of how much money is gained during adventuring."

Instead of placing gold, why not just place XP?  If/when the players get to this point in the dungeon, or defeat this trap, or achieve this goal, they get XP.  Sure, the Ref has to keep a separate tally, kept from the PCs until the end, but that's no harder than totaling gold.  And if that's too fine-grained and fiddly, the Free-form Experience system above is even quicker, assuming the Ref lays out concrete definitions of Mediocre, Standard, and Exceptional.  If the Ref hands out XP for individual achievements, one eminently fair way is to have one player nominate another, and someone else in the group second it, before the Ref can raise one player's total above another's.

The conceptual problem I have with gold is that it's already an in-game reward, and tying a game mechanic to an in-game item breaks my idea of how an internally consistent world works.  In adventure fiction and real life, characters may learn something new independently of how lucrative the adventure is; many heroes get better at their craft while remaining relatively poor, and learn nothing from a routine paying job.

Maybe I play RPGs for different reasons than the majority.

Last edited by fmitchell (2010-09-08 17:15:52)

Frank Mitchell
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." -- Anatole France

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

Beedo wrote:

It is kinda funny (here) to have all these ideas for abandoning XP for Gold bandied about... after all, these are the LOTFP boards!  I'd expect the whole, 'OD&D, AD&D, B/X, BECMI et al need fixing...' over on RPGnet.

I knew Mr Raggi had made a post about it somewhere in the blogosphere, so it's clear why WFRP maintained the same approach as all the other rules systems:

http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2009/01/xp-for-treasure.html

I can understand the reasons to wanting to tinker (I've been there - giving class bonus XP for doing class things...) but its a big headache.  I think this excerpt sums it better than I could:

"Experience for gold is sublime in its effectiveness in taking everything involved with the playing of the game and abstracting it to an easily trackable game mechanic. You can't think of it literally - "Oh gee, I found a gold coin in the street, so I'm a little bit better at what I do!" - but the placing of gold in places that require role-playing, or mission-solving, or dealing with monsters, or exploration, or characters using their class abilities, effectively summarizes and rewards those activities. And all you have to do is keep track of how much money is gained during adventuring."

It is not about fixing but about customizing, there is important difference. If I get a custom paintjob for classic Cadillac it is not because I would think the car sucks, you are free to discuss my choise of color and maybe in some case even point out that you think I have f*cked up a classic beyond recognition

I think the tone is considerably different, and tinkering is just what people tend to do with games that get tabletime.
If there is game that people never make houserules for it is not pinnacle of rules perfection it's a game that does not get played. Rules might be completely functional and well thought out but it is sort of feature of the hobby to try out different things.

Last edited by MutieMoe (2010-09-09 09:56:00)

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

fmitchell wrote:

Dungeon #94 includes "Omega World", a minimalist d20 take on Gamma World, and that game includes a Free-form Experience system, based on what happened in the session: Nothing, Mediocre Adventuring, Standard Adventuring, or a Spectacular Success or Failure.  Apart from scaling XP down to old-school levels, I might just adopt that.

I think that could work*. I better dig up my copy of Omega World and refresh my memory. To tell you the truth XP issues sort of fell to background in the few OW games I tried.

I would perhaps lump the mediocre and standard together. If these rules would lead to genre emulation and that's the goal it would be great, for example when in Fritz Laiber's Lankhmar stories the two heroes Fafrd and Gray Mouser mad with grief storm the thieves guild I would use that as example of something spectacular.

*Well almost everything works with good and not really too bad participants, normal guys and gals just take the XP the DM announces they get and get on with the game, weirdoes start calculating the XP values according to CR of creatures they just encountered in relation to party level and point out DM mistakes in calculations right in middle of the game.

Last edited by MutieMoe (2010-09-09 10:04:42)

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

Akiyama wrote:

Using the Opera Browser, I don't seem to be able to post on blogs that don't allow anonymous commenting, so I'll post my comment here instead.

Some systems are far more generous in their monster XP awards than others; for example, C&C compared to BECMI D&D. I actually like the idea of 100XP per hit die for monsters, provided that monsters that are not a significant threat to the party give no XP. The XP gained would be more significant to low level characters than high-level ones, which feels right, because it's the characters with low hit points that are risking the most by tackling monsters.

I like Jeff Rients' idea of XP for spending treasure, rather than getting treasure. I think this idea was in the First Fantasy Campaign supplement too, which listed different things characters could choose to waste their money on.

GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri gives a variable XP system for MUs, under which they would probably get most of their XP from studying arcane tomes. Of course, this means they have to get hold of such tomes first. Adventures which include libraries would be popular with MUs under this system! In general, I like the idea of different character classes getting XP for different things, but I don't think XP should be awarded for things that are too easy (e.g. casting spells) or that already provide in-game benefits (e.g. magic items). I was thinking Fighter types might get full XP for monsters and treasure, Rogues no XP for monsters and double XP for gold, MUs 1/2 xp for monsters and gold, but 500xp for each tome studied and retained in their library (so they have to have a residence with a library too . . . they are going to need a lot of gold!).

The Dying Earth RPG allows players to select their own goals before or during a game session. XP is then awarded if the player made significant progress towards their goal in the face of adversity, or if they tried hard to achieve their goal but were thwarted by circumstances. I quite like the idea of this as an alternative to "story" awards. Maybe allow PCs the option to change their goal once per session, to take into account new circumstances arising during the adventure.

Then why don't you  try just 100XP per hit die for monsters???

Re: Experience: What to award it for?

One could reward players for completing character goals rather than Story rewards.  Keeps it sandbox-y.