XP for treasure found and retrieved, onlyRewards: Treasure seeking by any means; avoiding combat; the players as adventurers, not plot monkeys.
DM judgment calls: Defining what is treasure; should bounties and rewards count? The loot from a plundered town?
Hidden sticky points: Sticking with standard, classic 1000-2500 xp to reach first level, that's a lot of treasure running through your hands - enough to max out a fighter's standard equipment. Hard to make players stay hungry.
XP for treasure spent on "useless" goods and activity, only (carousing, etc.)
Rewards: Demand-side rather than supply-side behavior; your party can get rich running a caravan or looting a town and level up, because the experience comes from money spent.
DM judgment calls: Minimal; you do have to decide when something is useless, but this can be strictly defined in a list of allowed activities.
Hidden sticky points: As above regarding amount of treasure. You may have to choose between spending on useful equipment and getting levels, which is a temptation to overcalculate things.
XP for monsters slain
Rewards: Facing monsters; heroic combat; unless adjusted for imbalance, pointless hunting expeditions.
DM judgment calls: When NPC's count; when the players are farming instead of adventuring.
Hidden sticky points: Adjusting XP for balance ratios can be fiddly and mechanical.
XP for exploration and defined missions
Rewards: Other forms of adventuring than treasure hunting, and other forms of overcoming than monster slaying
DM judgment calls: What a particular exploration goal or mission is worth. No real good guidelines I can see out there. Also, how to deal with somewhat subverted missions.
Hidden sticky points: Lots of DM subjectivity as to where to seed your Easter egg baskets of goodies.
Perhaps I currently run a mix of all four - monsters and treasure, plus carousing, plus occasional set rewards for challenges and adventures with neither monsters nor treasure - because I see drawbacks in each of them. If I had to drop one, it would be monster XP - replacing it with goal awards. Rewarding the process of treasure finding is important, but treasure spending, carousing and the like, also adds great color to a game. Training should be an option for leveling up; but so should drunken revelry, ostentatious charity, or arcane scholarship.
Out of curiosity, does investing treasure — in building projects or business ventures — count as "useless" in this schematic? If not, why not include it?
ReplyDeleteEven though I'm more of an Arneson guy, I dislike the wasted money = XP thing that seems to be all the rage lately. I can think of plenty of things for my PCs to spend money on from buying business , ships, outfitting expeditions or even buying and training their own gryphon to ride around on.
ReplyDeleteI'd prefer to move beyond the murderhobbo phase as quickly as possible.
Is the idea of "useless" spending an Arneson artifact? Why not just convert any expenditure to XP? This seems to map pretty closely to the idea of all retrieved gold=xp plus keeps players hungry.
ReplyDeleteWe've been playing with this for the past year or so, and it works well (the exception being that monies payed to henchmen only gives 50% xp, the other half going to said meatshield).
Arneson's FFC document discusses earning XP by spending it. It wasn't always "useless", however. Each PC picks a hobby and gets XP for spending on his hobby. One hobby is actually accumulating gold. You get XP for your gold but you lose XP if your gold is later stolen. Go figure. Arneson had some weird XP ideas. In his Adventures in Fantasy, you could lie about your exploits and gain "Reputation XP" and levels to go with them. However, if you are ever caught lying, you'd lose those levels and from that point on only score XP if a neutral third party will vouch for your actions.
DeleteI really need to reread the FFC.
DeleteI'm a huge proponent of GP spent = XP, but I also make an effort to respect standard economic incentives. I don't expect any PCs to spend money on "useless" things... if they are carousing it's because of standard risk/return or other personal desire.
ReplyDeleteI always thought the "spending treasure to get x.p." meant spending it in a character appropriate way, like armor, strongholds, and training for fighters, magic research for wizards, propping up the local temple for clerics, and gambling (win or lose) for thieve...errr...rogues. That's not necessarily wasteful, especially if the magic research turns up something useful or the temple rewards big donors. Am I making this part up, or did anyone else read it that way?
ReplyDeleteYou might find a post of mine interesting:
ReplyDeletehttp://recedingrules.blogspot.com/2009/11/systems-of-reward
was trying to come with alternate and individual ways to push people to explore dungeons that wouldn't necessarily pull the party in different directions. If nothing else, I think the idea of a character getting XP from keeping other pcs safe from injury still interesting.
Hm... link doesn't work and I can't really search your blog that well... try again?
Deletehttp://recedingrules.blogspot.com/2009/11/systems-of-reward.html
DeleteThanks - yes, that is also a very intriguing system that deserves to be worked out and calibrated in a bit more detail. I like the possibility of codifying exploration in terms of new things seen.
DeleteAlso relevant:
Deletehttp://jrients.blogspot.com/2009/12/exploration.html
Thanks for all your comments. The general trend reminds me that I forgot to include the idea of just rewarding money spent, which is fairly common. But I like the idea of especially rewarding expenditures that don't necessarily give any in-game benefit but are cool or risky or in character, like carousing or fabulous outfits or donations. I think if you just reward spending, characters will never be profligate; they'll just invest in warehouses and factories and trade routes, and this will ultimately ossify more sessions into accounting and take the focus away from adventure.
ReplyDeleteI have actually found this to be exactly the opposite, especially if one takes advantage of projects that players care about — the trade route is being plagued by pirates/giants/mutant frogmen form mars etc. I have found that the campaign world actually comes more alive because it begins to have a life of its own.
DeleteI have this concept of carousing (and other such activities) that have the potential for "interesting" side effects, but reward the expenditure 2 to 1.
Deletehttp://untimately.blogspot.com/2012/11/carousing-and-friends.html
That said, I agree with FrDave as well.
Brendan: That's actually a very reasonable compromise system you propose and I'm also digging the idea of clerics sitting in judgment - did you ever produce a table for that?
DeleteUnfortunately, I have not written up a more detailed cleric table yet. I really should, as clerics are probably the most popular class in my current game.
DeleteI love to read these posts even though I am squarely in the opposite camp. This reminds me of the Quantum Ogre. The similarity is "there is a implied desire of wanting the DM to be impartial"
ReplyDelete@Random Wizard
DeleteI think the desire for impartiality is quite explicit, in most cases.
MERP had - if I correctly remember- a rule for 1 mile trevelled = 1XP.
ReplyDeleteMaybe in a D&D play, it could be something like 100 XP per Hex, with additional XP for special landmarks discovered: mines, ruins, etc?
Alexis hands out XP depending on damage dealt and received. Seems like a very nice way of balancing XP for fighting: http://tao-dnd.blogspot.dk/2009/04/experience-solved.html
ReplyDeleteIn my oldschool campaign, I go by 1 XP for every GP spent on specific ventures. For every 1000 XP earned/gold spent, they get a specific benefit.
There is Carousing, which gives a randomly determined contact (lawyer, weaponsmith, sage, etc) or henchman (a groupie who will adventure with the character without getting payed) for every 1000gp.
There is Holdings, which allows the character to construct a home base, with new rooms for every 1000gp spent (each room of which gives various benefits).
Donations can be given to one of the many churches, giving divine boons for every 1000gp. As long as a character has at least one boon, he can ask for a miracle, and the more boons, the greater chance the miracle is successful. Anything from resurrection to transformation of water to wine.
Finally research. For every 1000gp, the character can try to create a new spell, or get the answer to a specific question.
I've also wanted to make trade a possibility, but the obvious reward there seems to be money, which could turn the trade category into a perpetual XP machine. And I don't want that.
In my game, XP are purchased explicitly, at a rate of 1 GP each. This is quite similar to the idea of XP for 'useless' expenditure in effect but doesn't require any thinking about what constitutes 'useless'.
ReplyDeleteIn my game I run with "carousing" as a random roll that burns a random % of the character's wealth after a "buy-in" - it results in random xp and potentially debt for the character.
ReplyDeleteThe other main mechanic is rolling for random xp on monsters killed, with bonus xp rolled for killing blows.
Finally, a certain amount of ad hoc xp for good roleplaying, completing quests and finding out that the princess is in another castle.
Yes, my "heroes" tend towards murderhobos, but, then ... what is best in life, after all?
Like the random carousing!
DeleteThe whole dialogue sounds like a group of stingy, tight-fisted DMs squabbling about how best to punk the player ... like politicians inventing a tax law code.
ReplyDelete