[XP] My problem with XP and advancement in D&D

Recently I’ve been dipping into the various rules on gaining experience points in D&D-type games and I’m of the opinion that while they are great in a ‘standard’ game, they are hardly adaptable enough for more eccentric campaign types. But more so, I have to say that I’ve yet to read of any character advancement system in any RPG that I’m really in love with…

The classic D&D way = XP for gp and kills… with the majority coming from gp seems ubiquitous across the editions and clones as far as I can tell. There are some tiny variations, such as only XP gained from gp when adventuring or removed from dungeons or only if taken from a monster or whatever… While I appreciate that this method has its passionate defenders and I appreciate how it encourages and rewards a pure dungeonist/gamest style of play that certainly has its place and therefore is ergonomically wonderful, yadda yadda… Yet it seems to me that this is far too narrowly focused if your campaign doesn’t revolve around amassing treasure.

What if I want to run a game of D&D based on political intrigue? Or an investigative game? Or some other variant of fantasy that doesn’t insist upon delving deep into monstrous lairs, committing genocide and robbing them of their hard hoarded gold… It strikes me, if my campaign is going to obey the ‘official’ rules, then my poor players are going to progress at a crawling pace compared to their traditional dungeoneering cousins. Not necessarily a bad thing per se, and maybe gold and kills can be found elsewhere at times… yet I can’t help but think that the rational of XP for gp and kills would slightly breakdown if too far removed from the dungeon/wilderness.

My other problem with this approach is = bookkeeping…  Actually, this is my main problem with D&D’s experience system… It boils down to: keeping a record of every gp worth of bootie and every kill (factoring threat level vs. player level) then dividing it amongst the players… easy? Yes… But dull… yawn! If I’m the DM, I’m writing, buying, prepping and running the game… The last think I’m going to want to do is start distributing thousands of XP around the place as well… I didn’t walk out of my last admin job for nothing, you know!

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t find it a very elegant system. I want something neater, faster and easier.

So what are the alternatives to gp and kills for XP?

Within the classic D&D line, 2e introduced some class specific XP awards, although they were still rather ‘adventure’ focussed; however I could see a courtly game giving some ad hoc 100 XP awards for wooing, etc… Still, this will require more bookkeeping than I want and it removes some of transparency of the traditional XP system in D&D: a clear and unambiguous association between of a specific style of game play and reward. Also, if the class-based criteria for XP award is too simple then it could be fairly easy for a player to squeeze some easy XPs out of this system while doing very little to earn them. Also, it could be very hard to balance…

Other XP-type systems?

From what I remember from Rolemaster/MERP XP was given in a highly mechanistic way for pretty much every activity a player does. Cast a spell = [insert formula for determining XP from that task], climb a wall = [different formula]… Which is going to require even more bookkeeping than D&D! Forget it!

WHFRP 1e gave XP awards for ‘good role-playing’ and reaching certain key plot-points, which is okay, although it won’t suit a relatively freeform campaign and in retrospect does reek of railroading. Certainly XP awards in later game design (1990s+) do seem to be more focussed as plot/story/role-playing awards, so is this the way to go?

Frankly my experience with WHFRP is that there is a big disconnect with XP awards and how they are gained because the reward to risk ratio just seemed very arbitrary. With D&D the reward is quite clearly linked with looting and killing and the size of the bootie is usually in direct proportion to the difficulty of the threat. If it wasn’t then your PCs would stick with orcs… It is implicit in the system and rewards a specific kind of play. Whereas the XP awards in WHFRP scenarios are dished out for such prosaic crap as finding a specific player’s handout in the draw of the dead cultist or whatever or finding a simple nugget of info from an NPC that would almost be spoon-fed to them in order to complete the adventure. Which is bad enough, but more so, it is hard to rationalise and worse than that it is almost impossible for the player to identify the final reward to the action that earned it by the end of play. It’s just too removed from the game to feel like it really matters. It doesn’t work in theory or in practice.

But even worse than this is XP awards for ‘good role-playing!’ To my mind it feels like a total cop-out by the game designers and is potentially the most flawed system of all. For a start, it is obviously prone to bias and favouritism and will likely reward the loudest players. Also, it puts the DM in a tricky position when he has to justify the reason why Player A received significantly more XP than B or C! I probably don’t mind a few extra points being dished out for exceptional role-playing, etc… but if this became a significant portion of a sessions XP award, it would be hard, if this award was to be in anyway meaningful, not to insult some of your players at least some of the time. Sure, some DM’s might relish this, but frankly I don’t. It’s a personal criticism and I don’t believe it is my place to dish that out.

It has other problems too: i) role-playing is not a competitive sport and is impossible to quantify, ii) there is no right or wrong way to role-play, and iii) I fail to see why it should be supposed that a DM is in anyway especially qualified to determine this kind of thing! Just because you bought the game and are the only sucker prepared to run it doesn’t qualify you as a judge of improve acting. Nope, this is the worst possible method IMO and for me would never occupy more than ~10% of total XP for a session.

So, any good alternatives to XP?

Well, I must confess that I’m a fan of Chaosium’s BRP experience system games (Rune Quest, Stormbringer, Call of Cthulhu, Elf Quest…), as it takes character improvement totally out of the ref’s hands and gives it to the players for their skill use. In case you don’t know how it works, here it is in a nutshell: player makes a skill check (woopie!), he ticks a box by the skill (that’s all the bookkeeping)… at the end of play he makes a skill check against the skill… but, unlike a normal skill check, if he rolls higher than his skill (which is the same as a failed skill check) he gains some skill points, if he rolls equal to or under then he learns nothing from his skill use… The rationale here is a PC with a low skill learns quicker (or more frequently) than a player with a higher skill, thus representing that it is easier to pick up the basics and that you reach a point of diminished returns as you get better and better, I suppose.

It’s a good and simple system – but it also has its problems. First, it really requires a skill system, thus it isn’t readily adaptable to other game systems such as D&D as far as I can see. [but let me know if you know different] Also it encourages frivolous skill use. Obviously the ref can clamp down on this, but it can’t be denied that once a player has a ‘tick’ by his broad sword attack and parry, he is likely to unsling his mace and have a go with that for no reason whatsoever other than he wants to improve his skill. I guess this kind of thing could be restricted by only allowing a player to make a skill advancement check a set number of times, but it is open to abuse and a ref needs to be aware of this.

Anyway, the exact mechanic isn’t important here… What I like about it is its simplicity, its lack of bookkeeping and the fact that it removes the ref from the sole responsibility of dealing with this shite. I have to say that it is also the most ‘game mechanicey’ character advancement system that I know of and I have to admit that one of the aspects of RPGs I like the most is the mechanics themselves: the foolish attempt of turning probabilities and numbers into a virtual world. To my mind, this system is one of the only official advancement systems to do this. It also makes some rational sense, albeit it in a highly simplified way.

I suppose the other obvious skill improvement mechanic from Rune Quest is training, where you pay to improve a skill over a period of game time, usually between adventures. It’s probably the most realistic system, although I’m not sure how many players like it really as it’s also the most boring… Maybe players may spend gp for XP to represent training? Yeah, that’s cool enough, but it only really works in a typical hyper inflated D&D world. Also, with this system it would be impossible to rationalize the concept that only gp gained on an adventure can be cashed in for XP related training… thus a savvy merchant Fighter could gain levels faster than his dungeoneering rivals… which hardly encourages the game to be played as intended! Also, it doesn’t help PCs improve in a non-Reaganomic campaign.

Another variant of the training idea was Golden Heroes’ Day Utility Phases, where off-adventure time is spent on researching, training, making gadgets and patrolling… Or, in other words, improving! It’s a good, if unexciting system, which could lend itself to episodic campaign play – say D&D with a Pendragonesque winter phase?

The other option is to take a leaf from the first edition of Traveller, which (I think I’m right in saying) didn’t have a character improvement system at all (or maybe only a slo-mo training system, I forget now…). Once play began, PCs were relatively static. It’s not popular with many role-players, but did Traveller hit upon something here? Sure, there are some BIG examples of character improvement in genre texts, but these are usually younger characters (Skywalker, Potter, to a lesser extent Conan…) and I wouldn’t say that many characters in most genre texts improve massively in their abilities over the course of a narrative. Maybe the answer is to make the players fully experienced, as most typical Traveller characters would be, then ignore the issue from that point on… TBH I don’t think it would hurt, although it would probably mean that PCs would need to start at a mid-level, which I don’t really like as I must admit that my preference as a player is for low-level D&D games. Maybe a Day Utility Phase system could supplement this for gradual advancement.

However…

…I think there is a big difference between D&D and Traveller or Golden Heroes… And that is: lethality!

Simply put, the risks are greater in D&D! Thus there has to be some reward to compensate. Frankly, jumping about from star system to star system trading goods doesn’t really deserve much in the way of character improvement and superheroes never seem to die or to change that much in the comics anyway… Nope, Fighters, Magic-Users et al deserve more, because they give so much more…

Maybe I’ve answered my own question here then… The PCs in D&D campaigns involving political intrigue and investigation don’t deserve any/many XPs from their wooing or their foiling of cultist’s plans because they simply don’t put as much on the line as their dungeon delving cousins! Their progression is slower, because the real risks are lower… Seems fair to me…

But still there’s all that bookkeeping! Grrr… There must be a way?!

Ad hoc advancement…

I guess a lot of DM’s just ignore XP and bump the players a level every few adventures. Not a bad (non-)system, although part of the D&D’s game balance comes from different classes needing different amounts of XP to progress levels. Removing this makes Basic Elves look like a tasty proposition! I think it would be better to just give a flat number of XP, say 500 XP per session, multiplied by the session’s difficulty level… which would be fairly arbitrary, yet still maintain some semblance of game balance. If risk is the multiplier, then those courtly PCs should still progress slower… although they’ll likely live longer too – so who’s laughing?

Or let the dice decide…

For those who haven’t seen them, there are these ‘roll to advance’ rules, which I quite like, although it is hard to gauge house rules that are as extensive as these are without actually play testing them.  Still, they’re intriguing… It completely removes the ‘reward for results’ dynamic that underpins most experience systems… You turn up > you play > you have a chance of going up a level > the more you play > the better the chance… Simple! Reward the player, not the PC! I suppose a ref could add a sub-system where a PC could pay gp to get a bonus to their advance roll? Or some other reward system… It has the advantage of next to no bookkeeping, like RQ’s advancement system it is very game mechanicey, and it mirrors the key mechanic of D&D (the ‘hit’ roll and the ‘save’)… It is prone to accusations of unfairness, yet I’d argue that D&D is inherently an unfair and unbalanced system anyway, so why shouldn’t it’s advancement system mirror this to? That’s half the fun! You can imagine one lucky player fluking his advancement roll three sessions on the trot and his fellow fumbles away chance after chance…

But…

…has anyone got any other groovy ideas? A system that rewards a variety of play, isn’t as boring as training of DUPs, yet isn’t entirely arbitrary or ref dependent…