It’s Ask Angry time again!

Every so often, I select one or two or more questions sent in by readers to answer with my characteristic mix of sarcasm, hyperbole, insults, and brilliant correctitude.

Want a shot at being one of my future Ask Angry victims? Just send your question to ask.angry@angry.games. Remember to cut to the chase — I get bored quickly reading anything not written by me — and tell me clearly what I should call you.

The Ideasmith asks…

When choosing the main source of experience points, what are the pros and cons of the recent ‘challenges overcome’, and what are the pros and cons of the old-fashioned ‘treasure gained by adventuring’?

I’ve been sitting on this question for a while. I’ve wanted to curb-stomp this gold-for-XP bullshit for a while, and this question gave me the perfect opportunity to put my boot down without it looking like I wanted to pick another fight with the beardy grognards. We had a few issues back at the start of the year, see. But this ain’t picking a fight; I’m just answering a fan’s question.

I guess I should have put a spoiler warning in that last paragraph. I kind of gave away how this analysis is going to go, huh? Look, I’m gonna need some lead-in to this one.

The truth, Ideasmith, is that I can’t really answer this how you want me to. That sucks because you’re just asking me to do what I always do. Despite the Angry moniker, I’ve got a long, well-established history of being really objective and analytical about things. I do the whole pro-con, cost-benefit thing all the time, regardless of my personal feelings. Sure, I lace it all with swears and insults and sarcasms, but it’s still fair and objective and all that crap.

The problem here is that there’s no pro-con, cost-benefit way to do this. This really is comparing a good, strong approach to a weak, limited, crappy approach. Gold-for-XP is just the worse way to do experience points across the board. That’s why we don’t do it anymore and why most gamers aren’t clamoring to bring it back. The old guard clings to it, but that’s just what they do. Meanwhile, you get the occasional bratty little upstart who discovers the old school and gets really excited about how it changes everything, but their analysis of gold-for-XP as a game-changing panacea to every ill of modern D&D is just totally flawed. Most of their excitement comes from their being burnt out on a system they misapplied in the first place, or that’s not handled as well as it could be in a specific product or edition.

What blows my frigging mind, though, is just how emotionally charged this whole thing is for the beardy grognards and the excitable little nouveauSR zygotes. I didn’t realize how big a deal this shit was to the OSR crowd. Gold-for-XP is like the OSR’s Justin Beaver or… hold on… let me look something up… or The Kid LAROI… apparently that’s who the kids are dropping their panties for these days… Gold-for-XP is like the OSR’s Justin Beaver or The Kid LAROI. It’s the hill to die on. It’s the one thing that ruined D&D more than any other thing that Wizards of the Coast ever did, except, of course, for everything else that Wizards of the Coast ever did. “Gold-for-XP will change everything,” they say. “Gold-for-XP will save gaming.”

I personally don’t get the zealotry. I don’t have the Beaver Fever or the LAROI Hoi Palloi over XP systems. I know the arguments, and I know the case. Trust me, I know the frigging arguments. You can’t talk to someone in the OSR crowd about experience or advancement or anything that starts with the prefix ‘ex-‘ without hearing the arguments. The problem is they’re bad arguments. They don’t hold up, and they’re based on faulty assumptions and a poor understanding of modern D&D.

None of that makes the alternative — challenge-based XP — good. Two things can both be terrible. Ripping apart someone else’s stances doesn’t make yours right. So I really don’t want to spend this whole discussion shredding the OSR stance on gold-for-XP. Especially because this ain’t an emotional issue for me. Except insofar as I hate when people scream wrong things at me over and over while I’m trying to have a normal, dispassionate discussion and get to some kind of truth.

By the way, Mr. Smith, I want to thank you for using the term ‘challenge-based XP.’ It shows you’ve got a good, dispassionate understanding of the issue yourself, and you’re not coming into this with an axe to grind or a flag to plant. I want to provide a dispassionate analysis. That’s what I do. I’m in the business of truth. Sweary, sarcastic, mean-spirited truth. But I really can’t do the cost-benefit thing because I don’t think it works that way. Instead, I’m going to explain why challenge-based XP is a good approach and why gold-for-XP just doesn’t cut it. I will address some of the other side’s talking points at the end, but that ain’t going to be my main approach. I do expect a few comments trying to pull me into a debate over the issue and more than a few nasty e-mails and I really wish people would comment more and e-mail less, but what can you do? I probably won’t engage in any ongoing debate though.

Let me start with a very clear description of challenge-based XP because that’s the approach I think outshines gold-for-XP in every category, and there’s a lot of crappy strawmen that get raised in these discussions. We don’t scarecrow here, regardless of what side we take. We play fair.

In a challenge-based XP system, the players earn experience points or otherwise advance their characters by overcoming obstacles, challenges, and threats during the normal course of gameplay. I’m totally onboard with that. That’s the hill I’d die on if I thought this shit was worth dying for.

As a side note, I also think challenge-based XP can be supplemented with goal-based XP. That’s where the players advance their characters by accomplishing specific goals through gameplay. If the game’s about rescuing a princess from a dragon, the players earn goal-based XP by returning the princess, whole and unsinged, to the castle. If a character’s personal goal is to recover a family heirloom, the player earns goal-based XP by reclaiming the ancestral tchotchke.

I don’t want to end up mired in executional minutiae here. We’re talking overall approaches and top-level design philosophies. Every system designer will have to figure out some specifics based on the specific game they’re designing. Questions like, “who defines the goals,” and “do the characters share XP or does each gain XP based on their individual participation in challenges,” and “who decides what counts as a challenge,” are secondary questions and the answers aren’t as important as the general idea that overcoming challenges — and maybe accomplishing goals — is what advances characters.

Now, some of you reading this will think that what I’m describing sounds way broader than what modern D&D does with its kill-for-your-XP system. “If D&D did that shit,” you might say, “I’d actually be more okay with it.” Well, guess what, bucko? You need to crack a rulebook. Even the 2024 version of the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide offers a broad definition for defeating monsters that includes, explicitly, “cleverly avoiding them.” The DMG also suggests Game Masters give experience awards for non-combat challenges commensurate with combat challenges. Supplemental experience awards for accomplishing incremental and long-term goals are described as well. That’s what D&D calls Milestone Experience, by the way. Most people think Milestone Experience means you level up whenever the Game Master deigns to let you, but that approach is called Session-Based or Story-Based Advancement, and neither is strictly about the Game Master just deciding when the players deserve a level. This is all described in the 2014 DMG on pages 260 and 261 and in the 2024 DMG on pages 48 and 49.

You see what I mean about strawmanning? Lots of folks fighting about these systems claim modern D&D only rewards players for slaying monsters and that circumventing or neutralizing challenges just doesn’t earn advancement. That just ain’t frigging true. It’s not what the books say.

But even if it were true, I’d still be on the side of modern D&D’s challenge-based XP. I’d just say D&D did it shitty, and then I’d write a better system and share it here for all of you to use instead.

See, challenge-based XP is a very good, very strong way to provide advancement through gameplay. Games are, at their hearts, leisure activities that have a defined goal, present the players with challenges, and include rules for partaking in them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the players or the Game Master picking the goal, and it doesn’t matter what the challenges are or what counts as winning. What matters is that goals exist and challenges lie between them and the players. A game is a game, and a roleplaying game is just a kind of game. At least, a roleplaying game adventure or campaign is a kind of game. Even if the goal is for the players to explore on their own initiative and acquire wealth and power, they’re still facing challenges and achieving goals.

Challenge-based XP, therefore, provides advancement for players who make progress in the game. Players who overcome the challenges on the way to their goals get to level up their characters. Advancement is tied inextricably to gameplay, and as long as players play the game in a way that leads to progress, their characters advance.

Most people have a backwards view of this, and I can illustrate that with the idea of victory points. In some games, you win by getting the most victory points, so you play the game by chasing victory points. Except, you don’t really. You do things that are defined in-theme as progress toward victory, and you earn victory points for successfully doing them. If the game’s about making Mars fit for human habitation, actions that, in the game’s world, make Mars more capable of supporting human life are worth victory points. Victory points are just a way of keeping count of how many things you’ve done successfully in pursuit of the game’s goals.

That’s simply the most natural way for any game to work. If you do the thing the game is about, if you make progress, you reap the rewards of that progress. If you don’t make progress, you don’t reap rewards.

What’s great about challenge-based XP, though, is that it works for any kind of game. Literally any. But I am going to stick to talking about fantasy adventure here. Whatever the goals, whatever the challenges, however you overcome them, if you make progress as defined within the game world, you reap the benefits. Challenge-based XP is just a reward system that rides on whatever the game happens to be about. If your goal is to get rich by plundering dangerous ancient ruins most wouldn’t dare explore, you advance by facing the challenges those sites represent and emerging victorious, even if victory means sneaking past the guardian daemon unnoticed.

This is probably a good place to actually define gold-for-XP systems. In traditional gold-for-XP systems like those featured in the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, several iterations of Basic Dungeons & Dragons, and numerous old-school inspired game systems, players earn experience points by recovering treasure during the course of their adventures. In AD&D, the formula was very simple. You earned one XP for every g.p. Easy peasy. Kinda.

See, I still don’t want to get bogged down in specifics, but in many gold-for-XP systems, players were required to actually bring the treasure they found back to civilization to earn advancement. See, old-school D&D assumed that a world once ruled by wealthy, powerful kingdoms and continent-spanning empires had fallen into a dark age. The wealth of ages past was lost in the ruins of ancient kingdoms. Thus, the adventurers would explore and plunder those ruins, recover the treasures of yore, and inject them into the contemporary economy. Treasure that didn’t make it back home didn’t count for advancement. In some systems, players had to deliberately dump treasure down character-appropriate money sinks like carousing or donating to temples to advance. But that shit’s all secondary questions.

You can probably see the big weakness in the gold-for-XP approach already. It only works in a game about recovering the wealth of ancient kingdoms, and it assumes the players are motivated, for some reason, to loot and plunder the world for treasure. If you, as a Game Master, want to run a game about anything other than stimulating the economy of a fallen world, or if one of your players wants a motivation that isn’t advanced by wealth acquisition, you’re stuck with a bunch of mismatched incentives. In the business, we call such things perverse incentives.

If the players want to advance, they have to recover treasure and bring it home. But if the characters aren’t wealth-motivated or the game presents other goals, the players and their characters are chasing different things. Imagine if the players have to decide between spending days transporting the cult’s treasury home and following a lead they discovered about an imminent threat in the next town. They have to choose between advancing their characters and pursuing their characters’ actual in-world goals. You can argue that’s the sort of meaningful decision that’s the bread and butter of tabletop roleplaying gaming, but I don’t agree. Meaningful choices should involve resolving conflicts between the characters’ goals, not resolving a conflict between the characters’ goals and the players’. The players’ and the characters’ motivations should always align. Choosing between advancement — a player motivation — and progress — a character motivation — isn’t roleplaying. It’s just kind of mean.

See, the beauty of challenge-based XP is that challenges are part of the gameplay. As the players pursue their goals, no matter what their goals are, they will face challenges. Otherwise, you don’t have a game. So whatever goals the players chase — whether you define them or they do — they are going to advance as long as they make progress. Gold-for-XP means that you must ensure that, whatever goals the players are chasing, they’ll find treasure on the way, whether they make sense or not. Moreover, converting the treasure to advancement can never, ever be allowed to detract from progress toward the next goal.

When you get down to it, gold-for-XP is just goal-based XP that only works for one, specific goal. I like goal-based XP as a supplement to challenge-based XP, but it’s got to be broad enough to encompass the whole broad spectrum of goals that you can find in fantasy adventure. Fantasy adventure can be about plundering the wealth of ancient kingdoms, but it can also be about the quest for the Holy Grail or the quest to save Andromeda from the kraken or the quest to destroy the One Ring to Rule them All or the quest to stop Sephiroth from wiping out all life on Gaia.

I’d actually argue fantasy adventure is more often about quests than it is about plunder. I think those stories are more satisfying to most people than scrounging catacombs for pocket change. But that’s just a matter of taste. Correct taste. Because it’s my taste.

Again, though, let me stress that challenge-based XP works equally well for a recover the wealth of ancient kingdoms campaign. Every site the players plunder presents hazards, obstacles, and challenges to defeat, circumvent, or avoid. Even if the goal is just to bring home loot, the players will still advance by dealing with the obstacles between them and the treasure hoards. And it doesn’t matter how you define “dealing with obstacles.” Avoidance and neutralization are perfectly valid approaches.

Challenge-based XP is actually totally agnostic. It doesn’t care what your game’s about or how you define progress. It guarantees advancement as long as the players progress, however you define it, because the nature of a game is to put challenges between the players and their goals. It’s much more versatile.

I have another argument here, but it’s a little hard for me to make because I have to admit modern roleplaying games suck sometimes at realizing their potential. Which makes me sad. There’s something that video games are actually better at here than tabletop roleplaying games that should figure into this debate more than it does. It’s something I plan to do better with in my own future work.

Experience points and wealth represent two potentially separate advancement tracks. Or, rather, they measure advancement along those tracks. Experience points lead to level advancement. Level advancement makes characters stronger and more skilled and more powerful and all that shit.

Treasure, meanwhile, leads to equipment advancement. With money, you can buy better armor and weapons or upgrade or enchant what you’ve already got. Or, often, you just find better stuff mixed in with the treasure. You can also enhance your character in other ways. You can buy horses to increase the distance you can travel and your carrying capacity. You can buy ships that open up new options for exploration. You can hire people to adventure with you. You can buy permanent or temporary blessings. Maybe. In theory. Like I said, I know modern RPGs mostly do suck-all with this, but that’s just unrealized potential. I’d rather have the potential and work to realize it than throw away the potential.

There’s actually a benefit to having two distinct but parallel advancement paths. Level advancement and equipment advancement are actually a very good, complementary pairing. Level advancement is the major advancement path. It’s automatic — as long as you’re making progress, you’re advancing — but it’s also mostly fixed. It comes at a steady rate, and the rewards are pretty narrowly defined. Your advancement is determined by your class and build, and any choices you make are about specific details within that framework.

Equipment advancement, meanwhile, is a minor advancement path. It’s supplemental, it’s haphazard, and, in modern D&D, it doesn’t drastically impact the game balance. In fact, it’s designed not to. It’s sort of a gravy system. Thus, it requires more active effort and direct choice by the players to gain advancement. It also provides a lot more freedom in how it’s used.

Again… in theory. Fucking modern game designers.

Gold-for-XP marries the two progression tracks. That makes both more shallow and less distinct. Worse, it means there’s never a situation where you can afford to leave treasure behind. With equipment advancement as a minor, gravy path, when character motivations don’t align with the pursuit of treasure, leaving it behind is a meaningful choice without being a complete screwjob.

It’s also worth noting that, as long as there’s anything worth buying in the game — anything at all, even healing potions and food — gold is extrinsically valuable. Players are motivated to collect gold. It’s worth doing. You really don’t need to incentivize it anymore. Gold-for-XP just elevates gold from something worth collecting when possible to something that absolutely cannot be ignored.

Honestly, I could close here. Frankly, I think challenge-based XP beats gold-for-XP hands down on the idea that it aligns purely with the players’ natural gameplay activities and that it encompasses a broad variety of different types of fantasy adventure and character motivations. Gold-for-XP can only build plunder the wealth of ancient kingdoms sandbox games, whereas challenge-based XP can build lots of different fantasy adventures, and that includes plunder the wealth of ancient kingdoms sandbox games. Challenge-based XP gets me everything I can do with gold-for-XP and a whole lot more.

You see why I say there’s no pro-con, cost-benefit here. The one system subsumes the other and does lots more besides.

That said, I do want to address some of the grognardy gold-for-XP arguments just for completeness’ sake. Though, really, I’ve mostly tackled the strongest points already.

For example, one common argument in favor of gold-for-XP systems is that it incentivizes the core gameplay loop of a proper Dungeons & Dragons campaign about open-ended, player-driven exploration. The players head into the wild, explore ancient sites, and bring the spoils back to civilization. Well, as I’ve already noted, it doesn’t incentivize that any better than challenge-based XP does. Every explorable site is filled with both treasure and challenges. You can reward the players for seeking either and get the same result. What I take issue with is the idea that this is the only proper way to play D&D or that it’s superior to quest-based play. Gold-for-XP locks D&D into a very narrow definition, and I don’t agree that that’s a good thing to do. I sure as hell don’t think it inherently leads to a superior style of gameplay.

Speaking of assumptions I just reject, many supporters of gold-for-XP suggest that it discourages combat as a default solution . Because advancement isn’t tied to killing monsters, players are actually better off finding ways to avoid combat. Or, better still, to avoid any confrontation at all.

Now, I’ve already addressed the fact that modern D&D’s challenge-based advancement does not incentivize combat at all. Players are rewarded just as much for circumventing fights, neutralizing threats, and overcoming non-combat challenges as they are for winning fights. So modern D&D players are also better off avoiding combat and confrontation. It’s the most efficient way to play.

But, frankly, I don’t see why discouraging combat, confrontation, and conflict is so great. Combat is fun. Epic battles with terrible monsters are a staple of fantasy adventure. I don’t want the players looking for ways to avoid the most exciting parts of the game. I reject the assumption that combat is a failure state.

I also reject the notion that testing players’ abilities to avoid fights is somehow a purer test of player skill than testing their strategic and tactical abilities. Especially given that a well-rounded adventure includes lots of different kinds of challenges. Combat is just one flavor of challenge. I think the players should be rewarded for any approach that gets them a victory. Including combat. The argument that combat needs to be discouraged as a solution is just saying, “Well, players should be rewarded for any approach except combat. Combat is them failing. Everything else is real gameplay.”

No. Just no.

Really, if you extend this argument to its logical conclusion, gold-for-XP actually incentivizes the players to “grab the money and run” while putting themselves in as little danger as possible. The absolute best ending is the players sneaking out of a cave with a dragon’s treasure hoard having never even been noticed by the dragon. I’m not really sure that’s the kind of game I want the players aiming for. If I did, I’d run heist bullshit like Blades in the Dark. And then I’d drive my car into Lake Michigan because heist bullshit sucks.

That said, I don’t think most players would play that way even if the incentives drive them to it. In my old-school days — also called my childhood — I had a few greedy-ass grab-the-gold-and-go thieves, but most of the players just played the game that was in front of them and didn’t think about the incentives. Because they were normal human people having fun.

I bring that up because another argument often cited by the gold-for-XP crowd is that it stops players from grinding for experience points by killing rats in a sewer instead of having a real adventure. Yeah, in theory, that’s true — though it’s also easily preventable with simple system guardrails — but who’s ever seen players actually do that in a real game? And what stops those real players from grinding coppers by “grabbing the gold and going” in gold-for-XP games?

It’s a spherical chicken in a vacuum argument. I don’t put much faith in it.

Though if I did want to engage with the argument, I could make the point that, because challenge-based XP is motive-agnostic, there’s no advantage to grinding that’s better than not grinding. The players will advance whether they slay rats in the sewer for hours at a time or whether they go do something that aligns with their actual gameplay motivations. Slaying sewer rats is no more or less beneficial than actually having a real adventure, and the real adventure is probably more fun.

Like I said above, though, I’m less interested in picking apart the faulty arguments and flawed assumptions that grognards scream online to justify their clinging to gold-for-XP than I am in analyzing the two different advancement philosophies and seeing which one is the better design choice. So I’m going to stop here. Because, really, no argument about how awesome gold-for-XP is will overcome the fact that challenge-based XP does everything gold-for-XP does, and it does more besides. It’s more versatile and more agnostic and less likely to lead to perverse incentives outside a very narrow definition of Dungeons & Dragons.

And if you really must have gold-for-XP in your game, just treat it as a goal-based supplement to challenge-based XP and you’ll get the best of every world with no downside. Except, of course, for the strawman downsides you invent because you can’t be bothered to read a frigging rulebook.

But that’s a you problem.

General you, not Ideasmith you. You’re cool. We’re cool. Thanks for asking.