In the not-too-distant past, in one of my Ask Angry columns, Ask Angry: Gold for XP, I was called on to compare and contrast different experience point award systems by one Ideasmith. Specifically, the Smith asked me to compare the modern approach of doling out XP based on the players overcoming or bypassing challenges to the older-school approach of giving the players XP based on how much treasure they lug home from their dungeon delves. I described the former as Challenge-Based XP and the latter as Gold-for-XP.
As an aside, I also talked about Goal-Based XP, where the players earn experience points by accomplishing in-game goals. I also talked about Milestone XP, which is technically Goal-Based XP, and Fiat XP, which is what everyone thinks Milestone XP is, even though it isn’t.
All of that sparked a lot of discussion, both in the comment section and in The Angry Discord server available to those generous folks whose financial support is the only reason I’m able to keep cranking this bullshit out. Thanks for that. I even got a few follow-ups in my Ask Angry mailbox.
By the way, if you want to submit a question for a future Ask Angry column, send it to ask.angry@angry.games. Don’t forget to tell me what to call in a way that’ll hold up against the inevitable doxxing lawsuit you’ll file when you don’t like my answer or my tone.
Since this was a hot topic, I’m gonna reopen it and respond to a few of the questions, criticisms, and curses I got. Sort of. I’m not going to do the normal, “Ideasmith asks…” thing since lots of you raised the same points, asked the same questions, and cursed at me for the same reasons. I’m just gonna hit the highlights.
Also, I ain’t going to rehash the original column. Go read it if you haven’t already.
Now, on with the show.
Gold for XP is Stupid and So Are You
Let me address, first, the most common criticism I heard of my original column. Several of you pointed out that gold for XP is a dumbass term, and I was a dumbass for using it.
For the first time in the nearly two decades that I’ve been publishing this shit online, I’m going to take one on the chin. That criticism is totally valid. It’s a stupid name. I should have called it XP for Gold. Or, really, I should have called it Treasure-Based XP or some shit like that.
So, you dickweeds who fought me on my points? You win this one. Savor it, though, because it’s the only win you’re winning today.
Taking Shit Too Far
Despite my tone there, I actually don’t intend to spend the next few thousand words yelling at all y’all about how wrong and stupid you all are. In fact, there’s only one counterpoint I want to raise directly. I’ll get to it in a minute. I made my points pretty well the first time around, and I’m happy to let them stand. Any remaining disagreement is your own, stupid problem.
That said…
Deeply overthinking game mechanics, game design, and the psychology of play to empower myself and the thousands of masochists I’ve Stockholmed into consuming my work regularly is kind of my thing. If you ask me a question like, “What are the benefits of such and this over this and that,” I’m gonna start punching the crap out of that question, and I’m gonna keep right on punching until I’ve punched my fists raw. I don’t stop mid-assault just because the target’s dead. I don’t start anything I can’t finish to component atoms.
Hold that point for a sec. I’ll explain why I’m making it below.
Now, when you hit me with a question, I tend to keep my answer within a pretty specific context. If you ask me, for example, about the game design of Dungeons & Dragons, I’ll answer with an eye toward system-level design that works for all the different playstyles I think D&D is meant to capture based on how it describes itself in its core materials. Absent instructions to the contrary, I’ll also assume we’re always talking about the current edition.
Obviously, I won’t cling to that context when it’s the wrong one. Ask me, “I’m running an old-school faction-based hex crawl and was considering Treasure-Based XP. How can I use it best?” and I’ll give a very different answer than I gave Ideasmith. Probably, I’ll say something like, “I cannot in good conscience help you do something so utterly depraved to innocent players, and any further attempts to contact me will be treated as harassment. Good day, sir.”
Except lots of you know that ain’t true. I might put out a disclaimer if I think something’s truly likely to backfire, but I have shocked the hell out of people by giving them good advice about running games that I would never, ever run myself. I once spent two hours showing how the best way to run a Students of Hogwarts campaign was using the Fate of all things. I shit you not.
And my advice was great.
Here’s my point, though…
This analysis shit can be helpful, but it ain’t everything. My analyses are totally, factually, axiomatically correct, but that doesn’t mean they’ll make you happiest. There’s always room for other value propositions and preferences. Moreover, there’s a point of diminishing returns in all this crap. All the time lost to research and the mental energy and anxiety that comes with turning everything up, down, and sideways doesn’t always move the gamefeel needle that much.
Will you ruin your game by not using the objective best XP system? Fuck no. Your players probably won’t even care.
That said, this stuff does matter. That’s why I consider it my job to do the research, burn the mental energy, and spend the sleepless nights worrying over all these questions so you don’t have to. Then, I can just deliver you the bestest, lowest-friction solution possible.
There’s a difference between academic analysis like I do on request and actually making and running games. Hell, I don’t think this hard about what I do at my own game table. I run on vibes. In fact, most of the shit I write is about using research and analysis to figure out why my vibes are right so I’m justified in sharing them, or else discover they’re wrong so I can replace them.
So, take all this analysis in the spirit it’s intended. I’m overthinking shit to an excessive degree to give the correctest answer because I’m basically a dancing monkey who can’t say no to anyone who flings an interesting-enough question at me. Especially if they’re paying me on Patreon or SubscribeStar, because dancing monkeys need bananas.
Anyway…
No, It Does Not Encourage Exploration or Resourcefulness
Now for the one actual, factual counterpoint I’m allowing myself in this follow-up. It’s a counter I’ve already pointed out in comments, e-mails, on social media, and in my Discord, so all I’m doing is making it official and parking it somewhere I can point at later.
As I said above, this shit’s all cold, objective analysis. If you disagree with me and you don’t want a fight, all you have to do is admit you’re just stating a preference. If you say, “I like it this way,” or “My group and I have done it this way for years, and it’s easier to keep doing it than change it even if there’s a better way,” or “I don’t think it’s better enough to be worth the effort,” I’m done. I might tell you that your tastes suck and you like shitty things, but that’s not an argument; that’s just me being an asshole, and I’m an asshole even to people who agree with me.
You see, I firmly believe that the customer is always right in matters of taste, which, by the way, is the actual quote. Everyone forgets the last part, and it’s really important.
The minute, however, you make a factual claim to back up your opinion or to convince others that your stupid-ass opinion is superior, it’s my job to come in with the punching and the not stopping and component atoms. At least if it’s on my site or in my Discord or whatever. Even then, I actually will stop fighting the moment you say, “I really don’t want to debate this anymore. Can we just accept we don’t agree?” As long as you also stop fighting, that is. Everyone forgets that last part, too, and it’s really important.
Honestly, the reason why I even addressed the whole, stupid Gold-for-XP or XP-for-Gold or whatever thing at all is because, shortly before I published that, I’d gotten drawn into several screaming matches in a few different places over the whole thing. I didn’t realize it was something people felt so damned passionately attached to. I heard a few factual claims, I made counterpoints, politely even, and then got slammed for it. And people wouldn’t stop slamming me even when I said, “Whoa, okay, I didn’t know this was a hill you thought was worth being reduced to component atoms on. You can have the hill. I’ll leave you to it. Please let me retreat.”
There’s a factual claim that certain beardy grognards and certain snot-nosed nouveaux-SR brats keep making about XP-for-Gold at me that I have to counter because it’s actually, factually, provably wrong. XP-for-Gold does not, by its nature, encourage exploration or clever resource management or the circumvention of obstacles. That claim is false. Please stop emailing me. You jackass.
XP-for-Gold encourages precisely one thing, by its nature. It encourages the acquisition of gold. That’s the only incentive it creates. Any knock-on effect on the activities the players undertake or their approach to gameplay is down to where you, the Game Master, put the gold and how you create your challenges.
XP-for-Gold only encourages exploration if you put the gold in places that need to be explored and make it hard to find. XP-for-Gold only encourages clever resource management because the better you manage your resources, the farther you can go and the more gold you can find in the same period of time. XP-for-Gold only encourages players to bypass encounters instead of taking them head-on insofar as you make it possible to sweep all the gold into a sack and run away without dealing with the obstacles.
XP-for-Gold isn’t doing the heavy lifting there. If you replaced the gold with XP awards for getting to certain locations in the dungeon, which is basically XP-for-Gold without the gold, you’d have the same effect.
My players do a crap-ton of exploring even though they get XP-for-Challenges. You know why? It’s because I put the challenges in places that need to be explored and make them hard to find. My players manage their resources and find clever ways to avoid overexertion because that lets them overcome more challenges in the same period of time on the same resource pool. It’s the same shit.
Except my players don’t have to grub for pennies to level up. They’re also allowed to be do-gooders or honor-seekers or explorers-for-exploration’s-sake. Because I prefer my players to play characters I want to cheer for instead of plundering murderhobos.
That said, I don’t encourage my players to avoid combat and circumvent every challenge. I could. I wouldn’t have to change my XP system at all. They get XP for overcoming or bypassing challenges by any means they can. That’s what the rules say. I just make sure that they have to tackle most of the challenges head-on because that’s what we find fun. One of the reasons why combat — and combat XP — started to dominate D&D is because most players like to fight monsters. That’s part of the whole fantasy adventure thing. Most players don’t want to slink through every dungeon like thieves in the night, trying to avoid attention. If you and your players do, good for you, but if you were in the majority, D&D wouldn’t have evolved the way it did.
Sorry.
But that’s not my counterpoint. My counterpoint is that XP-for-Gold does not, by its nature, encourage any specific kind of gameplay other than grabbing all the gold. Any exploration that happens or resource management as a result is about where you put the gold and how you build the obstacles, and switching XP systems wouldn’t change that.
Why Make Goal-Based XP Secondary to Challenge-Based XP?
Buckle up, kids, because we’re diving deep into overthinking analysis again. Remember what I said above, okay?
In my previous column, I talked about combining Goal-Based XP and Challenge-Based XP. Specifically, I said it’s best, from a gameplay perspective, for the players to primarily advance from overcoming challenges and supplement that with bonus advancement for accomplishing their goals.
Several of you wanted to know why it wasn’t the other way around.
To explain that, I’ve first got to explain why Challenge-Based XP and Goal-Based XP are the right approaches at all, and that’s down to what games actually, fundamentally are.
A game is a voluntary leisure activity with structured rules in which the player-participants try to accomplish a goal while overcoming one or more challenges.
To put that in a less up my own ass kind of way, to have a game, you need at least one goal, at least one challenge, and some rules.
Of course, I’ve said that eleventy billion frigging times on my site by now. I’ve also said that roleplaying game systems aren’t actually games. They’re game engines. D&D is like Super Mario Maker; it’s not a game, it’s a tool for making games. The actual game parts of the game are the adventures and campaigns people play.
So, D&D, as a game engine, must define a set of rules that work for all the kinds of games anyone might expect to play, run, or make with D&D. The list of kinds of games D&D lets you make and play is something the designers settle on. If they’re smart, they settle on the list based on what they think the sort of people who would buy a game called D&D want from it. If they’re smart, they also describe the kinds of games D&D lets you make and play in the introductory chapters and in the blurbs on the back of the books and boxes and all that shit. Which they do.
So, here I am, a hypothetical D&D designer. One thing I’ve got to design is an advancement system. I need a way for characters to level up because I have decided that’s a thing characters do in D&D. Part of the whole fantasy adventurequest thing is getting more powerful the more you adventure. I want D&D to be approachable, and so I want to lower the friction as much as possible for any Game Master of any experience level. Therefore, I don’t want to provide a giant menu of different possible systems and options Game Masters can choose from. I want one nice, universal advancement system that’ll pretty much work across all the different kinds of D&D that I’ve decided to support. At most, I’ll add a few minor variants and tweaks Game Masters can fiddle with.
Whether you personally like this fact or not, and regardless of whether you think it’s a good idea, D&D is designed to satisfy a broad range of player motivations within the sphere of fantasy adventure gaming. Contrary to what many dumbasses scream, though, it’s not designed to be “all things to all people,” and it’s not designed for the “lowest common denominator,” and it’s not “dumbed down for mouthbreathing video gamers,” and saying shit like that just makes you sound like a complete fucking moron.
Sorry. Still getting used to this not arguing with hypothetical people thing.
My point is, I’m trying to build an advancement system for a game-making engine that allows for a broad range of fantasy adventurequest games. What can I count on happening at every table? I can count on challenges and goals. If those don’t exist, you don’t even have a game.
Now, don’t @ me. I do know some people actually play RPGs without challenges or goals. They play slice-of-life, fuck-around-and-find-out horseshit. Those aren’t games, and they’re not even experiences that D&D claims to offer. I know. I checked the books. If you personally want to use your D&D game system to do that crap because it’s fun for you, go right ahead. You bought the game, you can do whatever you want, and you can like whatever you want. The customer is always right in matters of taste. But the product wasn’t actually designed for you, and it absolutely shouldn’t be redesigned for you unless the designers are willing to drop the word game from the cover.
Anyway…
Challenges and goals are both great potential elements to hang an advancement system off of. Whatever else anyone’s doing with my D&D game engine, if they’re following the basic directions and running anything that counts as a D&D game, the players are facing challenges and achieving goals. That’s what I can reward.
So why are challenges better as the primary driver of advancement? There are actually several reasons.
The biggest and bestest reason to dole out XP for overcoming challenges over accomplishing goals is that the players are facing challenges all the time. In fact, that’s primarily what they’re doing when they play the game. Overcoming challenges is gameplay. Accomplishing goals is winning.
Rewarding the players for beating challenges lets them experience constant, incremental progress toward advancement by playing the game. It lets them watch a meter fill until they finally ding a level. That’s also why it’s best to give out XP at the end of every session, even if the players can’t level up mid-adventure.
Goals are knocked down sporadically and, worse, from a system design perspective, they’re knocked down at an unpredictable rate. Players may tick off goals only every second or third or fourth session or whatever, depending on what the Game Master’s doing. I just don’t know. But I do know challenges are happening constantly. Or nearly constantly. So I let Challenge-Based XP drive most of the advancement.
Additionally, in most roleplaying games, the way most people play and run them, ticking off goals usually comes with some mix of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Saving the kidnapped princess is intrinsically rewarding because that’s how you win the adventure, and winning feels good. It may also be extrinsically rewarding because the king will probably give you some money or a land grant or something.
It’s actually very natural to design an adventure game by coming up with a goal, offering a reward, and dropping challenges in the way. It doesn’t get much easier than that, and most Game Masters will just go that route naturally. I don’t need to explain it.
Since most Game Masters are likely to match up goals with rewards already, I don’t need to attach an advancement reward to ensure beating goals feels good. I can and I should, but I need to recognize that any advancement reward is probably going to get mixed in with a pile of other rewards.
By the same token, challenges aren’t guaranteed by their nature to come with rewards. Some monsters have treasure and some traps protect magic swords and some NPCs will give you prizes if you overcome their social challenges, but lots of monsters don’t have treasure and lots of hazards and obstacles are just in the way. The only reward for overcoming them is the chance to keep playing the game.
Just like I, the hypothetical D&D system designer, have no idea how often the Game Master is going to let his players tick off goals, I also don’t know how many encounters the Game Master is going to build other rewards into. So, instead of writing instructions to lock the Game Master into writing games that conform to a specific style, I just attach most of the XP to encounters to smooth out the lack of reward, and because I know that’s the primary gameplay activity, and I want XP to come at a constant, incremental rate. Meanwhile, I trust most Game Masters to make goals feel rewarding to accomplish, but I can’t predict how often those goals will come, so I attach a little extra XP there as gravy.
Now, does all of that mean that I would do anything differently if I weren’t building a system and were instead just running my own home game? Especially if I’m the sort of sexy gaming genius that can analyze systems to this obsessive degree?
Actually, no.
What’s Better Than Challenge-Based XP?
One follow-up question I got from several of y’all, including the OP of the day, Ideasmith, was what advancement systems might exist that are even better than Challenge-Based XP with a sprinkling of Goal-Based Bonuses?
Now, that sort of question is hard to answer because I can’t imagine anything I can’t imagine. I don’t dismiss the possibility that someone could come up with a better system than the ones that exist so far, and all the ones I can imagine. But putting aside what is beyond my ability to conceive, I personally think Challenge-Based XP is the best you’re gonna get with a frisson of Goal-Based if you want it. And I think that precisely because it gets to corest core of what gameplay actually is.
In the end, you want to tie advancement to gameplay. You advance by playing the game. The one thing you’re always doing in a tabletop roleplaying game, no matter the genre and the style of play, is overcoming challenges to accomplish goals. How the game defines a challenge and how it measures whether those goals have been overcome can vary, but you can’t get rid of the challenges without getting rid of the actual gameplay. So it just makes the most, best sense to tie advancement right to the gameplay at its core.
Additionally, the one thing that roleplaying games have to provide Game Masters instructions for is building challenges within the system. If a Game Master at least knows how to throw an obstacle at the players that they can overcome to accomplish a goal, the Game Master can make a game. The crunchier roleplaying games, like D&D and Pathfinder, focus a lot of attention here. Since that’s where attention is already focused, it’s also just efficient to make that the place where you connect the advancement system. Especially because that’s also where you’re connecting things like pacing and the difficulty knobs and all the other adventure design shit that really matters.
But don’t mishear me. That doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of room for variation. For example, I’m a big proponent of varying the XP award based on how well the players did. If my players take heavy losses or suffer a huge setback in an encounter, they’ll hear me say, “I can’t give you the full XP for that encounter. You didn’t really win it.” Likewise, if they do something decisive or avoid something impressively, I’ll say, “You really knocked that one out of the park. I’m increasing the XP award.”
Do you want to encourage your players to beat encounters efficiently? Penalize them for using too many resources. Do you want them to avoid encounters? Double the XP they get for any encounter they wholly bypass. Not miss, by the way, but bypass.
In the end, though, I’m hard-pressed to imagine any gameplay experience that truly counted as a gameplay experience where I wouldn’t at least start with Challenge-Based XP and then tweak my approach to the specific goal I’m trying to accomplish. I really do think it’s just the cleanest, best, and simplest starting point.
The question I’m left with — and this is a rare case where I don’t have an answer and am interested to see what others say — the question I’m left with is, “Why does there seem to be this nose-wrinkling response to tying advancement to overcoming challenges?” Why do I have so many people whose tone suggests they really want me to give any other answer but Challenge-Based XP because they just can’t stomach the idea?
Especially after I pointed out that most of the stuff about “only getting XP for killing monsters” was a strawman, and even modern D&D tells you to give the players Challenge-Based XP for avoiding or evading fights?
Seriously. What’s still got your panties in a jimmy?
Probably my only hang-up with challenged-based XP is that it seems like it could give people a perverse incentive. Like if the party wants to get to the Castle of Goall and they can either take the Peaceful Route or the Dangerous Route, it seems like they’re encouraged as players to take the Dangerous Route to get more XP, while the characters would wanna take the Peaceful Route because it’s more likely to get them there in one piece. That’s just a hypothetical but we can imagine hundreds of equivalent scenarios. In BG3, I’d often be going back down routes to find extra bad guys that I didn’t even know were there so I could get more XP.
I guess my solution would be “don’t award XP for challenges where they deliberately made it harder on themselves just for XP” and so I’d only give them XP for the Dangerous Route if they have another reason for going down it. Maybe I’m just being nitpicky but my next thought is “How do I judge whether their reason is good enough and not just an arbitrary reason so that they can get the XP?” If I was a player in that scenario, I’d feel like I’m in a weird position because I’d want to make up a good reason to take the dangerous route, especially if we were close to levelling up.
Goal-based XP seems to fully solve that issue by saying they get the XP no matter how they reach the castle. But I do see how that can be problematic when the goals might be quite far apart and so there’s no trickle of XP.
Am I worrying about stuff that’d never happen? Is there a decent solution I’m missing?
I am wondering if the problem isn’t that XP in most D&D games (video games especially) is only given for killing. If you avoid the badguys, you don’t have to fight, but you don’t get XP. With Challenge and Goal-based XP, you can reward PCs for completing goals and overcoming challenges and that has nothing to do with killing. The peaceful route where you talk out your problems can be just as rewarding as the danger-fighting route. That’s just asking your PCs to choose their approach.
As I’ve already noted: a D&D game that only gives XP for killing is violating the literal core rules of D&D. Both versions of the current edition’s DMG discuss both giving XP to players for routing, evading, blah blah blah, and for non-combat challenges.
I think my example got misunderstood. I meant when the party can choose to walk through the Quick Peaceful Meadows instead of the Slow Dangerous Forest and thus completely avoid ever potentially interacting with a threat from the forest. Feels odd to give them XP for every threat in the forest that they had no reason to even face given the forest is such a bad idea to go through.
Or, if they do get XP for overcoming challenges that they never had a reason to face to begin with, then they might decide “let’s go through the Dangerous Forest because it’ll give more XP” without any character-based reason.
Goal-based XP says that they’ll get 200 XP for reaching Castle Goall regardless of how they do it, and so there’s no reason to go through the Slow Dangerous Forest.
The solution there with challenge-based XP seems to be just don’t award XP for overcoming challenges that are their own pointless fault. If they insult the drow because they’re being stupid and get targeted by a hunting party as a result, then no XP. But if they annoy the drow by pursuing a goal, then that hunting party is a challenge overcome in pursuit of their goals and thus worth XP.
Following that: if the drow are fickle and likely to send a hunting party after you, then preventing that hunting party with smart play would reward the same XP as causing the drow to send one and fighting them off, or might reward even more since it was smart play.
So if they pointlessly decide to walk through the Slow Dangerous Forest, then they don’t get XP for killing the dire bears and whatever that lives there. If they go through the forest because it’s a faster route to their goal? Then maybe the forest and its threats are worth some XP to overcome/avoid.
And as a GM, we’ll just have to apply our own judgement on when something is a challenge due to their goals, or a challenge they pointlessly brought on themselves. I think.
I feel that what you’re missing is the opportunity cost of the time at the table spent grinding xp.
In a video game there’s no reason not to be as high a level as possible before fighting the boss because the game is over after you beat the last boss.
But in a ttrpg, if you spend 2 sessions hunting goblins in the dangerous forest instead of taking the quick shortcut and spending 2 sessions storming the castle, you’re not a higher level a month later, you’re actually behind.
Not that it matters, because the only group you’re behind is a theoretical you in another timeline, but if your goal is to be as powerful as possible before fighting the boss, then maybe a sidequest for the sword of boss slaying is a better use of your gaming hours.
And if you’re capable of storming the castle and killing the Duke now, might as well take the quick route and do it, so you can save 3 sessions which you spend on the next quest, hunting down the king or whatever.
If your players think hunting random encounters in the woods is more run than taking a direct route to the goal, that’s fine I guess, but spending 3 hours in the dangerous forest only gives you 3 more hours of gaming if you’re doing it by yourself
Check out Angry’s response to RatherDashing below.
At a basic level, you should not design a situation where one option is clearly easier with no downsides. It’s fine to have multiple ways to reach a goal, but each path should involve meaningful obstacles, aka “encounters.” If the party can just stroll to the finish line without resistance, there is no real game.
XP is meant to reward players for overcoming the challenges the GM intentionally puts in front of them. It is an incentive system. Whatever you attach XP to is what players will focus on.
That is why encounters should be planned ahead of time. Not just fights, but social conflicts, traps, puzzles, etc. Each one should have XP assigned ahead of time and the party should earn that XP no matter how they handle it, whether they fight, negotiate, outsmart it, or bypass it entirely. The reward is for overcoming the obstacle, not for choosing a specific method.
On the other hand, if something was not meant to be an obstacle, if it was not a planned encounter and had no XP attached, then it should not suddenly become an XP opportunity.
Don’t reward bad behavior. If the party picks a fight with an NPC who was never meant to be a challenge, they do not automatically earn XP. There is no need to create a new encounter later just to reward their behavior. If you hand out XP for that, you are teaching them that random aggression pays off.
In short, XP should be tied to intentional, planned obstacles. Players earn it however they overcome those obstacles. Don’t award XP for unplanned or trivial conflicts. XP works best when you use it deliberately.
Sadly, that does not stop many videogames from tying XP to fighting and defeating enemies.
But that does not make those videogames right, of course. At most, it makes them an example of what to avoid.
This is, IMO, something that’s only going to happen if you make everything really easy.
I use XP (both challenge-based and goal-based) in my game essentially as-written in the DMG. While my players will sometimes choose to take a completionist approach in dungeons where they’ve done well, they will also often have conversations about whether they’re going to have to turn back, how long they should rest for, etc.
That dynamic means that they are welcome to choose to fight more things if they want, but that choice also comes with big risks: they might have to turn back earlier than they planned, or in a worst-case scenario they might all die! So choosing the harder path is a valid choice, but it’s not strictly or obviously better than choosing the path of least resistance. There will be a lot of factors that go into it that are equally or more salient than how much XP they’re getting.
In your example, what happens if the party takes the peaceful route anyway? Do they reach the Castle of Goal and immediatly get pancaked by the high-level ennemies? “Haha, guess you should have gone through the Slow Dangerous Forest instead!” Tha’ts bad design in my opinion.
What’s the alternative? Use goal-based/milestone leveling when they reach the castle (or give the party all the experience they would have gotten on the dangerous route – which is the same thing)? Are you comfortable with your players finishing your campaign in a few sessions because they chose to not play the game? That’s also looks like bad design too.
If you include “quick peaceful meadows” in your games, no amount of tweaking the XP system will make your design better. You can’t design an interesting, challenging game (“The Dangerous Forest”), then just give your players the option to not play it. If there’s a non-challenging path that just leads to the castle, why don’t you just fast forward to the castle gate? Why mention the existence of the forest?
If you were designing that scenario, then why would you provide an option that has no challenges? Maybe the players would choose the “Dangerous Route” because they want to play D&D?
I’d say that, for roleplaying in itself, basing experience on overcoming challenges is the only way that even makes sense, since it represents characters putting their skills into actual practice. Otherwise, they’re just training or sparring or learning new magic words, and the players are just play-acting…which leads to how I’d answer the question that ends this article. As an old cynic, I think many of the Kids These Days™ are being lured by the siren song of RP-sans-G, and it makes them allergic to a game rewarding them for actually playing it.
I don’t think players care what XP represents. They mostly treat levels like birthdays: look forward to it, enjoy it when it comes, don’t die and you’ll get another soon enough. XP is just marking off days on the calendar.
I believe it’s the same reason that people don’t bother with encumbrance, arrows, gold, food or reading the rules: in the end people want the interesting part: fighting, exploring, interacting et leave all the math away, which is easier done with milestone lvl up whenever the DM feels like it. No risk for people to lvl up to early or at different times, no need to care about encounter xp, just give a lvl whenever you feel like it and spend more time playing and less time doing math. It’s especially true if your players suck at math, if you have low playtime or even both. You gotta choose your battle and the xp battle is lost the moment that character levels exist to measure progression.
And even with a skill system that uses exponential xp to improve, I find myself on the verge of doling out skills points rather than xp to spend just so we don’t lose half an hour doing the maths. It does not help that our last session we realised by counting backward that some people had spend 20% more xp than other despite gaining the same amount overall :/
You’re fighting a lost cause, but kuddos for trying.
Unfortunately, I think you might be right. Lazy players, and worse lazy GMs, seem determined to sand the skin straight off the game and then complain when the game doesn’t work right. And not to shame people who are bad at math, but everyone has a calculator in their pocket nowadays. If the game master keeps track of what the players do, it’s just a quick division by the number of players using that same calculator.
On the flipside, you have a group of people that seem to avoid any kind of challenge based XP system because video games reward players by killing things and they want to avoid being compared to a video game in any regard, even if it’s detrimental to do so.
Forget the calculator; if you don’t want to do the maths, VTTs and even D&D beyond do all the calculations for you.
Same goes for encumbrance. DDB does it automatically. It’s not “too much housekeeping”
I’ll preface this by saying I agree with and run challenge-based XP with Goal-XP capstones using a system inspired by the Angry XP awards.
As far as why people are averse to it, I think it’s a combination of inexperienced GMs, the balancing act of “balance”, and the mindset that failure isn’t fun. I struggle(d) with this myself even though Im no longer a rookie GM but its a little warning light I’m alway keeping an eye on.
I think handling XP calcs can be daunting to newer DMs for combat alone. Then add in the inherent fuzziness of doling out XP for various challenges and obstacles gets pretty murky. The hyper specificity of Combat XP calcs makes it feel like the obstacle XP needs to be determined with the same rigor, but there doesn’t seem to be good tools to do so, so its easy to worry about game balance. And you err on the side of caution, and likely make them too easy, and then it feels like the Party gets free XP. So eventually you just stop doing it and learn Milestone and say youre running that.
I think once you lve done that enough its easy to know you want something better in your game, so you wrinkle your nose when the answer is “do it the way you know in your truest of GM hearts that you should have always been doing it.”
Great work as always Angry, hope your recovery is going well.
Do you think people want an easier way? I could probably slap together a comprehensive Angry Approach to Experience. I mean, I can’t help with the XP and challenge calculations in D&D, because that shit is a beast, but I can streamline the actual doling of XP using both challenge-based and goal-based bonuses.
I would like that
Honestly, your XP awards system you outlined a while back really helped me with this. I think thats a very simple and somewhat intuitive approach that eases the burden: If its an obstacle that gets more than a note or two in my prep, it probably gets at least a half XP Award. I use that ruleset for both challenge and goal based bonuses, and its been working for me for a few years now.
If anything, another look at that, maybe with an eye towards types of challenges like puzzles or something, might be very useful for newer DMs looking to improve their games.
I think I tried to use an earlier version of this that you put together, but I’d very much appreciate a revisited/revised version; I feel like some of the numbers were a little vague in the previous one. I’m not looking at it right now, so I can’t say for sure, but that’s what I remember.
That’s because vague numbers work better.
I dont remember it being vague, but there were several suggestions. The one I use was the XP threshold for a Medium encounter as the base award. Every level its different, but easy to reference and remember. Kept the pace generally in line with design intent, at least enough to shed the mental load. For me, at least.
I was unclear how it worked in terms of dividing XP between players. If an obstacle is worth a medium encounter, is that per player or total?
(Complicated by my too large table of 7 players… yes, I know that’s a separate issue but don’t want to kick out friends, and it means we play almost every week as we can always get 4 people)
I think a possible part of the hangup might be people confusing Challenge with “Challenging” ie difficulty. So, in my opinion, a “challenge” might be “get up the mountain face” and the characters could climb up the sheer side of it, or navigate an easier path with switchbacks, or use some fancy magic item in a clever way to get up the side. These would all be beating the “challenge” but would not all be equally “challenging”*. So I think the strawman people opposed to challenge-based-xp are worried about is that you’d give less xp for the “easier” way of dealing with the challenge and thus encourage players to take the path of most resistance.
*note that I think people usually think of this in terms of challenging “to the character” which is a backwards way to think about it anyway. Rolling a die for climbing the surface is probably the hardest approach for the characters, but is easy for the players–it’s not hard to roll a die unless you buy those big fancy metal ones. The magic item solution might be the “easiest” for the characters but could be the cleverest solution by the players, so it’s no less “difficult”.
This is a very interesting analysis. It is possible. But also, your note at the end is very correct. There’s a lot of “crap mindset” in this if it really is what people have in their heads.
Ratherdashing nailed it. If the challenge is getting up the mountain then climbing the sheer face is the hardest way to do it. It feels as though it should be worth more XP because it’s hard and dangerous but then you are rewarding actions that choose the harder path for the sake of being harder.
Angry has partially addressed this by increasing or decreasing XP based on how well the players met the challenge. If the players are playing characters who love taking risks for the sake of risk and they pull it off. Then they should absolutely get extra XP. They should also feel that they got lucky. If they nearly splattered they should get reduced XP because they didn’t have to do it the hard way.
If the only differentiation between one path and another is that one is harder, then choosing the dangerous path is stupid. Experience represents learning from your experiences, not just honing your skills. It’s wisdom as much as it’s fitness. Those idiots don’t have wisdom. They don’t get XP. But then, the Game Master who decided the only difference between one path another is that one is suicidally stupid also doesn’t have any wisdom.
As people engaged with D&D communities beyond the play-table we inevitably spend more time contemplating the game than we spend experiencing the game. As a result we tend to evaluate ideas by applying simple frameworks to hypotheticals. For example, we look at XP, decide it’s a reward, construct hypothetical situations, use what we know about rewards and punishments and human behaviour, and make pronouncements like “system A rewards B and punishes C, so it makes player’s do D and that’s good/bad.” We tend to significantly overestimate the importance of things that we can think about in isolation, like the influence of rewards/punishments on a player’s behaviour or game experience. Nobody ever says “We should go over Yeti Pass instead of through Spider Forest because spiders come in groups so they are less XP efficient.” They say “Yeti Pass gets us to the dragon faster, but Spider Forest has cool ruins we could explore on the way, but then again, spider’s are gross so let’s not.” You don’t kill 101 puppies for 1,010 XP, you do it for a fetching fur coat.
Whenever you see me refer to “spherical chicken in a vacuum” type discussions, this is exactly the problem I’m talking about. Yes, it is theoretically possible for players to recognize that the dungeon restocks and there is no cost to staying there forever, so they can grind up to 20th level before moving on. But no one does it. Outside some extreme, insane outliers that can be easily thwarted by a Game Master saying, “no,” that is just not how people play the game. I don’t lose sleep over those possibilities.
Hi Angry and y’all. I think it is the first time I leave a comment, but I’ve been lurking in the dark for a very long time. So I wanted to say thanks and congratulate you for your shining intelligence and writing bravado. Bravo. We are many to say that, but I guess it’ is always nice to read it, and it is really well deserved. Anyway, I also wanted to put my five cent in the conversation. I agree with WhiskyBoat, I don’t think XP-awarding systems are very important. Advancement is, of course, and in DD especially, because the forte of DD, one of the forte at least, is character progression, or so it seems to me. It’s not the case in all RPG, Cthulhu comes to mind for instance. I’ve been a DD player but as a gamemaster I played CoC and the One Ring (and other stuff many years ago). The One Ring gives XP on a time base, i.e. 1 point per hour of gameplay. It seemed strange when I read it in the rules, but it worked just fine. I think the challenge thing is well attuned to the feel of DD, better than the goal thing. But I don’t think it will have a big impact on players’ decisions.
If. for some reason, i would give exp for gold, i will rather prefer to remove XP entirely so PC can directly use gold and time to train from masters of the world and gain levels and feats. Just saying
I think some of the fear people have for Challenge and Goal XP is just from bad DMs. With XP-from-monsters only, you know you will level up based on killing so many monsters of such and such level. It’s right there in the Monster Manual!
With a bad DM, it’s at their whim – so you never level up, b/c the DM never wants you to fly, or turn invisible, or whatever. Or wants the game to forever be under level 10, or or or. (You also sometimes get the flipside – you survived a headcold – now you’re level 10!)
This was especially a problem in OG Pathfinder – if your DM was stingy with loot, you didn’t have the magic items the system expected, and things got much more challenging without being more fun. (A weird mirror of Gold for XP, Pathfinder 1 assumed XP ALSO yielded gold / magic items, which was not necessarily true.)
All of which is fixed by having a better DM, and specifically, one you can trust to run the game. I suspect a lot of xp-for-killing-only is because it’s easiest for DMs – it’s right there in the Monster Manual! – and fear / bad experiences from players when DMs have just winged it on milestones or challenges or goals. “You DID save the princess, but you came up with something that bypassed / one-shotted my super awesome bad guy of infinite backstory, so I’m only giving you 100XP. Next time ride the rails, peon.”
Should that happen? No. Does it happen? I experienced that with DMs a lot as a teen and young adult, and I suspect that is all too frequently an experience others have as well.
When DMs want to “tell” stories, you’re probably in for a bad time.
A lot of comments are mentioning how players seeking challenges for the purpose of boosting your XP would be strange. I think the opposite, within the game world, seeking out challenges to improve your skills absolutely makes sense. If someone chooses to do a bunch of hard things rather than easy things then they will get smarter/stronger/wiser. The potential benefit of practice is a real consideration for the characters in the world. XP for challenge doesn’t unrealistically warp player motives when factoring in costs like risk or resource expenditure.