This Feature is part of my ongoing True Campaign Managery course. If you’ve not been following it from the beginning — or you don’t know what the hell I’m babbling about — visit The True Campaign Managery Course Index to catch up.

True Mechanical Managery: Experience and Advancement Systems

In my last True Campaign Managery lesson, I talked about Mechanical Managery. That’s when True Campaign Managers — the kind y’all want to be — recognize that their chosen game system’s mechanical rules — as described in all those fancy and expensive core rulebooks — ain’t the whole story when it comes to certain game aspects like death, advancement, optional rules, and character generation. There are a bunch of practical considerations to considerate. What does a player do, for example, when they get their character killed? What are the rules for making and introducing new characters? When should you give out Experience Points and when should you stop the game for all the fun-as-hell math and paperwork that comprises Leveling Up? Are the game’s default rules even the right fit for your campaign?

As a True Campaign Manager, you’ve got to be a True Mechanical Manager too. You’ve got to be ready to handle questions like those before they come up. You can’t be blindsided when a character kicks it. And you’ve got to know, before the first session starts, when you’ll be giving out XP and when the players can advance their characters.

That’s today’s subject. The Experience and Advancement thing, not the general idea of having plans for mechanical practicalities. That shit was last lesson. Try to keep up, dumbasses.

Anyway… let’s get to it.

Making the General Case for Experience and Advancement

Every game system ever defines some means by which the players’ characters get better as they adventure. At least, every game system worth playing. Some games don’t have character advancement but those are shit games designed by hipsters and loved by losers. Don’t be a hipster loser.

Mostly, this shit comes down to characters accumulating some kind of point-like things as they have adventure-type experiences. Sometimes, those points are earned for overcoming challenges or accomplishing in-game objectives. Sometimes, they’re earned just for showing up. Sometimes, the Game Master awards them based on subjective criteria. Sometimes there’s objective math. Sometimes, the players give each other points for dumbass bullshit like building relationships and roleplaying good. Sometimes, the players have to make the case to the Game Master that they deserve points.

In most games, those points — whatever they’re called and however they’re earned — somehow allow the players to improve their characters, mechanically and statistically speaking. Sometimes, it’s by increasing skill and stat points. Sometimes, it’s by acquiring new abilities. Sometimes, all the increases come all at once every time the acquired points top some threshold. Sometimes, the players can spend the points directly to buy improvements.

Sometimes, there are not even points.

This shit… does not matter. I ain’t here to analyze different mechanical systems and tell you which ones are best. That sort of crap’s for Mere Campaign Supervisors to argue about on r/DnD which is why both of those d’s stand for dumbasses. Instead, I’m here to teach you how True Campaign Managers implement whatever rules they’ve got to best run the campaign they’re, you know, running. This is about practical considerations, not mechanics. That said, there is always the possibility that you might want to change the rules.

My first problem here is that I need a collective term to talk about all the ways good roleplaying games handle Character Progression. That’s the fancy, game design thing all these rules deal with, not that we give a crap about game design here. I’m going to use the collective term Experience and Advancement System to refer to any and all of any game’s mechanical rules to do with mechanical progression, even if those mechanical rules have nothing to do with anything called Experience Points. Why that term? Because it’s an easy term everyone can grok and because most games use those terms anyway.

You — the aspiring True Campaign Manager — are responsible for knowing how your chosen game system works. You’re also responsible for figuring out the underlying design intentions behind that system and figuring out whether your campaign aligns with those intentions. I’ll talk about that more later, obviously, but you’re gonna have to do the heavy lifting here. Especially if you’re not running a nice, normal, popular game because you’re too much of a pretentious hipster to run shit people like and you think the game rules actually matter. Save your angry comment, by the way; I don’t give a crap.

My second problem is that I need an example system to discuss and analyze. Except that ain’t a problem because there’s a logical, obvious, simple answer. The vast majority of gamers in the world and the majority of my audience play and run Dungeons & Dragons and every other game in the world takes its inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons. That includes the ones that explicitly say they’re purposely different from D&D. Hell, those ones especially are inspired by D&D.

Now, I’m fully aware the new version of the Player’s Handbook just hit store shelves and my copy is sitting right beside me, but I haven’t had time yet to process it and most of the shit I need to know won’t appear until the Dungeon Master’s Guide is done, so I’m still running on the old hardware here.

By the by, from this point forward, I will refer to the 5th Edition of the world’s most full-of-itself roleplaying game as Dungeons & Dragons or D&D and I will refer to the latest revision as D&D ’24. But that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway…

Why Does This Crap Matter?

To make good management decisions, a True Mechanical Manager must understand the underlying purposes that underlie the mechanics they’re making management decisions about. Game mechanics exist for reasons and those reasons are more important than the mechanics themselves.

But there’s more to this story than just why mechanics exist. Roleplaying games are complex systems and their mechanics are interwoven. Smart designers don’t just worry about mechanics in isolation, but also how they affect the game as a whole. And True Mechanical Managers recognize that changing any game mechanic can have loads of unintended consequences. That’s partly because the designers interweave shit in complex ways and partly because games are complex systems and changes propagate unpredictably. It ain’t obvious how changing the stats of a butterfly might force changes in your random weather table, but that doesn’t mean it don’t happen.

So, what’s the point of Experience and Advancement Systems? What do they do for the gameplay experience? What impacts might they have on the game beyond their design intentions?

Being Progressive

First and foremost, Experience and Advancement Systems provide the players a sense of extrinsic growth, progress, and achievement. Accomplishing shit feels good. That’s intrinsic achievement; it’s the warm fuzzy feeling you feel when you’re getting somewhere or when you accomplish something. But people feel best when an intrinsic sense of accomplishment is paired with some measurable, tangible extrinsic reward. If intrinsic rewards alone were good enough, people wouldn’t want trophies for winning things. More importantly, different people prioritize different rewards differently, so pairing intrinsic and extrinsic rewards is the best way to ensure everyone has something to celebrate.

Experience and Advancement Systems provide both extrinsic rewards and an extrinsic sense of progress toward something. Those are two different things and people need both. Players need to feel like they’re getting somewhere as much as they need to feel like they’ve accomplished something. That’s why True Campaign Managers don’t think of Experience and Advancement Systems merely in terms of rewarding the players for playing the game. Good systems let the players look both backward — rewards — and forward — progress.

Good Experience and Advancement Systems create a strong connection between the players’ — and their characters’ — in-game activities and their Advancement. If you ain’t tying Experience and Advancement directly to the shit the players do, you’re diluting and diffusing the sense of progress and accomplishment the system’s supposed to provide. Really good Experience and Advancement Systems go a step beyond and tie only whatever the designers consider to be Core Gameplay Activities to progression, such as returning the treasure of ancient empires to civilization in older D&D editions and overcoming encounters in modern D&D.

The point is that Experience and Advancement Systems provide players with an extrinsic sense of growth, progress, and accomplishment as they play the game. That’s the most important purpose underlying such systems.

Like a Wheel in a Circle in a Spiral

Experience and Advancement systems affect the game’s structure and macroscopic pace. In well-designed and well-run games, it’s purposeful. In… less games, it’s accidental. But it’s never not that way so True Mechanical Managers have to know this shit.

Games are a mix of progressions and cycles. I already talked about progression above, so let’s talk cycles. Or, better yet, let’s talk Gameplay Loops. You’ve probably heard of those. Probably from me. A Gameplay Loop is just a sequence of repeated gameplay activities that feed into each other. They’re really good, but I don’t have time to go into why they’re good, so you just have to trust me today.

I’m gonna explain the basic Experience and Advancement Gameplay Loop and you’re gonna be like, “That’s all? Are you shitting me? That’s so simple and obvious it doesn’t even deserve a term.” And I’m gonna be like, “Shut up.”

Anyway, it’s like this…

In Dungeons & Dragons, characters go on adventures. While they adventure, they earn Experience Points. Once they earn enough Experience Points, they get to Level Up. After they Level Up, they can go on new and different adventures. For which they earn Experience Points. So they can Level Up. See how this shit works?

Experience and Advancement Gameplay Loops are usually simple, two-step cycles. First, you earn Experience by playing the game. Then, you stop playing the game to Advance your character. Then, you’re back to earning Experience again.

Here’s where I separate the men from the boys, though. At least, here’s where I separate the True Campaign Managers from the Mere Campaign Supervisors and also the True Game Designers from the Mere Frigging Hacks. Complex games have lots of little looping structures, but games work best when there’s a solid, core Gameplay Loop at their hearts. So actual, talented game designers — and True Campaign Managers — try their damndest to sync up all the little looping structures with their game’s core Gameplay Loop.

Now, this isn’t quite true and there’s more to it than I’m explaining — like loops within loops like moons orbiting planets orbiting stars — but it’s true enough for True Campaign Managers and you don’t want to get too abstract when you’re trying to practically manage a campaign, so we’re gonna go with it.

Experience and Advancement Systems primarily provide the players with a sense of extrinsic growth and progress, right? Synchronizing that system with other Gameplay Loops is actually really powerful. Let me show you what I mean with a really basic, simple, obvious example…

Say you’re doing a Megadungeon Delve Campaign. The characters plunge repeatedly into the Ruins of The Undercity beneath the City of Overdungeon or whatever. They can delve as long as they want, but when they run out of supplies or health or spells or whatever, they have to return to the surface to rest, heal, resupply, or whatever. Simple, right? And there’s a really obvious Core Gameplay Loop going on there. You see it, right? As a True Campaign Manager, you can synchronize that Core Gameplay Loop with your Experience and Advancement Loop by making it so the players can only earn Experience in the dungeon and can only Advance in town.

Am I making sense here or are y’all looking at me like cows look at oncoming trains? I hate this online teaching-by-blogging bullshit.

My point here is simply this: True Campaign Managers recognize that Experience and Advancement Systems represent Gameplay Loops and they can either clash with or harmonize with the structure of the campaign as a whole.

Keeping Up with the Foeses

Most of you are probably wondering why it took me so long to get to the most important aspect of Experience and Advancement Systems, but let me assure I’m putting this in its proper place. Also, let me assure you that you’re a dumbass, and Experience and Advancement Systems aren’t about Game Balance, and Game Balance ain’t the proper way to think about this shit.

Yeah, now we’re doing Game Balance. Sort of.

Game Balance is about how the players’ skills and abilities match up with the game’s challenges. Game Balance is not about how the characters’ statistics match up with the monsters’ statistics. Obviously, if the stats are out of whack, the players have to make up that shortfall with cunning plans and crazy capers, but most roleplaying games are designed such that player skill can only make up for small differences between character stats and monster stats. Or challenge stats. Whatever.

No matter how smart your Dungeons & Dragons players may and be, their 1st level characters don’t have a Smurf’s chance in a blender of defeating a Challenge Rating 20 cataclysm dragon. No matter how smart they are, once the lid is sealed and the blender’s on, no strategy will keep the Smurfs from becoming blue smoothies.

Obviously, then, Experience and Advancement Systems are designed to work alongside roleplaying games’ other mechanical, mathematical systems to maintain a predefined level of parity between the players’ characters’ mechanical statistics and those of the challenges they face. But you can’t be too reductionist about this shit. Lots of Mere Campaign Supervisors like to use words like treadmill to show their disdain for the way most Experience and Advancement Systems keep the characters — mathematically — on par with their challenges so nothing ever changes. That’s a dumb thing to complain about and you’re a dumbass if you do.

The thing is, this shit’s complicated. Really complicated. That’s why most popular games are built more through playtesting than math. It’s also why most popular and successful roleplaying games — at least the ones that emphasize mechanical, strategic, and tactical challenges — provide all sorts of Scenario Design instruction to help adventure writers set appropriate challenges based on the players’ characters’ expected statistics. That is to say, the characters’ Experience Levels. Doing so ensures the proper room is left for an appropriate amount of player skill to determine the outcome based on the overall level of difficulty the system’s designers discovered was appropriate for most players.

To put it another way, Dungeons & Dragons’ designers — for example — put their games through lots of playtesting to figure out just how much player skill should swing gameplay outcomes. Everyone knows that, if you demand too much skill, the average player will find your game frustrating and if you demand too little, the average player will find your game unrewarding. Once the designers found the balance point that worked for most players, they built their adventure-and-challenge design systems to provide that gameplay experience even as the characters’ mechanical abilities increased through gameplay.

To put it in yet another way to emphasize the important point, Experience and Advancement Systems come first; then the game’s other math is balanced against them to provide an appropriate level of challenge at every level based on whatever the designers think is an appropriate level of challenge. So Experience and Advancement Systems aren’t about Balance; Balance is about maintaining a fun gameplay experience as the characters gain Experience and Advance.

Most Mere Campaign Supervisors put the cart before the whore — an idiom I never understood — and think it works the other way. Which is why they make dumbass remarks about treadmills and shit like that. True Campaign Managers, though, recognize that everything’s balanced to the Experience and Advancement System and thus recognize that their practical implementation choices have a lot of implications.

The True Campaign Manager, for example, asks, “What will happen to all that careful balance if I let the players’ characters advance at different rates? Will it break the game if there are characters of different levels in the party?” Or, they ask, “Will it wreck the boss fight if I let the players level up before they face the climax of the adventure?” The answers to such questions help the True Campaign Manager decide whether absent players’ characters should earn Experience or whether to let the players Advance their characters in the middle of adventures or what Experience Level new or replacement characters should start at.

Trusting Designers

Unless you want to rewrite the whole damned game — and you don’t — there comes a point when you have to trust the designers. Even if they’re idiots.

I talk a lot of shit about the current crop of “game designers” working at Wizards of the Coast. I’ve made my disdain for the latest edition of the world’s… roleplaying game clear countless times. But I still think D&D is a very well-designed roleplaying game that provides a solid, fun gameplay experience. It does what it promises. Lots of Game Masters piss and whine to me about how D&D is too easy or too broken or whatever, but when I ask them whether that’s their players talking, most of them have to admit their players are having a perfectly good time. It shocks people when I tell them that, when I run D&D — or any game, really — I run it by the book. I very rarely hack my own games. And even when I do build hacks, I try to work within the system rather than changing it. My much-lauded Boss Fight and Eff CR alternative monster-building systems follow the game’s core math. I just rejiggered some shit.

Part of being a True Whatever Whateverer is trusting your game’s designers to provide the experience they’ve promised. It’s trusting the designers to be smarter than you. If there’s a game — or a designer — you can’t trust like that, don’t run that game; run something else. If there’s a game that doesn’t promise the experience you want to provide, don’t run that game; run something else.

And remember, problems ain’t problems until it’s your players complaining. Mostly.

You Can Have Your Complexity When You Prove You Can Handle It

The final thing True Campaign Managers must considerate when deciding how to practically implement their game’s Experience and Advancement system is down to how that system delivers Complexity. And, as with that whole Not Balance thing above, this is something True Campaign Managers have to be aware of and trust their system’s designers about.

Most roleplaying game systems — especially the biggest and most popular and best-designed systems — are actually really complicated. So, system designers try hard to put the game’s Complexity on a drip feed. They know — unlike many Mere Campaign Supervisors — that it’s best to feed players Complexity slowly over time. That’s why powerful monsters don’t just have big numbers, they’ve got more options and more and different kinds of abilities than weaker monsters. It’s also why characters gain new and different kinds of abilities as they Advance instead of all at once.

Experience and Advancement Systems are designed to dole out gameplay Complexity at a defined — and manageable — rate. As it happens, D&D and Pathfinder are especially good at doing the same for Game Masters. Especially Game Masters who write their own adventures. But I digress…

The point is that true Campaign Managers know that their choices about how to implement their chosen system’s Experience and Advancement system affect how quickly the players have to come to grips with more options and more mechanics and more complexity. That, again, plays into questions about whether it’s wise to let players gain new abilities in the middle of play or before complex encounters like boss fights and what Experience Level new and replacement characters should start at as well as whether to use a Variant Advancement Systems or change the rules outright.

The Unfinished Lesson

Experience and Advancement Systems are pretty damned complicated, huh? There’s a lot to think about. You’re probably wondering whether I really expect you to worry about all this crap when you’re trying to decide whether it’s best to award Experience Points every session or only at major milestones or when you’re looking longingly at those fiat options wherein you just tell the players when they get levels and they’ll thank you for it, damn it.

Yes, I expect you to worry about this crap. Why else would I have written it? This is what being a True Campaign Manager is. You can ignore all this crap and just do whatever you always do or whatever is easiest or whatever the book says or just make it up as you go and you’ll end up with a perfectly adequate, totally fine, reasonably fun campaign. But this class ain’t for Mere Campaign Supervisors with a good enough is good enough attitude. Do you want to be a True Campaign Manager? Do you want to set your course based on what’s likely to provide the best and most successful gameplay experience for months or years to come? Then, you worry about this crap.

So, yes, I expect you to understand that, whatever form they take in your system of choice, Experience and Advancement Systems are primarily there to give the players an extrinsic measure of growth, achievement, and progress to pair with the intrinsic sense of accomplishment that comes from overcoming challenges and progressing through a game. And I expect you to understand there’s more to that than just rewarding players for playing right.

I also expect you to understand that Experience and Advancement Systems represent a cycle and they work best when synchronized with your campaign’s Core Gameplay Loop or some other macroscopic Gameplay Structure. And I expect you to know what that sentence means.

I also expect you to recognize that Experience and Advancement Systems are carefully designed to interweave with other gameplay mechanics to provide a deliberately balanced gameplay experience at every level of play and to deliver gameplay complexity at a manageable rate. I expect you to see, therefore, how important it is to work within the game’s tolerances when you implement its Experience and Advancement System. That means I also expect you to be smart enough to spot the game’s tolerances. And I expect you to trust that the game designers knew what they were doing when they built their game and that they’re probably better than you at designing their game.

Finally, I expect at least a few of you dumbasses are going to comment about how certain games — Dungeons & Dragons; you’re going to slag on Dungeons & Dragons — I expect a few of you dumbasses to comment about how Dungeons & Dragons should be way more transparent and tell you all this shit so you can make informed decisions. I’m going to suggest, strongly, you don’t make those comments though because you’re going to end up looking like a dumbass when I come back in a few days. Because I will be back in a few days. Now that you know what’s at stake when you’re figuring out how to implement Experience and Advancement Systems in your campaign, I can teach you how to actually make the practical decisions you need to make.

See you in a few days.