If the last several lessons have taught me anything, it’s that I’m gonna need another two years to get through all this True Campaign Managery crap if I don’t cut to the chase, so…

I’m continuing my lesson on Experience and Advancement Policy today. Try to keep up.

Previously…

I told you last time that True Campaign Managers decide before they start running their campaigns how they mean to handle their system’s Experience and Advancement System. I then wasted a metric butt-ton of time on what I mean by Experience and Advancement System and about all the things such systems do in and for and to roleplaying game campaigns. Remember that?

Don’t answer; I don’t have time to care. We’re moving on. Let’s talk policy implementation.

Implementation, Not Mechanics

I hope it’s absolutely frigging clear here that I’m not talking about game mechanics and I won’t be teaching you how to hack Experience and Advancement Systems if you’re too much of a pompous ass to use the rules the actual, professional game designers wrote. If not, let me make it clear: I’m talking about how you apply the rules at your table. Every system’s got gaps to do with practical, at-the-table implementation. True Campaign Managers must be able to spot those gaps and figure out how to close them. There are also always a few rough edges to sand down and lots of systems let Campaign Managers choose between optional and variant rules.

As with all that Scheduling and Attendance crap, the goal is to have a little procedural policy to follow. One that leaves no confusion about how you — and your players — will do everything to do with Experience and Advancement. Fortunately, such policies are simpler than all that Scheduling and Attendance crap. More fortunately, Experience and Advancement Systems have nothing to do with attendance.

Nothing!

The Metrics System

All that spiel last time was to establish what True Campaign Managers look for in an Experience and Advancement Policy. What they must consider when deciding how to practically implement their system’s Experience and Advancement System, what optional systems to adopt, and whether to take the extreme — and almost always entirely unnecessary — step of hacking the game system.

Chief among those considerations is that Experience and Advancement Systems provide an extrinsic measure of growth, progress, and accomplishment. That’s what they do. That’s why they are. Your implementation can’t break that and it can’t try to turn the Experience and Advancement System into something it’s not. The system should begin and end with, “As they adventure, characters get better.”

Beyond that, Experience and Advancement Systems impact your campaign’s pacing. That ain’t surprising given that absolutely frigging everything affects your campaign’s pacing and, remember, pacing is more about structure than speed. It’s important, though, because there’s a huge correlation between pacing and actual goodishness of gameplay experience.

Ultimately, there are two sides to the pacing coin here. The first is that Experience and Advancement Systems are basically a bunch of math and paperwork. When you’re futzing with them — I said futzing — you’ve stopped playing or running the actual game. The second is that Experience and Advancement Systems can either harmonize with your campaign’s pacing structure or else trash it.

There are also gameplay balance issues like parity between the characters and the challenges they face and the introduction of increasingly complex gameplay elements.

All this shit’s the criteria on which you base your Experience and Advancement Policy decisions.

Shit That Doesn’t Matter

I am not going to get too much into this topic today. A three-day discussion in my Supporter Discord Server and a bunch of feedback I received via other channels have shown me that we all need to have a very serious talk about Campaign Management and Game Mastering. By which I mean, I need to slap you all because you’re thinking about the wrong things wrong.

Expect that in a few days.

Today, though, I’m just going to say this…

Experience and Advancement Systems are not for driving or changing player behaviors. They’re not for getting the players to do what you want them to do — like attend game sessions — or for communicating what you think your game’s about. They’re not punishments, rewards, incentives, or disincentives.

Does Experience and Advancement impact player behavior? Yes. Everything impacts human behavior. But is that what Experience and Advancement are for? Should you be actively using them like that? Absolutely fucking not. Don’t do that. Just don’t.

While I’m on the subject, let’s just stop using words like reward and punishment altogether because every time you use those words, you sound like a frigging moron and I want to slap the stupid out of you and I know that can’t actually be done.

I’ve tried.

And… moving on!

Let’s Read the Rules!

Let’s do something absolutely frigging insane! Something none of y’all would ever do! Let’s actually read the rules of the game.

See, setting Experience and Advancement Policy is about deciding how to implement your game’s rules, right? It’s about spotting gaps in the rules and rough edges and closing them or sanding them down or whatever, right? What does that mean? It means you actually have to frigging know the rules!

Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of you dumbasses demanding I fix this or that broken-ass, incomplete rule for you, it’s that none of you actually know the rules. Since most of you play or run D&D and since D&D Game Masters are particularly stupid about knowing the rules, we’re going to run through D&D’s Experience and Advancement System.

Remember last time when I stopped a bunch of you from commenting about how the rules don’t tell you anything? This is where you get to feel really stupid.

You can find all the Experience and Advancement rules for D&D in the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide. The only supplemental post-core shit’s found in an appendix in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and it’s specifically about shared campaigns between multiple Game Masters which is totally beyond the scope of this lesson and beyond the scope of good sense.

Players are told, on PHB 15, that their characters gain Experience Points as they go on adventures and overcome challenges. Once their characters accrue enough Experience Points, they gain a level, a process spelled out in detail.

That’s it for the player-facing Experience and Advancement rules. Notice, by the way, that it matches, almost exactly, that simple statement I made about what Experience and Advancement Systems are for and why they exist. I don’t pull this shit out of my ass nearly as much as y’all think I do.

For the rest of the Experience and Advancement rules, you need to open the Dungeon Master’s Guide to pages 260 and 261.

First, you’ll find that, when the players’ characters defeat a monster — by killing it, capturing it, routing it, or by other means — they divide the Experience Value of the monster between them. If they get help from nonplayer characters, their proportional share of the Experience Value is reduced. Each character in a four-person party helped by one nonplayer character receives a fifth of the Experience Value of every defeated monster.

Next, you’ll see that characters only earn Experience Points for encounters in which they participate. Note, specifically, that’s characters and not players — the book uses the term adventurers — but it does note that if a player is absent from a session, they may therefore miss out on the Experience Points. The text acknowledges that this rule might lead to characters of different levels in the same party, but that that’s totally okay and the game works totally fine even when there are two or three levels of difference between the players’ characters.

That said, the rules do grant that some Game Masters might just want to give absent players’ characters the same Experience Points as everyone else because Experience and Advancement Rules are rarely a major driver of players’ behavior with regard to attendance.

Next, the DMG explains that you, the Game Master, decide when non-combat challenges warrant Experience Points. It notes that the criteria should be whether the characters face a significant risk in the encounter and it suggests guidelines for determining appropriate awards commensurate with combat encounters.

The DMG then says that you, the Game Master, can also decide to award Experience Points when the characters overcome significant challenges in the game, such as completing whole adventures or making substantial progress toward completion. Those are called Milestones. Guidelines are provided for determining appropriate awards commensurate with combat encounters.

As a side note, the DMG also suggests using non-Experience awards to mark Milestones instead of awarding Experience Points and offers a few examples. That, combined with the wording and presentation of the section as a whole lead me to conclude that Milestone Awards are a variant or optional system but that Experience awards for noncombat challenges are an assumed part of the core system.

I don’t feel like having that debate though, so don’t start with me.

Finally, you’ll find a section on handling Advancement without Experience Points. There are two systems: Session-Based Experience and Story-Based Experience. Under the former, the characters level up every so many sessions while, under the latter, they level up after accomplishing significant campaign goals.

The variants are what they are — though note that even Story-Based Experience is centered firmly on marking accomplishments and progress — but there are two very interesting and significant bits of info in this section that are worthy of your attention. First, the DMG notes the whole system has been set up to ensure a specific rate of advancement. Characters gain their first and second level-ups after a session apiece and then gain levels regularly every two or three sessions on average.

Second, the DMG suggests you modify the rules or use optional rules if your campaign deviates from the normal number of assumed combats as described in Chapter 3. If your campaign is particularly light or particularly heavy on combat, it says, you should consider an alternative to Experience Points.

That’s D&D’s official, by-the-book Experience and Advancement System as spelled out by the game’s actual designers. It’s way more clear, complete, and transparent than many of you dumbasses give it credit for, and lots of you owe it a frigging apology.

I’ll wait.

Running an Analysis

I didn’t run through D&D’s Experience and Advancement System just so I could drink a nice, cold glass of I told you so and burp in your face, though. Reviewing your system’s actual, complete rules as they’re actually written in the actual rulebooks is an important first step when setting an Experience and Advancement Policy. True Campaign Managers always go through their system’s rules and find out everything it’s got to say about Experience and Advancement. Everything. No matter how well they think they know that shit, they always review it, because it’s amazing how much you miss when you think you know everything.

True Campaign Managers then hunt down any questions, rough edges, or practicality gaps. They do so by imagining they’re running the campaign they actually intend to run for their players and seeing if they can follow the rules without running into problems.

Let’s say I’m starting a campaign and I want to do this whole Experience and Advancement Policy thing. I close my eyes and pretend I’m running my D&D campaign. My players’ characters have just defeated a monster by killing or capturing or routing it or else they’ve just overcome a noncombat challenge at a substantial risk to themselves. What do I do?

The rules imply — though they don’t say outright — that I immediately give the characters who participated in the encounter an appropriate Experience Point award which I can calculate easily from the text. If any of the players then announce that they’ve crossed a level-up threshold, the rules imply — though they don’t say outright — that I should stop the game so they can run through the steps in the level-up process described on PHB 15.

I might imagine a few different scenarios to see if they lead to problems. For example, I imagine a player’s missing from the session. Does that pose a problem? No. If the player’s character is involved in the encounter, they get Experience Points. Otherwise, they don’t. This does raise a question about how I handle absent players’ characters, but that’s a separate question I’ll answer — and we’ll talk about — later. It’s nice to note, though, that the Experience and Advancement System doesn’t have anything to do with player attendance.

What do I discover through this little visualization exercise? I discover that D&D’s Experience and Advancement System doesn’t have any gaps. There are no questions. It’s not going to blindside me. But does that mean it works from a practical standpoint? To answer that, I’ve got to analyze it in terms of my important criteria.

First, the by-the-book approach perfectly exemplifies exactly what an Experience and Advancement System is all about. It provides an extrinsic measure of growth, accomplishment, and progress. The character’s achievements are linked directly to their growth. Even if I use the optional Milestone bullshit, that’s true. Characters that don’t participate — defined as overcoming challenges at significant risk — don’t grow. That makes perfect sense. It works.

Second, do I foresee any pacing issues arising from the by-the-book rules? Well, actually, yeah, I see a pretty damned big pacing issue. I don’t really feel great about stopping the game at the end of every encounter to dole out Experience Points. I’ve seen players try to add numbers with more than two digits and frankly, if I run an encounter with a lot of monsters or I have to reference the XP Threshold By Character Level table in the DMG every time I run a noncombat encounter that entails a risk, I’m not going to be super quick on the draw either.

On top of that, if a character actually gains enough Experience Points to level up at the end of an Encounter, that’s gonna pull a frigging drag chute on my game. Worse yet, because the characters might not Advance at the same time, that means everyone might be waiting however the hell long it takes for one player to level up their character. Then, two encounters later, I might have to do it again.

So, yeah, there’s a pacing issue.

Third, are there any balance issues to worry about? Honestly, no. The designers have assured me the game won’t break as long as the characters are all within a few levels of each other, which implies also that if they’re within a few levels of the challenges they face, all is good. Therefore, I’m not worried about the characters getting out of sync with each other or about rebalancing the challenges if they level up mid-adventure. It is possible — hypothetically — that the characters might get outside that three-level window — either within the party or as compared to the challenges I’ve already designed — but that seems really unlikely given the sorts of numbers we’re talking here. A player would have to miss five or six sessions in reasonably short order to fall that far behind and the characters would have to face something like eighteen extra optional encounters to out level their current adventure.

In the end, my only worry — the only rough edge — is the pacing issue. But it seems like a really rough edge. I gotta sand that shit down.

You see how I analyzed this? See how I imagined implementing the system as written in the campaign I actually plan to run and then compared it to the actual, important criteria for evaluating Experience and Advancement Systems? That’s how True Campaign Managers do it.

Imagine the Campaign You Mean to Run

Note that I said, very specifically, that this analysis relies heavily on imagining implementing the system in the actual campaign you plan to run. My analysis, for example, assumed that I planned to run a campaign that aligns with the normal structure of play described in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Especially in Chapter 3.

The D&D designers actually called that out, by the way. On DMG 261, they warn you that if you ain’t running a campaign like the one they describe in Chapter 3, you need to adjust things. Otherwise, it ain’t gonna work. They then — very nicely — provide you some guidelines and benchmarks for doing so.

Unfortunately, though, you can’t always count on the system designers to do that. Even when they do, you can’t count on them predicting precisely whatever weird-ass way you intend to abuse their system. Once again, the job of True Campaign Manager means thinking shit through, spotting problems, and then solving them creatively. That also means knowing your system well enough to know the core experience it was designed to provide and figuring out precisely how your dumbass deviations are going to screw things up.

Hence, you need to know how your intended campaign deviates from the system’s norm and then imagine yourself running that to see if there are gaps or rough edges. This, again, is why a detailed Campaign Vision is so useful.

Going Off the Rules Radar

It’s no secret that lots of game systems offer us Campaign Managers a Chinese buffet of optional, variant rules to pile onto our plates if the core rules ain’t to our liking. So, how does a True Campaign Manager decide whether to sample the variant Experience and Advancement eggrolls? More extreme yet, when does a True Campaign Manager say, “To hell with this; I’m just going to cook for myself,” and hack their own rules together.

As anyone who’s eaten at a Chinese buffet knows, you don’t eat at Chinese buffets. They suck. True Campaign Managers actually try to do everything they can by the book. Look, I know you’re all hack-happy. You don’t think you’re doing your job as a Game Master or a Campaign Manager or a Homebrewer or whatever if you ain’t rewriting at least one rule a day. But that ain’t the way.

True Campaign Managers only use optional rules when they have absolutely no other choice and the realization that they’ve got to hack shit just makes them feel sick so they try to get it over with as quickly as possible with the minimum number of changes possible.

When you do your little imagine you’re already running your campaign exercise, if either of the first two major criteria is off, you need to consider a change. But what does off really mean in this context? And how off is off?

When it comes to evaluating whether the Experience and Advancement System works in your campaign the way an Experience and Advancement System should work — as an extrinsic measure of character growth, progress, and accomplishment — there are two things to worry about. The first is how well the system connects whatever amounts to progress and accomplishment in the game with the characters’ growth and advancement. If implementing the by-the-book rules doesn’t preserve that connection, you probably need a variant or a hack.

Except…

There are actually a fair few tabletop roleplaying game systems out there — designed by actual, experienced, talented designers no less — that don’t really put the the issue of connecting intrinsic and extrinsic progress front and center. There are a couple of systems on my shelf — like Savage Worlds which is kinda unforgivable — that just cop out with that, “Just give your players X-many Experience Points every session and don’t sweat it, bro” horseshit.

The problem is that hacking an alternative is way more work than it’s worth and, to be fair, every True Campaign Manager eventually ends up just accepting a certain amount of crap design bullshit because it ain’t worth changing and it works okay enough. That’s True Campaign Management for you.

The second issue is way more important though. You can’t just, “Hold your nose and get through it.” It’s too important. In fact, it’s so important it needs its own, separate heading. I’ll get there.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the second criterion — pacing issues — the only problem that’s likely to come up is the one I already highlighted above. Experience and Advancement Systems — by their nature — are bookkeeping and maintenance systems, not gameplay systems. Deciding where to slot them is important. Fortunately, you rarely need any sort of full-on variant rule or hack to handle that shit. All you need is a clear statement about when you — and your players — will — and will not — stop the game for Experience and Advancement.

Now, that second thing I mentioned…

Are We Level Two Yet?

The one aspect of Experience and Advancement Systems you absolutely cannot screw up — because it’ll eventually piss off the majority of roleplaying game players — is how quickly the characters progress and how often they grow. Remember, this is all down to giving the players an extrinsic measure of growth, progress, and accomplishment. Most players — not absolutely every last one but the vast majority — need a regular shot of progress and accomplishment or else they start to feel like they’re going nowhere.

Fortunately, this is one of those rare few things that’s reasonably consistent across all games. This ain’t as system-and-player-and-genre sensitive as most things.

Advancement feels good; players like doing it. Left to their own devices, they’d do it constantly. But that’s not good for them. Advancing doesn’t continue to feel good or meaningful when it happens too often or too quickly. Moreover, remember all that shit I said about gradually increasing gameplay complexity? That kinda requires you to ride the advancement brakes a bit, no?

Now, there’s a lot of psychology here that I don’t have time to get into, but advancement feels best, first, when it slows down over time and, second when it’s just a little bit unpredictable. Note that I said a little bit unpredictable and not totally frigging random. That’s like sometimes it takes an extra session longer to advance and other times two level-ups happen pretty close together.

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that D&D says exactly that on DMG 261. If you weren’t paying attention, what the hell is wrong with you?

There’s a slight randomness in D&D Experience Point awards that comes from variances in how many Experience-worthy encounters come up from one session to the next and how they vary across the difficulty spectrum. Additional variance comes from sometimes having NPCs to help, sometimes having members split off from the party, and occasional absences. On average, though, characters gain levels every two, three, or four sessions and the higher their level, the longer it takes to level up.

That’s actually a perfect rate of advancement for any Big Advancement System like D&D. You see, broadly speaking, you can divide Experience and Advancement Systems into Big Advancement Systems and Small Advancement Systems. Big Advancement Systems include D&D, Pathfinder, and pretty much all class-and-level-based systems. Characters advance in spurts. They accumulate Experience Points consistently but don’t grow or change until, suddenly, bam, they gain a new level. Then lots of stuff changes.

Small Advancement Systems, meanwhile, are usually skill-based or classless systems and most involve direct-buy advancement. Characters gain Experience at a fairly consistent rate and can spend it whenever they have it to make small changes to their character. Maybe they can increase one stat or one skill or add a single talent or spell or whatever.

Where Big Advancement Systems offer periodic advancement every one, two, three, or four sessions — with shorter intervals at lower levels and bigger intervals at higher levels — Small Advancement Systems can run a wider gamut, but often allow for more, frequent advancements on average.

Meanwhile, the actual Experience Points that mark progress toward Advancement should be awarded frequently and consistently. Players should never go more than two sessions without earning some Experience Points and really should get some every session.

Knowing this not only helps you evaluate Experience and Advancement Systems by projecting the expected rate of Advancement for the campaign you’re running, but it also gives you a target to shoot for if you ever do end up using a variant system or — the gods help you — hacking your system. At least you know what rate of advancement to make happen.

My Policy

As I’ve noted before, I tend to do things by the book. My D&D games focus on challenging encounters — combat and non- — and I try to get through four to six of them every session. If I didn’t want to do that, I wouldn’t run D&D because I’m not a frigging moron and I don’t believe in hamfistedly cramming game-shaped pegs into wrong-shaped system holes. I recognize I’m the exception, not the rule there.

Thus, my analysis of D&D above is valid for most of my campaigns. The by-the-book Experience and Advancement rules work, but the pacing sucks. Thus, the only policy change I have to make is to adjust when I give out Experience Points and when my players are allowed to level up. Fortunately, that’s an easy adjustment to make. I just look for the spots in my imagined campaign’s structure where it’s okay to stop playing and do the Experience and Advancement thing.

In general, then, I award Experience Points at the end of every session — so the players are never waiting for it but so I never have to stop the actual gameplay to deal with it. Generally, the players are only allowed to level up their characters between sessions when, again, we’re not stopping the game to do it. Moreover, depending on my campaign, I usually place other restrictions on leveling up based on what the characters are doing in the game. I don’t generally let my players level up when they’re in the midst of actual adventuring. I might let them level up when they’re camping or traveling, but I usually only let them level up when they’re in some safe, civilized place. See, I generally follow a strong Travel-Adventure-Travel-Town Cycle in my fantasy adventure games so that harmonizes well with making leveling up a town only activity.

You are absolutely free to steal that wholesale because it works for pretty much every properly run and structured fantasy adventure campaign.

To Sum Up

So that’s Experience and Advancement Policy. It’s not about mechanical rules, but rather about how you — a True Campaign Manager — implement those rules. That might mean making some adjustments to your system’s mechanics, but True Campaign Managers do so only sparingly. And they do so only after evaluating the gameplay experience the system’s rules will provide as the campaign plays out.

The first step to setting a good Experience and Advancement Policy, then, is to review your game system’s actual rules. Completely and comprehensively. Then, you should run a little thought experiment in which you imagine actually using the Experience and Advancement Policy while running the game you plan to run. A strong Campaign Vision is a must here. If you notice any gaps, rough edges, or problems, highlight them so you can make adjustments.

There are two important criteria to consider when evaluating an Experience and Advancement System. First, consider whether the system is providing an extrinsic measure of character growth, progress, and accomplishment. That means ensuring there’s a connection between the players progressing through the game and their characters’ advancement and ensuring that advancement comes at a comfortable rate. Second, consider how implementing the system will impact your gameplay pace. After all, managing Experience and Advancement is a gameplay stoppage so you want to slot that shit into places where the game is already stopped. It’s also worth considering the other cycles in your campaign’s gameplay structure to see if there are particular places where Experience and Advancement bookkeeping suit the flow of the campaign.

All of this takes careful review, analysis, and consideration. You must be especially aware of your game system’s core assumptions about how a game should be structured. If you’re deviating from that in any significant way — and you stubbornly refuse to find a system that fits your campaign better — you need to analyze how that’s going to affect Experience and Advancement. Especially in terms of the rate of Advancement; the players are going to notice if that doesn’t feel right.

Now that I’ve shown you how to analyze a mechanical subsystem and set a campaign policy based on the campaign you’re running, I’m gonna do it all again for Character Death. And probably a few other systems. But that’s not the next lesson.

Next lesson, I need to yell at all y’all for still being dumbasses even though I keep telling you not to be. That should be fun.