XP without Killing | Rewarding your players for accomplishing things in the other two pillars of the game
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I've also started making a new system based off of 5e, 6th Dawn! Become a patron and join the playtest.
A new trial, mostly for me to come up with things. This time, more XP awards, because although there is a paragraph and 3 listed examples of how to award XP for reaching 'milestones' and another two paragraphs for roleplay. It doesn't feel like they put any actual thought into it, they just point at rules designed for combat encounters and say 'that, but not monsters'. Also, what is a deadly encounter for rolelay?
Furthermore, they only really cover XP budgets in that section not once does it actually tell you what counts for awarding experience. So I'm doing a due diligence and telling GMs to reward ingenuity
And now to plug my stuff. I release homebrews weekly over on my Patreon.
Anyone who pledges $1 or more per post don't have to wait a month to see them, and also help fund my being alive habit.
At the moment, they have exclusive access to the following:
Lawyer Background
Circle of the Ooze
Greed Domain
Points of Inspiration
I also have four classes, and two splatbooks over on DriveThruRPG to check out:
The Rift Binder. A class specialising in summoning monsters and controlling the battlefield.
The Witch Knight. A class that combines swords and sorcery in the most literal way.
The Werebeast. A class that turns you into a half beast to destroy your foes.
The Beguiler. A spellcaster dedicated to illusions, enchantments, and general fuckery.
d'Artagnan's Adventurer Almanac. A compendium of races, subclasses, feats, spells, monsters and more!
d'Artagnan's Lycanthrope Survival Guide. A book of lore, stats, and werebeast subclasses for lycanthropes.
Experience Systems, Pacing, and Player Motivation – An Analysis of UnderRail’s Oddity XP system
Rewards and incentive systems motivate action, and the experience system of a game will shape how the player plays that game. This much is obvious, but experience systems also shape the pacing of a game as they determine the pace at which players get stronger. UnderRail is an interesting case study because it is an isometric cRPG with 2 xp systems; Classic and Oddity.
Classic xp works like how most RPGs award experience; killing enemies and completing quests. Oddity xp is unique to UnderRail. You get oddity xp for collecting oddities. Oddities are weird items that you can find in containers or by killing enemies. Some examples are the maps of Core City, a rat-hound ear with an earring, or a human skull with 3 eye sockets (where is your god now). You can also only gain xp from an oddity a fixed amount of times, eg: you can only get xp from the rat-hound ear 3 times.
UnderRail allows the player to choose between oddity xp and classic xp when the player creates a new save file. This creates a very interesting scenario because it means that we can view how the same game works with 2 different xp systems, how the pacing and player motivation changes.
In terms of pacing, classic xp is far smoother. Since you’re constantly killing enemies and completing quests, you’re constantly getting xp. This is unlike oddity xp which is very feast or famine. Since you can only get xp from any given oddity a certain amount of times, when you enter a new area there’ll be a whole host of new oddities for you to collect. But pretty soon you’ll have collected most of them and now the only source of xp is completing quests. There are some areas that oddity xp awards experience smoothly; those are the early game (until the player collects the drill in Depot A), the late game (Deep Caverns), and the Expedition dlc (the Black Sea). So it’s clear that oddity xp can be smooth, but in UnderRail’s mid game, it is not.
So why is UnderRail’s oddity system smooth in some cases but feast or famine in others? And why is the classic system consistently smooth? I believe that the reason for this is a discrepancy between goals of the oddity xp system and the goals of the core gameplay loop. The goals of the oddity xp system are to encourage a more pacifist playstyle and to enable an immersive sim experience. However the core gameplay loop is based around combat. Half of the skills in the game are purely for combat, a further quarter indirectly improve the player’s combat abilities, while only a quarter have no combat utility. This mismatch is the cause of the oddity system’s flaws. While the player is always fighting enemies and doing quests, the player is not always exploring new areas. This means that the xp system which rewards fighting monsters is always granting xp which the system which rewards exploration is only granting xp some of the time.
This brings us onto the discussion of how xp systems impact player motivation. As I mentioned previously, the oddity xp system encourages a more diverse “immersive sim” playstyle while the classic xp system encourages a more combat oriented playstyle. For example, the skills hacking, lockpicking, and pickpocketing are very much optional skills under the classic system (especially pickpocketing, which only leads to a different way to complete a quest exactly once). However under the oddity system, they become practically mandatory to gain a decent amount of xp. Additionally, under the classic system, the player only has to kill enemies and complete quests to gain xp, while under the oddity system, the player also has to comb through the environment looking for loot. This demonstrates how a different xp system can encourage a different play style even in the same game.
This is why I love analysing how systems interact. Teasing out that the oddity xp system leads to a worse paced game that encouraged a more looter style gameplay, while the classic xp system led to a better paced game that was more combat oriented, was a very interesting experience.
Breaking news! Experience Points: The Lost Chapters from Monsters, Aliens, & Holes in the Ground has been nominated for an Ennie Award in the Best RPG Related Product category!
Big thanks to Exalted Funeral for submitting the zine, and a heaping pile of congratulations to my co-conspirators Ed Coleman (author of the Paranoia essay), Kyle Patterson (illustrator), Derek Kinsman (designer), Jamie Springer (copy editor), Orrin Grey (line editor) and Joe DeSimone (fact checker), who can all officially append "Ennie-Nominated" to their list of qualifications for all time.
It would be swell if you voted for them! They worked super hard on both this and the main book, on a shockingly tight turn-around, and made an amazing reality out of my rambling thoughts. I'm forever in their debt, really.
The Ennies are a community award, so you, my community, please go and vote!
Earlier today I saw someone talking about the common wisdom that you can't make an RPG without SOME sort of system where after you finish a session (or maybe an adventure), the GM gives you some sort of points that, whether automatically or based on assigning them, makes your character better at doing stuff. Not only do I strongly disagree that that's something every game needs, I'd like to present the argument that even in games you'd have a hard time imagining without them, experience points might actually be doing more harm than good.
Before I even get into this, let's take apart the obvious perks to having experience systems:
1- It helps maintain longterm interest in keeping a campaign going when the players are getting some sort of regular reward.
This is true of certain campaigns, but I don't think I'd really ever want to be in one. In a good campaign, everyone involved should be having a fun time just hanging out with each other, putting themselves in the shoes of the characters, building up a story and a world together, and generating cool memorable scenes. That should be more than enough incentive to stick with a game, and if you don't have those things going on, you should really stop and work out what's going wrong, not try and pave over it by powering everyone's characters up. I don't need to boost some Watcher Score when I marathon through a good TV show or a movie, and I'm not even getting to influence how those unfold, you know?
This is also one of those many things where what we have today is sort of a twisted ghost of what was originally conceived back in the early days of D&D. I had an old project on this very blog where I was reading through the books for 1st edition AD&D with a critical eye, and a huge takeaway from that was that Gary Gygax seems like he was just the absolute worst kind of GM (also backed up by reading message board posts of his, and various accounts). Back in his day, leveling up wasn't the expected inevitable progression as a game went on necessarily. You'd roll your stats, with some harsh restrictions, be forced to play what you had, roll your HP too, and the game was just kind of inherently hostile to the PCs, so you had a good chance of dying in a given session. Not only that, but when you did, there was no real coming back from it, you make a new character, starting from scratch, with 0 experience, and see if you can keep this one alive long enough to get up there again.
And aside from the carrot of maybe getting one of those elite high level characters if you stuck with it, there was the stick of characters partying their gold away. Seriously, by AD&D 1e rules, characters would just kinda burn through... I want to say it was 100 GP per level per day. And not in-game day. Real life day. You'd better show up for every session, because a week from now, your character's going to have 700 less gold in their pocket whether you show up to play or not.
We don't really play that way anymore. At least nobody I know does. Leveling up is planned out in advance by GMs, characters level up at the same time as everyone else even when the player misses a session, and if you need to make a new character or you're just joining the game late, obviously you come in at the same level as everyone else. I don't even want to dignify the arguments against doing that with discussion. It's even common for people to start games at levels other than 1 because people just don't like low-level play.
And you know, this is way outside the scope of what I was sitting down to write, but I've gotten into the jobification of video games before, right? Where people keep doing stuff like daily login rewards and weekly challenges just so there's a sense of obligation to log into games every day? That crap doesn't actually make things more FUN, it's in there to keep players compelled to play regardless of how much fun they have, and that's... literally the argument behind experience as an incentive to keep a game running.
2- It good when number go up!
Funnily enough, this is the hardest one for me to refute. There is some basic direct release of the good brain chemicals when you have numbers, and they go up. And I mean... sure, but in a tabletop game you're not generally seeing a number climb on its own, you're getting points thrown at you that you have to jot down or mark off or otherwise track and do math with, and like... there's plenty of other results from playing the game good to release the good brain chemicals. You don't explicitly need this one.
3- It's cool when you can have a story where like some dorky little kid starts off barely able to do anything and all unconfident and then gradually gets it together and gets more confident and competent as time goes on!
Oh yeah, everyone loves that sort of thing, and there's a strong case to be made that this is the primary reason people feel the need to put an experience system in basically every RPG, but those systems are all kind of just the worst at actually delivering on that, is the thing.
D&D and its derivatives are the absolute worst with this. The way I put it in this earlier conversation, you start out all, "I am a poor peasant child, barely able to afford the clothes on my back, a length of rope, a week's worth of food, and this dagger here" and then a few months later "I am basically a god and any amount of money less than 1,000,000 times my starting net worth isn't even worth stooping over for." And when I made this point someone corrected me that if you really go by the expected pacing, a campaign without big stretches of downtime between adventures with the recommended combat pacing is going to get you to level 20 in a month.
Now, I don't want to completely spit on the D&D power curve here (the economic one though can absolutely go to hell, stop making me a billionaire as a side effect of killing monsters and do all that bookkeeping). I do enjoy the eb and flow, campaign to campaign, of playing the same characters as wimpy little nothings and demigods over however long it takes my regular group to finish a campaign. But as far as having characters with arcs to them? It is AWFUL!
First off, it's just too damn fast and abrupt. When our little ragtag band heads off into the swamp to deal with those goblins or whatever, we're going to come home from even that little speed bump of an adventure tougher than all our neighbors and absurdly wealthy, to a point where it feels almost inevitable that you leave your old life behind completely and look down on everyone you grew up with.
It's not IMPOSSIBLE to have some sort of long or medium-term personal quest to avenge my parents or show I'm better than some bully, but it takes a real delicate touch to do it right, since you really have to decide up front when exactly I'm going to have that confrontation, make the villain something of an appropriately challenging nature for the level I'm going to be when I settle things, and that I don't manage to arrange that confrontation much earlier or later than planned, because again I'm pretty quickly going from dealing with food rationing, animal attacks, and slippery ravines, to taking down monsters four times my size without breaking a sweat, to like changing the course of history and rivaling evil gods. There's a very small window where it makes sense for me to get back at that owlbear who put me in the hospital or whatever.
And that's not even getting into the problem of how I've got these other three humble little kids from home experiencing all this rapid growth at the same time. Can't really have a wise old mentor if we're using experience as experience. We're either never going to catch up, or we're going to leave them in the dust if they're not leveling with us.
Now, again, D&D is kind of a huge exception here. Most RPGs I've played instead go with a starting setup where you don't start off as some starry-eyed youth who can't do anything, but instead have some skill-based system where every character is an expert without peer in a handful of skills that fit some archetypical theme, and for anything else, they need outside help, either from fellow PCs, or making arrangements with NPC experts. Standard with this is a little drip-feed of extra skill points, but this... really doesn't work for what we're looking for here. If I want to be the party's hacker, I'm going to start off as an excellent hacker. I'm not going to put all my points into shmoozing people and then expect the rest of the party to put up with me looking for the any key over a dozen adventures before finally working out this make or break ability.
4- You gain new abilities as you level up!
So... first off this actually isn't generally all that true. If you're playing a wizard in D&D, sure, every couple levels you get access to a new tier of spells, and hey that's a big game changing deal maybe. Most level-ups though are just about numbers going up. All of them in most games. Hitting harder, more often, in bigger areas, maybe. Skills and abilities work more consistently. You maybe get more HP.
For now though let's focus on when you do level up and get cool new abilities. One moment you're some kid with a stick, then you bonk the magic number of goblins with it, and now suddenly you can make all your friends fly, unbound by gravity, or you can read the thoughts of everyone around you, or you can teleport home where it's nice and safe no matter what the situation. Well that actually really sucks for the GM!
Let's say I'm doing what everyone ever making an 8 or 16-bit RPG did and lifting plot concepts shamelessly from Laputa. We've got our big floating continent. Maybe we've got some kinda evil emperor up there, raining terror down on people or something. Nobody can get there and confront him... until they hit level 7 or whatever and have access to the fly spell. I better get any air superiority based adventures out before then. Also anything where there's a tower that has windows, or dangerous terrain, etc. Better get mysteries and hidden agendas taken care of before that mind reading. Better not think about trapping the party or them getting word of an attack somewhere else before that teleporting. And that's assuming I'm being on the ball about that sort of thing. I might have this whole thing planned, where the party desperately needs to get to that flying continent, and it's this whole quest hook where maybe they have to befriend a dragon or help build an airship or get some kinda rubber bones potion and access to a powerful cannon. Whole adventures about getting that power of flight, and any of these might just totally fizzle because oh whoops, the party leveled up and they just do that now.
Less dramatically, what if we're playing of those skill point games. I'm already a super great seductive femme fatale sneaking past laser sensors and stealing keys off people I'm charming right from the start of the game, and hey, cool, that's a nice simple archetype, everyone knows what I'm good at, we can plan missions around me being all sleazy over here while someone else sets up in a sniper position and someone else is in the basement hacking and all that. Several adventures down the road, well, I have all these skill points, I haven't been able to put them into the stuff I'm good at, so now I'm also a combat monster. The original combat monster can also hack. The original hacker can also charm the pants off everyone. We're starting to develop a lot of redundancy, but that's not necessarily bad? But then we play a bunch more adventures. Those secondary concepts capped off, we're working up more. Nobody is unparalleled at the thing they originally did. Have the party is equally amazing at a given thing. If we keep going like this, eventually everyone is going to loose all sense of unique identity, and there isn't really a strong in-game reason we need this whole ragtag crew anymore. Anyone of us can take on any problem solo, really.
5- The power fantasy of being super amazing.
This is kind of a point I've already hit but I'm stuck with this format, but the thing with experience is, again, sometimes sure you gain new abilities, but usually all your various numbers go up, and that actually kinda sucks in practice. First off, it's a lot of tedious bookkeeping, in basically any system you can name. It also doesn't generally really make a difference in the grand scheme of things?
I'm level 3. I've got a +7 to hit, doing 15 damage a hit, and an AC of 18. I'm fighting some orc with 40 HP, 15 AC, and attacking at +5. I level up a few times. Now I'm level 7. I've got a +13 to hit, doing 30 damage, and an AC of 24. I'm fighting crustaceanoids now, with 80 HP, 21 AC, and attacking at +11. Objective numbers wise, crustateanoids are way way tougher than orcs, but in my experience this is the EXACT same fight. I hit on an 11. I need 3 hits to take something down. It's bad news for me if my enemy rolls a 13 to hit me. All we've done is a bunch of annoying math refactoring with nothing to show for it but cosmetically reskinned mooks.
Now here, interestingly enough, I ONLY have the D&D type example here. Again, most other RPGs I have don't have that same sort of rampant power creep. You start out absurdly skillful at whatever your specialty is, and there's little if any room for growth, numbers wise. So here, if we go from orcs to crustateanoids to hellborn cyberdragons as enemies, not only is this technically a set of progressively scarier enemies to have to deal with, they actually ARE more meaningful threats to the party. Maybe those orcs were all show, they never really hurt us because we're awesome secret agents or something, but now things are getting serious because these crustaceanoids are just as good at sick flips and firing machine guns in two different directions as we are, so we have to take them much more seriously. And oh damn, after this we have to deal with a hellborn cyberdragon? Those are so scary if we all just rush in we're probably all gonna die. We need to come up with a whole complex plan to avoid directly engaging that if at all possible, and run for it if that doesn't pan out, or something.
And hey, we don't need something even more epic than a hellborn cyberdragon to top that. One of those is still going to be harrowing no matter how late in the campaign we bust it out. We can establish a power balance early on and keep it relevant like that. PCs gotta get more innovative and clever not just kill most monsters until demigods are easily punchable.
6: Revenge of 3- Well character growth is still important!
So, I really shouldn't be trashing experience points' ability to deliver cool character growth if I don't have some alternative to it, right? We need some way to change things up so the game doesn't stagnate. Well sure, but we can do better than experience there.
Just off the top of my head, how about we go with plot relevant respec-ing? Like at any given time a character's got their main spotlight thematic kit. Your best of the best at being a hacker or wizard or whatever. Maybe also a secondary skillset. And then definitely some number of slots for stuff they're into but it's not their main thing. Maybe we have a few variant minisets for those. Like if someone just unlocked their psychic powers and haven't fully figured them out, you have access to this here set of abilities. Once you have your big dramatic power mastery moment, that becomes their main thing and we demote their previous main thing to a secondary thing... and if we don't like this psychic stuff in the end, we demote it back down and fill a tertiary slot with like Lost Psychic Powers, where you still get to be all knowledgeable about how this sorta crap works and maybe have some battles of wills but your cool telekinesis is all locked away. At least for now.
I don't want to sit down and fully design a game at the tail end of a blog post here, but feel free to try this out with whatever system you like. Just pick whatever level feels like the good one, build characters with that as their basic kit, let'em have a few dips into secondary and tertiary angles, do a lot of getting thrown out of orders and taking major injuries and getting temporarily possessed or infused with mystery things. And you can do the plucky young kids in over their head thing with this sort of system easily enough. Start off with just the tertiary interest/mini-skill-packs, and once whatever you want to grow into starts coming up, rapidly grow into that over the course of a few adventures, no needing some big dramatic status quo change like this usually calls for.
Oh and I haven't been talking about video games here, but kill experience there too. If I'm not doing the whole Metroidvania/Zeld'em Up thing to pick up new powers as I explore, just gimme the whole kit from the get-go. Have traditional difficulty curves. We're good. Leave the skill trees and the level-grinding out of it. What are you holding back for, replayability? It's been raining free big-name big commitment games for years. Quit demanding that much of our time.
Oh and I keep forgetting to beg for money while I write these. I went 24 hours here without eating because I was just out of food and couldn't afford to go to the store. Someone took pity on me and hand delivered a big bowl of soup. Things are getting real bad. Patreon link.
so instead of actually working on my D&D campain I instead made a spreadsheet on docs that helps dms keep track of the xp given to the players, what they’re current xp is and what level they are based off of the xp they have. Its super simple with only three collums, well mostly simple, the third collum which tells you the level is a massive if, then statement. Anyway here is the link, just when you open in it make a copy and then you can edit it.
Well it appears the duolingo forums are imploding...
XP being capped to 20 when testing out instead of 10 XP for each lesson being skipped.
Such a minor change causing such an outrage.
But what other option did duolingo have if they are making a league system? Seems the league wouldn’t work if people could earn truck loads of XP via testing out or taking placement tests in languages they know well.
What are your thought, if any, on thisminir but apparently controversial change?
Milestones, XP Rewards, & Training Your Players, Longer Thoughts The flowchart of the "murder hobo." Game systems, role-playing game systems, are a set of constraints on cooperative imaginative play that are designed to facilitate making up stories together…
