Ditch Experience Points Forever!

When I left role-playing games long ago, in the ‘90s, the future of experience points seemed to be simply as a reward for lively role-playing. It included successful achievement of in-story goals, but it increasingly meant actually playing your character in the choices you made and even in how you acted. Players were rewarded for characterizing their characters. That was the direction of character design in role-playing games back then. Exhortations to get into character appeared already in Basic D&D and the first edition of AD&D, but it became a part of game mechanics. Some games soon built in personality-based traits, often in the form of disadvantage traits that reward players with a trade-off for taking them. (This is the route of GURPS, following the early superhero game Champions.) If your character had a bad temper or felt compelled to save children—officially, on your characters sheet—then acting those characteristics out rewarded you with more experience points. That was playing your character. Every gamer I knew expected that they had to do that. That was our idea of player skill. You had to play the loosely predefined role of your character to get a reward.
 

XP for GP

The OSR movement came along some time ago and said, no, the very original way was the best way: experience points are given for gold pieces recovered by adventuring! Even getting paid to go on an adventure doesn’t count. OSR gamers seem split over whether butchering and burning monsters should give experience as well. Either way, in D&D and its clones, these are the two standard ways to advance in power. You steal and you kill. Since character growth means largely an increase in lethal force and the ability to take treasure, this works, in a way.

From the point of view of the gaming scene at the time when I left it, that way was hopelessly retrograde. But retro is part of the point of the OSR folks. The justification for it emphasizes role-playing games as games. XP for gold rewards game play, not persona-play. It rewards exploration and encourages risk in the face of encounters. Characters aren’t fictional personas; they are costume shells of mutually complementary character class abilities employed for the expression of “player skill.” Skill at what? Skill at exploring and defeating the dungeon, that’s what!

XP for gold means that DMs must deposit treasures with fixed values in their dungeon or wilderness, where they await greedy fingers behind traps and claws. If players want to level up and get more powers, they must unlock the secrets of the environment that the DM has populated with challenges. DMs must scale the treasure they tuck into the environments appropriately for the current power-level of the characters involved, and treasure has to be boosted if there are more players in the game among whom it is necessary to divvy up coins. Otherwise advancement will slow and players will get frustrated or bored.

Motivation for the characters (really, for the players) to grab that gold is guaranteed because the characters don’t gain power without plunder. They want treasure because treasure moves the game towards the one goal at the heart of the rules of the Original Game: more hit points! Now I can kill you and you cannot kill me! The game world becomes a labyrinth of cool settings with hidden video-game-style Easter eggs to find so that you can unlock your character’s level-ups.

And why not? That probably can be fun. The game Munchkin is a spoof of this syndrome, and a lot of people love it.

An old alternative: XP for achieving goals

A lot of games by the early 1980s had already abandoned the kill-and-snatch approach to experience points. It made especially little sense for role-playing games in non-fantasy genres. Superheroes, government agents, and space explorers do not advance through gold pieces or killing minotaurs. That simply doesn’t work outside of a dungeon or wilderness fantasy environment. Game designers began to put in rules that experience points should come as a result of goals achieved. If you save that princess or stop that lich, however you do it, you get the reward and your character matures in power. There is no financial accounting session at the end of a module.

A danger with the goal-achievement approach is that grave sin, railroading. When the referee predetermines the goals, it can lead to trapping the players into a course of action that they have no choice about. The characters do not advance unless they achieve the goals that the referee dreamed up beforehand. The Alexandrian recently wrote about railroading as “player abuse”! I agree that railroading can make things less fun for everybody. Still, players surely like to be rewarded for achievements, and the success of non-fantasy genres of gaming show that XP for achievements can work well.

 

Another old alternative: using abilities

Early Chaosium games with the Basic Roleplaying engine found a great alternative to experience points. If you use a character’s ability successfully in a game session or scenario, then you have a chance to increase that ability slightly. That chance diminishes the higher your ability goes, so that beginners in a skill advance rapidly, but mastery is hard to achieve. Using abilities is what improves abilities. The more you are challenged, the better you get. Players who sit back and whose characters do little get little reward. Brilliant.

It also hints at another avenue for character advancement. Just as sessions in the old system of GP for XP may conclude with a bit of accounting and possible level-ups, games by Chaosium made the end of the session or scenario the moment to take stock of player advancement. What if we just made it all about that end-of-session moment, and refused to count points? This leads to my method, which flushes tallies of experience points away for good.

My alternative: Chapters instead of XP

Referees who stock their scenarios with opportunities for experience points—monsters to defeat and treasure to take or goals to achieve—are always already estimating how long it will take for the characters in their game to level up. They just do so with prearranged numbers. They decide what counts as success, and they give a boost to characters’ powers through the medium of experience points accordingly.

If the referee already controls the rate at which XP can be handed out, then XP are to an extent a fiction, a buffer between the referee and the players to justify rates of advancement.

I say, get rid of experience points entirely. You do not need them!

My home-brew game works by Chapters.

A substantial play session for me lasts about three to four hours. Long ago they could be much longer, but life is busy now. In any case, a session culminates, one way or another, in a stopping-point or a cliffhanger that makes sense in the fiction of the game. I call this unit of [real time player engagement + challenging story events] a Chapter. I give the Chapter a name—perhaps consulting the players about the name they think is most fitting—and the players write that on their character sheet in a list of Chapters Completed. The character’s experience develops as a descriptive list of session-length events in the character’s tale.

In my home-brew game system, there are no classes or levels, but upon completion of a Chapter, players pick from a list of possible small upgrades to their character. Every session they grow just a little. Every session has a reward. Every third Chapter Completed entails a bigger reward, wherein one of the core stats can go up slightly. (It works in this game system.) Players do not wait longingly for the next level.

They are not allowed to improve in characteristics that were not tried or tested during the game session. On the other hand, if they tested some trait and failed, they are allowed to improve in that area. Often we learn by failure. So do characters in my game. Losing a sword duel can teach one to be a better sword-fighter. Getting out of the dungeon alive is enough to improve. That which does not kill them makes them stronger.

In D&D this can still work, levels and all. The DM decides how heroic the campaign mood is. You, the DM, decide how many Chapters it takes for a character to level up. Two substantial Chapters for  one level-up will be enough for the taste of many. Then your players won’t get bored and neither will you. One level per Chapter Completed is a very fast-paced zero-to-hero campaign (not my style, but the kids will love it). Three or more Chapter for a level-up creates a grittier tale, requiring patient players, or players who meet to play with each other frequently. (JC mentioned that his players are still on level one after eleven sessions!) If you are a DM, you probably plan character level-ups tentatively already.

So, you say skeptically, in this system of experience by Chapters, why wouldn’t the players simply stall the action to power up gradually without hard work?

Need you ask? You simply declare that they aren’t doing enough—they’re not doing their part as players—and so the current Chapter is ongoing! It’s not over if they do nothing! Hanging around the tavern at the Keep on the Borderlands will never finish a Chapter! My players don’t finish a Chapter by dithering and delaying. Session Zero often is just a prologue with no “experience” gains. They expect this. Whatever the case, I tell them that they haven’t earned any gains yet. That’s what the Referee is for. And you know what? The players know when they have done very little, too. They do not complain when I tell them they are not there yet.

If you had players who care so little about the shared enjoyment of the game that they wanted to subvert the fun to give their character an easy advantage by dragging their heels, you would have a bigger problem: unskillful players.

Character motivation is the player’s job first

Experience points exist to motivate players to do stuff with their characters and to reward them for it. But you can’t force your players to want to play and engage with the game. If they won’t come up with strong enough motives for their own characters, so that they, the players, stay in the game, they are being lazy or dull and they are not being good players. It’s their job to develop a background, any background story, that will motivate their character. If you, the referee, have ideas for them, by all means feed them to your players. If anybody refuses to motivate his or her character, simply ask them if they really want to play.

Wanting to play an awesome imagination game with their friends should be motive enough for your players to come up with even the crassest of character motives. “My character wants to be rich!” “My character is seeking magical power!” These are enough for OSR-style games, or, probably, any role-playing games. It’s on your players to make these motives clear. Maybe they are seeking treasure for their cleric’s god, to found a new temple. Maybe they are trying to prove to the princess’ father that they are worthy of her hand. Maybe they are searching for Dear Old Dad, another long-lost adventurer who disappeared on his own quest. Anything that works and that is fun should be enough.

If your players say, “I just don’t know why my character is doing this!” then tell them to make another character. Seriously. Tell them to make one that has a reason to go on the adventures you created. Or be creative and give them something to get motivated about! Players may groan about railroading, but disasters and crises from the outside should be able to trigger adventures. Misfortune is not the same thing as railroading. You OSR gamers, who love random tables, just make another random table to decide character motives for you.

This is a part of player skill. Designing a character that will be fun to play and that will keep the player involved is the fundamental player skill. Players: keeping yourself, as a player, engaged in fun is its own reward. You don’t need XP for that. Get into the game, do stuff, and your character will improve, too. The Referee guarantees it, so long as your character lives. Either way, you will have a great time.

Referees: start your game sessions—each session—asking the players to recall, out loud, what their character’s motives are. If they can’t state them, you need to get creative as a group. But trust them. They’re creative. They’re gamers. They’ll come up with something.

Summary: Ditch experience points now

You don’t need experience points. They limit the possibilities of the game. They distract you as you design scenarios. Players get railroaded by them. They reward nasty characters (not players) and punish kindness. They don’t make much sense. They hinder players from coming up with creative motivations for their characters on their own. They stunt your collective creativity.

Ditch experience points and focus on stuff that’s more fun: an adventure story created collaboratively between friends through a rule-structured game. Character advancement will happen gradually anyway. Just make it so. Check in the with the Referee after every session, as you already do, and find out.

May your characters have many chapters in their tale!