NeoGrognard

Can we live without experience points? 

Looking around it sure doesn’t seem that way. Just about every game that features a progression system has them. Sure, Call of Cthulhu has experience checks, Mouse Guard has persona and fate points, but for the most part XP is king. 

The funny thing is the more I think on it, I don’t think experience points are the best progression mechanic for D&D. I know this sounds like daft. I mean, wasn’t this system made for D&D? Yes, but some of the obvious concerns of the original system have been discarded, and instead we have a system that basically regulates the speed of progression while incenting action and adventure. Pathfinder even gives you three speeds of progression, and has you pick which one you want based on your play style (and wisely throws out the dead end rules on spending XP for magic item creation). 

But XP systems can sometimes have strange consequences. Even before my 1e game and Masterplan, I overheard this conversation among my Days of Long Shadows blue group.  

Qaj (wizard played by Skaff): Do we stay in the Ice Spire and find a portal in here, or brave the tundra again. 

The rest of the group in unison: Not the tundra! Not the tundra! It’s cold and dangerous out there! 

Thorn (paladin played by Andrew): The lady who runs this place is pretty powerful, and her minions are a pain in the ass. We’ve already had two deaths, and a couple close calls. There’s got to be a better way. 

Qaj: Well, we do have a third option. We are only 300 XP from leveling. Next level I get a ritual. How about we find one more combat encounter in the Spire, I learn Linked Portal and get the hell out of here? 

I have two groups playing in two different versions of my campaign. I call one tan group and the other blue group (the colors come from the initiative cards I use for each group). The play style for each group is slightly different. My tan group love combat, but are more interested in character than complete character optimization, and their decisions tend to be very character driven. Members of my blue group all have interesting characters and backgrounds, but tend to be gear-heads. They argue (seemingly endlessly) over the probability of each success (many of them work or worked for the Magic R&D), character optimization, and whether or not they brought their “A-game” this session. I’ve done quite a bit of house ruling for the tan group, I have little to no house ruling in the blue group depending on which member of blue group you ask. (One blue group member constantly gives me shit for not allowing rain of steel to target invisible creatures, and for making stances end when a creature goes unconscious. He thinks I house rule to Nerf his character.) Still, there was a consensus around the table that they didn’t like Skaff’s solution though leveling (at least not yet). They decided to brave the tundra, at least until they level. My guess if they are in dire enough straits, they’ll use the ritual option. 

Now, when it comes to these guys, I let decisions like this go. I am a strong believer in allowing the players determine play style. I’ll step in every so often with a rules adjudication, but most of the time my job is to create an interesting game with bad guys played to the hilt. But I found it interesting that my metagame group thought that the solution was rulesy and cheesy. 

That’s because at the end of the day, D&D and RPGs are immersive games, and good rules serve that immersion rather than work against it. Now I’m not saying that XP have no place in D&D. I think they’ve done their job admirably, but I think there might be a better way. Here’s my idea. It’s dirt simple, and by no means new. 

After some number of sessions, let your player’s level their character. 

This is basically the experience that XP are trying to provide, but without a lashed-on scoring system. The trick is not to make it arbitrary or at least seem arbitrary. To do that, you need some more guidelines. 

Basically you want to give leveling meaning, specifically story meaning. If it just seems like you counted to three sessions, and at the end of it you tell the players to level up their character, this seems more arbitrary than giving out XP. Instead, I think you want to lash your leveling model on to a structure that is already in D&D and the literature it is based on—quests. 

I like the term quest, but then I like the Arthurian Romances, the Greeks, old historical movies, and Joseph Campbell, so I don’t think World of Warcraft created the term. You could call it a plot point, goals, chapter ends, or even Bob if you want. Right now there are quests in 4e—they basically provide bonus XP for achieving goals, but you can also make your leveling structure talk directly to quests. 

Quests can be a subtle as you want them to be, but they shouldn’t be obscure. Every time your group is introduced to a quest, you don’t have to play a soundtrack with trumpets blaring, but at the same time they should have a reasonable idea (though maybe not always the correct idea) that they’ve picked up a quest. Let me give you an example. 

Before they got sidetracked by a massive ice spire filled with genasi, archons, eisk jaat, frost giants, and ice toads, my blue group was looking for a goliath village that was hidden somewhere in a vast and deadly tundra. Finding the village is a quest. Instead they decided to explore the ice spire. Within that spire they found a number of quests, some of them major (kill some frost giants on behest of the agents of the Ice Spire’s mistress…a task well above their level), others minor, like figuring out the story behind the strange prophet of Olhydra that has a shrine within the Spire. Typically, over the course of a level, if you complete a major quest you level or if you complete two minor quests you level. Major quests can sometime span numerous levels, but minor quests typically don’t. 

Usually it’ll be quite obvious the PCs are on a quest. At the start of G1-3 Against the Giants the characters must “deal a lesson to the clan of hill giants nearby, or else return and put their heads upon the block of the headsman’s axe!” In I6 Ravenloft the quest is determined by the reading of Madam Eva’s gypsy fortune cards, and can change each time the adventure is played. In many ways it feels right for the completion of these things to also involve a level ding. 

Of course there is another side of this coin; in order for this to work, you must learn to structure your game with quests as dings. When a PCs commits to a quest, structure your game toward the completion of that quest. If you are running a sandbox style game, create (or at least outline) the encounters needed to complete that quest. If you want, you can even make it a series of major and minor quests. You can even introduce more quests than you PCs could ever accomplish and level them. If the PCs are too high level, even if they achieve the goal of the quest it does not ding them, or if it is a major quest, it is treated as a minor quest (if you want to be nice). There could still be legitimate story reasons why the PCs would want to “waste their time” on this quest, and I’ll take story reasons over metagame reasons any day of the week. 

For more episodic campaigns, those episodes become the frame for quests. Episode can last one two or three sessions (or even more if you want) and you probably want to vary the size of the quests. 

You can even use some of the core assumptions of your game in order to structure the adventures around quests. You can assume there will be 6-10 encounters (combat, skill, or RPG challenges) in a quest, and build those challenges based on the current level of the PCs. In 4e this is really easy, as a moderately difficult combat encounter is typically consists of a group of monsters, traps, and hazards equal to the number of the PCs and of the same or similar level. Elites count as two monsters, solos count as four. With skill and RPG challenges, just tailor skill checks to the DC of the parties level (or around that DC). Vary the difficult from time to time, with some challenges being easier than the level of the PCs and others being harder. 

What I like about quests is that it fuses the goal of adventure games (to perform adventurous acts) directly to the advancement system, instead of trying to search for a few select components of the goal and giving them numeric values in a points system, which often has the symptom of creating other goals that grow out of the point system. It gives the DM more flexibility in creating challenges, and the players more urgency in finding goals and meeting them. In short if focuses the story and the players on the story rather than a subsystem in the rules set that’s basically trying to accomplish the same thing through abstraction. It also takes out a lot of book keeping on both the DM and the player side. No more giving out points and having that one player who always asks “how many XP do we have again?” It gets folks playing, performing acts of heroism (or anti-heroism) and keeps your players invested in your world, its troubles, and its challenges. 

And that’s what D&D is about.