I’ve all but stopped giving out XP in my games. I mean, I guess that isn’t entirely true. My last couple campaigns have been Savage Worlds games and I assign XP at the end of the sessions based on how much I feel we got done that night. Some evenings our gaming group tends to chat about work and families and computer games and sports. Some nights you can tell we need time to chat, vent, or share. When we eventually get down to gaming it can mean the session is shortened. I generally give out less XP for those sessions.
Maybe what I mean is I don’t calculate XP. I can recall the heady days of yesteryear when we’d tally up how many kobolds got slain, how much loot was gathered, and what magic items were found. Arcane formulae were applied to derive the magical number of treasured experience points we would receive. These were added to the former total and everybody held their breath waiting to see if the math would grant them a new level for their character. Remember those times when you came up just a handful of XP short?
I love Piratecat’s stories about “Peeps for EPs.” Apparently it was common for the players to bring candy and other treats to the gaming sessions. Around Easter somebody brought several packages of Peeps. A good number of them were not eaten and then became lost behind some gaming books on a shelf or something. A LONG time later they were unearthed during an archeological expedition among the dusty bookshelves (cue Indiana Jones music) and comments were made about how edible they might be at that point in their shelf life.
At the end of the gaming session, a player came up just shy of the number of experience points needed to gain a level. Piratecat contemplated their predicament and offered that, if they would consume one of these stale, months-old Peeps, he would grant them the needed XP. The player did this and their character got their level. I don’t recall if the player survived or not. It’s not the most important part of the story.
But it goes to prove that, for some of us anyway, XP are a really vital part of the game. It is, literally, how we keep score. And over the years I’ve done it in a lot of different ways; some dictated by the game system. I played Rolemaster for 12 years and its XP system has levels of complexity unrivaled by most games I’ve seen. Another game, Powers & Perils (which will always have a special place in my twisted heart), tracked XP separately for every single skill your character had! A friend and I even devised our own XP system that we used for 3e D&D-- it was kind of popular around ENWorld for a while.
Then one day I woke up and discovered I really did not give a crap about XP at all. We were spending quite a bit of time calculating and applying it to the individual characters. It was raising questions about what happened when a player couldn’t make it to the session. It was occasionally even causing some minor hurt feelings when it seemed that certain activities were being rewarded at rates different than some players preferred. I took a deep breath and chucked the whole thing.
I decided to do what a lot of other GMs have done before me and just have the PCs advance in level at a rate that had nothing to do with experience points. Notably, I opted to have them gain a level every three sessions. It was simple; we stopped thinking about XP and simply focused on the game, story, and fun. It was a huge success. We discovered none of us really cared about keeping score using XP. It was remarkably freeing.
Not too long ago I discovered that this same notion applies to life in general. My wife works in the healthcare field and was working in a private clinic. It was often the practice in their office to double book patients. The therapists would bounce from one to the other. Some of her co-workers would beam with pride and say, “I saw 14 patients today!” My wife would come home to me beaten and miserable and say, “I saw 14 patients today.”
How is it that some employees there loved it and felt a huge sense of accomplishment from their work while my wife hated it? Because they were keeping score in completely different ways. Those other folks liked seeing their productivity numbers up high like that, and they liked the pay bonuses they would get as a result. My wife on the other hand felt she was having to subdivide her attention too much and wasn’t giving good patient care. She was much less concerned with how many people she helped and more concerned with how attentive she was to each patient.
I’m happy to report this knowledge allowed her to seek out a job doing home-health care. As a result, she sees only one patient at a time and her focus can be completely on that person the entire visit. Furthermore, these are people so debilitated that they can’t leave their homes to get help at a clinic. While under my wife’s care they are able to progress to the point where they are ambulatory and can get out and about. That is a huge kind of progress and gives her an enormous sense of satisfaction about what she does. Same kind of work. Different method of keeping score. And it makes all the difference.
I see this in my own career change as well. My former business as a videographer was not personally fulfilling. It was using almost none of my strengths and I felt no higher purpose in doing it. So the only good way I had of keeping score was the money I made doing it. I focused on that a lot, often sitting there in the middle of a job mentally calculating how much money I was going to make from it. Bleah. Closing that business at the end of the year was a happy, happy moment for me.
The work I do now as a coach is FULL of the kinds of gratification I seek. What I love most is helping people. As a result, I’ve minimized the money aspect. The client pays me once at the start of the coaching and then I never have to think about it again. I don’t spend any of my time with my clients thinking about how much money they paid me. I don’t have an accounts receivable. I spend zero time doing collection calls. All my focus is on aiding them and that’s exactly how I want it. That’s how I like to keep score.
Do you track XP in your games? Is that an important way of keeping score for you? How do you track whether you are succeeding in life?
Maybe what I mean is I don’t calculate XP. I can recall the heady days of yesteryear when we’d tally up how many kobolds got slain, how much loot was gathered, and what magic items were found. Arcane formulae were applied to derive the magical number of treasured experience points we would receive. These were added to the former total and everybody held their breath waiting to see if the math would grant them a new level for their character. Remember those times when you came up just a handful of XP short?
I love Piratecat’s stories about “Peeps for EPs.” Apparently it was common for the players to bring candy and other treats to the gaming sessions. Around Easter somebody brought several packages of Peeps. A good number of them were not eaten and then became lost behind some gaming books on a shelf or something. A LONG time later they were unearthed during an archeological expedition among the dusty bookshelves (cue Indiana Jones music) and comments were made about how edible they might be at that point in their shelf life.
At the end of the gaming session, a player came up just shy of the number of experience points needed to gain a level. Piratecat contemplated their predicament and offered that, if they would consume one of these stale, months-old Peeps, he would grant them the needed XP. The player did this and their character got their level. I don’t recall if the player survived or not. It’s not the most important part of the story.
But it goes to prove that, for some of us anyway, XP are a really vital part of the game. It is, literally, how we keep score. And over the years I’ve done it in a lot of different ways; some dictated by the game system. I played Rolemaster for 12 years and its XP system has levels of complexity unrivaled by most games I’ve seen. Another game, Powers & Perils (which will always have a special place in my twisted heart), tracked XP separately for every single skill your character had! A friend and I even devised our own XP system that we used for 3e D&D-- it was kind of popular around ENWorld for a while.
Then one day I woke up and discovered I really did not give a crap about XP at all. We were spending quite a bit of time calculating and applying it to the individual characters. It was raising questions about what happened when a player couldn’t make it to the session. It was occasionally even causing some minor hurt feelings when it seemed that certain activities were being rewarded at rates different than some players preferred. I took a deep breath and chucked the whole thing.
I decided to do what a lot of other GMs have done before me and just have the PCs advance in level at a rate that had nothing to do with experience points. Notably, I opted to have them gain a level every three sessions. It was simple; we stopped thinking about XP and simply focused on the game, story, and fun. It was a huge success. We discovered none of us really cared about keeping score using XP. It was remarkably freeing.
Not too long ago I discovered that this same notion applies to life in general. My wife works in the healthcare field and was working in a private clinic. It was often the practice in their office to double book patients. The therapists would bounce from one to the other. Some of her co-workers would beam with pride and say, “I saw 14 patients today!” My wife would come home to me beaten and miserable and say, “I saw 14 patients today.”
How is it that some employees there loved it and felt a huge sense of accomplishment from their work while my wife hated it? Because they were keeping score in completely different ways. Those other folks liked seeing their productivity numbers up high like that, and they liked the pay bonuses they would get as a result. My wife on the other hand felt she was having to subdivide her attention too much and wasn’t giving good patient care. She was much less concerned with how many people she helped and more concerned with how attentive she was to each patient.
I’m happy to report this knowledge allowed her to seek out a job doing home-health care. As a result, she sees only one patient at a time and her focus can be completely on that person the entire visit. Furthermore, these are people so debilitated that they can’t leave their homes to get help at a clinic. While under my wife’s care they are able to progress to the point where they are ambulatory and can get out and about. That is a huge kind of progress and gives her an enormous sense of satisfaction about what she does. Same kind of work. Different method of keeping score. And it makes all the difference.
I see this in my own career change as well. My former business as a videographer was not personally fulfilling. It was using almost none of my strengths and I felt no higher purpose in doing it. So the only good way I had of keeping score was the money I made doing it. I focused on that a lot, often sitting there in the middle of a job mentally calculating how much money I was going to make from it. Bleah. Closing that business at the end of the year was a happy, happy moment for me.
The work I do now as a coach is FULL of the kinds of gratification I seek. What I love most is helping people. As a result, I’ve minimized the money aspect. The client pays me once at the start of the coaching and then I never have to think about it again. I don’t spend any of my time with my clients thinking about how much money they paid me. I don’t have an accounts receivable. I spend zero time doing collection calls. All my focus is on aiding them and that’s exactly how I want it. That’s how I like to keep score.
Do you track XP in your games? Is that an important way of keeping score for you? How do you track whether you are succeeding in life?
