Drinking and Whoring for XP

[Crothian]

Hey y'all, a while back someone mentioned a game that gave xp for burning money on drinks and whores.

What is College?

 

[Mark]

What is College?

I think we have a new thread-jeopardy champion.

 

[Alzrius]

I haven't played in a game with this rule, but I can imagine that it'd have some effects over the long-term.

For one thing, it'd lead towards the PCs all being of different levels over time. Characters who spend more will gain levels at a faster rate than those who don't (the comparative lack of equipment such characters have compared to those who spend all of their gold on gear won't, I think, be a balancing factor so much as it'll just make those characters lopsided).

This will also encourage spellcasters to create their own magic items more. After all, you burn XP to create magic items, and that's easier to do when you can just spend excess treasure to gain disposable XP.

There'll be some gamers who'll definitely start looking to loot and then hock everything. Be prepared for the guy who'll want to Appraise every damn thing in the dungeon, dump it into a bag of holding, and then sell it.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

Well, back in the old days, gold not spent on equipment or adventure advancement (employing hirelings, bribes, whatever) counted toward XP anyway, right? Killing things and acquiring gold were the two ways to gain XP (apart from bonus points for thespianism). So in that world, if you wanted to color up your gold conversion to XP by saying you spent the gold on whores, drinking and opium, then have at it, heh. It's just flavor.

Assuming you were playing a newer edition, where gold didn't convert into XP, then you'd basically be adding that old rule back in by allowing the XP for spending gold on something that doesn't directly affect gameplay - like drinking/whoring/drugs, right? This is, of course, assuming that you don't already use some system to account for drunkeness, alcholism, addiction, STDs, etc that would create negative effects for too much of any of that.

I'm at work though, so forgive me if I've missed some obvious detail here, heh.

One important detail that folks seem to frequently miss is the way in which XP is earned compared to back then.

In the old days, the rules by default had gold giving XP. Ok, fine. An awful lot of people houseruled that out though, saying that gold was its own reward. The effect this had was that they either tossed out more critters to kill for XP (occasionally I'd see this but not too often) or you simply had slower leveling due to decreased XP being earned (much more common).

3E came along and bumped up the XP being earned from killing monsters; a lot of people freaked at the time, talking about how crazy the XP awards were, but it actually was moving the rate of XP gain back to the rough _default_ assumption.

In other words, since everyone ruled gold didn't give XP, the designers explicitly bumped XP awards to push the rate of leveling back towards the way the game had been intended to run, rather than the slower rate of progression that was much more commonly seen as a by-product of a common houserule.

The version done by Conan I think just whacks a chunk of money out automatically, although I'm hazy on it since I don't have my book handy and haven't read it for a while. I seem to recall it also takes out a bunch/most of your equipment as well.

The article that's being mentioned from Dragon Magazine Issue 10 and was called "Orgies Inc". It suggested that instead of simply gold=xp, it be shifted to gold spent=xp. They had some rules about how it could be spent by various things such as sacrifices, orgies, donations, research, etc. A shortish article but interesting. I believe it showed up in one of the Best Of Dragon compilations.

There was somethings sorta floated like this in a small game called Thugs & Thieves. You can find it here: Thugs & Thieves - SimplePhrase The Thugs & Thieves approach is the whole Vice and Mastery thing. Random sidenote: I say "Thugs & Thieves" and not "T&T" because "T&T" to me is Tunnels & Trolls. Groovy game, but not related to this discussion.

I haven't played in a game with this rule, but I can imagine that it'd have some effects over the long-term.

For one thing, it'd lead towards the PCs all being of different levels over time. Characters who spend more will gain levels at a faster rate than those who don't (the comparative lack of equipment such characters have compared to those who spend all of their gold on gear won't, I think, be a balancing factor so much as it'll just make those characters lopsided).

This will also encourage spellcasters to create their own magic items more. After all, you burn XP to create magic items, and that's easier to do when you can just spend excess treasure to gain disposable XP.

There'll be some gamers who'll definitely start looking to loot and then hock everything. Be prepared for the guy who'll want to Appraise every damn thing in the dungeon, dump it into a bag of holding, and then sell it.

Some good points. There are ways around the potential issue of disparity of character levels and casters creating items, but it's something the GM is going to need to think about explicitly.

The whole looting everything that isn't nailed down? Heh. It still goes on in 3.x games I've been in, but it was a lot more prevalent back in the day.

Personally, I'd caution the OP about trying to use this to make a game "grim-n-gritty". Sure, you _could_ do it; it could also blow up in your face. Lots of GMs seem to be enamored with the idea of "grim-n-gritty" games, but players often aren't so keen on it. Because it generally means they're going to be making new characters frequently. I suspect GMs wouldn't be as keen on the idea if they actually had to keep making new characters. Especially given the complaints I see folks make about creating NPCs and how they have to resort to generators because of the time involved.

A rule like this is much more workable to help guide a group/game into a more "devil may care" attitude towards money, somewhat like you'd see in stuff like Conan and Fafhrd & Grey Mouser.

Of course as with any rule, folks are going to look to see how they can push it.

The trick is that money is simply a means to an end. In D&D, it currently is a scorecard. The only "end" it really serves is to buy up more magic items. Back in the day, the game was about more than simply the endless dungeoncrawl that most folks seem to run, regardless of whether they're actually _in_ a dungeon or not. As characters gained levels, they had to worry about administering lands and crap like that. As the game has evolved, stuff like this has taken more and more of a backseat, while roaming the land forever has become more and more prominent.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

The game that gives you XP for spending money on ale and whores later became D&D. This idea is literally as old as roleplaying itself.

In 1977, Dave Arneson published The First Fantasy Campaign, in which he looks back on the development of the Blackmoor campaign beginning in 1970/71. It's a weird, fascinating, and confusing book because somewhere in that time span, what started out as a series of PvP miniatures-based wars turned into the modern RPG, which seemed as natural to the group at the time as it seems bizarre to us. Arneson does talk about the ongoing evolution of the game. As Scurvy_Platypus mentions, one thing that was established early on was that you got 1 XP for each gold piece you discovered and brought safely out of the dungeon.

The example later published in OD&D makes it clear that you were meant to get the bulk of your XP from treasure-hunting; the first ever supplement for OD&D radically reduced the amount of XP you could get from killing things. This attempt to focus the game on finding creative ways to seek profit & avoid combat was carried over to AD&D, but the message was totally lost on me & I think most other AD&D players.)

Anyway, looking back on the development of the proto-D&D game, Arneson mentions that his group soon evolved a new approach to getting XP from GP. Bringing it out of the dungeon was no longer enough:

"Character motivation was solved by stating that you did not get experience points until the money had been spent on your area of interest. This often led to additional adventures as players would order special cargos from off the board and then have to go and guard them so that the cargo would reach their lodging and THEN the player would get the experience points. More than one poor fellow found that his special motivators would literally run him ragged and get him killed before he got anything."

Note that the FFC list of prices includes both kegs of wine and two different grades of pleasure slaves, so that you could quantify how many wagons worth of wine or women you had to shepherd through the wilderness to your barony in order to earn the XP you'd paid for!

Like many of the essential innovations in RPGs or any other DIY field, this idea seems likely to have been independently invented a number of times. "Orgies, Inc." and The First Fantasy Campaign were both published in 1977, without being influenced by one another as far as I know. And it's possible that Dyson Logos's DM read the Orgies piece in Best of the Dragon, but it seems equally possible to me that he thought of it on his own based on wanting to emulate stories like Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser and/or make the XP for treasure thing "make more sense".

In my White Sandbox/Caverns of Thracia OD&D campaign, I award XP for treasure twice - once for getting it out of the dungeon, like in core OD&D, and once for spending it as per Arneson's inspiration and Jeff Rients' carousing rules. I've never read "Orgies, Inc." but will definitely try to track it down, because I've house-ruled some modifications to Jeff's carousing rules to let them cover spending on other non-game-useful stuff than just raising hell. I'd love to get some other old-school ideas about how it might be done.

I'm really happy with the ways it's helped characters develop unique personalities & expanded the campaign beyond the dungeon. This thread talks about some of the ways players planned to use it. More recently the gold-for-XP rules have led to one assassin PC founding a ASPCA-style animal shelter, and to another magic-user having to taste the giant eagle dung he was passing off as giant roc guano. Good times!

 

[Thanael]

EQUIPMENT: This section goes over the equipment list for characters, starting with weapon stats. In a cute little touch, all the weapon illustrations (even the blunt weapons) are bloodstained. With regard to other goods and spending money, the game deliberately assumes that PCs are going to be blowing their money on various vices (even Scholars who don't go out drinking and whoring will still be collecting a lot of reading materials, for instance). Every week, every character spends at least 50% of any wealth over 50 silver pieces. Otherwise, they wouldn't need to adventure, obviously. As the authors put it: "Conan the RPG, in keeping with the stories, encourages characters to be larger-than-life action heroes capable of achieving their ends with little more than a broadsword and whatever can be found around them. The Games Master is always at liberty to cross items off a character's character sheet in between adventures without compensation if characters begin to become laden down with junk- after all, if they really need something, they can always steal it."

from this review of Conan the Roleplaying Game by Mongoose Publishing

 

[Gunton The Terrible]

Interesting, I would put a limit on spending to avoid someone laying all their gold for xp. Say 25 gold X level per session.

 

[Gunton The Terrible]

Trying this on the group:

Passions & Goals
Bringing back the “gold for xp” arrangement, but with a twist. Each character can earn extra xp for the gold they spend. Characters will define a goals or passions that they are working for and any money spent on obtaining that end can be converted to xp. There will be limits of course to avoid abuse.
Possible passions/goals:
• Carving out a castle in a wild land
• Becoming chief of your tribe or splinter off a new tribe
• Establish a church in a region/village/city
• Feed the poor
• Due to the dangerous life you lead, Wine, Women, and Song
• Taking over or establishing a guild
• Obtaining a noble title
• Marry a noble
• Build a library
• Building a tower, to further you studies, in a remote area.
A limit of 25gp X PC lvl per session will be set. You can always spend more gold, but the xp is capped.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

That looks like a good list of goals, Gunton the Terrible. I'd present it to the players as examples rather than an exhaustive list - part of the fun is seeing what people come up with on their own.

I do cap the amount of gold that can be spent each session to gain XP. As this campaign is devoted to old-school randomness, the cap is determined by a dice roll. Based on Jeff Rients' carousing rules, I have each player who wants to try to gain XP roll a die whose size is determined by the size of the town they're in - 1d6 for a smallish village, 1d8 for a frontier walled city, etc. They spend the roll x 100 gp and gain that many XP - assuming they have enough gold. I then have them make a saving throw to see if there are any complications - save vs. poison if they're carousing, save vs. spells if they're trying to carry out a more cerebral scheme. If the save fails, I roll for mishaps on Rients' table for carousing, or roll up a city encounter or random geas/quest using the Judges Guild's Ready Ref Sheets. Down the road I may make some more specific mishaps for different passions - eventually I will grow tired of (roll) cursing PCs to (roll) grow an inch shorter every week that they (roll) do not return to supply my wizard NPC with roc offal. Hasn't happened yet, though.

 

[Woas]

Basically this is how Barbarians of Lemuria works.

The GM is encouraged to let the character finds mind-blowing amounts of loot. We're talking like Scrooge McDuck, swimming in vault of coins amount. Then the characters describe how they squander all their riches after the adventure on whatever they want. If it's cool, and even better, if the story about how the character spends/squanders their riches provides a good hook for the next adventure: extra Advancement Points.



While we're on the subject, I always wondered if there was a way to somehow capture the tantalizing sexuality present in S&S stories?
I don't really think suggesting actual pornography to the players for every barely-clothed woman-folk the characters save from the snake-god's sacrificial altar is honestly all that exciting. In fact it's kind of creepy. Maybe best left out...?