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OSR/older D&D and XP from gold - is there a "proper" alternative?
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<blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7459675" data-attributes="member: 19857"><p>This is why you give XP for gold, though - because this is the kind of game you want to play/run. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And all of that is exactly why the game has been moving away from giving out XP for gold for decades.</p><p></p><p>XP for gold is great if you want to run a "dungeon heist" game. A ragtag group of shady characters - each with their own area of expertise - are brought together through their connections because the owner of a mysterious map needs a crew to help him recover a fabulous lost treasure that is held in the ruined tower of the mad wizard Yrag-Xagyg. In a game like that - where the story is the heist - giving out XP for gold and encouraging paranoia and backstabbing amongst the crew makes perfect sense.</p><p></p><p>Once you go beyond that and start using D&D as a more generic "fantasy story simulator" you need to rethink your incentives. If you want to encourage teamwork, you don't want to reward stealing from other PCs. if you want to encourage heroic action, you'll want to reward the folks who dive into the fray. If you want to encourage cleverness, you'll want to hand out something immediately as a reward when the players are clever, etc. </p><p></p><p>Or you might want to go full-on simulation and think about XP in a more literal fashion as "what it takes to learn". In the old days we had a house rule in some of the skill-based games we used (Torg comes to mind, though there were others) that you could only spend experience points to raise skills if you failed a certain number of times when you used the skill - after you hit that threshold you could pay to raise the skill and then start counting again. Because the idea was that it was only through failure that you really learn something - succeeding just shows you already know how to do it, failing is when you can think about what you're doing wrong and how to fix it next time. (Of course that wasn't about earning XP as much as about spending it - but you could do something similar. In the Apocalypse Engine games you only earn XP when you try to do something and fail, so there's at least one game engine out there that uses that as a measure).</p><p></p><p>So there are a lot of alternatives out there. Now you ask for OSR/old school appropriate alternatives and a LOT of that depends on what exactly YOU mean by OSR/old school. Because everyone seems to have their own definition of it. The way you choose to line up incentives for XP definitely impacts how your game feels - to me a "true" old school dungeon delve involves party backstabbing and grubbing for coins in a hole in the ground, so XP for gold is the only way to go to get that feel. If that's not what old school means to you, then you need to think about lining up incentives for party activities. What are the "core activities" you think constitute an old school game? Once you've named them, you'll have a pretty good idea for what you should be rewarding with XP when the PCs are doing them.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jer, post: 7459675, member: 19857"] This is why you give XP for gold, though - because this is the kind of game you want to play/run. And all of that is exactly why the game has been moving away from giving out XP for gold for decades. XP for gold is great if you want to run a "dungeon heist" game. A ragtag group of shady characters - each with their own area of expertise - are brought together through their connections because the owner of a mysterious map needs a crew to help him recover a fabulous lost treasure that is held in the ruined tower of the mad wizard Yrag-Xagyg. In a game like that - where the story is the heist - giving out XP for gold and encouraging paranoia and backstabbing amongst the crew makes perfect sense. Once you go beyond that and start using D&D as a more generic "fantasy story simulator" you need to rethink your incentives. If you want to encourage teamwork, you don't want to reward stealing from other PCs. if you want to encourage heroic action, you'll want to reward the folks who dive into the fray. If you want to encourage cleverness, you'll want to hand out something immediately as a reward when the players are clever, etc. Or you might want to go full-on simulation and think about XP in a more literal fashion as "what it takes to learn". In the old days we had a house rule in some of the skill-based games we used (Torg comes to mind, though there were others) that you could only spend experience points to raise skills if you failed a certain number of times when you used the skill - after you hit that threshold you could pay to raise the skill and then start counting again. Because the idea was that it was only through failure that you really learn something - succeeding just shows you already know how to do it, failing is when you can think about what you're doing wrong and how to fix it next time. (Of course that wasn't about earning XP as much as about spending it - but you could do something similar. In the Apocalypse Engine games you only earn XP when you try to do something and fail, so there's at least one game engine out there that uses that as a measure). So there are a lot of alternatives out there. Now you ask for OSR/old school appropriate alternatives and a LOT of that depends on what exactly YOU mean by OSR/old school. Because everyone seems to have their own definition of it. The way you choose to line up incentives for XP definitely impacts how your game feels - to me a "true" old school dungeon delve involves party backstabbing and grubbing for coins in a hole in the ground, so XP for gold is the only way to go to get that feel. If that's not what old school means to you, then you need to think about lining up incentives for party activities. What are the "core activities" you think constitute an old school game? Once you've named them, you'll have a pretty good idea for what you should be rewarding with XP when the PCs are doing them. [/QUOTE]
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