OSR/older D&D and XP from gold - is there a "proper" alternative?

[Ancalagon]

Hello

So I'm looking into the Spiked Gobling Punch system (itself based on GLOG, itself based on older editions of D&D, a simple yet very intriguing system, esp magic) and one of the (to me) striking elements is that you don't get XP for killing monsters, but from gold. The logic is that your characters aren't going in the dungeon (or other adventurish things) to kill monsters - they are going in there to get treasure. This encourages the players to favor cunning over brawn and leads to better play. I'm given to understand that this feature is not unique to GLOG but is how it was done in older editions (I started playing with 2nd ed).

I really do agree that killing the monsters shouldn't be the objective. And I really think that cunning over brawn is *good*. There is no need to force battle, it will happen sooner or later anyway. Monsters as XP can really distort the game.

buuuuut

I'm kind of bothered by gold as the source of XP, because it too can distort the game! It encourages PCs stealing and hiding treasure from each other - if you palm that golf-ball-sized diamond and don't share it, you might have just gone up 2 levels. Not all adventuring should be about money. And what you learn from an adventure isn't just about the reward.

It can also lead to logic-defying situation. If two groups go into an identical barrow, and at the end of one there is a small copper bowl worth 5 gp, the party made xp... but if the other groups - having faced the same traps and the same monsters - find at the end a 50 pound bejeweled golden bowl worth 10 000 xp, they somehow learned 2 000 more than the unlucky people who found the dinky bowl? A group of hero that repels a week long zombie siege in an abandoned tower might gain nothing, while others who rob a fat merchant might bet 500 XP for a lazy heist. This isn't right.

Lastly it can put odd constrains on the GM, as the power and advancement of the heroes is now directly tied on monetary reward. If the GM wants to run some kind of gritty game with low monetary reward where the heroes are constantly poor... they won't level up. Conversly, if the party is going to find a huge sum for plot reason... probably a bad idea too.

So... what why I don't like it. What I would like to learn is if there are good alternatives that are "osr/old school appropriate" to gold as XP out there?

thanks,

 

[Charlaquin]

XP is an incredibly useful tool for encouraging desired player behavior, to the point that I believe “what am I going to award XP for?” is just an important a question when planning a campaign as “what are the themes?” Want a campaign with a lot of fights to the death? Give XP for killing monsters. Want a campaign where fighting is common, but players let fleeing enemies escape? Give just as much XP for routing monsters as for killing them. Want a campaign where conflict is common but characters favor diplomatic solutions whenever possible? Give XP for enemies defeated, but give more XP for resolving conflicts without violence. Want a campaign where fighting is a last resort? Don’t give XP for combat, but give it for treasure earned. Want a campaign where the characters prioritize the mission above all else? Only give XP for completed quests. Want a campaign where exploration is the primary focus? Give XP for new points of interest discovered.

Once you understand that players will always find and exploit the optimal strategy for earning XP, you can easily encourage whatever style of play you want simply by rewarding it with XP.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm pretty sure that, if you choose to go that route, the DM is supposed to design the dungeon like it was an old video game where the players are going for the high score. It's your job to make sure that GP/XP awards are appropriate for how hard they are to reach. The best treasure is found above a pit of spikes, and if you botch the jump then you die.

If you want to run a game where characters advance more quickly than their wealth would dictate (and you don't want to just change the XP charts), or if you want to roll randomly for treasure without penalizing advancement, you can normalize the amount of XP gained per GP found.

For an easy example, let's say that you want the party to gain a level if they find everything in this dungeon. You then roll randomly for each bit of treasure (or place the amounts you think are appropriate), and equate that to the amount of XP required to gain a level. If the dungeon only contains 300 copper, but it takes 6000 XP to gain a level, then each copper found would award 20 XP to the party.

 

[amethal]

I'm kind of bothered by gold as the source of XP, because it too can distort the game! It encourages PCs stealing and hiding treasure from each other - if you palm that golf-ball-sized diamond and don't share it, you might have just gone up 2 levels. Not all adventuring should be about money. And what you learn from an adventure isn't just about the reward.

If you want "realistic" experience then I think your best bet is just to throw out the Gold=XP idea.

But if you just want to tweak the Gold=XP a bit, one rule that might work is that you only get XP from Gold when you spend it. It might then become obvious if one character has been spending too much.

However, if I was worried about the "stealing from the party" scenario I'd just ask my players not to do it. If, for some reason, that does not work for your group, then you could award XP on a group basis - everybody gets a share of the XP from the diamonds the thief has palmed, even though they don't officially even know they exist.

It doesn't really matter what basis you allocate XP - the gold is just a proxy here - so long as everyone knows what the basis is and can make rational "risk vs reward" decisions. A DM who stuck a 5 gp bowl at the end of the Tomb of Horrors without giving the players a reasonable chance to realise ahead of time that they were most likely risking their characters for nothing is a bad DM.

It very much doesn't work for all situations. I think you are better off not running certain adventures if they don't fit your XP system.

The characters in the Zombie Siege will be asking "what is in it for us?" and if the answer is "nothing" then don't run it. However, if the Zombie Siege is the direct result of the choices the characters have previously made - they were warned not to loot the tomb of the Necromancer, as the tomb's undead guardians are relentless in recovering pilfered goods - then it becomes fair game.

In my games, I don't bother with XP. Characters level after reaching milestones, and if they haven't reached a milestone for a while (for whatever reason, although getting sidetracked is the usual one) then they level anyway. It works for our group because there is no behaviour I am seeking to encourage - not even turning up for the session (absent players get full XP) as playing the game is considered to be its own reward.

 

[Les Moore]

JMHO, but sometimes the DM should take a particularly lucky session, and wholesale out XP, rather than literally funding several levels
with one treasure hoard. This would take evil personal venality out of play. (Ancagalon's example: "PCs stealing and hiding treasure from each other")
One of the benefits to XP being tied to monsters is it avoids players over-leveling, upon finding a treasure hoard. PCs with experience, IME, without
player experience, are not very worthwhile.

 

[GMMichael]

A group of hero that repels a week long zombie siege in an abandoned tower might gain nothing, while others who rob a fat merchant might bet 500 XP for a lazy heist. This isn't right.

Gain nothing? They can tell their story at public houses for tips, get paid as anti-zombie informants/consultants, and make cool zombie-story T-shirts, cereal boxes, and flamethrowers...merchandizing!

 

[Jer]

It encourages PCs stealing and hiding treasure from each other - if you palm that golf-ball-sized diamond and don't share it, you might have just gone up 2 levels. ,

This is why you give XP for gold, though - because this is the kind of game you want to play/run.

Not all adventuring should be about money. And what you learn from an adventure isn't just about the reward.
...
It can also lead to logic-defying situation.
...
Lastly it can put odd constrains on the GM ...

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.

 

[Les Moore]

I'm not a real fan of the "gold for XP" regimen, because RPGs are fashioned after real life, to a great degree. And no amount of money can buy
experience, in real life. Or look at the adventurers who delve for six or eight expeditions and come up relatively empty-handed, each time. Are
they to hit paydirt, on the 10th attempt, and suddenly jump 8 to 11 levels? IMO they should be gradually leveling, awarded XP by the DM. This also gives the player the chance to max the character properly, by vetting at each level.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not a real fan of the "gold for XP" regimen, because RPGs are fashioned after real life, to a great degree. And no amount of money can buy experience, in real life.

XP for killing enemies isn’t particularly “realistic” either. And at any rate, not everyone considers realism a high priority in D&D.

Or look at the adventurers who delve for six or eight expeditions and come up relatively empty-handed, each time. Are they to hit paydirt, on the 10th attempt, and suddenly jump 8 to 11 levels? IMO they should be gradually leveling, awarded XP by the DM. This also gives the player the chance to max the character properly, by vetting at each level.

Why would you design your adventure that way if you’re using gold as XP? It’s entirely possible to distribute gold gradually throughout a campaign the same way it is to distribute monsters.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The last time I ran 1e, I stressed that all XP is divided equally amongst the PCs, always. This was in part caused by the person playing a barbarian declaring their intent to break all the magic items for XP and also to prevent that sort of backstabbing.