D&D General An alternative to XP

[Lanefan]

Then you are the anomaly IME, not the norm.

Why? You can adventure without leveling, so if you are pulling a PC out of the adventure to level you are sort of metagaming IMO because their only reason to train is to gain a new level...

Party enters Keep on the Borderlands and does pretty well. After several days of hard adventuring characters A and B have bumped and need training while C, D, and E haven't yet. Party goes back to the town to restock; A and B stay there to train up and are replaced by new recruits F and G. Party goes back in; a few days later C needs training, D is dead, and E (who judging by its slow advancement must be a Paladin!) is still 1st level. Party goes back to town again; A and B are still training, C joins them, new recruits H and I are taken in, and back into the field they go.

Lather rinse repeat; and thus is troupe play born.

So, like I said, IME we only pulled PCs and introduced new ones if it was pertinent to the story.

If someone can't adventure right now because she's busy training I'd say that's pertinent to the story. The party have a choice: recruit a replacement and carry on, or wait for her to finish training and thus maybe give the dungeon a few weeks to restock itself and prepare defenses.

 

[Lanefan]

“Can we go kill some orcs? I’m really close to leveling!” is literally the effect I’m talking about in action. Humans are motivated to make the progress bar fill up. Now, you may not like the effect that causes on your game, that’s totally fine. But the effect is very real.

And as I see it that levelled characters in the setting kind of know when they're ready for training - and when they're potentially about to need training - I-as-DM really don't have any problem with this.

That’s like saying jackhammer isn’t a powerful tool for everyone. A jackhammer is objectively a powerful tool. It might not be the right tool for the job you’re doing, and if so, obviously you shouldn’t use it. But it’s still a powerful tool, independently of your need for it (or lack thereof).

Jackhammers, like fireballs, can be universal problem-solvers in the right hands.

 

[Lanefan]

@Rabulias

That is talking about time in the campaign and keeping your game world equal to real life for the sake of simplicity when , not about saying "if you go a week without playing the game, a week should pass in game time". That would be ridiculous if that was the case.

I always read that DMG passage as saying exactly what the bolded bit says above, and thus I too thought it ridiculous.

That said, I also think Gygax assumed sessions would never end in mid-anything and wrote his books accordingly.

 

[Lanefan]

My argument was that you can be just as loosey-goosey with combat XP if you want to, so the benefit is not with counting encounters over XP, it’s with judging encounter difficulty after-the-fact and awarding progress (be it a fraction of an encounter or an amount of XP) based on that, as opposed to planning combat encounters around an award budget and then giving that budgeted award regardless of how difficult the encounter actually ended up being. Whether the award is XP or counting encounters doesn’t actually make a difference, except that the former is more granular.

Regardless how loosey or goosey the system in use might be, my issue is with judging encounter difficulty after the fact in that doing so would unfairly penalize parties who made an encounter easier on themselves (or got lucky with the dice) while unfairly boosting parties who made a mess of things and thereby made an encounter appear harder than it should have.

That said, I don't plan anything around "award budgets" (the very thought makes me shudder). Instead, they do what they do and they get what they get. Getting past that trap is worth 85 xp? That's what they'll get (divided however way, depending on who did what) for getting past it; and I'll have put the trap in first before assigning any sort of xp value to it. Ditto monsters, or any other xp-awarding element.

 

[Charlaquin]

I always read that DMG passage as saying exactly what the bolded bit says above, and thus I too thought it ridiculous.

That said, I also think Gygax assumed sessions would never end in mid-anything and wrote his books accordingly.

Although, if you could somehow insure sessions never ended mid-anything, then having away-from-table time equal to in-game downtime could be interesting. I can’t imagine how one would realistically insure that, short of having the luxury of always being able to keep playing until you resolve whatever you’re doing. But if you could.

 

[Charlaquin]

Regardless how loosey or goosey the system in use might be, my issue is with judging encounter difficulty after the fact in that doing so would unfairly penalize parties who made an encounter easier on themselves (or got lucky with the dice) while unfairly boosting parties who made a mess of things and thereby made an encounter appear harder than it should have.

Yeah, for sure, that is a drawback of such a technique.

That said, I don't plan anything around "award budgets" (the very thought makes me shudder). Instead, they do what they do and they get what they get. Getting past that trap is worth 85 xp? That's what they'll get (divided however way, depending on who did what) for getting past it; and I'll have put the trap in first before assigning any sort of xp value to it. Ditto monsters, or any other xp-awarding element.

That doesn’t surprise me, given what I know of your play preferences.

 

[Oofta]

About as much as you have a level stamped on yours and get better at fighting because you've worked at your desk job for the last year.

Huh? As a software developer my skills grew and expanded during the course of my career. So, yes, I did level up. Why would I level up in a class unrelated to what I did?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Ok. It’s clear to me you either haven’t been following or haven’t understood the conversation I’ve been having with Yaarel.

Okay, we're at the gaslighting stage. Cool. Toodles.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Huh? As a software developer my skills grew and expanded during the course of my career. So, yes, I did level up. Why would I level up in a class unrelated to what I did?

Oh, goodness, now people in real life have classes to go with their levels? This is bizzarro world.

 

[Charlaquin]

Okay, we're at the gaslighting stage. Cool. Toodles.

I would appreciate it if you didn’t accuse me of a literal abuse tactic. If you think I’m being dishonest, fine, (I’m not, but obviously I can’t convince you otherwise), but there is a world of difference between that and gaslighting, and you trivialize the term by using it to describe arguments on the internet.