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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5331210" data-attributes="member: 55271">Justin Alexander once playtested a system where characters could spend money to purchase training to duplicate the effects of magical equipment instead of directly buying magical equipment. It had some glitches, but it was an interesting way of keeping the math balanced while still having characters who were inherently awesome instead of awesome because they had nifty equipment.In any case, a variant of this could be an interesting expression of the "treasure for XP" idea.One of the behaviors being encouraged, however, is explicitly "go look for treasure". And since treasure is gained through adventuring, the system enforces a balance between the adventuring portion of a character's life (where they go to get the treasure) and the non-adventuring portions of the character's life (the goals they spend the treasure to achieve) while still allowing the individual player and group to define exactly what balance is ideal for themselves.While it's true that the very earliest dungeons were "start at the dungeon entrance", it wasn't long before Arneson's groups were exploring the world outside of the dungeon. And that was driven by the player's desire to explore the agendas of their characters outside of the dungeon; and insofar as that's true, I suspect the XP system had something to do with it.The "strip the dungeon" thing can be a bit debilitating when it comes to designing awesome adventure venues. ("I'd love to include a door of solid gold, but let's be honest: The <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ers are going to melt it down.")But, frankly, it doesn't take treasure = XP for the PCs to enter "strip the dungeon" mode. It just takes "treasure is valuable" for that to happen. And that seems like a fairly basic property of treasure.</blockquote>

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