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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6825012" data-attributes="member: 5834">It's meta-game. As in the players never know how much experience they have. They never use it in combat or in the actual game world. It's a tracking number that loosely represents advancement. It advances all abilities, even ones the player doesn't use when he advances a level or that don't involve combat. The generic proficiency bonus advances and it affects all skills, even if you didn't use any of them in any encounter. It's always been this way for every game system.Even skill point game system it is meta-game because you can usually spend it on any skill you wish even if you didn't use it. If a game forced you to spend skill points or experience only on skills you used during the combats or encounters, then it wouldn't be meta-game. Given how it is used in D&D and 5E, it is a meta-game number.It was meta-game back in the old days. It was meta-game in 3E. It is meta-game in 5E. Experience is a tracking number that gives players a vicarious sense of character improvement and allows the DM to use a higher level of enemy to challenge them. It's always been that way in D&D and most game systems. It has little to nothing to do with the actual experience of what they are doing, even less so in a game like 5E where a generic proficiency number advancing improves everything the character can do.I'm not going to fault you for wanting to see it as "real" knowledge. I don't see it that way and never have. Experience points have always been a tracking number to create the illusion of advancement with not much tied to what they are actually doing. The fact that combat experience is the primary method of advancement for every character is the biggest indicator that experience is a meta-game number since combat makes up so little real knowledge as you put it. A character has many skills and abilities, not all of them combat-related. Yet they advance based on combat experience just as combat skills can advance based on role-play or milestone experience or curing some NPCs insanity. Experience is a meta-game tracking number. Even designed modules treat it as such. You can even see that different characters impact combat differently and always have, yet experience is generally divided evenly regardless of the impact each player had on the combat. If experience were really tied to combat experience, it would be doled out according to their impact on combat or according to the skill used. Instead it is doled out exactly like you would a generic tracking number with a meta-game effect that the character doesn't know about, but the player gets to use as he wishes, even taking another class if he so chooses. Even the function of using the advancement gained from experience is a meta-game function.</blockquote>

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