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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 4871120" data-attributes="member: 18017">The game that gives you XP for spending money on ale and whores later became D&D. This idea is literally as old as roleplaying itself. In 1977, Dave Arneson published The First Fantasy Campaign, in which he looks back on the development of the Blackmoor campaign beginning in 1970/71. It's a weird, fascinating, and confusing book because somewhere in that time span, what started out as a series of PvP miniatures-based wars turned into the modern RPG, which seemed as natural to the group at the time as it seems bizarre to us. Arneson does talk about the ongoing evolution of the game. As Scurvy_Platypus mentions, one thing that was established early on was that you got 1 XP for each gold piece you discovered and brought safely out of the dungeon.  The example later published in OD&D makes it clear that you were meant to get the bulk of your XP from treasure-hunting; the first ever supplement for OD&D radically reduced the amount of XP you could get from killing things. This attempt to focus the game on finding creative ways to seek profit & avoid combat was carried over to AD&D, but the message was totally lost on me & I think most other AD&D players.)Anyway, looking back on the development of the proto-D&D game, Arneson mentions that his group soon evolved a new approach to getting XP from GP. Bringing it out of the dungeon was no longer enough: Note that the FFC list of prices includes both kegs of wine and two different grades of pleasure slaves, so that you could quantify how many wagons worth of wine or women you had to shepherd through the wilderness to your barony in order to earn the XP you'd paid for!  Like many of the essential innovations in RPGs or any other DIY field, this idea seems likely to have been independently invented a number of times. "Orgies, Inc." and The First Fantasy Campaign were both published in 1977, without being influenced by one another as far as I know. And it's possible that Dyson Logos's DM read the Orgies piece in Best of the Dragon, but it seems equally possible to me that he thought of it on his own based on wanting to emulate stories like Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser and/or make the XP for treasure thing "make more sense".In my White Sandbox/Caverns of Thracia OD&D campaign, I award XP for treasure twice - once for getting it out of the dungeon, like in core OD&D, and once for spending it as per Arneson's inspiration and Jeff Rients' carousing rules. I've never read "Orgies, Inc." but will definitely try to track it down, because I've house-ruled some modifications to Jeff's carousing rules to let them cover spending on other non-game-useful stuff than just raising hell. I'd love to get some other old-school ideas about how it might be done.I'm really happy with the ways it's helped characters develop unique personalities & expanded the campaign beyond the dungeon. <a href="http://redbox.wikidot.com/forum/t-145756/wine-women-and-song-xp" target="_blank">This thread</a> talks about some of the ways players planned to use it. More recently the gold-for-XP rules have led to one assassin PC founding a ASPCA-style animal shelter, and to another magic-user having to taste the giant eagle dung he was passing off as giant roc guano. Good times!</blockquote>

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