Experience Point: Keeping Score

I’ve all but stopped giving out XP in my games. I mean, I guess that isn’t entirely true. My last couple campaigns have been Savage Worlds games and I assign XP at the end of the sessions based on how much I feel we got done that night. Some evenings our gaming group tends to chat about work and families and computer games and sports. Some nights you can tell we need time to chat, vent, or share. When we eventually get down to gaming it can mean the session is shortened. I generally give out less XP for those sessions.

Maybe what I mean is I don’t calculate XP. I can recall the heady days of yesteryear when we’d tally up how many kobolds got slain, how much loot was gathered, and what magic items were found. Arcane formulae were applied to derive the magical number of treasured experience points we would receive. These were added to the former total and everybody held their breath waiting to see if the math would grant them a new level for their character. Remember those times when you came up just a handful of XP short?

I love Piratecat’s stories about “Peeps for EPs.” Apparently it was common for the players to bring candy and other treats to the gaming sessions. Around Easter somebody brought several packages of Peeps. A good number of them were not eaten and then became lost behind some gaming books on a shelf or something. A LONG time later they were unearthed during an archeological expedition among the dusty bookshelves (cue Indiana Jones music) and comments were made about how edible they might be at that point in their shelf life.

At the end of the gaming session, a player came up just shy of the number of experience points needed to gain a level. Piratecat contemplated their predicament and offered that, if they would consume one of these stale, months-old Peeps, he would grant them the needed XP. The player did this and their character got their level. I don’t recall if the player survived or not. It’s not the most important part of the story.

But it goes to prove that, for some of us anyway, XP are a really vital part of the game. It is, literally, how we keep score. And over the years I’ve done it in a lot of different ways; some dictated by the game system. I played Rolemaster for 12 years and its XP system has levels of complexity unrivaled by most games I’ve seen. Another game, Powers & Perils (which will always have a special place in my twisted heart), tracked XP separately for every single skill your character had! A friend and I even devised our own XP system that we used for 3e D&D-- it was kind of popular around ENWorld for a while.

Then one day I woke up and discovered I really did not give a crap about XP at all. We were spending quite a bit of time calculating and applying it to the individual characters. It was raising questions about what happened when a player couldn’t make it to the session. It was occasionally even causing some minor hurt feelings when it seemed that certain activities were being rewarded at rates different than some players preferred. I took a deep breath and chucked the whole thing.

I decided to do what a lot of other GMs have done before me and just have the PCs advance in level at a rate that had nothing to do with experience points. Notably, I opted to have them gain a level every three sessions. It was simple; we stopped thinking about XP and simply focused on the game, story, and fun. It was a huge success. We discovered none of us really cared about keeping score using XP. It was remarkably freeing.

Not too long ago I discovered that this same notion applies to life in general. My wife works in the healthcare field and was working in a private clinic. It was often the practice in their office to double book patients. The therapists would bounce from one to the other. Some of her co-workers would beam with pride and say, “I saw 14 patients today!” My wife would come home to me beaten and miserable and say, “I saw 14 patients today.”

How is it that some employees there loved it and felt a huge sense of accomplishment from their work while my wife hated it? Because they were keeping score in completely different ways. Those other folks liked seeing their productivity numbers up high like that, and they liked the pay bonuses they would get as a result. My wife on the other hand felt she was having to subdivide her attention too much and wasn’t giving good patient care. She was much less concerned with how many people she helped and more concerned with how attentive she was to each patient.

I’m happy to report this knowledge allowed her to seek out a job doing home-health care. As a result, she sees only one patient at a time and her focus can be completely on that person the entire visit. Furthermore, these are people so debilitated that they can’t leave their homes to get help at a clinic. While under my wife’s care they are able to progress to the point where they are ambulatory and can get out and about. That is a huge kind of progress and gives her an enormous sense of satisfaction about what she does. Same kind of work. Different method of keeping score. And it makes all the difference.

I see this in my own career change as well. My former business as a videographer was not personally fulfilling. It was using almost none of my strengths and I felt no higher purpose in doing it. So the only good way I had of keeping score was the money I made doing it. I focused on that a lot, often sitting there in the middle of a job mentally calculating how much money I was going to make from it. Bleah. Closing that business at the end of the year was a happy, happy moment for me.

The work I do now as a coach is FULL of the kinds of gratification I seek. What I love most is helping people. As a result, I’ve minimized the money aspect. The client pays me once at the start of the coaching and then I never have to think about it again. I don’t spend any of my time with my clients thinking about how much money they paid me. I don’t have an accounts receivable. I spend zero time doing collection calls. All my focus is on aiding them and that’s exactly how I want it. That’s how I like to keep score.

Do you track XP in your games? Is that an important way of keeping score for you? How do you track whether you are succeeding in life?

 

[Rel]

Wow! I'm away from the computer for a few days hosting the winter NC Game Day and come here to find all these great comments! Thanks to everybody who took the time to reply. I enjoy writing these columns but I enjoy it a lot more when folks express their opinions about them. I'm here more for the conversations than the soliloquies.

I was reading your comments and then revisited what I wrote. I'm hoping that I don't come off as making a value judgement about XP. I mean clearly I'm saying that for me, and for those in my group, it's not a very useful metric of either whether we're having fun or when the characters should advance in ability. But I'm absolutely not claiming that others should feel the same. If I had a different group of players then I might revisit the use of XP if it seemed to have value to them.

I am also not suggesting that the way we "keep score" in life directly mirrors the way we keep score in RPGs. Some people play RPGs for precisely the reason that they are allowed to keep score in ways that they can't in life (or, as the illustrious Wulf Ratbane used to say, "There is no problem that a big enough pile of dead bad guys can't solve."). I am mindful however of something one of my coaches says a lot: "That which is measured is improved." In gaming, I try to determine what I as a player want from the game and how that translates into what my character wants. I try to track it and I try to get more of it.

THAT does translate directly to how I keep score in life. I set goals. I track my progress. I try to move forward.

Anyhow, please keep the comments coming. I love hearing them even if they disagree with my premise. I enjoy having my ideas challenged because it gives me a chance to examine aspects of them and improve them in ways I was incapable of seeing.

 

[Umbran]

It's belittling, deprecating, inherently judgmental, and intentionally denigrates the target by labeling them an animal associated with filth, greed, and foul manners. By doing so the user seeks to generate an image of themselves as nobler, more enlightened, and better than the people to whom the label is applied. That's hypocrisy. And rude. It's name-calling.

But I'd do so recognizing the fact that XP is largely subjective and that it's part of my job to go through the pantomime that it's not to generate a sense of achievement and accomplishment in the players.

And calling it a pantomime isn't belittling or judgmental? And how about those players for whom there *IS* a sense of achievement involved?

This slips into a confrontational way of looking at things, but it still carries some of a point: the score in a football game is, in its way, subjective - some teams are better than others, so a goal scored against one team is not the same as a goal scored against another team. Does that mean we shouldn't keep score? The experience of a movie is thoroughly subjective - does that mean that "number of stars" ratings are completely useless?

No, it does not - to bring it back to RPGs, a subjective measure simply means that players should be ready to scale their expectations about the meaning of XP from one GM to another. But, having done so, for a given GM, they can legitimately take some sense of achievement, and it has some use.

"Objectivity" is a big deal in science and mathematics. Not so much in terms of, say, judging media or entertainments. So long as you *think* about it, the subjective measure is still a useful thing.

 

[Razjah]

I find myself torn about XP. I think it is often unneeded. Especially in Pathfinder, which removed XP payments for crafting and powerful spells. However, XP functions as an excellent carrot on a stick. If you want to run a game with truly heroic PCs, awarding some extra XP for the behavior you want to see is excellent positive reinforcement. I have tried to get players interested in things like titles and reputations, but they never get players to jump at a challenge like some XP. But this can feel forced as a GM. I want the players to do A so I award extra XP for A-like behavior.

The carrot on the stick issue may be why I prefer games that remove XP entirely and never rely on it, such as Burning Wheel. Instead of Xp advancement is tied to using skills at certain difficulties enough times to advance it. The game uses a dice pool and the number of dice vs the obstacle determines the difficulty for advancement. If you need to pass the test, get help and use advantages to boost that pool and make it. But if you gamble, and probably fail, you can earn that critically needed challenging test to advance a skill. I like putting pressure on the players with this. Make it easy and have a stagnant character, gamble and you are closer to advancing a skill. This works even better than it sounds because the test involve intent if you want to open a lock before the guards show up, and fail, you still open the lock- as the guards round the corner.

 

[Nellisir]

And calling it a pantomime isn't belittling or judgmental?

I say not. Since it's my position that XP is largely subjective, for me to act otherwise is for me to engage in a deception, to put on an act, to pretend, to conduct a charade. "Charade" has strong negative connotations however, which is why I didn't use it.

We engage in this sort of thing everyday when interacting with others (and sometimes with ourselves). There's nothing negative about it; in fact, we usually do it to support or reinforce other people, to create good feelings and show empathy.

And how about those players for whom there *IS* a sense of achievement involved?

What about them? Reread my post. I said that "...it's my job...to generate a sense of achievement and accomplishment." I didn't say it was a false sense. I didn't say it was bad. If I'm using XP, I WANT them to have a sense of achievement. They DID pass a test - but it was *my* test.

The experience of a movie is thoroughly subjective - does that mean that "number of stars" ratings are completely useless?
...
"Objectivity" is a big deal in science and mathematics. Not so much in terms of, say, judging media or entertainments. So long as you *think* about it, the subjective measure is still a useful thing.

You seem to have gotten the idea that I'm against subjectivity, which is utterly false and somewhat puzzling. Not using XP and advancing characters "when I say so" is about the ultimate in subjectivity. What I'm against is subjectivity unintentionally masquerading as objectivity.

The only rules in a game are what the participants decide they are. Cards Against Humanity is a completely subjective game. One person asks a question, the other players submit answers (weird, deviant, possibly illegal answers). The one that amuses the questioner the most "wins". There's nothing objective about it, and that's fine - it's a hilarious game.

Honestly, this comes up a lot, and it's become one of my pet peeves. There's a cultural assumption that subjective = bad and objective = good. As a result of that assumption, people pretend that they make "objective" judgments, because that's what's seen as "good" in society. They try to fool other people and themselves, and it's annoying. There's nothing wrong with being subjective.

 

[Umbran]

I say not. Since it's my position that XP is largely subjective, for me to act otherwise is for me to engage in a deception, to put on an act, to pretend, to conduct a charade. "Charade" has strong negative connotations however, which is why I didn't use it.

I'll chalk this up to a difference of opinions on connotations, then. I agree that "charade" has negative connotations. However, given that mime isn't generally viewed as a particularly grand art form (reference: Opus the Penguin beating mimes with an olive loaf), I submit that pantomime ain't all that much better.

What about them? Reread my post. I said that "...it's my job...to generate a sense of achievement and accomplishment." I didn't say it was a false sense.

Given that pantomime is a performance form in which movement is exaggerated and unrealistic, I kind of thought the falseness was implied. And, I submit that if you are generating it, then it is kind of false. The players should be generating it in themselves. If I have a consistent XP awarding scheme, the players can rather easily see how this works out to register their achievement. I don't generate it - they figure it out on their own. Note that I merely need to be consistent, not objective.

Honestly, this comes up a lot, and it's become one of my pet peeves. There's a cultural assumption that subjective = bad and objective = good.

Agreed. Your word choice led me to think that you also had that assumption. My apologies.

Mind you, I also think you and others are confusing objectivity with consistency, as noted above. Objectivity is required to compare one campaign to another. To compare my success today with my success in the same campaign last week, I merely need consistency.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I dropped XP years ago (and only ever implemented it on a pure ad hoc basis).

The core XP system is in my mind antagonistic to roleplaying; it imposes a pressure on players to seek out challenges that doesn't exist for the players. It encourages a style of play I want to avoid: goal-directed, antagonistic, and miserly.

Now I just throw them a level every now and then to represent their characters learning through experience. No problems there.

How do you track whether you are succeeding in life?

I try not to. My mentality is more along the lines of just doing whatever I think I should and catching whatever comes my way.

 

[Nellisir]

Pantomime has a larger meaning than just face paint and invisible walls. It's an action. If you do it, that's what it is. Also, there's nothing in the definitions I've found about it being exaggerated or unrealistic. It's communication without words; or communication through gestures. The most relevant definition is " action without words as a means of expression". http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pantomime

Anyways, pantomime might not be the ideal choice, but charade and pretense are much more negatively loaded, so....(and I'm not referring to awarding XP, I'm referring to awarding XP as an OBJECTIVE measure of success).

And, I submit that if you are generating it, then it is kind of false. ... If I have a consistent XP awarding scheme, the players can rather easily see how this works out to register their achievement. I don't generate it - they figure it out on their own. Note that I merely need to be consistent, not objective.

But see, right there, you are generating their sense of achievement by awarding XP. Note your repeated use of the word "I": "I have...", "I...need to...". There's nothing wrong with that; it's the role of the DM to put together an adventure that challenges the players and generates a sense of achievement and reward (and fun). It's not something unearned: they are taking the actions that result in the reward, but you are the mechanism that evaluates and decides on the reward for those actions. The entire job of the DM is to create a story, with challenges and all that. You shape the ENTIRE world they adventure in for the purpose of making the players feel a sense of accomplishment.

The more I think about it, actually, the less I understand your stance. If you feel excited watching an action movie, or cry during a drama, or get "wrapped up" in a book - are those reactions false? They are generated by the author/director/etc. If those are "real", what's the difference?

If someone feels an emotion, then it's a valid emotion. It might be generated by false pretenses or fictional circumstances, but it's still a real emotion. Chemical reactions in the body and everything.

Mind you, I also think you and others are confusing objectivity with consistency, as noted above. Objectivity is required to compare one campaign to another. To compare my success today with my success in the same campaign last week, I merely need consistency.

I don't think I'm confusing the two at all. I totally agree, consistency is essential in both objective and subjective judging.

Here...

If I have a consistent XP awarding scheme, the players can rather easily see how this works out to register their achievement. ... Note that I merely need to be consistent, not objective.

There is nothing in this quote that I disagree with; in fact, I completely agree with it.

Cheers!

 

[Janx]

"That which is measured is improved."

the other version of that from folks who study and define Metric is "You get what you measure"

Your wife experienced that. The company valued getting a high number of patients seen. So staff worked to crank up that number.

The side effect was diminished quality of service per patient.

give XP for monsters killed, and your players will pursue killing monsters instead of diplomacy.

this slides us to a conversation I had recently about a software testing tool called NCrunch. it displayed a green or red dot next to each block of code for if it passed. What it did was tell if your code was passing tests. It fed the gaming instinct to collect green dots. On top of this, it was revealed that there was an add-in to Visual Studio for developer Achievements (like on the X-Box). This meant the developer scored points if he used a particular good coding practice, etc.

Applied in moderation, points are an incentive to drive a certain desired behavior. Problems arise when somebody finds a perverse way to get those points. That doesn't mean incentives or metric are bad. Merely that they are hard to design good ones.

 

[Libramarian]

Here's what I would like to establish: XP can be awarded in a way in which the players feel a reasonable and legitimate sense of accomplishment, and that their enjoyment of this way of playing does not constitute evidence that they are lesser human beings than people who do not enjoy it. Is there anybody who disagrees with that?

 

[Libramarian]

Basically, if you take the DM out of the game except as a person to read the booklet.. And furthermore, if XP is only awarded for objective, concrete goals, rather than role-playing. D&D might have started out that way, but it's been eclipsed by CRPGs.

It's more like a CRPG in some ways, but still miles away from them in others. Even in the most hack and slash dungeon bash D&D game, you still have NPCs walking around that pass the Turing Test and a mostly natural language "what do you do?" interface. Computer game developers would kill for these things.