For Fortune or Glory: XP for Gold versus Challenges

[Reynard]

Last night I was sitting down and "running the numbers" on the size and sort of encounters might be expected to gain a level for a party in Pathfinder (mostly to get an idea of general guidelines for creating a PFRPG mega-dungeon). I presupposed the slow advancement track, a five member party (or 4 plus 2 henchmen) and a distribution of 10% APL-1, 30% APL+0, 30% APL+1, 20% APL+2 and 10% APL+3 encounters -- which comes out to be just about 32 encounters per level. (about 6/12/8/4/2 of the previous catergories, for anyone who cares). This was all interesting and kind of informative, but when i got to treasure distribution it really threw me for a loop because the numbers are so LOW. It takes 15000 XP for a party of five to go from 1st to 2nd level on the slow advancement track, during which time the total treasure value is about 8500 GP (I don't have the exact number because my notebook is at home). Because gold=XP in prior editions, the number would be much higher (close to the XP required, if not more) in thos editions.

This got me to thinking about motivations and play, and how XP (and for what it is awarded) informs play.

Now, this is important: I am bringing this up in the context of dungeon exploration based play, with an emphasis on XP rewards for that activity. "Story awards" and ad hoc levelling, though interesting discussions on their own, aren't really relevent.

Under the treasure=XP model, the most important thing is getting out with the gold. this informs play. Since combat is dangerous and offers relatively small rewards, it is best avoided. This includes not only bypassing "guardian" monsters but also not dallying because that draws rolls on the wandering monster table. Moreover, there's no reward for overcoming a trap. They are best avoided altogther. The tendency to search everything for hidden stashes is also based on the treasure = XP paradigm, because missed treasure is missed opportunity to get better. All this results in characters, if they survive, being fabulously wealthy. of course, rich characters don't need to go delving for more riches, so the game supposes methods by which to seperate these fools and their money: training costs, upkeep, very expensive hired casters and so on.

In 3.x and onward, where treasure has no impact on XP (and totally leaving out wealth as a component of PC balance -- that's a different can of worms), XP comes from overcoming challenges. Suddenly the definition of "overcoming" becomes extremely important. Is "completely avoiding" the same as "overcoming". Do PCs get XP for traps they don't set off and monsters they don't fight? If not, the XP motivator points characters toward combat and other dangerous activities, and only raw greed gets the characters flipping desks and cutting open couches.

So, I guess I am asking two things: can you do a classic "plotless" dungeon crawl in 3.x+ (not mechanically -- that's another issue), and what overall effect does moving XP away from treasure toward overcoming challenges have? As an aside, what qualifies as "overcoming challenges" to you?

 

[jonesy]

Is "completely avoiding" the same as "overcoming". Do PCs get XP for traps they don't set off and monsters they don't fight?

I have an additional question that's really started to bug me lately. How do you differentiate between:

0. Going through a dangerous encounter.
1. Doing something clever to avoid a dangerous encounter.
2. Doing something clever to avoid a dangerous encounter without ever actually knowing that there was one.

If the characters never find out that what they did to avoid danger actually avoided danger do they still get rewarded for it? How does it compare to the other two?

 

[Reynard]

I have an additional question that's really started to bug me lately. How do you differentiate between:

0. Going through a dangerous encounter.
1. Doing something clever to avoid a dangerous encounter.
2. Doing something clever to avoid a dangerous encounter without ever actually knowing that there was one.

If the characters never find out that what they did to avoid danger actually avoided danger do they still get rewarded for it? How does it compare to the other two?

or 3. Doing something boneheaded and accidentally avoiding an encounter.

 

[Krensky]

Well, most of my games give out the majority of XP for achieving goals. Defeating Maidengobbler the dragon might be a goal, but so might avoiding him or stealing a macguffin from his hoard. Heck, if it's fitting for the game I and the players want, every X silver value of loot might equal Y amount of XP. Same with magic items and prizes in general.

Similarly, I give the XP value for encountering adversarial NPCs (not defeating, just surviving the encounter in a meaningful way) and encountering certain types of traps and hazards. In the latter, it involves being aware of and dealing with it. Finding a trap and going a different way is worth as much XP as disarming it. Same with triggering it accidentally for that matter.

Heck, they get XP for resolving subplots and personal issues.

Generally XP from hazards and NPCs is a thrd to a quarter. The rest is achieving goals. It's a fine distinction between 'ad hoc' or 'story awards' but I find it works far better for driving the players forward, and it doesn't require the GM to make everything up, and it helps prevent them from 'missing' (I lack a better word) XP because they decided to not follow the GM's adventure. I might set 'explore' the Cave of Doom at 200 XP, but they decide to go do something else. All IO have to do then is figure out what there goals are and make them worth the appropriate amount of XP.

 

[Ariosto]

First, it is not necessarily a problem for players even to accumulate large stocks of real wealth, so long as there are yet more things for them to desire. Indeed, moving up in the world to have one's stronghold and army and (eventually) stable of dragons to ride on forays into the outer planes can simply add to the fun.

Being a spendthrift is both evocative of some fictional heroes (and more generally of the medieval virtue of largesse) and expressed in the rules for upkeep. Other impositions are at the DM's disposal to keep the balance between risk and reward. The more common imbalance back in the day was too-great generosity in rewards, but the target remains the same even if one tends more to err in the other direction.
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Treasure made an appealing "token" for XP partly because it is so easily described even in character.

It is part of the utility that players can potentially find out approximately how many XP are in what hoard, and weigh that against the risk. Discrete cases are not uniformly balanced. A poisonous spider might be a terrible wandering monster, yet carry no loot, and even its "lair" might hold little or nothing of value. A trap might be baited with treasure, but more often it will offer nothing but trouble. Then again, a windfall might merely be hidden, free for the finder's taking.

Considered in a larger context, looking for instance over a whole dungeon level (and multiple levels), the richer treasures will tend to be more challenging to acquire -- and the really spectacular hauls to be the most difficult.

Getting through that larger context is part of the challenge, and in an old-style game there might even be the strategic consideration of rival adventurers!
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What may trip up a DM not accustomed to the old style is that attaining the objective -- bringing home the gold -- is the basis. The problem I sometimes see arise is that DMs think players should get docked for "avoiding encounters". They divide up XP so that an ogre is worth so much, and a troll so much, all neatly in proportion -- so that the best strategy is just to hit everything, and it probably does not much matter in what order.

It should be more like a ball game in which you score points by getting the ball through a goal. The other team should put up a good defense, so that the game is an exciting challenge, but you don't score more points by playing a worse offense -- or fewer for a cunning end run.

There was a time when I found that adjustments for character level were not necessary. Besides the math of the old game, players just were not interested in futzing around with things beneath their stations. They were more likely to go deeper into the dungeons and up the stakes.

However, sometimes even the level ratio may be too generous. Sometimes beating a bunch of monsters is so trivial that it really warrants no XP at all.
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It's not necessarily a case of only XP for treasure and slain monsters, either. Spot awards for figuring out puzzles or the like can also be good.

 

[Reynard]

What may trip up a DM not accustomed to the old style is that attaining the objective -- bringing home the gold -- is the basis. The problem I sometimes see arise is that DMs think players should get docked for "avoiding encounters". They divide up XP so that an ogre is worth so much, and a troll so much, all neatly in proportion -- so that the best strategy is just to hit everything, and it probably does not much matter in what order.

It should be more like a ball game in which you score points by getting the ball through a goal. The other team should put up a good defense, so that the game is an exciting challenge, but you don't score more points by playing a worse offense -- or fewer for a cunning end run.

This is just the thing though. Gold=XP was a very efficient method of providing a goal without mandating how it be made -- whether the PCs ran roughshod through every lair, slaughtering every goblin child, in search of the coppers, or they sneaked there way through and nary drew a blade, was up to them. The result was the same: fortune gathered, XP gained. The question of whether the PCs got the XP for monsters they avoided was essentially irrelevant -- that's not where the XP was to be found. Of course individual DMs would vary, some demanding blood for XP and some giving awards for clever thinking, but in the end the lions share of the XP came from a tangible, *countable* source (although, at least in AD&D, poorly guarded treasure might be worth only 1/5th its GP value, but I don't recall anyone I ever played with actually doing that -- probably mostly because DMs never left such hoards "poorly guarded").

If you take out the gold=XP aspect, suddenly the question of what constitutes a "victory" is very important, and both stingy and overly generous DMs are likely going to create problems in their campaigns as well as with their players. In the day and age of the Adventure Path, it probably doesn't matter too much since Chapter Two is for 3rd level characters and if you want to play (or run it), 3rd level the party will be. But outside of Adventure Path, in either the open sandboxy campaign or the exploratory dungeon crawl, where the XP comes from and how it is earned is an important matter and has a real and tangible effect on game play.

 

[Ariosto]

If you take out the gold=XP aspect, suddenly the question of what constitutes a "victory" is very important, and both stingy and overly generous DMs are likely going to create problems in their campaigns as well as with their players.

Well, you may just have to talk in terms of "naked" XP if you really want players to be weighing that. On the other hand, you may get a similar effect from the nature of objectives alone.

If a player is really attached to an NPC who has been captured, or really keen on impressing another NPC with an interest in the affair, then the goal of not botching the rescue may be compelling enough in its own right.
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The thing is not to turn "rewarding overcoming challenges" into "rewarding behavior that ought to reap no reward". Nothing so surely increases difficulty as foolishness.

Again, the key is to make XP come mainly from actually reaching the goal, based on the overall challenge of getting there. Monster and trap "stats" relative to character level are certainly a good yardstick, but some challenges are (perhaps especially in the old game) not so dependent on those factors.

It's not having to get into a fight with Monster X, it's the risk that Monster X adds, either of failing to attain the goal, or of it costing too much (in lives, or in whatever else of value matters).
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Whatever the books suggest in points values, what really matters is how things work out in your game. What seems like a good balance to some people may seem too generous or stingy to others.

The idea is that there should be enough so players get the feedback of making progress so it's not "too hard", but not so much that they feel as if the game is "too easy". It may be a bad sign if they never stretch their skills to take on something riskier but more rewarding,
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I would emphasize that the risk assessment for valuing awards should be based on moderately cunning play. The more difficulties players avoid, the greater the skill they have demonstrated.

 

[S'mon]

You can take a leaf from 4e's book and treat treasure acquisition as quest accomplishment with an XP award proportional to the treasure size, but not necessarily 1gp = 1 XP.

For my current City State online AD&D game I'm giving a lot of XP for roleplaying and social accomplishments like recruiting allies, rescuing (and possibly seducing) damsels in distress, gathering information, making friends, as well as for killing things/people and taking their (usually meagre) coin purses. The baseline is around 100 XP per hour of meaningful play. After 4 sessions I have some PCs close to 2nd level, but with only few coins in their pouches and looking for a big score, which feels very Fafhrd/Mouser/early Conan.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

There are still incentives to chase the loot because loot provides a substantial portion of your power. Even if the PCs will then want to fight the monsters, they have an incentive to steal the magic sword first--it will make the fight easier and faster.

Re: what constitutes defeating an encounter: my basic approach is to analyze what the encounter is there for. In a dungeon (without some external plot like "go in and find and kill Acerak"), some encounters are about guards to areas, some encounters are about guards to treasure, and some are just hazards. For the guards to areas and guards to treasure, it's pretty clear what defeating the challenge means: get into the area behind the dreaded hydra? Have some XP. Get the treasure out of the temple of the bugbears? Have some XP. It doesn't much matter whether you killed the hydra or bypassed it (although it is important to avoid double-counting, which can be particularly problematic with multiple expeditions into the dungeon/multiple parties going into the dungeon.) Random threats (wandering monsters, the monster in a room without treasure, reactive threats that attack the PCs because they have done XYZ) don't fit well into this-- there, I guess the question is did the PCs successfully escape?

That said, XP for challenges versus XP for treasure definitely changes the incentives. If you want to reward getting treasure, not fighting fights, why not do so directly? Nothing about Pathfinder or 3.x will break if you switch to giving out XP only for treasure. (You can set the exchange rate as you like to get the speed of advancement/amount of wealth by level you want--if they should get about 8500 gp worth of treasure from level 1 to level 2, why not define 1 gp as 1 xp and set the amount of xp required for second level (for the party size you describe) as 8500 xp?) If they only get xp for treasure, it will certainly focus their goals on getting treasure, since that's the only thing that produces any mechanical reward, and they will have no interest in fighting random encounters that simply take time and provide no or little reward.

 

[Bullgrit]

I appreciate the idea of gp=xp more nowadays than I did 25 years ago when I removed that from my AD&D1 games. That idea is a great motivator for exploration, (which I love in D&D), and it does put traps and battle in a "more proper" light -- that is, avoiding traps and battle are sometimes better than taking them on. Wandering monsters are better avoided instead of are something to hope for. Wandering danger vs. wandering xp.

But, and this is a legitimate "but," it does tend to mean PCs should have a greedy streak in their character. Any character that doesn't have a greedy streak will end up missing out on xp for not having that character trait. A party of thieves would be better xp-getters than a party of knights.

The gp=xp idea is good for parties of dungeoneers who are just dungeon crawling for the fun of it. But if they are, say, a rescue party sent into the dungeon to rescue the princess, then rescuing the princess should be what you reward with xp. Rewarding the party for "wasting" time searching everything for treasure is counter productive to the more heroic goal.

Something I tried in my most recent D&D3 games:

I made up the "dungeon" with a McGuffin for the PCs to find and bring out. I then figured up what I thought they'd have to go through in the dungeon to successfully retrieve the goal. I added up the xp for that, and left out xp for anything not "in their way".

That is, say the "dungeon" has 20 "encounters". 14 of those "encounters" are in some way between the PCs and the McGuffin. (The other 6 are side encounters, or just generally not in the way.) I'd add up the xp value of those 14 encounters, and that would be the reward they get for retrieving the goal.

Even if the party managed to find a way around some (or even all) of the "encounters", they got the full xp I had calculated. If they put effort on the irrelevant "encounters," well, that was a waste for them.

Unfortunately, this approach wasn't a hit with my group. (I told them of my method before I implemented it.) They liked essentially getting xp for encounters they found a way to sneak past, but they didn't like being denied xp for goal-unrelated encounters they took on.

Overall, xp for gp is a great reward system for a certain kind of play style, (one which I enjoy), but it is a detriment to a different play style, (one which I enjoy, also). But the xp for killing monsters isn't "great" for any play style *other than kick in the door and kill the monster*, and it is sometimes bad for many play styles. The xp for goals is good for certain play styles, but it's bad for other play styles.

I haven't seen a perfect xp system for all play styles. I've kind of accepted that I have to pick a play style I want to have at my table and then choose the xp system that rewards it.

*Edit between the asterisks*

Bullgrit