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Message: <blockquote data-quote="werecorpse" data-source="post: 7743426" data-attributes="member: 55491">Your article seems to conflate a couple of well trodden lines of discussion being the argument against levelling up style advancement in rpg's and the argument that a particular style of conflict resolution in rpg's should be encouraged (or perhaps more accurately that another style should be discouraged). Addressing each in that order:Levelling up Yes, the levelling up style of advancement results in characters becoming better at things they haven't been seen to use in an adventure AND in ways that don't make intuitive sense. The purpose of such levelling up is to give players a sense of advancement when they achieve the goals set out for them by the game master, to give them access to new abilities they can enjoy using and to enable them to take on more difficult challenges. It is not intended to model real life experience. The RQ or CoC method of advancement does meet these goals as well but I'm sure anyone who has played RQ for any length of time has experience the guy who keeps casting a spell at the start of combat to get a power check then he throws his javelin, until he hits and gets a tick on that skill at which point he then shoots his bow. In OD&D it was through finding gold, in newer through defeating monsters, in others through achieving milestones. At the end the way you gain experience does matter as it encourages a style of play but none are actually "realistic" to justify why the wizard can now cast better magic missiles - but then that's not what the games are trying to do IMO.what you seem to want in d&d is Xperience for overcoming obstacles with a penalty for killing stuff. Just do that then.HeroismYou view heroism as not killing. This is one way to play but the posters above address this. Is killing shoggoths OK? a mad scientist co-operating with deep ones to summon a horde of star spawns of Cthulhu to eat Chicago? A necromancer working with goblins to release Tharizdun? I am not a fan of pure treasure hunting scenarios without a level of threat to innocents or important exploration. But these are few and far between IME. Most D&D scenarios are perhaps too much save the world, too heroic IMO. Could Tomb of Annihilation, Tyranny of Dragons etc be any more like Masks of Nyarlathotep in requiring the party to do stuff at high personal risk to save the world?If you don't eliminate some evil it just kills again. It is just as much a moral decision with consequences to let it live than to kill it. In many games the player knows that the things they are killing will kill innocents if left to their own devices.I too have been playing since the late 70's and pretty much since the early 80's the majority (but not all) of my gaming has been "good" goal oriented (defeat the raiding Giants, stop the cultists summoning the thing that wants to destroy the world, rescue the slaves) where the goal is not just kill and loot. Combining the issuesMy solution is to:1. Recognise that the purpose of levelling up isn't to model how humans improve but to allow access to different types of adventure and to grant a tangible sense of improvement. (If I don't want this too much I can play traveller or just make the characters at the level I want in D&D and gain no exp.)2. Make the adventures good goal oriented and award exp mostly for goal achievement and overcoming obstacles. 3 award xp for the stuff you want. I want slower advancement in one of my games so give out 10-20% of the stated exp for defeating monsters and bonus lumps of xp fo rescuing innocents, foiling plots etc.</blockquote>

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