Level Up!

[Incendax]

I've been thinking about the pros and cons of accumulating experience versus being awarded levels, and I am having a hard time thinking up very many pros for the former.

To be clear, I simply tell my players to level up when the story makes sense for them to level up and do not deal with experience at all except for budgeting encounters. However, a recent conversation with one of my players made me stop to consider the positive aspects of assigning experience. I can't see very many.

I mean, if you just enjoy doing math then that could constitute a pro. You could say that experience points give you a more tangible metric to judge when you will level up, but that seems to encourage meta-gaming. (Aka, your group might actively seek out challenges to overcome just to gain experience, as opposed to roleplaying more realistically). Perhaps a possible pro might just be pure nostalgia?

 

[moxcamel]

In the campaign I'm currently running, we're going to try the "level up when it feels right" route for the very first time. Mostly it's because we can only get together once a month, and we really don't want to spend 4 years getting to 30th.

Basically I'm going to run the campaign in an "episodic" style. At the conclusion of each episode, everyone dings. Hopefully I can keep episodes to no more than a couple sessions each, although I do plan on running some single-session episodes too just to keep things humming along at a brisk pace. I'm interested in seeing how this turns out.

 

[TerraDave]

XP may feel more like a "reward", especially if there clearly is some link with what happens in the session. Also may be an reward for the player and not just the group, if you give only to those who show up for the (whole) session.

You can also do individual XP for RP, that kind of thing, though I don't really recomend it.

 

[samursus]

I have also started leveling players as I see fit... it really helps with metagaming.

 

[Stumblewyk]

I have also started leveling players as I see fit... it really helps with metagaming.

I'm curious about this. Maybe I just have a different group of players, but I've never DM'd for anyone who's been serious when they said "we should kill them for the XP," or "There's got to be some orcs around here we can kill. We're close to leveling..."

 

[moxcamel]

I'm curious about this. Maybe I just have a different group of players, but I've never DM'd for anyone who's been serious when they said "we should kill them for the XP," or "There's got to be some orcs around here we can kill. We're close to leveling..."

Back in the day, I was guilty as charged. I had a character that carried around a little box with an undead skull in it. You inserted a gold piece, pulled the lever which crushed the skull, whereupon you earned 1xp and the skull regenerated. If somebody was close to leveling, they'd spend a couple hundred gold or whatever to pull the lever a couple hundred times. Now granted, our campaigns tended more towards Pratchett than Tolkien, but yeah, it's not something that would ever fly in one of my campaigns these days.

 

[Incendax]

I'm curious about this. Maybe I just have a different group of players, but I've never DM'd for anyone who's been serious when they said "we should kill them for the XP," or "There's got to be some orcs around here we can kill. We're close to leveling..."

I do not think many players would make such a statement outright, but you cannot divorce yourself from the knowledge that tackling a challenge will probably result in experience.

It's hard to tell exactly how much this is influencing their decisions. Maybe your players really don't care. Maybe they stay in character most of the time but jump on situations that seem like they would give a good experience reward. Maybe their every action is silently judged against getting the biggest experience reward possible.

A good DM should probably reward Frodo with just as much experience for sneaking past the Ringwraiths as trying to defeat them in combat. But, how many DMs really would award the same experience? More importantly, how many players think their DMs would award the same experience, and does that influence their choice of action?

 

[Dausuul]

Experience points offer a tangible sense of progress and a feeling of "earned reward." The latter can be done without XP if the DM ties level-ups to important achievements (complete the quest and gain a level), but it's hard to get the feeling of steady progress without something like XP. So if that's important to you, XP might be worth using.

Another reason to use XP is to encourage desired behaviors. If XP is awarded for monster kills, players are encouraged to seek out and kill monsters, and if you like running "dungeon hack" games, that could be exactly what you want. 1E awarded XP primarily for treasure found rather than monsters slain, which encouraged more sneakiness and cunning. I've seen some DMs hand out an "MVP bonus," where all the players vote on who's the "most valued player" for the session and that person gets a bonus award, thereby encouraging teamwork and cohesiveness. And of course, there's the old standby of not giving any XP to people who don't show up to the game.

Finally, XP is a venerable tradition of the genre which has survived almost unchanged in CRPGs and MMOs, so you might use it just to fulfill player expectations, I guess.

4E is unusual for being the first edition of the game where XP can be discarded without affecting the rest of the system. (In 3E, you needed to track XP for item creation and certain spells. Pre-3E, you had to track it because different classes leveled at different rates.) My group ditched XP within a few months of 4E's release, and I haven't regretted it once. Still, it does have its uses.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

I have to weigh in on this conversation as well.

To me in the course of a game the characters are always earning experience, whether it be by skill challenges, exceptional role-playing of the scenarios, exploration of the world, or combating the evils that are around.

I don't really see a need for experience points for leveling and therefore don't use them. I'm a pretty easy going DM for my games and my group levels every 2 sessions. In those two sessions we can get in as many as 6 encounters or as few as 1 with a lot of role playing. I don't want my players meta-game thinking they NEED to go running from combat to combat to "level up" all the time.

If they feel like roaming around town, buying supplies and interacting with NPCs or if they feel like exploring an known haunt of undead, they can feel free to do whatever they wish and the storyline will still progress naturally as they advance through the plot and through their levels. Experience points are tedious as well, the only thing I use them for are building of encounters to challenge the characters.

I just feel this way of doing things encourages them to think outside of the box of combat only and to really delve into their characters.

Some people feel very strongly to go strictly by experience, some like to go by sessions, some like to go by feel, it's all arbitrary to what the group likes and personal preferences. To each their own and everyone should have fun with however they progress is what I think.

 

[Dungeoneer]

I do find that in 4e you're not short on things you can award to players, from gold to weapons to boons to temporary rewards, so XP may or may not be necessary in that regard.