D&D 5E My D&D Next Wishlist: Bring back XP for GP!

[Doug McCrae]

I agree with you, xp for gold should definitely be there in some form. I also agree with Kamikaze Midget, that perhaps the best way to present the idea would be as part of a discussion about the awarding of xp as a driver of player behaviour in gamist play. And ofc, a simulationist version of xp also needs to be included.

For old school play, I've considered only granting xp for gold that is acquired in dungeons and monster lairs, to discourage PC behaviour such as becoming merchants, becoming adventurer patrons, stealing in towns, or stealing from other parties.

The problem of what to do with gold once it's acquired is another matter. The 1e DMG frequently considers means to unburden the PCs of their gold, such as training costs and taxation. I've seen a suggestion that PCs only get xp from gold once they spend it or give it away. So Conan types would get xp from ale and whores, paladins from paying tithes and giving alms, and so forth. You don't exactly get xp for gold, you get xp for largesse.

 

[slobo777]

I've gone the opposite way and don't really use xp, except as a ready-reckoner for balancing encounters, and in a "roughly ten encounters equals a level" way. Or simply, "You've completed the adventure - your game reward is levelling up".

Not that my approach would need a module. I'll happily ignore all the xp rules, and have no problem with there being a mountain of them allocated for players who enjoy that part of the game.

This sort of thing could easily be a 1-page optional sidebar, and in fact it was in 3E and 4E. Not sure whether WotC would label that a "module" for clarity. If so, we'll have 100s of "modules", and DMs will need to present something like a menu of "modules in use" at the start of the game. Not that I'm anti that, just pointing out the consequence.

 

[Pickles JG]

As a middle- and high-schooler, I thought it was the silliest thing I'd ever heard. How in the world can getting money make you better at your job? As an adult, with the help of a few forum discussions, I realized it's a feature of 1e that makes its playstyle unique among the various D&D editions.

I went through this process myself a looong time ago. I gave up D&D at 15 in 1981 as it was dumb. HP made no sense XP for treasure made no sense & levelling by killing orcs took too long. Clerical healing & all the D&Disms made the game quite unlike any of the fiction we wanted to emulate (Lankhmar mostly in my case)

We played Runequest as that was reallistic (plus the setting was imaginative & tied in to the mechanics).

When I was 17 I payed in a big AD&D campaign with the RAW (plus more detailed encumbrance rules for god knows what reason). It was great played on its own merits as a game. We did not really get the safe loot > monster bashing though as we liked fighting. It was also fairly divisive - thiefs keeping things to themselves to get them more XP being an issue. It fell apart after some party members sneaked off to loot a huge gem PHB cover style to get an XP leg up on the rest of the party (not my finest hour...)

Anyway different ways of gaining XP as certainly an easy painless & simple thing to modularise & could be used to enourage different plays styles. My current XP "when I feel like giving it out" system would be hard to beat.

 

[dervish]

Experience for gold found really depends on whether you consider the gold as the goal or as a means to an end. As both 3e and 4e have had gold as a method of character advancement through upgrading items, having gold grant experience in those systems wouldn't make much sense. However, in a system like 1e or 2e where the gold was mostly useless (at least in a character improvement way, there are always uses for gold), gold giving experience makes a certain amount of sense.

Experience should be awarded for achieved goals. Whether gold should be a goal to aim for or just another way to improve is an interesting design decision. I'd personally prefer for wealth to be a goal in itself, rather than constantly forking out buckets of coins for a new, slightly better, sword.

 

[KesselZero]

Strongly agree with the OP. I used to think XP for GP was silly and shallow; now I see it as an essential part of the true dungeoncrawl experience. I was concerned during my 5e playtest that there was no concrete impetus to sneak around/diplomacize/otherwise avoid combat (aside from not getting killed), since combat is the only method of gaining XP so far. The worry is that this may lead people not well versed in old-school gaming to conclude that a 1e-style dungeoncrawl really is just "rooms of monsters," if the method of XP gain is just to kill all the monsters. XP for GP returns any number of levels of nuance to dungeoncrawl methodology. I also like the house-rule that the treasure must be spent to gain XP, though I might not apply this to found magic items that the party wants to use.

I also agree with the above poster that guidelines for any number of methods of XP award would be awesome. Aside from XP for GP I'd most like to see clear guidelines for XP for RP and XP for domain management (as part of a larger set of domain management/politcal/mass combat rules).

Good post! If I could I would have XPed you with the comment "XP for XP for GP."

 

[billd91]

I think xp for gp would be a great optional rule but I think a lot of people would be against it as a standard rule. I agree with the above poster that there should be a lot of avenues for xp. One I would add, which was in the Companion Set rules, was gaining xp for running a dominion.

I think it would be very difficult for this to be an optional rule without a whole second set of XP tables for class advancement. That is, if you try to mimic the 1e system.

Maybe one option that could get around that would be assigning an XP value to a cache of loot rather than awarding XP by GP value. Unattended but hidden or trapped caches would be XP-valued based on their difficulty. Encounters could award XPs based on either defeating the monster or taking his stuff (I would suggest now awarding XP for both).

 

[TerraDave]

One variant is training expenses or the "wine, woman, and song" rule (which apparently goes back to Arneson) were you get XP for spending gold.

allows for gold as xp while keeping the PCs hungry (maybe literally, depending on how it is done).

 

[howandwhy99]

I award by class. I think awarding XP for coin or treasure only changes the focus of the adventure. Fine for thieves, but not quite for any of the other classes.

I simply award per successful theft. Treasure is its own reward.

 

[Mattachine]

AD&D wasn't consistent about gold for xp. There was already a note about the DM awarding xp:gp at 1:1, 1:2, or even 1:10 ratio, based on difficulty. Also--

1. No systematic xp for traps, but some official adventures awarded trap/puzzle xp
2. No systematic xp for quests/story awards, but some official adventures awarded quest/story awards
3. Xp for magic items, and also for selling the items? Could PCs double-dip?
4. Hard monsters sometimes had little treasure, and easy monsters had lots; this happened frequently when doing random monsters/treasure
5. Characters who weren't allowed to have much treasure (monks, paladins) got a significant penalty
6. Thieves often had the easiest time getting treasure, and needed the fewest xp to level up

I think that many of us look back on AD&D with what we remember the best, or with the set of the rules we used. The RAW back then were inconsistent, often confusing, and sometimes just poorly written. Perhaps that's why they encouraged such creativity.



In any case, xp for gp really can change the focus of the game.

 

[dagger]

To help keep things fair (if you care) in the AD&D XP system is to put all the magic item XP (and gold) into a pot that gets divided equally. That way you don't have a people trying to get items they will never use just for an XP boost.

Thats STILL how we do it to this day.

In our PF game we don't keep track of XP, the DM just tells us when to level.