New Experience System

[LostSoul]

When I was getting ready to run a new Star Wars campaign, I came upon the question of experience and advancement.

I wanted to keep the PCs in the mid-low levels (4 to 7) for a long time; but, at the same time, I wanted them to experience advancement on a regular basis.

So I came up with this:

Experience Points:

You don't get experience points. What you get is a number of points after each adventure that you can immediately cash in for new class- and character-related abilities. The typical reward is about 2 points per game. Each category costs 2 points each to improve.

The categories are:

• Base attack bonus,
• saves,
• class features (bonus feat, spells, sneak attack, etc.),
• character level features (feats at every 3rd level, ability increases, hit points), and
• skills.

When you "purchase" one of these categories (by spending 2 points), you get the benefits appropriate for that category as if you had gone up a level. You can purchase the categories in whatever order you want, but you must purchase all five of them before you can gain a level. Therefore, you can't buy Base Attack Bonus twice in a row and increase your BAB by +2. You'd have to wait until you bought every category until you could buy Base Attack Bonus again.

You have to decide what class you are taking your next level in by the time you purchase your first category. Once you do so, all other increases draw from the same class. So you can't take the Soldier's BAB and the Scoundrel's skill points and the Jedi Consulor's saving throws.

Optional advancement: each category costs your current level / 2 points. 1st level is 1/2 per category (each point buys two), 2nd level is 1 per category, 3rd level is 1, 4th is 2, 5th is 2, etc.​

I have no idea how it would work with crafting magic items or spells that cost exp. Maybe a PC could sacrifice a point for a number of xp, and you calculate how many xp it is worth at the current "level".

 

[Cheiromancer]

May I suggest that you multiply the xp rewards and costs by about 100? That will allow finer distinctions to be made. The cost of a magic item might be 2.5% of a level, and that is hard to manage if the level only has 10 xp. If it has 1000 xp, there is no problem.

If I may pimp the CHI-RHO experience point system yet again, here is a way of implementing it for your system:

First, assume we are talking about a party encountering a group of monsters. Other challenges would work too, as long as they can be given a CR rating. The CRs should be as calculated by Upper Krust in v4 of his Challenging Challenge Ratings document, available here. V5 would be better, but I don't know if UK ever posted it, as opposed to emailing it to folks. For WotC monsters, you can just increase their CR by 50%. A CR 8 WotC monster is probably about 12 on UK's scale.

X is a monster encounter composed of m monsters whose CR is x₁, x₂,... x_m.
P is a party of n characters whose levels are p₁, p₂,... p_n​

This is what we want to calculate:

xp(k) = character k's xp from encounter X​

To do this a DM will have to calculate both of the following:

Chi(X) = (x₁² + x₂² + x₃² + ... + x_m²) * 300
Rho(P) = (p₁² + p₂² + p₃² + ... + p_n²)​

The expression Chi(X)/Rho(P) is just the xp per encounter; give this amount to each character. A moderate encounter gives 75 xp, and 13.3333 of those gives 1000 xp. At 2 or 3 encounters per session an individual will be able to level up completely in 5 sessions; one step each session.

If item creation or a spell requires an xp payment, the character doing the paying divides by his or her character level. A 20th level wizard would pay 250 xp to cast a wish; 25% of what is needed to get to 21st level. In standard DnD a 20th level wizard would pay 5000 xp to cast a wish; also 25% of what is needed to advance to 21st level.

 

[LostSoul]

Interesting...

If you increased the "point" amount by 100 times, you could hand out varying amounts... but I'd rather keep it simple and let crafters have some kind of pool of xp to craft magic items with, maybe by sacrificing one of those points.

I wasn't really interested in doing CR calculations, etc. I just figured I would eyeball it based on what the PCs did, using 2 (or 200) as the baseline per adventure. I get tired of always rewarding kills but never rewarding something like character growth.

 

[Bront]

When I was getting ready to run a new Star Wars campaign, I came upon the question of experience and advancement.

I have no idea how it would work with crafting magic items or spells that cost exp. Maybe a PC could sacrifice a point for a number of xp, and you calculate how many xp it is worth at the current "level".

They craft magic items in Star Wars?

It's an interesting system. The problem is in some cases, where BAB doesn't increase at that next level, it's always going to be the last thing picked. I would link that in with Level Features or Saves (Saves might be better).

You could easily institute this rule using exp, and simply saying that 250 xp per level is used for each quarted of the character. There are still cases where advancement gets a character nothing, and since not every aspect of the character is balanced, nor is every level balanced (Some levels get no class level benifits, some get less skill points than others, some levels bab and saves don't change much, etc), but overall it should work out fairly well. However, you will have to adjust their encounters a bit to deal with fractional levels.

 

[LostSoul]

They craft magic items in Star Wars?

(handwave) "These aren't the droids you're looking for."

It's an interesting system. The problem is in some cases, where BAB doesn't increase at that next level, it's always going to be the last thing picked. I would link that in with Level Features or Saves (Saves might be better).

You could easily institute this rule using exp, and simply saying that 250 xp per level is used for each quarted of the character. There are still cases where advancement gets a character nothing, and since not every aspect of the character is balanced, nor is every level balanced (Some levels get no class level benifits, some get less skill points than others, some levels bab and saves don't change much, etc), but overall it should work out fairly well. However, you will have to adjust their encounters a bit to deal with fractional levels.

I've only done limited playtesting with this, so I'll let you know how it goes. The PCs have already reached the point where, in some cases, neither saves nor BAB was going to increase; but I'm an easy-going GM, so I don't really care too much (yet). It could be a problem later on.

That is a good note about xp. I would probably do something like that instead if I were to use this in a D&D game (and I wanted to provide slow but steady advancement).

Thanks for the comments.