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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7003570" data-attributes="member: 42582">Always happy to provoke!In Burning Wheel, which is the system I was renferencing, all abilities (skills, weapons, resources, circles (= a "contacts" ability, a bit like the yakuza in original OA), health (= recovery from injury), steel (= morale, which PCs as well as NPCs have), etc) are on a common progression chart.With very few exceptions, making a check is enough to meet the requirements for advancement (ie it doesn't matter if the check succeeds or fails). But if the GM just "says yes", because nothing is at stake and so - as part of pacing/drama management - the GM just wants to move things along, then the player doesn't get the check.This is why, even for even really easy stuff, if there actually is something at stake in the event of failure, the GM is obliged to grant the check - so that the player can get the "tick" for advancement. And flipping that around, players have an incentive to push the game into a direction where dramatically salient things are at stake, so they will get the checks they need to build up their PCs. (From experience, I can report that it's an interesting dynamic. It puts a very different spin on a system that, if you just looked at the PC sheets or the core resolution rules, would resemble Runequest or Rolemaster or similar long-skill-list, ultra-sim games.)I haven't thought about how it would generalise to D&D. In my 4e game, I use the XP rules in the DMG, the DMG2 and the RC, which means - to put it simply - that as long as the players are actually engaging the game (via combat, or skill challenge, or free roleplayijng that isn't just faffing around) then they earn XP, at a rate that boils down to about one-tenth of a level per hour or so of play (high level combats are complex enough that they put a bit of a drag on this pace, but not too much). A consequence of this is that shifting a 4e game from the default XP rules to "milestone" advancement probably won't make a very big practical difference. (And that is how I'm planning to handle the 4e Dark Sun campaign that I started fairly recently.)I'm not 100% sure about your corollary. My feeling is that if you make players "chase" XP (ie some strongly non-milestone, non-pacing-based system - like, say, AD&D's XP for gp) then player will probably feel ripped off if the GM deliberately "blocks" the chase. So in AD&D, the GM can't just handwave the treasure total. Maybe in 5e, this creates pressure on the GM not just to handwave combat, if XP are earned by actually engaging in it and beating a certain CR.If there was a skill-challenge style system for non-combat XP, then players might feel entitled to engage that system rather than have the GM just handwave it (and thus deprive them of the XP they are chasing).I'm not sure if the last couple of paragraphs are connecting to what you were thinking, or if I've completely missed your point!</blockquote>

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