Legatus Legionis
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OSR/older D&D and XP from gold - is there a "proper" alternative?
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
So why did you let the GM run the game that way rather than set him straight that the XPs gained for obtaining treasure should be equally shared? The problem wasn't XP for gold, but allowing the PCs to compete in a non-competitive game.
howandwhy99
Adventurer
Gold as XP means you can trade your treasure for XP. The local merchant is the best place to get XP in such a game, after sneaking past monsters to collect all the treasure you can.
I prefer XP for roleplaying, which simply means each role (class) gains XP for the unique way each class is designed to be mastered. Become a master roleplayer in your class and your gaming piece will increase in class-related abilities (as presumably the player has increased in ability at playing that class's game in D&D).
There are many different ways to improve at playing an actual game, four of which are included in D&D. However, only three really have underlying systems for players to master (and really only two and a half ever finished in early published D&D). These different roles are:
1. Gaming (fighting-man) - manipulate the game design seeking game-related objectives which improve your standing within.
2. Puzzle Solving (magic-user) - manipulate the game design in order to discover more and more of the underlying design of the game.
3. System Balancing (cleric) - think like a game designer and attempt to balance the game as an operational system in one of three ways (one of which the player must declare): growth cycling, equilibrium balancing, or death spiral system collapse.
4. Resource Acquisition (thief) - this is not a separate game system itself within the underlying game, but a basic action of it. Therefore this is a simpler class to play with less difficulty to master. To focus it and make it harder, I only reward for treasure gained that is stolen property from something in the game guarding it.
What this does is set up individual scoring and personal objective selection as D&D originally was designed. It also sets up cooperation as the obviously best strategy. However there is an additional challenge when gaming with any player seeking to improve in an alternate class, what I think is called orthogonal conflict. Overcoming these in order to cooperate is so beneficial to all parties cooperation becomes a learned skill between players as they struggle to become a team with wholly different world focuses. It is as much a challenge (and enjoyable reward!) as mastering the actual game designs set for each of the chosen roles.
Lastly, when you take XP out of gold then treasure (game resources) become their own rewards and differ in value depending on the roles played and strategies chosen. You can play at any level with no resources or tons (there is a technical system limit), but balancing resources in the game design (campaign world, module, monster's treasure, etc) remains vitally important.
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Salthorae
Imperial Mountain Dew Taster
Well I did warn the DM and tell him what it SHOULD, but I wasn't DM, it wasn't my game, and that is specifically how the DM wanted to run the system... and then the game blew up like I'd already warned him...
Mordorandor
Villager
Games don’t blow up, people do.
That’s probably too flippant a way of saying that while systems can incentivize certain behaviors, they don’t necessarily predicate behaviors, and players are just as culpable in propelling a game into a downward spiral with the way they choose how to play in such a system.
I ran sessions using 1 GP = 1 XP, with XP unevenly divided. Some after-adventure sessions became interesting but never unmanageable. Players are more in control of their characters/decisions than they sometimes believe.
The reason XP for HP sucks is that it warps the reward structure of the game away from completing the adventure and accomplishing your goals to... you know, nonstop murder. XP for GP mostly works, because whatever else you want to encourage your players to do, you can simply have someone rich and powerful offer to pay them to do it. Done and dusted.
Of course, you're right, because equating wealth with advancement warps the reward structure of the game around acquiring wealth-- possibly at the expense of other party members. If you're not trying to run D&D like an open-ended boardgame with a high score table, it would be undesirable if your players picked up on it and started... well, doing exactly what you just described.
If you want to encourage goal-oriented and team-oriented gameplay, the reward structure should... reward players for advancing the team's goals. I'm not aware of any D&D-adjacent game that does this as well as Iron Crown Enterprises' High Adventure Role Playing, or HARP; in HARP, the party has a shared goal, and each party member has 2-4 personal goals, and the XP structure is based (individually) on either advancing or completing those goals.
HARP awards larger XP totals for pursuing party goals, to encourage teamwork. I would be inclined not to do that, because encouraging (purely IC) intraparty strife is something I view as part of my responsibilities as Dungeon Master. But it's... not difficult to adjust the ratio of party:individual XP rewards to encourage the desired amount of tension between them.
Unfortunately, if you're running 5e, I don't know enough about the XP system or how often PCs are expected to level to give you rough numbers... but basically, if you break it down by # of encounters and # of sessions per level, you can pretty easily translate that into an XP reward based on a rough estimate of how much a given accomplishment brings the party (or the PC) to a stated goal.
The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
For me, the reasons why I think Gold for Exp is so alluring has more to do with the knock on effects of making attaining treasure the primary focus of play, for context the version I'm looking at for our Pathfinder 2e West Marches would involve paying to level, rather than just getting exp when you acquire gold, or when you spend it on whatever.
1. Treasure is an amoral motivation-- whether the characters in your party are good or evil or neutral the need for funds, wealth, and magic items is a believable motivator. This means that characters of differing moralities have a common goal for their adventuring, and that as a GM I don't need to worry about or police anyone's motivation to adventure. My variant capitalizes on this because since the treasure spent on leveling is only used for that purpose (as opposed to being able to pick up a magic item at the same time) the flavor of what makes you level can be bent to support your character's morality: the default might be paying someone to actually train you, but its acceptable to say you put the wealth toward an orphanage, or sent it home to your starving village, or used it to fund the operations of a cult to your evil god, or donate it to the descendants of the people who built the ancient ruins you just plumbed, or effectively donate your cut of the stuff to a museum. Similarly, secondary objectives, like rescuing hostages can still come up, but they aren't the sole motivator, meaning characters who aren't interested can always fall back on the possibility of finding treasure anyway or the need to preserve the party as a source of future wealth or some such, but if your character WOULD care about that, you still can.
2. Treasure works great for nonlinear content because it represents a granular and an expansive nonbinary victory condition, if you have a dungeon where treasure is the goal, then all paths that offer the possibility of treasure are viable routes (as opposed to say, the single path that leads to a boss monster that must be defeated for the good of the realm, that make all the other paths only obstacles and distractions) and the party can experience partial success by getting part of the total wealth stashed there. This inherently supports interesting adventuring locations that don't have to be straightforward, and where the party can focus on exploring the space without developing tunnel vision on a single point or a solitary objective. This also supports sandbox play by allowing the party to choose how much of a dungeon to explore (rather than a 'but thou must!' due to the story consequences of the location demanding they address some particular threat.)
3. All of the above can have the additional effect of refocusing the game on personal stories by providing a reason to adventure that doesn't have to hog the narrative spotlight. I like to call this 'adventurer slice of life' where the goals of the adventure take a back seat to the relationships and personalities of the characters, along with whatever situations they find themselves faced with. More traditional goals tend to make the adventure about the destination (beat the BBEG!), rather than the journey. Similarly it can make downtime more believable where the characters settle to enjoy their successes before planning a new expedition, which is nice because it helps avert the "zero to godlike in a few weeks" plot holes that seem to riddle a lot of games.
4. In my game, using wealth to level helps the West Marches format by empowering players to set their own progression speed-- they can ensure they're well kitted before moving on, or they can rush to catch up in level with their friends who play more, they can weigh their preparedness against the possibility of taking on higher level (and therefore more rewarding) content. It also helps the hexcrawling because getting the treasure back to a friendly port is necessary to 'finalize' your acquisition of wealth so all kinds of pirate like events are possible, like ambushes by rival crews. Similarly we have rules about how players are going to gather parties and schedule sessions with GMs, and be the ones to figure out their own cuts, which has cool implications since player owned ships, and paid hireling crews are a part of this too-- the GM is just going to enforce whatever distribution the players agreed to prior to setting out.
5. It can encourage information gathering proactively, since the players can effectively always be looking for new sources of wealth, I love stuff like this because it really makes all those cool little simulation elements in systems actually get used-- things like 'Gather Information' or 'Research' in Pathfinder 2e, the lack of a plot means that there's nothing to grind the train to a halt if the players don't know what to do, they can always just search for new leads on where to get treasure, there's always an answer to 'what do we need to do next' that isn't "look for monsters to kill" or "give the GM puppy eyes for the next bit of plot."
6. If you have to actually spend money to level, it makes leveling as fungible as your gold is-- if you wanna prop up a buddy or a secondary character or something, you can literally pass wealth around to facilitate that, which in a leveled West Marches, is nice-- you can invest in your fellow players, or in having more options for future expeditions.
7. It provides a natural tradeoff to the decision of how many players are even invited to come along on any given adventure-- we're scaling the adventure for four pc's of the level of the lead in terms of both encounter guidelines (though GMs aren't restricted to balanced monsters, not everything is meant to be fought), and treasure, so bringing more people is intrinsically safer... but probably means they're going to want more of a cut. Because gold scales exponentially as you go up in level, there's a significant pay off to trying to punch a little above your weight class, but that is very much something that will be very risky, and demand touch and go tactics and weighing how far you can push your luck.
1. Treasure is an amoral motivation-- whether the characters in your party are good or evil or neutral the need for funds, wealth, and magic items is a believable motivator. This means that characters of differing moralities have a common goal for their adventuring, and that as a GM I don't need to worry about or police anyone's motivation to adventure. My variant capitalizes on this because since the treasure spent on leveling is only used for that purpose (as opposed to being able to pick up a magic item at the same time) the flavor of what makes you level can be bent to support your character's morality: the default might be paying someone to actually train you, but its acceptable to say you put the wealth toward an orphanage, or sent it home to your starving village, or used it to fund the operations of a cult to your evil god, or donate it to the descendants of the people who built the ancient ruins you just plumbed, or effectively donate your cut of the stuff to a museum. Similarly, secondary objectives, like rescuing hostages can still come up, but they aren't the sole motivator, meaning characters who aren't interested can always fall back on the possibility of finding treasure anyway or the need to preserve the party as a source of future wealth or some such, but if your character WOULD care about that, you still can.
2. Treasure works great for nonlinear content because it represents a granular and an expansive nonbinary victory condition, if you have a dungeon where treasure is the goal, then all paths that offer the possibility of treasure are viable routes (as opposed to say, the single path that leads to a boss monster that must be defeated for the good of the realm, that make all the other paths only obstacles and distractions) and the party can experience partial success by getting part of the total wealth stashed there. This inherently supports interesting adventuring locations that don't have to be straightforward, and where the party can focus on exploring the space without developing tunnel vision on a single point or a solitary objective. This also supports sandbox play by allowing the party to choose how much of a dungeon to explore (rather than a 'but thou must!' due to the story consequences of the location demanding they address some particular threat.)
3. All of the above can have the additional effect of refocusing the game on personal stories by providing a reason to adventure that doesn't have to hog the narrative spotlight. I like to call this 'adventurer slice of life' where the goals of the adventure take a back seat to the relationships and personalities of the characters, along with whatever situations they find themselves faced with. More traditional goals tend to make the adventure about the destination (beat the BBEG!), rather than the journey. Similarly it can make downtime more believable where the characters settle to enjoy their successes before planning a new expedition, which is nice because it helps avert the "zero to godlike in a few weeks" plot holes that seem to riddle a lot of games.
4. In my game, using wealth to level helps the West Marches format by empowering players to set their own progression speed-- they can ensure they're well kitted before moving on, or they can rush to catch up in level with their friends who play more, they can weigh their preparedness against the possibility of taking on higher level (and therefore more rewarding) content. It also helps the hexcrawling because getting the treasure back to a friendly port is necessary to 'finalize' your acquisition of wealth so all kinds of pirate like events are possible, like ambushes by rival crews. Similarly we have rules about how players are going to gather parties and schedule sessions with GMs, and be the ones to figure out their own cuts, which has cool implications since player owned ships, and paid hireling crews are a part of this too-- the GM is just going to enforce whatever distribution the players agreed to prior to setting out.
5. It can encourage information gathering proactively, since the players can effectively always be looking for new sources of wealth, I love stuff like this because it really makes all those cool little simulation elements in systems actually get used-- things like 'Gather Information' or 'Research' in Pathfinder 2e, the lack of a plot means that there's nothing to grind the train to a halt if the players don't know what to do, they can always just search for new leads on where to get treasure, there's always an answer to 'what do we need to do next' that isn't "look for monsters to kill" or "give the GM puppy eyes for the next bit of plot."
6. If you have to actually spend money to level, it makes leveling as fungible as your gold is-- if you wanna prop up a buddy or a secondary character or something, you can literally pass wealth around to facilitate that, which in a leveled West Marches, is nice-- you can invest in your fellow players, or in having more options for future expeditions.
7. It provides a natural tradeoff to the decision of how many players are even invited to come along on any given adventure-- we're scaling the adventure for four pc's of the level of the lead in terms of both encounter guidelines (though GMs aren't restricted to balanced monsters, not everything is meant to be fought), and treasure, so bringing more people is intrinsically safer... but probably means they're going to want more of a cut. Because gold scales exponentially as you go up in level, there's a significant pay off to trying to punch a little above your weight class, but that is very much something that will be very risky, and demand touch and go tactics and weighing how far you can push your luck.
Jack Daniel
dice-universe.blogspot.com
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The nice thing about both XP for treasure and XP for defeating monsters by CR is that they're clean and objective.
The XP for goals model I prefer requires the DM to determine (or negotiate) how much total XP any given goal is worth and what percentage of that total any specific achievement represents,
The XP for goals model I prefer requires the DM to determine (or negotiate) how much total XP any given goal is worth and what percentage of that total any specific achievement represents,
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