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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1761140" data-attributes="member: 99">I was asked via e-mail to talk a little about the origins of this system and refinements we've made to it as we went along.We first started using it about 6 or 7 years ago.  I had just run a Mage campaign and grown accustomed to that XP system where you gave out "dots" in about 4 categories.  Speaks With Stone was up to run the next campaign, slated to be Rolemaster, in order to playtest some of the stuff from a book he and I were writing for that system.  Rolemaster XP has always been a bit of a math chore and he proposed the idea of using a slightly more elaborate version of the White Wolf system as a way of simplifying the XP situation.He came up with a set of categories and we went over it a bit, dropping some and adding others until we had it tweaked how we wanted it.  Then we guestimated how many tics an average player would get on an average night and we used the round figure of 500 as a multiplier.  Rolemaster has a linear/stepped XP progression requiring 10,000 XP/level for the first five levels, 20,000 XP/level for the next 5, 30,000 for the next 5 and so on.  By using a fixed multiplier we observed that it would take about twice as long to go from level 6-10 as it did from 1-5 and longer at the higher levels.  This was fine by us so we put the system into practice.Somewhat shockingly, it worked nearly perfectly and we made almost no adjustments to it for the remaining time we played Rolemaster.  Then 3E came out and we decided to change systems.  At first I ran some one on one games with my wife and used the XP system as written.  But I quickly became disenchanted with all the work I had to do in order to calculate the XP and the fact that I was only rewarding combat.  As soon as I began to run a full fledged campaign, I reverted to using our home grown system.Because of the different way that 3E tracked XP to advance levels, we had to lower the multiplier and I also decided to have a sliding scale where the multiplier increased slightly with each passing level.  Thanks to the aforementioned spreadsheet created by The Lone Corndog, I was able to get a guage of what this multiplier should be in order to get the sort of pacing I wanted and I settled on 50+(15xCurrent Level) as the multiplier.  We've pretty much stuck with that ever since, though the GM of our current campaign accelerated this slightly.The categories have changed names somewhat over the years and a few have been dropped (we tossed Puzzles and Riddles during my last campaign) and added (such as Melee).  But they have mostly stayed the same.I've payed lots of attention any time other folks here at ENWorld have mentioned other XP systems but I've never found one that I liked better.  I can appreciate where the "I just assign XP as I see fit to advance the party at the rate I like" crowd is coming from.  No doubt that is a simple method.  But I crave some sort of system and I'm glad that I've got one that works with our group.Hopefully that gives a bit of insight as to where I'm coming from with this system.  As always I'm happy to answer further questions or take suggestions as to how to improve the system.And I also wanted to mention that I love the ways that BardStephenFox has customized it to suit his group.  I printed out his tracking chart and a couple members of our group are using a version of it in our current campaign.</blockquote>

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