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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mxyzplk" data-source="post: 6255460" data-attributes="member: 16450">Well, you can, but here's the problem.  Having XP even "as an option" changes the tenor of the game.I was just listening to a Know Direction podcast where Amber Scott was talking about the process of working on an Adventure Path chapter lately, and discussed that some of the challenge was the changing/padding required to generate the 'right XP budget' and that the actual theme/story of the adventure had to be compromised somewhat to make that work. That sucks, and it means that any published adventure (and especially RPGA/Organized Play ones, from my experience there) have to make a lot of Hobson's choices just to get the 'correct amount' of XP generated.  If you are trying to generate a 'correct amount' of XP then having XP is of no value, as it loses its lovely alleged Randian properties.But I also feel that it hurts sandbox gaming.  Why?  Don't tell me about "OSR," I've been playing D&D since the original Red Box.  Here's the deal - I like Combat As War. XP for monsters (I'm not sure adding "for gp" really helps that) drives a playstyle where you confront everything head-on, grinding like it's WoW.  If the goal is "save the princess from a castle full of bad guys," you can't just do that, because the ugly head of metagaming rises and says "If you just scry and teleport in and grab her you won't get as many XP as if you do a room-to-room fight with every orc..."In this way, XP forces compromise from both the GM in terms of adventure design and the players in terms of in-character play. Having "the option" not to XP doesn't help that all that much - we already have that option, but our adventures and players are still tainted by the XP-oriented mindset.(I decided to express this more at length with some more backing details: <a href="http://geek-related.com/2014/02/02/the-time-for-experience-points-has-come-and-gone/" target="_blank">http://geek-related.com/2014/02/02/the-time-for-experience-points-has-come-and-gone/</a>)</blockquote>

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