What Is an Experience Point Worth?

It seems like a simple question, but the way you answer it may, in effect, determine the metaphysics of your game. Many RPGs use some sort of "experience point" system to model growth and learning. The progenitor of this idea is, of course, Dungeons & Dragons; the Experience Point (XP) system has been a core feature of the game from the beginning.

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Yet what exactly an experience point is remains unclear.

Think about it: can anyone earn an XP under the right circumstances? Or must one possess a class? If so, what qualifies an individual for a class? The 1st-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide specifies that henchmen earn 50 percent of the group’s XP award. In other words, they get a full share awarded, but then only "collect" half the share. Where does the other half go? Did it ever exist in the first place?

These esoteric questions were highlighted for me recently when I recreated a 20-year-old D&D character from memory for a new campaign I’m playing in. All I could remember of this character from my high school days was her race and class (half-elf Bladesinger, because I liked the cheese, apparently) and that the campaign fizzled out after only a handful of sessions. If I made it to level 2 back then, I couldn’t rightly say.

I asked my Dungeon Master (DM)—the same fellow who had run the original game for me back in the days of the Clinton administration—whether I could start a level ahead, or at least with a randomly-determined amount of XP (say, 200+2D100). Being the stern taskmaster that he is, he shot down both suggestions, saying instead that I’d be starting at 0 XP and at level 1, just like the rest of the party. As justification, he said that my character had amassed 0 XP for this campaign.

As the character probably only had a few hundred XP to her name to begin with, I let the matter slide. But it did get me thinking: do Experience Points only exist within the context of individual campaigns? Was my DM onto something?

This sort of thinking can in turn lead down quite a rabbit hole. Are classes themselves an arbitrary construct? Do they exist solely for players, or are non-player characters (NPCs) also capable of possessing classes and levels? Different editions of D&D have presented different interpretations of this question, from essentially statting up all NPCs as monsters, with their own boutique abilities (as in the earliest iterations of the game), to granting NPCs levels in "non-adventuring classes" (the famous 20th-level Commoner of 3rd-edition days).

The current edition of D&D has come back around to limiting classes and XP awards to player-characters only—which brings us back to our original question: are Experience Points, like character classes, meant to function solely as an abstract game mechanic, or are they an objective force within the game world? How do you, the reader at home, treat XP in your campaigns?

contributed by David Larkins

 

[Lanefan]

This claim is already controversial - that is, it takes a stand on an issue of game design where other stands are possible. To give concrete examples: I think it is largely true of XP in Rolemaster. I think it is largely false of XP in classic D&D, which are awarded to represent skill and success on the part of the player. (Hence, Gygax in his DMG explains that novice players should ideally begin at 1st level so as to get the full learning experience; but experienced players who have already undergone that learning experience, and raised PCs above 1st level, may wish to begin PCs at levels higher than 1st. They have already undergone the requisite learning and demonstrated the requisite skill in raising other PCs from 1st level.)

I'm not as convinced of EGG's motivations in writing that. Low-level play is a specific type of play which can rather obviously only be experienced at low level; and he's trying to ensure all players get the chance to do this. The "learning" part of it isn't as big a deal, as a new player is going to learn a bunch of stuff no matter what level she starts at. He's wrong, however, in saying a novice player will get the full experience by simply starting at 1st level as he fails to note that it'll be completely different (and somewhat lost) if the rest of the party doesn't start at 1st level along with him. (in other words, playing a 1st in a party of 5ths is hugely different than playing a 1st in a party of 1sts).

As I understand it, "milestone" advancement in 5e means earning a level when the GM thinks the relevant point in "the story" has been reached.

Or the game itself thinks such a point has been reached, as noted in several of the early 4e adventures which have embedded notes saying in effect "If you haven't levelled 'em up yet, do it now".

That might work where the main aim of play is for the players to work through the GM's story, and the main aim of levelling is to keep up with the challenges in the GM's story

I can also see it working...well, as well as it can work; I'm dubious...in a system where keeping a homogenous character level within the party is important e.g. 3e and 4e.

This is true only assuming that levels are valued by the person accruing the XP (as you note, and unlike actual currencies, XP are not a universal medium of exchange that is useful whatever it is one wishes to acquire), and that levels are scarce.

If levels are not valued by players, then they may not care particularly about whether they earn many or few XP. If levels are not scarce (eg they are a 4e-style pacing device, not a Gygaxian-style measure of player skill) then players may sometime want fast pacing and sometimes slow pacing, depending on varying taste and mood.

If XP are so rare that gaining levels ceases to be a signifcant element of play then players may shift their focus to other aspects of gameplay, resulting in XP not being valued even though they are frugally awarded.

As DM of such a game I can tell you that although levels are scarce xp are not; players generally enjoy getting them, and tracking their character's slow progress through each level. Levelling is not the focus of play, however, but more an occasional pleasant side effect.

There can also be multiple currency systems in a game. 4e, for instance, uses XP to set PC level, which in turn sets hp, defences, skill and attack bonuses, feats, and powers; and then it uses gold (which is awarded by reference to level) primarily to acquire magic items, which are a parallel source of powers and feat-like abilities.

In classic D&D gold isn't really a separate currency for PC building, as there is not much you do with it and magic items aren't generally for sale, until you get to high levels and use your savings to build a castle and thereby enter the name level endgame.

Except in 1e, where by RAW gold translates directly to xp. Also, IME in old-school D&D magic items can usually be bought or traded for somehow, so monetary wealth can be translated that way into (sometimes temporary!) character ability gain.

In 5e there seems to be recurrent uncertainty as to exactly what the function of gold is as a seemingly parallel but independent system for improving one's PC.

Agreed - their insistence on magic items not being sellable or buyable turns non-magical wealth into a means of buying social status (maybe) and not much else.

Well, if you want to reward fighting, they will work. If you want to reward (say) forging diplomatic alliances, the default presentation of them won't work. You'll have to adapt, or make up, some variant.

Of course.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

It's not secret backstory. A secret is something that one person knows and another doesn't. A piece of fiction that no one knows because it hasn't been written yet isn't secret from anyone.

Or, conversely, it's secret from everyone.

If I could run games half as compelling as Raymond Chandler stories, I'd be pretty pleased with myself. But Chandler himself didn't know the reason for one of the murders in the film version of The Big Sleep.

Sorry, never heard of 'im.

In the post you refer to, I said "backstory is . . . crucial, because it establishes the infiction logic/rationale/context of the events the GM is describing. But the backstory that plays this role isn't secret from the players. In fact, it is able to play this role excatly because it is known to the players!"

But that doesn't mean all the backstory is known to the players. Because, over time, new backstory will emerge, establishing new context, new significances, new twists, etc. A story is dynamic in that sense - it unfolds over time. A story is also written over time. In the sort of play I am describing, the two events are concurrent - the writing of the story occurs with the learning of it.

As I posted, that also doesn't mean that the GM doesn't have ideas. As soon as I started running the Traveller game, I had the idea of the PCs being stuck on an airless world in their ATV. But one person's idea is not backstory; it's not part of the shared fiction.

None of those things were true in the gameworld before they became announced by me at the table, and hence known to the players. I authored them as part of the process of adjudicating player action declarations - eg they interrogate their captives; their captives therefore tell them stuff about the conspiracy; so I make up some stuff about the conspiracy. These are therefore established as backstory, and able to inform subsequent events and provide them with context and meaning.

Which is fine going forward.

But you also have to look backward, and here's where problems arise; as any time an important new element is introduced out of nothing that element immediately becomes part of the game world not just now but in the past as well. Where the inconsistency comes in is whether anything would have or could have been done differently had that element been in place sooner even if nobody except the DM knew about it; that's the sort of thing I'll pick up on as a player, and seriously squawk about.

A game where the GM vetoes PC action declarations on the basis that she has already decided (privately, in secret) that they can't succeed - what else is that but a railroad? It is the GM who is deciding where the action goes and what the outcomes are?

You want to jump your 100-h.p. fighter off a cliff onto jagged rocks below? OK, I won't veto your action - but I'll veto your survival at the bottom (and probably mention this while you're still at the top).

So if a player wants to come from a village of fisherfolk, but there isn't one on your map, then they can't?

There's going to be fishing villages somewhere. But if the player wants their PC to come from a fishing village where the population is made up mostly of alien survivors of a crashed spaceship...no. Not happening. Ditto for coming from a foresters' village in an area where there's no trees...

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

The furthest I've gone down the nobility track with players has either been "ok it's around 15th level and you're the nobles" or "ok it's 1st level and you're all the second/third sons and daughters of nobility".

The two main nobles in that party came to it in very different ways: one got extremely lucky on my background/secondary skills table and ended up rolling "reigning monarch" as her profession. The other was put on a different throne as a result of a several-adventure story arc.

But as far as mercantile stuff goes, I've had more than a couple players open a "magic shop" with spare stuff they didn't want or couldn't use and expand into other things like mercenary armies. The harder you play the game, the bigger the opposition gets. Until you get an LN Imperial Prince and evil Blackguard each with significant resources/armies annoyed at you, you haven't lived as a player. Especially when one of your other players has significant ties with an Assassin's guild and the church needs to stride the middle to maintain power. Good times. Death everywhere.

That same party had a long-standing Assassin in it whose guild came after him for not paying his dues.

The party went to the guildhouse and blew it off the map.

(edit: Yes I realize that near TPK is not actually TPK, but in the event my players have to run away it's a major shock to their system, moreso than rolling up the new characters to replace those who aren't raised. Raise magic is not widely available as it's considered heresy by most major religions in my world - Thus the differentiation. TPKs are nasty.)

I have revival magic reasonably available - for the right price. But there's a big difference between killing half a party (where the rest can continue and-or reload) and killing all of one.

Lanefan

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Sorry, never heard of 'im.

Raymond Chandler is fondly remembered for having codified a writing convention which is now known as Chandler's Law: "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." If nothing else, you can get a few hundred words out of explaining who this man is and why he has a gun, and then maybe someone will get shot. It's a way to keep the story moving, when the plot has grown stagnant.

 

[Kobold Boots]

The two main nobles in that party came to it in very different ways: one got extremely lucky on my background/secondary skills table and ended up rolling "reigning monarch" as her profession. The other was put on a different throne as a result of a several-adventure story arc.

That same party had a long-standing Assassin in it whose guild came after him for not paying his dues.

The party went to the guildhouse and blew it off the map.

I have revival magic reasonably available - for the right price. But there's a big difference between killing half a party (where the rest can continue and-or reload) and killing all of one.

Lanefan

I'm not one to judge how people play the game unless I'm at the table and experience it first-hand.

Suffice to say that I'd find a way to make the party suffer on occasion and make it linger in exchange for those gifts. Reigning monarch on a starting background table just blows my mind.

As far as a big difference between half a party and a TPK. Presently, I don't allow myself to run games with less than six players or more than 13. 8 or 9 is my sweet spot. If one or two get away I've seen seven or eight die. That's a TPK to me even if I don't get them all.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Reigning monarch on a starting background table just blows my mind.

From my perspective, an ideal D&D campaign is roughly similar to a Final Fantasy game, the best of the classic games in that series was IV, and like half of the playable characters in that game were reigning monarchs by the end of it (Cecil and Rosa, Edward, Yang, Edge and Rydia). So it doesn't seem weird to me for a PC to be a reigning monarch. (A similar trend can be observed in Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom.)

 

[pemerton]

"Player skill" is correlated to experience points but in no way are xp in any way causal of player skill.

XP don't cause player skill. But if playing a high level PC is a reward for being a skilled player, then tying levelling to demonstrations of skill makes sense.

Gygax clearly thought it was "improper" (a type of soft "cheating") for inexperienced and unskilled players to nevertheless build and play high level PCs. The intro to Tomb of Horrors describes the purpose of that dungeon being to bring such players to grief.

With the right social contract in place, I think Gygax's XP system can do the work he wanted it to. But I think it's completely crazy to hang onto it, or a loose variant of it, when the social contracts and goals for play are completely different. Hence my doubts about its utility in 2nd ed AD&D, 3E and 5e. (I'm excepting 4e here because XP in 4e is not really a variant on Gygaxian XP at all.)

I don't see any difference between a story milestone that provides an experience award or level up, and doing it when a party goes through a very linear dungeon crawl and makes it to the next level of the dungeon after clearing the previous.

That may well be true. But a lot of RPGing, including D&D play, does not inovlve "going through linear dungeon crawls and making it to the next level". For a very evocative account of an alternative approach to dungeon play, which also makes sense of the idea of XP as a reward for skilled play, have a look at Luke Crane's description of his Moldvay Basic experiences.

(For the record, I don't play classic D&D. I sucked at it, as a GM, 30-odd years ago, and that hasn't changed. Nor do I have the patience for it as a player. But it's a real thing, and "story milestones" have no work to do in it.)

 

[pemerton]

On (reverse engineering) internal causality (and post-hoc justification), random encounters, and GM-side ad-libbing:

How many AD&D and BECMI GMs have run their games as below (as I always have)

<snip description of fairly standard approach to D&D, Traveller and other RPGs>

Between Wandering Monsters, Random Encounters, and Monster Reactions, I'm spending well over the majority of gameplay ad-libbing causality (via reverse engineering and post-hoc justification) as required

<snip>

So why does a gaping hole in the integrity of "internal causality" or continuity (temporal, geographic, thematic) suddenly emerge when, instead of (nearing) thematically neutral content introduction, when the dice are rolled in (say Dungeon World), outcomes are to be derived by fidelity to play principles that are centered around hooking into the (a) the thematic portfolio of the PCs and (b) dangerous action/adventure that propels the game ever forward.

Good question.

Referring again to my recent Traveller experience: when the random patron table throws up a diplomat, is it better GMing to introduce a "plot hook" that is indpendent of the players' current concerns in dealing with a bioweapons conspiracy, or to have the diplomat be an Imperial official who has heard of the PCs' anti-conspiracy exploits and wants them to investigate further?

When the random starship encounter table throws up a pirate cruiser, is it better for this to just be some random pirates who happen to be hanging out on the edge of a tech level 3 world? Or for the ship to be connected to the conspiracy, and coming back to the world that is the source of the pathogen that the bioweapons research is based on?

When I was a novice GM and didn't know any better, it probably wouldn't have occurred to me to use those random outcomes to establish connections to existing currents of play and thereby "go where the action is". But with a bit of experience under my belt, that seems the pretty natural thing to do!

I remember reading advice for dungeon building back in the early and mid 80s that talked about how to make sense of the results of random dungeon stocking (eg if room 1 has giant ferrets in it, and room 2 has traders in it, maybe the traders are trading in giant ferret skins). Extending that sort of principle to real time content generation, and also honing in on stuff that matters to the players, seems a straightforward extension of that approach. The fact that the resulting content is not "neutral" vis-a-vis events at the table and concerns/"biases" of the GM and players seems a plus if the goal is to play a game that involves collectively imagining dramatic adventuring, not a negative.

 

[pemerton]

You want to jump your 100-h.p. fighter off a cliff onto jagged rocks below? OK, I won't veto your action - but I'll veto your survival at the bottom (and probably mention this while you're still at the top).

So what's the point of the falling damage rules?

 

[pemerton]

Sorry, never heard of 'im.

Raymond Chandler is one of the more famous American crime fiction authors. The movie version of The Big Sleep, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is pretty well known and well regarded.

any time an important new element is introduced out of nothing that element immediately becomes part of the game world not just now but in the past as well. Where the inconsistency comes in is whether anything would have or could have been done differently had that element been in place sooner even if nobody except the DM knew about it

The world is such a wacky and unpredictable place that explanations for these things always abound.

There's nothing verisimilitudinous about imaginary worlds being less surprsing than the real one.