Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8170345" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Mainly, tying the filling of the progress bar directly to your in-game actions. Watching a progress bar fill up on its own is satisfying. Making a progress bar fill up is significantly more satisfying. If you award XP in batches and don’t specify what the players did to earn it, they get the former effect, but they don’t get the latter. And you can get the former from session-based advancement too.A side-effect of tying XP awards to in-game actions is that it encourages the players to seek out more ways to perform the actions that they get XP for. They want to make the progress bar fill up, so they will actively try to do more of the thing that they know makes it fill up more. Now, to some, like [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER], this may be a negative side-effect (in which case, session-based advancement will probably be more appealing), whereas to me it’s a hugely positive one. As I pointed out in the other post, it is a powerful tool for setting the tone of a campaign.In theory, story-based advancement ties progress to in-game behaviors, but doesn’t have the bar-filling element. In practice though, it tends to be pretty arbitrary which story-based achievements result in a level increase and which ones don’t. It is, in my opinion, the worst method for character advancement of the three, though it does require the least work on the DM’s part, which I believe is the main reason for its popularity.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 8170345, member: 6779196"] Mainly, tying the filling of the progress bar directly to your in-game actions. Watching a progress bar fill up on its own is satisfying. [I]Making[/I] a progress bar fill up is significantly more satisfying. If you award XP in batches and don’t specify what the players did to earn it, they get the former effect, but they don’t get the latter. And you can get the former from session-based advancement too. A side-effect of tying XP awards to in-game actions is that it encourages the players to seek out more ways to perform the actions that they get XP for. They want to make the progress bar fill up, so they will actively try to do more of the thing that they know makes it fill up more. Now, to some, like [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER], this may be a negative side-effect (in which case, session-based advancement will probably be more appealing), whereas to me it’s a hugely positive one. As I pointed out in the other post, it is a powerful tool for setting the tone of a campaign. [I]In theory[/I], story-based advancement ties progress to in-game behaviors, but doesn’t have the bar-filling element. In practice though, it tends to be pretty arbitrary which story-based achievements result in a level increase and which ones don’t. It is, in my opinion, the worst method for character advancement of the three, though it does require the least work on the DM’s part, which I believe is the main reason for its popularity. [/QUOTE]

Verification