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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5715876" data-attributes="member: 2205">I strongly dislike the advancement being dependent on combat angle of D&D and have for years for a variety of reasons.  It's an easy change to make, and there's a variety of ways to implement it.  Normally, I just do away with XP altogether and tell the PCs when they're good to level up, but other times, a flat XP by session attended method or something works fine.  You're also absolutely right in that it creates meaningful incentives to do things other than combat, both as a player and as a scenario designer and/or GM, which is one of its greatest benefits.Well, not necessarily.  Sometimes those kinds of activities are fun for their own sake, so even if they don't "further the story" or whatever, they're still nice to do.  That's one of the key differences between gaming and writing a novel or screenplay, IMO, and a great example of why it's important to be careful about making too many parallels between gaming and works of fiction that may inspire them.No matter what the purpose, though, that's bad adventure design.  If the encounters are boring, tedious or repetitive, and the only thing that they offer is XP, then they're still badly designed.  We should expect our XP to be fun to acquire, shouldn't we?  I think the boring, tedious and repetitive charge can be labeled fairly at a lot of moduels I've played, and I would guess that the reason that they're included is, as inferred here, to give the players more XP.  But that's really not a good excuse, though, even so.In which case, arguably, it's not filler, as it does serve another purpose, i.e., to flesh out the setting and create a sense of verisimilitude.Heh.  Love that label.Right; that's part of what I was trying to get at earlier, but which I think you said very well.  Even meaningful combats can be tedious if poorly designed.  There's more to exciting pacing than combat after combat unless you're the most gamist group of people who play D&D like a game of WarhammerQuest group of folks I've ever seen.That said, the opposite is also often a problem, where the PCs are floundering around trying to figure out what needs doing, and are starting to feel restless or frustrated, and bandit encounters are a good fantasy/medieval analog of the Raymond Chandler rule; "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."On the contrary, bandits can be the core of an entire campaign.  There's tons of source material to read about organized crime and rural organized crime, highwaymen, Robin Hood, The Swamp Fox, and I don't know how many real life inspirations.  You just have to make sure that bandits don't become boring and tedious.</blockquote>

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