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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7388420" data-attributes="member: 97077">Here are the advancement systems I used in the last three campaigns:The Delve, a town-to-dungeon campaign. PCs earned XP by defeating enemies in combat challenges. PCs earned bonus XP at the end of the session by answering some questions related to genre-appropriate achievements: Did they defeat a notable monster? Did they acquire an interesting treasure? Did they make an ally out of a potential foe? Did anyone nearly die while boldly confronting deadly perils? And so on. (Can't remember all of them offhand.) If they could honestly say "Yes" to those questions, they got the bonus XP. So the players were incentivized to murder things and to achieve particular goals that made sense in context for the focus of that game.Host of the High Chieftain, an adventure path (Red Hand of Doom, rewritten). Combat challenges and achieving set objectives appropriate to the adventure path were how PCs earned XP. It was a campaign focused on war, so I wanted to incentivize smashing skulls whenever possible; however, the campaign was on a tight timeline and I wanted the players to feel that pressure, so one of the ways I did that was to make wandering monsters worth no XP. This made them not worth the time and effort and worth avoiding in favor of tackling the major set-pieces and quests. Whereas in the previous campaign they would sometimes seek out random monsters to level up lower-level characters, in this campaign it wasn't worth it to do that, so they didn't. This also made them stick close to their caravan (which was a whole other thing that was a big part of the campaign) while they moved around the setting because wandering monsters wouldn't trouble the caravan. So that XP rule reinforced the theme further.Unity of Rings, a Sigil-based Planescape campaign. Since they mostly interact with intelligent creatures, combat and social interaction challenges are how they earn XP. That way they can decide, based on their current priorities, whether they want to destroy or ally with particular groups (usually other factions). I therefore set up scenes so that either is a possibility in many cases. So far, they do still tend toward violence, but this seems largely due to the players enjoying a good fight, plus the characters themselves tend toward the more Chaotic factions. But it seems to be working fine.So, really, unless you're running the same basic game over and over again, it's a good idea in my view to examine what's important in the campaign and then structure the advancement system around that. It's just another way to drive the play experience you're aiming for.</blockquote>

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