XP as dated?

[fireinthedust]

Is XP a good idea?

By which I mean that, as a GM I don't really count xp for all the monsters I throw at PCs. I come up with adventures, either an area with adventure sites, or else a series of plot events that trigger different events; or I follow along with the PCs as they realize their sandbox goals. When the time comes to level up, they level up.

I'm toying with the idea that adventures of a given length, or that completing a set number of quests, will level a character.

I'm not a computer, I'm a GM, and I'd rather be playing than doing admin prep work. More adventure design, less xp counting.


Then again, there has to be some way to say "okay, you've done enough" and let the heroes just level up. And some way to reward heroes for fighting tougher monsters, fighting tough quests, or interacting successfully with key NPCs.



What do you think?

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

I gave up on XP a few years ago, and haven't looked back.

The reward for fighting tough monsters is better loot, and the reward for talking to NPCs is well...whatever reason the NPC is there for.

 

[Daztur]

I used to play this way, but I think that if used well then XP really helps give the players drive and engagement. XP is a carrot and carrots encourage certain sorts of behaviors.

In FATE you can get fate points for (among other things) doing in-character behavior that gets your character in trouble. So in the FATE game I played the players did a whole lot of roleplay and constantly did fun in character things that got their characters in trouble.

In old school D&D you get 1 xp for each gp. This carrot incentivizes cunning, avoiding needless fights and risk taking (if you go deeper into the dungeon you'll get more GP and XP but it'll be dangerous, if you make a bunch of shallow raids you'll be safer but will fight mostly wandering monsters and get a lot less XP/GP), all good things for old school D&D play.

So as long as the XP is given for things that you want to provide a carrot for and make the game more fun then XP is a wonderful tool.

 

[Lanefan]

Be it XP or something else, I think a DM needs to do something to reward those characters (not players, but *characters*) that participated in a given encounter as opposed to those who did not. XP are a great mechanism for this, and it doesn't take me that long to calculate them out*.

Otherwise it becomes far too easy for a cautious player or cowardly character to stand back yet still advance due to the sacrifice of his braver companions. And that just ain't right.

* - that said, if you're calculating for a multi-level party using 3e as written you have my sympathy

Lanefan

 

[Mishihari Lord]

IME players like to feel they've earned their levels rather than having them handed out at the DM's whim. XP are good for this.

 

[Libramarian]

My players would hate it if I stopped calculating XP and just gave them a level when I felt like it.

Which I think is good.

I don't want to to train them to stop caring about it. I gather that some DMs like the extra control that gives them but I'd rather use XP to make the players more engaged and proactive.

 

[delericho]

I don't like the 3e concept of spending XP for spellcasting and crafting items. And I'm very much torn on energy drain reducing a character's XP.

Other than those two things, I think XP is a useful concept, especially for introducing new players to the game. And (aside from those two things) it's trivially easy to drop from the game.

(My group still use XP, but I just give out a fixed number per PC per session. Because I can't be bothered with the hassle of doing an exact calculation, and prefer a faster rate of advancement anyway, but because we use 3e (and have an Artificer) it's easier to retain the concept than to 'fix' the crafting rules to work without.)

 

[Jhaelen]

I gave up on XP a few years ago, and haven't looked back.

Ditto. However, I still tell my players what an encounter they just had would be worth, so they get an idea about the (theoretical) difficulty (and because they still like to get a numerical measure of their success).

 

[Libramarian]

I think a good XP system provides a very important support to sandbox play. In my game I've never gotten a "sandbox stall"; if the players don't have a quest/story thread to follow up on, they know what to do: hit up some taverns for rumors until they know where the nearest dungeon is, then go and loot it. The XP system makes this generally the most lucrative activity in the game.

So lucrative that I as DM have to be proactive and attention-grabbing with my quests to pull them away from it. This pushes me to design more interesting quests. I can't just have a guy show up and tell them to do something. That's not good enough. They know they can kill that guy for his churlish importunity and go do some dungeoncrawling for a few sessions until I come up with something better. Which again, I think is pretty cool, although I can see where the desire to temper this with quest XP comes from.

 

[Dioltach]

As a player I love getting XP. It gives you a quantifiable way of measuring your progress and development and there's a thrill in seeing the amount of experience that you need to gain a level shrinking to zero. So as a DM I use the system too. However, I do adjust it to reflect how the PCs have handled themselves and to make sure that they don't get frustrated with the lack of progress.

I gave up using recommended XP values in 2E, particularly at higher levels. The XP needed to gain a level after round about 7th or 8th is so ridiculous compared with the XP values of monsters that it's hardly worth killing anything anymore. (For instance, a 7th level Cleric needs to gain 55,000 XP to make it to 8th level. A Black Draon, Ancient Wyrm, is worth 16,000 XP. So the Cleric has to go out and defeat three Ancient Wyrms on his own, and he'll still not have reached 8th level. And then he needs another 115,000 to get to level 9 ...)