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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 7650026" data-attributes="member: 9789">Way back in the early days, I followed the XP guidelines for monsters to the letter - doing lots of complex math and whatnot.  But even then, I always awarded bonus XP for completing quests, and I always awarded XP for defeating encounters - not just killing things.  So if you slipped past the guards with stealth, that was the same XP as killing them.  If the bad guy escaped, that was still XP because he was "defeated."That system worked well for a long time.  One of the only bad things was the eventual disparity of levels between characters:  due to level drain or spending XP on items or missing games or whatever, PCs ended up with radically different XP totals and the math for gaining XP was specific to each character.  That was a big hassle.Around 4.0 time I sort of evolved to where everyone just had the same XP total.  There were no more anti-XP effects in the game, which helped, and I just gave everyone the same XP whether they were there or not.  It made the math a lot simpler.  4.0 also codified some of the things I was doing anyway insofar as what could earn XP, but not much changed there.Breaking away from D&D, we played other games that handled XP differently.  Our next game was basically a system where you earned a set amount each session, regardless of whatever specific thing you did:  and I have to say, I loved it.  We were leery at first, but it really worked.  When you put XP tags on monsters, it really changes how players look at the game world.  But when your goal is just to accomplish something, it widens your perspective (at least it did for us).  (Technically this system was also designed to encourage RP by allowing players to earn more or less XP based on their RP each session, but our group had been playing so long we never had a problem with that.)  I also modified it slightly by giving out small bonus awards for completing major objectives, which just felt right to us (since we'd always done that), and again:  everyone's XP totals were the same.These days we're playing 13th Age (basically D&D) and its system is to just award character advancements (a piece of a level) after each adventure "day" (long rest), and a full level after about 3 or 4 of those.  It's sort of a cross between session XP and hand-waiving.  Due to our play schedule, an adventure "day" has typically coincided with accomplishing a major goal, which works well for us:  I would probably keep that connection even if they didn't match up.  We've only played a few sessions so far so it will be interesting to see how it goes.In the end, the more I play the more I see XP as something that could go away.  It doesn't serve an inherent purpose in gaming other than measuring character advancement, and unless managing XP is part of the point of the game (3.5 for example), you can easily skip it.  Character advancement is important, but getting stronger only because you accomplished a goal makes as much or more sense than getting stronger only because you finally defeated the 47th slime.  Similarly, experimenting with different systems has shown me that there are a lot of things that can be stripped out - like rolling monster damage, as another example.  We do a lot of things just because that's just the way they've been done, but I think a lot of D&D could be boiled away and you'd still have a tight, excellent system that still had all the pure essence of what made the game fun.  I dunno - then again, maybe I'm just tired of the math.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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