One of the pieces of the RPG puzzle that alternative game systems try to solve is the idea of player progress.
In D&D we have Experience Points (XP), which has been copied by many, many games, both of the tabletop and the electronic variety.
Of course, a reason for this is familiarity - gaining points for killing things goes back to the days of Space Invaders - but it's also useful because it is immediately easy to understand for new players and old.
Essentially, experience points incentivize certain actions. Cause and effect.
In business, we say what you measure you get more of.
Another way of putting it is
We feed what we focus on
This also means because we incentivize killing and looting, you are going to turn your players into murderous sociopaths instead of heroic adventurers if you are not careful.
Give XP too freely and you end up with way overpowered characters who are more like gods than adventurers, and that brings a whole bunch of extra problems.
What alternatives are there?
There are a lot of game systems that do away with counting experience points and instead give the player a feeling of progress in other ways, but they usually come down to variations on the following:
- Gold - Instead of XP the players have to accrue gold or credits, which they can then spend on upgrades. Some people feel this is more "realistic", but I have my doubts about games being better the more like "simulations" they are, and in many ways, gold is another word for XP - after all, most of the gold is going to come from looting. That said, I think there is merit to players powering up via assets, weapons, wealth, acquisition of skills, etc rather than growing their own personal stats.
Merit - Rather than have a direct correlation between killing and points, the points are awarded for other things, solving puzzles, going undetected, retrieving an item, and so on. Even roleplay can be rewarded with points. The problem with relying on this at the exclusion of other things is it is going to feel arbitrary, or even unfair. If a player can't predict the cause and effect, they might feel another player is being "gifted" XP out of bias, or that they are being under-rewarded.
Progress Rewards - Players need to feel progress if they are going to want to participate in a campaign rather than merely a series of conflicts and encounters. This does not mean, however, that I wait a long time before giving my players a progress update! I like adding an element of milestone leveling but something I borrow from skirmish campaign games such as Kill Team and Frostgrave is the players can get rewarded after any successful mission. This gives a strong connection between their actions and their rewards, in addition to any loot they acquire.
Non-Conflict Resolution - It is ok to end an encounter early if the outcome seems obvious, especially if ending it is more fun than dragging it out! Perhaps the bad guys run away, teleport, surrender … interesting opportunity for moral/ethical choice. A potential issue with XP is the "grind" of having to keep blasting away to rack up points, way past the point of enjoyment.
Resource Allocation - Heavily related to the above, I recently checked out a popular Play By Web game and the whole thing was based on mining, farming, etc to build up enough points where you could fight rats, then more griding until you could fight a large spider, then more farming ... that feels more like a chore than a game to me.
My Approach
I've not really ever worked out a perfect system but I have something that is working for me right now.
What I have come down to is I still give XP, but players can gain XP in known ways, ways they can predict, and not at all for pure murder and mayhem.
I also keep a log of each player and their morality. If they go into a shop and murder the shopkeeper so they can loot their store, first they don't get XP, and second, they edge toward being evil. There are no evil PCs at my table - go full evil and I take over their character and they need to roll a new one.
The biggest rewards are for achieving goals and missions. Yes, they can still go off and do whatever they want, it's not railroading because they will inevitably find another mission.
What Do You Prefer?
As a player or GM, what is your ideal way of tracking player character progress and leveling up?
If you liked this, check out this article by @jacobtothe who has his own take on the topic!
I also like a mixture of encounter and story progress XP. If you feel like the players gain too many XP you could give them some short time benefits instead as reward from time to time instead. This way they get rewarded but will not level up too fast. Some examples:
If you are hosting a campaign where the players have their own piece of land or business they can also be rewarded with "fame", leading to more NPCs willing to work for them.
Love those ideas. I’ve used fame as a negative when they’ve got too murdery before!
I like the Genesys XP system. 5-15 XP is issued for each session depending on story progress, and instead of levels, you spend XP to buy skills, or add talents on a career tree. There is a discount on career skills based on your character's "class," but you can buy into anything if you want.
That is cool 👍
I got a diceless rpg recently and there was no levelling up at all, you can only add equipment and such. Rather than nice you have action points so extra actions is another way of getting rewards
So for the most part I play one of two games, D&D 5th and the Narrative Dice system (either Star Wars or Genesys). Both use experience points but in different ways.
In D&D you get earn a chunk of XP then spend it on a level of a class, which gives you a package of different abilities depending on the class. You get some Hit Points and maybe spells, new abilities or extra attacks. This feels good because of everything you had to do to earn it. However, it does feel... mechanical. I killed fifty goblins, now I know how to cast Fireball! It sometimes doesn't feel earned.
In Narrative Dice you get XP at the end of every session. This allows for character to make small improvements over time in the direction the character wants to develop. But this has a similar problem. "I spend my XP on three skill ranks in Medicine and two tiers of the Surgeon talent. I is now a dOcTOr!" In a typical game, that would take two to three sessions of worth of play.
These two games represent (in my opinion) the majority of leveling systems in TTRPGs. Most games have either the Level Package system or the Piecemeal/A La Carte system. I've only ever played in one game that didn't use either and that was Burning Wheel by Luke Crane.
Burning Wheel's advancement mechanic was simple...ish. The more you did something the better you got at it (in theory). You earned (Dice manipulation) points at the end of each session if you role played your character hard enough and the other players agreed. You would then use them to help you pass tests to help improve your skills. It is an excellent game system for medieval low fantasy. The kind of game where fighting should be your last opinion because recovery from injury takes days and weeks, not hours. I highly recommend it if you can wrap you head around the rules. Its a DENSE system (again, in my opinion) and I've covered it in very broad strokes.
I will look up Burning Wheel, that sounds interesting :)