Advancement in 6e: Awarding XP.

I’m not, in this instance, talking about doing away with levels. I’m not really talking about changing the pattern of XP for each level either. I’ve discussed removing levels before, and while I stand by that discussion, I don’t think it’s going to happen. There are ways to make levels more evenly spaced, in terms of xp and while that’s an interesting meta-discussion about game design in and of itself, it’s not really vital to designing 6e.

What I’m talking about here, instead, is properly discussing how 6e awards xp.

In 5e, you either award xp for combat encounters. The DMG advises, for non-combat encounters, that you compare the event to the combat encounter table and award experience on that basis. That isn’t quite verbatim, but that is the total guidance you get. The alternative approach is just to set chapters, in effect, milestones in the official parlance, and at each point award the characters a level.

Each of these approaches has issues. Milestones are good if your party follow the planned route. However, how often do parties follow the route that you expect? This is a story from a game I played in, rather than ran, but we were supposed to take out the big band, who was really too hard for us. He was in a cave system, at the end, which we knew, but we could make a hole in the rock somehow and get through it, I don’t remember the details now. We did this, because we didn’t fancy meeting the boss after being weakened by contact with the guards. Sounded like a sensible plan, no? We got our arses handed to us, because, even without that, he was too strong for us. If we’d gone through the caves, his minions had been collecting various things, including what was functionally a quiver of arrows of slaying for him,,, not a guaranteed kill, but a lot easier fight. Oh well. But, what happens if you set your milestone on the basis of three fights, two puzzles and three bits of serious investigation by the party and… they don’t bother with any of the investigation, and they skirt two of the fights? They’ll be ok, in terms of the gain of course, and maybe they’ll suffer in later chapter with the clues they’ve missed and not get the equivalent of xp later when they circle back to do the work they should have done, but they’re still advancing because you’ve predetermined they should.

On the other side of the coin, having such a detailed guide for calculating xp for combat and then a throwaway line about everything else predisposes people to assume that’s how they should spend their effort. It’s human nature. If you lay out clearly what the rewards for undertaking a given action are, or you set clear rewards for acting in a given way, people tend to work to achieve those rewards. Don’t believe me? Consider achievements in online games. Not everyone does, and some achievements have specific functional rewards in game - you have to do these twenty things in order to get the legendary item, but as I write this, I’m also betting zhaitaffy on moa races to rack up the Winner’s Circle achievement in Guild Wars 2. Do that 10 times total and I get 4 APs and 3 Dragon Coffers. I have 12,305 AP, so 4 more… wow. I’ve gained about 20 Dragon Coffers so far today, so 3 more is hardly a big wow either. The point is, if you make it clear how to reward people for other activities, people will undertake them. The barbarian might not spend time in the library still, but other characters will do it and get properly rewarded.

How do I see this working?

I think it’s a two part process. Part one is to describe the common things that in 6e we want to give XP for, and to provide a framework so if the DM in a given game wants to provide XP for other things they can. What might be in that list?

• Research. It’s not only the wizards, clerics and others spend time doing research and it can be just as vital to knowing how to fight your enemies and actually putting the big hits in.
• Traps and puzzles. This one kind of speaks for itself, but it’s glossed over in 5e.
• Exploration. Exploring new areas isn’t all about the fighting, and a lot of new areas won’t have threats that are a significant threat to tier 3 or 4 parties, not even top end tier 2 parties. But it’s still important, it can be fun, and the party should have rewards for it.
• Social and political play. I’ve lumped this in together, because there’s often a lot of overlap. Obviously persuading the shopkeeper to give you a better deal isn’t really political, and politics by leading a conquering army isn’t really social, but normally politics is a social game.
• Crafting. Normally this is just something you do that takes time. But in games like RQ where using skills gains you ticks in skills used, you get ticks here, and certain cults require craft skills at 90% to advance. In MMOs it’s common to get XP for crafting. Why not in 6e? But, on a bigger scale, it’s not that uncommon for a party to establish a base. Why not reward them for repairing and upgrading it as well as riding out from it?

How would it work? Well there’s a really simplistic approach: 10xDC. That has the benefit of being clear and really easy to roll out to anything else. I’m not convinced that’s quite right, but it’s a decent starting point for a discussion.

The second part is to actually spend some time on each of these thinking about how to implement the rules so they become a workable set of rules that are fun, but simulate some sort of reality. I don’t have answers for all of these but I have some thoughts.

• Research, in the sense we’re using it here, is really a four-part process. You have to find good sources, sift them for the data you’re after, compare the data and synthesise your conclusion. Each of those fits neatly into describe the activity, decide on the DC, let the player roll. It’s just four of those loops chained back to back with rather critical results, and, if you want to be awkward, the size of the success at each point affecting the DC at the next.
• Traps and puzzles kind of have this system built in already. We have a perception roll to spot them, have an investigate roll to work out what’s going on, and a thief’s tools to disarm.
• Crafting, I think we need a blueprint/design phase and a build phase.
• Social, and especially political, needs a whole system built around it, and that needs to be worked out from scratch. I have some thoughts on that, and I will develop them in a later post.
• Exploration is something where I don’t really have the background expertise to do this well, and what I would like to do is being in geologists, ecologists and the like to work on it. Why is the land where you live the shape it is? Why do the plants that grow around you live there? How about the animals? Ultimately this is going to be abstracted into some tables of course, but I’d like the tables to produce random, but plausible results. If you start with a 20-mile or 30-km hex as your “starting map zone” and you make some rolls for the climate and terrain, based on that, what are the surround hexes like? Based on that, the hexes around those? You can keep building up and going until you’ve got your world if you want, or just expand a bit at a time as the party level up. But you get to populate your world with sensible geology, geography, plants and animals. Sensible towns, villages and hamlets too. And, while we’re at it, an option of history. I spent part of my youth living near Stonehenge. If you were running a campaign and you had them walking across the countryside and they saw Stonehenge, what would you do as DM? Since the neolithic period, when it was started, we’ve have Bronze Age, Iron Age, LPRIA (common called Celtic), Roman, Dark Ages, Saxon, (not really Viking, not that far South and West, although the Danelaw certainly reached where I am now), Norman and then the successive royal dynasties until the modern era. Within 10 miles of Stonehenge you can easily find echoes of all those bits of history. Flip that around, why aren’t parts of your world as littered with the history and prehistory of previous cultures and civilisations?

This doesn't prevent a DM awarding level gains by milestones. but it gives them the tools to measure those milestones by more than gut feeling or need and set up different types of adventures. 

I would also set up a system where, if you're using milestones, you track sub-milestones as well. in the example I used above, the milestone was meant to be achieved because the party had had three fights, solved two puzzles and undertaken three bits of serious investigation. OK, you don't give them XP for those parts, but until they've done their three fights (or a suitable equivalent), two puzzles and three bits of investigation, they don't reach their milestone, and they don't level up.