“Should we do it?”
“I dunno. This quest doesn’t come with much of a reward.”
“It’s the right thing to do though. My goddess of right-thing-doing would want us to help.”
“Exactly! And besides, just think of all the valuable life experience we’ll gather in the process!”
This is a conversation I’ve heard more than once in my ongoing Dragon’s Delve campaign. And as an interaction metaphor, I honestly love it. You see, no matter what it says in the race/heritage blank on the sheet, all player characters are actually Saiyans. The know that they’ll get stronger if they head out and fight things. And as an (ironically) “real man” type gamer, that warms the cockles of my real manly heart. Anything that encourages players to act like big damn heroes rather than advantage-seeking money grubbers is OK by me.
You see, I like to take a page from the Powered by the Apocalypse playbook. Their injunction to “be a fan of the characters” is a sound bit of advice. When you’re excited about the PCs, and when you are on the edge of your seat to find out what happens next, the enthusiasm builds. The game is more fun for all and sundry. This is part of being a good audience, and it applies to GMs just as much as players. And speaking for myself, I find it much easier to be a fan of the PCs when they’re decent people rather than outright bastards.
This is why we’ve got everyone’s favorite self-absorbed schmuck Fighter out there doing good in today’s comic. Dude could care less about helping the poor mouse folk of Brie recover their holiday loot. But the game itself is bending his actions. He knows that more fights equals more power. And the mechanics are actually making him a better person.
So for today’s discussion, why don’t we pause and consider this oft-overlooked aspect of XP. Do you find that your players make different decisions based on acquiring our beloved meta-currency? Is that a tool to be used, or an unavoidable metagaming problem to be mitigated? What’s the most heroic decision YOU’VE ever made at the service of gaining that sweet, sweet level-up? Tell us all about your own selfless quests and “valuable life experiences” down in the comments!
COMIC STRIP OF HEROES DIY COMIC CONTEST! Happy New Year! We are at the end of 2023, and simultaneously at the end of our COMIC STRIP OF HEROES DIY COMIC CONTEST! Our contestants have taken old Handbook of Heroes comics, then cut ’em up, spliced ’em togethr, and made ’em into brand new comics! You can still check out the entrants over here, but that’s not the headline today. The big news is our pair of grand prize winners. So without further ado, please join me in congratulating Zarhon and Amythyst Míriel! These prolific creator swill be receiving this badass dice tray / map of Handbook-World. Well done, gamers!
JOIN THE HANDBOOK OF HEROES DISCORD! Do you want a place to game with your fellow Heroes? How about a magical land where you can post your dankest nerd memes, behold the finest in gamer dog and geek cats, or speculate baselessly on Handbook of Heroes plot developments? Then have I got a Discord Invite for you!
… Huh.
How about that? He’s actually fighting to save Yule.
Okay, I dig it. Lesser of two evils.
Happy 2024, everybody!
And what happened then? Well, in Brie they say that Fighter’s Hit Points grew three sizes that day.
I use something called Deed Levelling, where instead of XP, you have a list of Deeds that you spend to level up. Some are universal (save people, acquire a big-ass treasure hoard), some are class specific (fighters fight big strong things, wizards learn Deep Lore, thieves steal stuff…).
I’m a strong advocate for milestone levelups, personally.
To be fair, that is enough reason. Shiny stuff cones and goes but XP is eternal(or until character death), but some times it’s hard to shape those words to fit the character. Though there are systems that din’t avard xp and wait untill you have x ammount but rather you get points after a story section or “episode”. I kinda like those more as advancement while slow is constant.
I’ve never cared about exp, either as a Player or as the GM.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I like earning and advancing my paper peeps, but I’d prefer to rp the PC the way they are and not earn exp, than to do something out-of-character to them in order to earn it.
And as a GM I just give exp for 1) showing up to play and 2) doing something*, anything, in game. My Players get the same amount of exp for shopping and planning for a sesh as they’d get for murder-hoboing for a sesh. I do give bonus exp for really good Roleplaying (kinda “above and beyond” stuff, like are you setting your Character back following their goals and personality? Are you sacrificing tangible stuff to their personality and goals? – Not “anti-party activities’ like stealing from the party, backstabbing on epic levels, or things like that; I want a group, not 6 loners who are all just walking in the same direction).
Exp never guides behavior (aside from “showing up and doing something IC” and “good roleplaying”).
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.* I even had a PC earn exp for staying in bed depressed for an entire session, because they had committed some “accidental murderings” which was truly weighing on the PCs (not the Player’s) conscience. The party had been tricked into thinking one group was the “baddies” when they were in fact not actually baddies. It was kinda the PCs fault, the Players knew the game wasn’t colour ‘coded for convenience’, but yet they still took the word of a group of elves they were told were bad news over the word of, well actually, they never even bothered to ask the orcs what they were up to, they just started with the murdering… and then had to figure what to do with the children and elderly of the refugee group they’d just executed for trespassing and squatting in an empty forested area. The depressed PC was an adherent of the “Good” God (who wasn’t so much “good” as “focused on protecting the community that worshiped it”) and began having problems with all the Not Good other priests and adherents got up to that the deity allowed in pursuit of Protecting the Community. They eventually had a crisis of Faith and found a different deity, who focused on doing good works, no matter who the good was for… even though that meant being ostracized from the community.
We hadn’t really seen much of Fighter last year, did we? I suppose that’s why he didn’t get coal for Christmas. He didn’t have a chance to be a bastard lol
I will share some of my less heroic, and very non-glorious, stories of seeking out the XP. All coming from different versions of the same homebrewed system very early in my Roleplaying Career.
At the point of the first story, the system was made so that you chose a class, and then rolled for stats in order. Which lead to issues such as in this case, where my Fighter rolled a 1 for his strength. In a game where the average human had around 10 in it. Now, in later versions this would just cause the guy to be utterly ineffective. With the ability to get some extra points in it by leveling. But in this early version the only way to increase your stats was by spending time training them. And it turns out my guy was too weak to ever succeed in training his strength. Forever dooming him to having 1 strength. Things looked up for him however, when someone gave him an early rifle, so that he could be somewhat useful (He was too weak to use bows and crossbows). At least until he got his head punched off by an ogre.
The second story, takes place in a later version of the game that had fixed a lot of the early issues. Such as no longer having to chose class before rolling stats, and making it more difficult to end up with a 1 in a stat. Additionally, the system of training stats had been dropped in favor of a more traditional XP system.
But a big issue with this version was that the only way to gain XP was through combat. And only the person who got a kill, got XP. This was quite a disaster. Knocking people unconscious meant letting XP go to waste, NPC allies became killstealing burdens and you got that awkward situation where you are 1 XP from leveling so you start harassing pigeons or other weak creatures trying to eke it out of something. But the biggest issue was how it utterly skewered the Party Balance.
My, new and improved, Fighter did great. Killing things left and right and quickly ending up around level 8. The Wizard also did good. A bit slower in the start, but as he got stronger spells he quickly followed suit. Reaching level 7 pretty fast.
Our support focused druid, whose healing spells often saved our bacon however, was left around level 3 for a good while. Him being pretty bad at combat meant that he rarely had the chance to kill someone. We tried to help him by knocking enemies unconscious so that he could cut their throats and somehow learn something about combat from it. But still, it was an uphill battle. So he was just sorta stuck in the low levels until the GM finally relented to our pleas, made us all level 8 and scrapped the “Last Hit” system of XP. Giving the Druid a sudden powerboost, as he actually got to get things like “Good Combat Spells”.
The third story is simple. Our party was once just a couple of experience away from leveling. We were going into a dangerous situation, so everyone was pretty antsy to find some way to get them, but we had already killed most things in the immediate area. So the party decided to kill the most dangerous thing they could find, which was my characters donkey. The Donkey killed one player, and heavily wounded another before they put it down. Which was within expectations, it had already killed my character twice and gained a couple of levels on its own. But after rezzin our dead player, healing up and enjoying our newfound level we went into the dangerous temple, where my character almost immediately got eaten by a swarm of bugs. Which I was unable to escape as the rest of the party saw the swarm and immediately shut the door to the room in my face… Lets just say I did not feel the love that day.
I’m solely milestone, I honestly am glad we as a culture have mostly moved away from XP.