13 Comments
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David Rollins's avatar

I do something similar, but give them points for creating allies. People who see them in a positive light and would help them because they feel they owe the party one, or believe that the party is acting in the ally’s interest. I also set three levels of allies.

It looks like I’m rewarding the result and you are rewarding the action. I think your method might be a better way to go!

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Sean Valdrow's avatar

Try the RuneQuest III system. You didn't get experience, you got skill points based on the skills you actually employed during the campaign.

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James's avatar

So in modern dnd, among everyone I've talked to or seen talking about it, everyone is disagreement that you should do milestones, and definitely not exp. It's really as simple as just having a reward for everyone for playing, some advancement so your character is not exactly the same as it was the last time. You could do levels every session, you could do levels every other, and new equipment between them. But trying to gamify it with experience points is just getting yourself more work to deal with and the players are going to metagame it to the maximum extent they can, and then being competition with each other and jealous of one another unless it's the same, anyway.

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Speedway At Nazareth's avatar

This is just milestone with larger numbers

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HEAD SWAP's avatar

Great post! I think there’s always a balance with rewarding players and allowing players to have agency

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Atilla Büyükurvay's avatar

This is just story-based XP rewards from 2e/3e with extra steps.

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James's avatar

Read as "in agreement". By the way why can I not edit my comments on your post but can elsewhere? I really hate it 😭

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Mylon Pruett's avatar

Very nice system! I've done something a bit similar my adjusting the Feats of Exploration system to just be the goals we care about.

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Bookwizard999's avatar

When Al-Rathak comes out, take a look t how I am attempting to motivate players.

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John Williford's avatar

Great idea! I will definitely try this with my table.

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Daniel's avatar

It popped in my head today the idea of an XP system that would increase skill levels based skill checks. Probably nothing new, but say a warrior defeats or loses against a particularly tough and/or unusual foe. The GM can decide which skills the player most needed to fight the enemy and rolls an over/under on whether that skill will increase. The higher the skill, the higher the player must roll to increase the skill. I don't know if any system uses this specifically but it's definitely a mashup of some existing ones, I dare not say it's original.

Anyway I don't see the point in XP being earned by collecting cash unless it's a game where getting cash is the main objective. Otherwise for me, cash is there to enable XP by buying new equipment or experiences that make it easier or more possible to get XP.

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Burns Tabletop's avatar

I love systems that reward and thus encourage different avenues of engagement. Great stuff!

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sean f. smith / he, him's avatar

I like this a lot! I've also been using 1kXP × average party level for "impact"

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