/musings on XP and growth

/musings on XP and growth

/musings on XP and growth

So I’ve been looking at the leveling/xp mechanic in UW, and I must admit that it’s not quite what I was hoping. From general feedback (in this community and elsewhere), the system adds too much overhead to the game: it forces the players to keep watching themselves in order to “gain xp” in a particular career. Add that to the general confusion about cross-career xp and so forth, and I think we can say that this particular mechanic is well-intentioned but clunky.

Part of the problem may stem from my own GMing style; I forego xp. No matter what game, I’ve very rarely awarded xp on a session-to-session basis. Instead, I’d worked on a story-milestone “system”, which is too arbitrary to make an official rule. People expect some sort of measurable growth/leveling up out of an RPG.

I feel perhaps I’ve missed something important. For the player, an xp system is a measurable growth and increase in power. For the designer… xp is a way to incentivise behavior in the players through reward. It’s flat out operant conditioning.

I have a number of goals designing this; I don’t want wide xp gaps between players, I want a steady pace of growth, I want the rewards to be narrative driven, I want the tracking/awarding to be both satisfying and brief.

While I’m mulling all this over, I’d invite you guys to post your favorite xp/growth system, and (more importantly) what they did that makes it good. I’ll be tinkering over the weekend, and will post anything interesting, to get the general reaction of the community.

16 thoughts on “/musings on XP and growth”

  1. That would involve me deleting the section and just saying “give ’em a new skill whenever you feel like it” 😛

    But seriously, I’m not convinced the way I GM is even correct in that regard. I worry it may actually be detrimental, removing a seemingly essential (or at least ubiquitous) system for player motivation purely for my own sake (tracking xp and levels took up too much time in D&D, and my reticence carried over)

    Also, leveling, xp and such has been a surprisingly common question even before the previews. After folks see the character creation it tends to be their first question. I would likely be doing UW a disservice to handwave that.

  2. I love Keys from Shadow of Yesterday and Lady Blackbird. Pretty much the most basic of operant conditioning. Of the PbtA games I think I like DW best because it takes the sting off failure, but SotI might be the most clever.

  3. Keith Stetson, care to give a quick summary of how Keys work? I’m afraid I only have passing familiarity with Shadows or Blackbird (much to my chagrin, so many rpgs so little time!)

  4. Mm, I feel like if you examine what you normally do, there’s more to it than that. You have a sense of what story milestones are and when characters should advance that could be articulated and used by the game. Even if it’s something as simple as players, either singly or as a group, announcing goals and then when everybody feels they have reached a goal or a significant milestone on the path to it, they get to advance.

    Doing it as a group means everybody advances at the same time, so there’s little or no disparity between PCs, and also gives the crew of the ship a common purpose. Making this optional leaves it to the group. Maybe if PCs can have 2 (or 3) goals they want to achieve, a mix can be used, which keeps the group together and gives each player some spotlight time.

    You would just need to be clear about what constitutes a good goal, how the GM should use goals to create the situations the PCs find themselves in, and what a milestone that gives PCs an advance should feel like. I feel like that could work in a way that tells players to be active in the direction of play, to build toward those milestone moments, and to reward themselves for playing the whole game, and not just the rules (if that makes sense).

  5. Back when I ran True20 and Blue Rose (where the rule was literally “level up whenever the GM says so”), I would have players write down three situations that their character would find transformative – ie, worth gaining a level over. I would then run the game as normal, giving out levels at my whim, but regularly dangling these transformative moments just off the beaten path to make the players/characters choose and balance moving between the immediate crisis and exploring their backstory or personal narrative (since that’s what the whole list idea was basically about).

  6. I haven’t given XP or “levels” in two of the last three games I’ve run (a kit-bashed homebrew and a game of Fate Accelerated Edition). The players haven’t seemed to mind. I always make sure I give the players opportunity to change their characters, but I’ve phased out the steady accretion of power.

  7. I much prefer XP as operant conditioning. Having everyone level up when it “feels right” has always driven me nuts. XP should be tied to choices I make for my PC.

    Listen to Keith and look at the games he is mentioning.

  8. My favourite XP system is Numenera: get XP for doing what the game is about (finding weird sci-fi gadgets and tech), also get XP when things go wrong. It makes things easier for players because they only have to remember a few things that get the XP, and makes things easier for me when running because I don’t have to make a plot that accomodates multiple ways of earning XP.

    I find it depends on the game though. If I’m running a story based game then XP per session as they progress through the story works, but if I’m running a sandbox environment then XP for achieving party goals or completing missions might work better.

  9. I’ve tried using Keys in a PbtA hack and found them a bit wanting. The problem, I think, is that you’re already “listening” to the narrative so much for triggers to moves (both basic & character-specific) that adding another thing (keys) to watch for is hard.  The DW alignment keys are better, IMO, because they push you towards a particular type of play but they’re a binary.  You just look at them at the end of session and check whether you accomplished them.  You don’t have to track them during play.

    Have you see A Big Red Letter Day?  It’s an AW hack that never got a lot of attention, which is a shame.  Lemme see…  here!  http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=6344.15 

    Anyhow, in one of the iterations of BRLD, the playbooks each had a set of ~6 keys that were particular to the playbook.  At the start of each session, the MC chose one and another player chose a 2nd one for you.  And you could never choose the same keys two sessions in a row.  I never got to play it, but it seemed like a really solid way to incorporate both playbook-specific-XP-triggers and the AW idea of highlighting stats.  I’d probably make the keys 1-per-session (like DW), but it’s something to definitely consider.

    Regarding players “levelling” at the same time… Are there playbooks for the ships themselves in UW?  (Sorry, it’s on my reading list but haven’t really dug in.)  If so, maybe you track XP there (rather for each individual) and everyone gets advances all at once?  And/or you pick from a list of possible advances (like in an AW playbook), and some of the advances improve the ship, others improve the NPC crew, and still others let all the PCs improve?

    XP on a miss is wickedly elegant (takes the sting out of misses, encourages players to take risks, and largely self-corrects from a pacing standpoint).  But you’ve got to find the right balance for your game.  You might also consider some sort of karma chits instead of XP on a miss.  Like, you miss, and you get a token you can spend on a +1 forward later.  Might get a lot of the benefits of XP-on-miss without actually tracking XP.

  10. I actually got to play in a campaign on Red Letter Day with its creator (I feel famous now!) Keys weren’t too hard to track, but they did seem too easy to game in the iteration I played. We got to choose our own Keys and it allowed for a lot of power gaming, as far as PbtA can have power gaming.

    I do generally find Keys better for a pre-set scenario (like Lady Blackbird), but even with that being said they’re one of my favorite mechanics.

  11. I have to agree with Christian and Jeremy, Dungeon World (and Monster of the Week) both do the ‘mark XP on failed rolls’ thing and it’s really smooth. They also both have you mark XP for certain moves that are integral to the playbook, like MotW’s Mundane marking XP for getting captured by monsters. It’s not something every book gets, but it’s interesting on the ones without big fancy features.

    Getting XP on failed rolls is a great way to get characters to push outside of their core competencies and gives the GM plenty of room to add complications. It acts sort of the way compels do in FATE, letting you hose yourself right now to fuel strong moments later.

    In sort of a side note, the lack of a Hx/History/Bonds in the preview material sticks out to me. It’s been really key to my group’s enjoyment of these games. History doesn’t even do anything mechanically in Monster of the Week, but just having it be something you have to do ties your player characters together and makes the whole ‘traveling together’ thing seem more cohesive.

  12. Some people tend to abuse the DW system. I’ve seen it happen when I was GMing.

    They put their character up for failure way to often, just to accrue XPs faster than their fellow players. And in doing that, they bring too many complications to the group and the other players get bored because of the lack of progression of the story, as their PCs are always bumping into hardship and problems.

    I would advise against going the DW way.

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