I’m gathering info on experience systems in PbtA games and was wanting to have some people respond to the following questions:
What is your favorite mechanic for gaining experience in a PbtA game?
Are there any commonly used methods that you dislike?
How fast do you prefer to gain advances for your characters?
Have you encountered a mechanic for gaining experience that felt too slow or fast, and what was it?
If you had the option of having any of the following mechanics in a game, which two would you pick:
Exp tied to…
…relationships
…missing rolls
…rolling specific stats chosen at beginning of a session
…end of session move regarding actions taken within a session
…character specific moves that fit along a theme for every character
If genre of game is important to your answer, let me know how and in what way you’d want the mechanic tied to genre.
The purpose for those wanting to know is for a game I’m creating that I’m currently playtesting privately.
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My favorite is the corruption track in Urban Shadows (which fits under “character specific moves that fit along a theme for each character”). Second favorite is based on end of session questions.
I like an advance each session, personally, but the right pace depends on the game.
Like all PbtA design decisions, I think this one should be guided by how the experience at the table reflects the fiction you’re creating. Frex: Cartel doesn’t have xp on a miss because I want the players to be thinking about how to play “smart” instead of sometimes angling for a low roll. DW, on the other hand, is perfect for xp on a miss!
While Mark Diaz Truman certainly has a good point, my Dungeon World group found the xp on a miss system problematic because some players just had lots of ideas for moves and rolls and therefore had more opportunity to fail, while other players rolled maybe 2-3 times in a session, and never got to level up. There were hurt feelings. It wasn’t pretty. Maybe I could have done more to rein in the overly contributive players, but meh? We eventually settled on Jason Morningstar’s idea of everyone levelling every session (no xp tracking), which worked much better for our group. But not before we lost a player due to the previous issue.
I dislike XP on a miss. Encourage action, not failed action. I’m sure Barf Forth still has my extended comments on that from back in the day 🙂
The “too much XP from misses” problem could be contained by making something like “did you roll a miss, if so mark XP” an end of session question.
I sympathise strongly with the level every session thing, I’ve done that in some games before, but I also like end of session questions.
Huge fan of XP-on-a-miss for games that promote action. Yeah, I see the potential problems with it, but I think it’s spot-on for DW and similar games. It promotes bold action by cushioning the blow of a miss, and it tells the players “take risks, go for it, you’re a hero!”
But XP for loot (and very low HP) serves to make World of Dungeons much more like early D&D: careful play, try to avoid making rolls, don’t get into fights unless you can’t avoid it, and then look for every possible fictional advantage.
There was an old half-completed hack a while back, Big Red Letter Day (I think?) where each playbook had a series of keys to hit that were very playbook thematic. When you hit like 4 out of 6 of them, i think, you got an advance and cleared the check marks. I thought that was pretty cool; encourages breadth of different on-brand behaviors, not just hitting the same behavior over and over.
Like everyone else, I feel it depends on the themes and the player experience you want to evoke with the particular game. That said, I tend to like XP systems that motivate certain kinds of behavior, such as the original AW stat highlighting, Urban Shadows’s corruption, the Sprawl’s directives. XP on failed rolls can often feel very slow given my expectation of the games that use it. I’ve never seen players angle for low rolls for XP in DW or similar, though! Very cool!
Sagas of the Icelanders has a cool system based on participating in scenes with other characters, but it can be a problem if your relationship links die…
My players enjoy the experience on a miss. It’s the idea of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger but I think my players just like having some sugar with the medicine. I personally like the end of game XP because everyone interacts and put their two cents in. I find it a nice way to tie up a fun night of gaming.
I love XP-on-a-miss in Monsterhearts 2, mostly because it fits so well with the idea of teens flailing around trying to do anything, anything, to helpt them figure out their place in the world. I also love any “carrot-and-stick” XP mechanism, so Strings in Monsterhearts and Seduce or Manipulate in Apocalypse World.
It’s a bit further afield, but my favourite version of XP in a PbtA game is XP for Desperate rolls in Blades in the Dark. It’s got the “drive action forward” stuff from XP-on-a-miss, but also comes from a deliberate choice on the part of the players, invites steeper consequences from the GM and leads toward the type of fiction that the game excels at depicting. It’s brilliant.
Aaron Sturgill I’ve run into a similar problem with the xp on a miss situation. I’ve got a group where most of the PCs have 3+ advances more than one of them because that PC stacked their stats in favor of their character’s strengths. He now feels like the only way to gain advances is to cheese things in ways that aren’t appropriate for the character he’s playing.
This whole post came about because we had a playtest session using the xp on a miss and I think one person rolled crappy in the whole session. They were the only one who got any xp via that particular method.
I vote for “XP on a miss” and “XP at the end of session move regarding actions taken within a session”.
‘On miss’ means player have to take (try) actions, which is great for any RPG. PtbA luckily is not combat centric, so you have a huge variety of stuff to do you could get XP from. Receiving benefits for misses also encourages players to embrace failures – an important mindset most other RPGs do not foster. If someone can not take action then PtbA might not be the right system for them (yet).
Safe rewards for reaching story milestones are handy because not every finished storyarc will give in-game rewards in a story appropriate way if you try to force them in. That is my main reason for my second vote. It is also a safety net to reward players for doing stuff even if they are in the rare situation to not roll much.
But imho it is the wrong question from the start. A better one would be: Which way of levelling fits the genre and intended style best?
I’d say my favorite method is the highlight. Another player and the MC say what they’d like your player to do, and you’re rewarded for doing it if you choose.
My least favorite is XP on a miss. You get rewarded for what the dice roll, not what you do or what others want you see your character do. It’s completely arbitrary. It also leads to mismatched advances, where by random luck people have more advances then others and they can’t catch up because it’s entirely based on luck. MH 2 switching to that system was really disappointing for me, especially since gaining 5 advances means the end of the current season. Masks has this too, but at least there are a lot of other ways of gaining XP (“potential”, in that game) by acting in ways the designers want the characters to act.
I’ve noticed I like to gain my first advance quickly, usually within the first session, and then I’m fine with slowing down if that happens.
My two favorite would be rolling stats chosen at the beginning of the session and character specific moves.
Thank you everyone. This has been very enlightening for me and I appreciate everyone’s opinions.
As a general principle, I strongly dislike XP on a miss, and I was disappointed that Monsterhearts 2 went that way. To me it feels arbitrary, because it’s based on what the dice do. I like XP systems that reward you for taking specific actions, like stat highlighting or moves that let you offer someone XP to do something.
That being said, I’m designing several PbtA games right now, and my co-designer and I have realized that XP on a miss makes perfect sense for one of them (Cat-pocalypse World, about cats surviving the human apocalypse). In that game, you have two stats that are on a slider trading off against each other, which shifts based on how often you use each stat, and players have a lot of freedom to decide which stat to roll with. So XP on a miss becomes an incentive to use the worse stat. There’s also a mechanic that allows you to sacrifice one of your nine lives to turn a miss into a huge success, so XP on a miss helps counterbalance that.
But I’m definitely not using XP on a miss for my other games 🙂
Stentor Danielson Cat-pocalypse World sounds like such an awesome idea!
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