[Riffs] Design Diary: My Experience With Experience
I won’t play coy: Games that award experience points only for killing monsters suck. They’re not for me. I hate them. They are a blight on the hobby. I will not be discussing them except to say I’m grateful to have never been in a game where using such a system felt appropriate.
Take this as the usual disclaimer that I did not design any of these games and that people’s playstyles are many and varied. If any of my assertions fill you with visceral rage, feel free to comment. I’m always curious to hear other people’s thoughts.
Addressing the Dragon in the Dungeon
When I play or run the ‘Dragon Game’, I always use the ‘milestone’ advancement system. And... I don’t love it. It feels very explicitly like a ‘patch’ to remove a part of the system that people don’t like, while avoiding any knock-on effects.
Luckily, we live in a golden age of RPG design, and countless games have impressed me with their systems for gaining EXP. What follows is far from an exhaustive list; rather, it is a series of moments that influenced me as a GM and designer. I’ll end by sharing a system of my own that synthesises these experiences.
OSR Systems
Older editions of the Dragon Game and many of their more recent retroclones use a simple advancement system wherein a character is awarded a single experience point for every gold piece they manage to cart out of a dungeon and back to civilisation. Treasure is, naturally, worth whatever you can sell it for.
This, in my opinion, elegantly encapsulates the themes of those games. For one, your character is a good-for-nothing treasure hunter just out to make tuppence. For another, your character’s success is your success. The supposed ‘goal’ of such games is to use skill and ingenuity to overcome obstacles and keep your character alive; any emergent story is a bonus.
A similar game that has a unique approach is Mothership. In this game, your character gets a ‘high score’ tallying how many gameplay sessions they’ve survived. This, in my opinion (again), cleverly encapsulates the horrific tone of the game. Life is cheap. Staying alive will be a desperate struggle.
But both of these advancement systems enforce very specific assumptions about story and setting. I’m hoping to design something a little different…
The Year Zero Engine
Free League, or Fria Ligan in their native tongue, is Sweden’s powerhouse of game design. I’m a tragic for their games, as is another blogger I won’t mention by name. Their house system is called the Year Zero Engine, and in it, each session ends with a series of questions that vary by game. For each question a player answers ‘yes’ to, their character gains one Experience point. Check out these examples from Forbidden Lands and Vaesen, respectively.
I don’t know about you, but I can instantly tell what these games are about! Forbidden Lands rewards characters who leave their urban comforts for gold and glory, while Vaesen is a more meditative game all about mystical investigations. And not only does this system encourage players to play to the game’s themes, but they are also rewarded for reminding the table of what makes their character unique. Reflecting on the party’s accomplishments also makes for a nice way to cap off a session. What’s more, it is incredibly easy to adapt the questions to fit whatever Year Zero-fuelled adventure you can imagine. I think I’m in love. But before we jump to the end, I want to mention one more system…
Apocalypse-Powered Dykes
I was introduced to the ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ story-first RPG-design movement through a game called Thirsty Sword Lesbians. If you don’t know what that is, please don’t type the name into a search engine unless it’s a particularly lonely night. I tried, idiot that I am. Here’s a direct link instead, for those interested.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a game all about drama and making bad decisions. Like in the Year Zero Engine, each session ends with a questionnaire for gaining experience. However, there are also quite a number of special rules and abilities that can result in characters earning experience in-game. Many of them reward EXP for obeying a request from a PC or NPC, or for indulging the temptation to make a not-strictly-great decision.
Using something so valuable as experience points as a standard reward is a clever way of making players sympathise with the ‘temptation’ their characters might feel in a particular moment, especially for a short-form drama campaign. The game claims to be about ‘angsty disaster lesbians with swords’, and as a walking disaster myself, I love that they’ve tried to model this mechanically.
My Own Synthesis
So… yeah. These are some of my favourite games, and I’d be lying if I ever claimed they haven’t steered my design philosophy. As promised, here are some excerpts from what I’m currently toying with:
Experience
At the end of each game session, the Game Master should discuss the session’s events with the players. For each of the following questions a player can answer “yes” to, their character gains one EXP.
Did you participate in a quest set by the Game Master??
Did you discover a new location?
Did you discover a new secret?
Did you take a meaningful step towards a personal goal?
Did you risk or sacrifice something for somebody you care about?
Did you suffer because of any character’s secret, vice or flaw?
Did you receive a medal?
The Game Master has final say over what is reasonable.
Since it is a game set deep in the trenches of warfare, I wanted to include orders from above, personal agendas and moments of heroic sacrifice. I also like the idea of the system being dynamic and a part of the story’s push and pull... and of monsters that can hit you where it hurts. So here are some monster abilities that fuck with a player’s favourite resource:
Cultist Blood
If black blood enters a character's eyes, they hallucinate helplessly for one full combat round. They may attempt an appropriate Save* to end the visions after one round. On a failure, the vision continues for a second round, and always ends the same way.
They will see the edge of the Earth and the clouds below. And finally, deep beneath- Her. Her eye will seal their fate.
The victim will awaken the next morning seemingly on death's precipice, weeping tears of black blood. d3‑1 days after, they will become a cultist, and all their goals will be replaced by the following:
Oppose cleanliness.
Prepare the world for Her return.
Bring others into the fold.
Fill the sky with Titans.
Taking steps towards fulfilling such goals will become their only way of gaining Experience Points.
Gnawing Temptation
Once per day, if you spend ten seconds (or one full combat round) looking into a character’s eyes, you can force them to make an appropriate Saving Throw*. If they fail, the next request you make of them will replace one of their EXP triggers; ie. at random, one of the experience questions will no longer apply to that character. If they fulfill your request, they gain one Experience Point and regain that EXP trigger.
*Dependant on system, obviously.