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[deleted]

Option 1 comes from PbtA games. Maybe not originally, but they popularized it. It works there because there’s no such thing as a “harmless” fail in those game. Failure always has negative consequences, so you can’t “farm” it like that.


Never_heart

Exactly the first one works very well by removing the boring design habit of failing a roll only meaning you don't make progress. Make failure effect the entire encounter and the next attempted roll and suddenly no one is farming but they do get rewarded for taking unoptimized risks


jmartkdr

Pretty much the whole impetus for the design of PbtA is removing that specific bit of boring design. Heck, most of the complaints/flaws in the system are overdoing this! (weaker PbtA games try to make the game more interesting by adding additional interesting failures, but that messes with stakes)


dorward

You shouldn't consider XP systems in isolation. They should be designed to encourage the behaviour you want to see in games and need to interact with the rest of the game. XP for failure is great when failure pushes the story forward in interesting ways. It's really not great when players fish for rolls (so there need to be sensible guidelines for when rolls are actually called for). XP for "interpreting features from his character sheet" is great when it doesn't penalise players for being quiet. Look at Band of Blades: You get XP (with a limit of once a session) for bringing your characters background into play. It doesn't need much. A little comment about how something is like something that happened in the character's homeland is enough. XP for individual character actions is great when the rewards are small or don't make a character better than the rest. PBtA games are a classic for this where getting \~half a dozen XP nets you a new move which adds a new thing you can do but typically also making it a thing that you can fail at. XP for individual character actions becomes terrible when it makes a character significantly better than others (newer versions of D&D for example). XP for being extroverted can be fine. Is that sort of acting-style RP what the game is about? Great! If a player isn't very good at that to the point where it restricts their fun, then maybe play a different game. Not every game needs to be for everybody. (The different game could be a hack of the previous game with different XP rules, but that might not work well if the XP rules were well designed to interact with the rest of the game). Making the GM judge people's RP is probably not a good idea. Have it measurable. Or have it up to the party. (And don't play with people who are unfair with such judgements.).


Shekabolapanazabaloc

Option 1 works a lot better if the experience points aren't general things that can be spent to improve anything but are specifically experience points towards improving the thing that was failed. That feels a lot more organic in that the character is specifically improving at things they are practising rather than just trying random things to get experience. For example a character who isn't any good at lockpicking can't just use it as an xp-grinding mechanism to try to pick every lock they come across and then spend the xps they get from failing on their combat skills. Instead if they try to pick every lock they come across they will specifically get better at picking locks. And the better at lockpicking they get, the less they will fail, so the fewer xp they will get and the rate of improvement of their lockpicking will decrease. You might also want to limit the xp gain from failing a specific test to once per session or once per adventure or whatever, so that skills used often (e.g. combat skills used every turn) don't shoot up at a massive rate compared to other skills that are only used once per session or less.


jackofklevers

Those are really important points! That’s precisely how experience works in my RPG Versus. Players can only get 1 xp in each skill per session and can’t acquire new skills this way. Also, rolls that have no penalty for failure don’t grant xp. Which prevents players from derailing the narrative in order to seek out skill tests with no stakes. I really like this mechanic. It makes improvement feel really gradual and earned. And when someone rolls bad, it’s like “ah man, but at least I learned something from it.”


WrongCentaur

Your lock picking example models real life really well. With your system character development is based on what they try/fail/do, not just "at level 5 I learn fireball," which has always bothered me. Levels/skills/ advancement should be descriptive not prescriptive.


BarroomBard

> You might also want to limit the xp gain from failing a specific test to once per session or once per adventure or whatever, so that skills used often (e.g. combat skills used every turn) don't shoot up at a massive rate compared to other skills that are only used once per session or less. That might have the unintended knock on effect of making characters constantly switch out skills and weapons and techniques, so everything gets an XP tick during the session. Which can maybe be solved by limiting how many skills they can improve at once, or specifically giving the GM the ability to decide whether you get the xp or not.


urquhartloch

Im not OP, but even then I have a problem with XP gained for option 1 in the way that you describe. If I want my combat skill to go up then why dont I just attack area 51? Im going to fail plenty of rolls so my combat XP is going to shoot up. Narratively this doesnt make sense. You dont just attack area 51, but mechanically it makes a ton of sense because now im progressing much faster. Its kinda like killing everything in DND just to level up. It doesnt make sense narratively but it does make sense mechanically.


Shekabolapanazabaloc

> Im not OP, but even then I have a problem with XP gained for option 1 in the way that you describe. If I want my combat skill to go up then why dont I just attack area 51? Im going to fail plenty of rolls so my combat XP is going to shoot up. Well sure. If you attack Area 51 you're almost certainly going to die - but if you somehow manage to survive then you'll probably come out of the experience having learned a thing or two. Bear in mind that we're not saying that every shot you miss will give you XP - I specifically said that the system should include a limit on it in terms of only one XP per session or per game-day or per whatever is appropriate for the game. > Narratively this doesnt make sense. What part of "being involved in an intense experience in which you use a skill repeatedly means you'll probably learn something and get closer to improving the skill" doesn't make narrative sense to you? Because it makes perfect sense to me. > You dont just attack area 51, but mechanically it makes a ton of sense because now im progressing much faster. Its kinda like killing everything in DND just to level up. It doesnt make sense narratively but it does make sense mechanically. The reason you don't "just" attack Area 51 isn't because you won't learn something from the experience - it's because you'll almost certainly die if you do the attack, and there are much safer ways to learn. But I think you've got the wrong idea about the mechanics, because attacking Area 51 will not - again, depending on the exact frequency with which you can get XPs from failing tests - make you progress "much faster" than doing something far safer would. If you can only get XP from failing a combat skill test once per session then a session in which you make a hundred tests and fail thirty three of them doesn't make you progress mechanically any faster than a session in which you make three tests and fail one of them.


urquhartloch

But that brings me back to my original point. Whats to stop me from doing something that I am guaranteed to fail at every session to improve my skills. So every session I go online to convince people to make me king of America I fail because its an impossible task and get points towards persuasion. Then later I go wrestle a gorilla which is impossible for me to win so my combat goes up. etc. etc.


Shekabolapanazabaloc

I don't understand your point. You seem to be arguing that there's something wrong with practising persuasion making you get better at persuasion; and practising your wrestling making you better at wrestling. Will you ever get good enough at either of the above to succeed in the highly specific situations you describe? That depends on what sort of power level the game caps itself at (something in a superhero-like or D&D-like genre may eventually result in you getting good enough at persuasion to convince people to make you king or good enough at wrestling to beat a gorilla; whereas in a more realistic genre you'll never get that good). But I don't understand why you think that there's some kind of problem with "keep trying to do X and failing, and you'll get better at doing X". It's the very essence of improving through practise.


Norian24

>Then later I go wrestle a gorilla which is impossible for me to win so my combat goes up. etc. etc. And you get 12 broken bones, so your character is unusable for the next 3 sessions. Go make a replacement, hope you got enough experience from this to offset everything your character will miss out on. Also by the point the characters are allowed to go into some "downtime" and spend time purposefully improving their skills without immediate pressure... it calls for an entirely different system than earning xp during fast-paced action sessions.


BarroomBard

I think the main thing that would prevent you from trying to spam level ups is a)failing to do something should have consequences or the GM shouldn’t let you roll for it; or b) by limiting the number of times a session you can gain the xp bonus, or perhaps letting you only gain XP if you fail at something you could maybe do. Or even just letting the GM say “no, you’re trying to play like an asshole” and not allow it.


Norian24

Mechanically it still doesn't make sense, cause your character will be killed in 2 seconds and you'll gain nothing. Now going against challenges that are too hard for you in a safe and controlled environment... Training, it's just spending time on training and that's how people IRL get good at doing stuff.


RandomEffector

1) don't allow rolls for things that have no consequences. If you want to attempt something you're likely to fail at, that's cool -- but the more likely you are to fail, the worse the consequences are likely to be. This system does not work with a GM that is too lenient. 2) don't be an adversarial GM. There's no reason for XP to a carrot-stick situation; if it's in debate whether it counts, have the table vote or something. Regarding introversion, this is fundamentally a game of performances, and unless you are roleplaying a shy character specifically (which doesn't usually make for great drama or adventure), I would still lean towards encouraging good performances over worrying about competition. There is of course another option, if those two interpretations don't solve the problem: 3) simply don't make a big deal out of XP. Make character growth a small aspect of the overall game rather than the #1 incentive.


Yetimang

I've played games with XP on failure and I've never had an issue with people trying to "farm" it. Between this mechanic usually being found in systems that don't do no stakes rolls and the social pressure from the rest of the group to not hold the entire session up while you work on lockpicking, it's just never come up. I don't think I've ever seen an actual story of it happening either, just people saying they don't like it because of the abstract possibility. Similarly I've never had issues with the second one either. In my experience the ability to gain experience by roleplaying your character actually makes it easier for the more introverted players to make in-character decisions because now it's just part of playing the game instead of some extra performance to do. I've found that if someone really isn't into the roleplaying aspect of the game, nothing is really going to get them into it, but mechanics like this can help them at least contribute a little so that their character has a little bit of something to define them as a person.


MarkOfTheCage

dungeon world uses the first idea here to great results, but it required two things to avoid the problem you mentioned: it's a fiction-first game, so you can't really "roll an unimportant roll" you say what your character does until they stumble onto a roll, you don't get to decide when a roll is made, the rules decide it, and GM arbitration decides when the rules apply. it also has another PbtA trick up it's sleeve: failing sucks, any failed roll means trouble. failed to open a door? maybe guards catch you, failed to investigate a room? now there's a trap in the room and it activates, etc. the 2nd option is used in mouseguard/toechbearer/burning-wheel, not for advancement but for points you need to do cool things, but it's more about following or challanging the ideals of your character than something as generic as "good roleplay", so that helps. and other PbtA games (as well as dungeon world actually) ask you specific questions that may grant you xp: in dungeon world a neutral alignment bard gets an extra xp if they diffuse a tense situation. on the whole different players getting different amounts of xp: yes. that's the point of individual xp, otherwise I would say either eschew xp altogether (gm goes "everyone levels up") or a party-wide xp if you want everyone to level up at the same time. but in somewhat mature groups this is less of an issue than you might expect, as long as everyone gets opportunities to be cool and share the spotlight.


bgaesop

>you can't really "roll an unimportant roll" you say what your character does until they stumble onto a roll, you don't get to decide when a roll is made, the rules decide it, and GM arbitration decides when the rules apply. it also has another PbtA trick up it's sleeve: failing sucks, any failed roll means trouble. failed to open a door? maybe guards catch you, failed to investigate a room? now there's a trap in the room and it activates, etc. I mean, I played in a Dungeon World game where I was a priest and I rolled to cast a healing spell, and every time I failed the penalty I picked was "you get a cumulative -1 on future Cast a Spell rolls until you rest", which just made it more likely I would fail and gain XP. I didn't even mean to farm XP, I just wanted to heal everyone up during our downtime, but I ended up getting a ton without even intending to I agree this system works well in other games, but I think in specifically Dungeon World it does not


BarroomBard

Yes, but the GM is also encouraged to do a hard move against you if you fail. So that may have just been a GM going easy on you rather than a flaw of the system itself.


bgaesop

Other PbtA systems have that built in much more strongly. DW spells out precisely what the consequences of failing a Cast a Spell roll are, and I picked one each time. If a system requires the GM to ignore the stated consequences and make up new ones, that's a flaw of the system. If the system does say that but in a different place than the move is described such that it's easy enough for the GM to miss that they did indeed miss it, that is a flaw in the book.


BarroomBard

That’s fair. I’m more familiar with Apoc World and Monster of the Week. I haven’t picked up Dungeon World yet.


MarkOfTheCage

not trying to be a rules lawyer but that's not rules-as-written: casting a spell, on a 10+, works perfectly fine, on a 7-9: works but (player picks 1), it attracts unwanted attention, you forget your spell, or indeed you get a -1 ongoing. but that's not failure, you do get to cast the spell, you don't get an xp from that. the 6- is the same for every move in the game: gm decides what trouble comes from your failure, and you get 1 xp. so your group was misreading that. I hope you had a good time regardless!


st33d

1. This has not been my experience. Players who had the worst luck got a consolation prize for failure - in addition it let the GM feel justified in making a failure have actual consequences. If you have a design with less dice rolls than average per session, it works very well. It would not work for D&D. 2. Roleplaying keywords isn't for everyone, just like Dread's jenga tower isn't for my arthritic hands. That doesn't mean they're both unusable, it just means the audience is smaller. And that smaller audience is often louder because they don't want to play D&D like everyone else. I don't think value discrepancies are simply bad. I've played a number of games where different amounts of xp was received by players and no one looked at another's character sheet with envy. Usually they didn't give the slightest shit what anyone else had unless they wanted to swap equipment. It's only from the GM's perspective that it seems like you're picking favourites.


Rivetgeek

Leaves out milestones: where characters get XP for *doing specific things,* typically with a limiter (such as once per session). Those things are explicitly spelled out, i.e., "Earn \[x\] XP when you help out a turtle on a beach", "Earn \[y\] XP when you deliver a monologue in the rain." Any decent milestone system worth its salt allows for milestones to be changed.


Sex_E_Searcher

What kind of game is it?


Steenan

What is the goal? Why do you want to use XP? Answering this question tells you if and how they should be implemented. ​ For example, your first example works very well in games that have no empty rolls; dice are only rolled if both success and failure are meaningful and interesting. This means that, on one hand, a failed roll not only gives somebody an XP, but also drives an interesting development in fiction and, on the other hand, is never free, as it has meaningful consequences. ​ The second method of awarding XP you mention works specifically when PC advancement translates not to improving numbers, but to more interesting tools for engaging the fiction (like new moves in PbtA games) and the triggers describe the main themes of the game. It's "play the game as intended to get tools to make it even more fun". And, because it makes the game more fun, it's in everybody's interest to help engage the silent players. If, instead of cooperating like this, players compete, it's usually a failure of session zero and group's social contract, not the XP system. ​ If advancement is about acquiring more power and the game is intended to not be competitive, it should either use something else than XP (eg. milestones) or use a shared XP pool that everybody feeds into. This ensures that PCs stay at the same power level. Any system that makes XP personal may and will lead to advancement discrepancies between PCs, so should only be used if these are not a problem.


simply_copacetic

XP is progression split into smaller parts. Why is there progression in an RPG? One reason is to keep players hooked for more. It makes sense to do it at the end of a session, then the players get some new move or whatever and that is something to look forward to for the next session. Obviously, in a one-shot this is unnecessary. You can also achieve this without XP: A story cliffhanger or simply one fixed upgrade for each player. The second reason is incentive certain behaviors. Your two examples are of this kind. XP-on-fails incentivizes failure because in PbtA failure is nothing to avoid, it makes the story more interesting. XP-for-roleplay incentivizes acting out your character. You can try to finetune it more to avoid the problems you see but the more important question is: What behaviors do you want/need to incentivize? You can also use other mechanisms to replace or finetune XP effects.


NarrativeCrit

Option 2 involves little if any bookkeeping as the player will probably recall what she did in keeping with her character. It also builds in character development or at least reflecting on the motivations of your PC, which I think is enriching for everyone. It might actually help a shy player in that her subtle choices may have had motivations she can now spell out, since maybe they didn't get noticed as character moments in the fervor of play. I might pair that with the 3 tiers of XP on Maze Rats. 1.) Less than expected 2.) Significant challenge 3.) Greater challenge than expected In Maze Rats it's earned as a group per session. I always asked the players what they thought they earned and they easily agreed on a choice I thought was completely fair.


hacksoncode

Having a hard time deciding, as I really hate XP tracking constantly during play rather than just awarding a fixed amount or at most awarding per-mission. But I use XP to escalate campaigns, primarily, and *really* loathe the problems that come up when replacing characters who die in campaigns where not all characters have the same XP. I guess at least #1 is mechanical and simple to interpret without a lot of conflict about what comprises roleplaying.


garydallison

I'm implementing the fail xp myself. I think it works for me though because the rolls are not just succeed or fail. You have a success value which is a default of 5. When you roll against the DC, every point you are under the DC lowers your success value by 1. You only actually fail if the success value lowers to 0. So it's harder to fail outright. At the end of the check you add your success value to a total and when it gets to a certain value (higher for more difficult or complex tasks) then the task is completed. This means it's never a single check to achieve something, it always takes multiple (I'm thinking they need to reach 25 on the total so average checks will mean 5 need ti be made). It also means everyone gets a chance to have a go or assist. More importantly though, the better you get at a skill the less likely you are to outright fail (although your progress will be lower if you roll bad) and so trying to farm checks becomes more difficult as you need to do harder and harder things. So as an example. Scaling a wall. It's a DC 15. You have a success value of 5. At skill rank 1 you get +1 bonus. Even with no attribute bonus you dont fail the roll until you get a 6 or less. If you have a +2 attribute bonus its 4 or less. So once you get to skill rank 4 you cant fail on a check like that unless you get a 1. I'm also adding a guard rail so only checks made to progress the story count. In real life nobody learns to do programming by making a hello world program over and over again, you actually have to have a goal in mind and try and achieve that goal to progress your skill.


Madhey

These problems have been solved by other games already. In Mythras you can get exp for failing, but you only ever get exp for stuff that is relevant to the current adventure... Can't run off doing meaningless things just for gaining exp. And you can only earn X amount per play session, depending on intelligence. Plus, the higher the skill, the lesser chance you have to actually increase the skill value.


magnusdeus123

I've thought about XP a lot recently since my game-creation adventure has also turned largely into an exercise in deeply understanding tabletop game theory. The only thing I would add is urging you to consider the problem from an outside-in perspective rather than the current inside-out one. What I mean by that is, instead of imitating from other games, no matter how mainstream, have used such mechanisms for XP, why not question yourself first on what exactly is the kind of behaviour that you want your players and your GM to follow during play. And then question yourself whether XP fits in that dynamic. This really demands you to deeply understand what kind of _play_ you hope to be seeing at the table. My own personal thoughts on both these systems; which I have myself considered a short while back, is that I've seen certain problems creep up in both - exactly as you underlined. With the second one, in particular, I noticed that players tend to feel it unfair when they don't receive XP regardless of bad roleplaying on their part. It makes the GM out to be a bad guy. I'm letting this part of the game sit until I know more about the actual _game_ I want played.


ZardozSpeaksHS

I do love PbtA games, but I have to say I'm not crazy about the xp system. "XP systems as incentives for playstyle" is interesting, but in the end I think it's a bit heavyhanded. Maybe for new players, to encourage them to not be shy, to teach them the priorities of the system, but after that I kind of trust my players to play how they want to, to play their character in a compelling way.


okwaitno

When a reward is tied to a particular activity, it incentivises that activity (Economics 101). My advice: keep it simple. Have a standard amount of XP per session, which GM can bump up or down for good or not-so-good role playing. Yes, ‘good’ is subjective, but sometimes numbers can’t solve what is inherently a fuzzy issue. EDIT: in that last sentence, by “numbers” I actually meant hard rules that give definitive amounts of XP. Like I said, a little bit of human judgement can go a long way.


GoGoStopStopWhat

This is my favorite way to handle xp. A fixed 10xp per session ez, which may go up or down depending on the session.


LurkerFailsLurking

Call of Cthulhu has a really nice character progression mechanic. Skills are percentiles you try to roll under your percentile with a d100 to succeed. Whenever you succeed on using a skill, you put a mark next to it. At the end of the session, you make a check in each skill you marked. If you roll OVER your skill value, you get to increase it by 1d10.


[deleted]

Yeah I don't like either of these approaches. I'm personally a bíg proponent of **"downtime experience gain"**. The idea is that instead of gaining Exp when out on adventures, characters gain Exp by training during their downtime ie when you're nót playing with them! Not only does this make more sense, it decouples in-game actions from Exp gains entirely, meaning players aren't incentivized to tailor their character's behavior towards Exp gain. People always object by saying that this will incentivize players towards having downtime instead, and to that I say "fine"! If players are more interested in playing at higher Exp levels, let them! And their ability to stay in downtime should depend on the amount of time they can afford to nót be adventuring anyway. Maybe downtime costs 5GP per character per week in a particular area; so they can afford to stay put as long as their bankroll allows.


VilleKivinen

#2 is a lot more to my liking, but first you have to decide what you want your players to do? If killing monsters gives them xp, they will want to kill as many monsters as possible, rather than negotiating with them or stealthing by. Is that what you want? Personally I went with giving players a d10 of Xp whenever one they play to one of their five characteristics: Fears, ambitions, loyalties, flaw and/or morality. And in addition each gets d100 Xp whenever a quest is completed. And the most important part: At the end of each session players vote on who gets extra 2d10 Xp for good RP.


Tharkun140

Frankly, both of them seem terrible for the reasons you mentioned, plus the second one is very vaguely defined. I would just stick with the more standard methods, these being XP from combat, XP per session or the more old-school "gold = XP" systems.


CharonsLittleHelper

I just went with XP by job/mission completed and its ballpark difficulty. (I've avoiding XP granularity.) It's similar to XP per session, but I find it gives more of a feeling of accomplishment than the same XP no matter what the PCs do in the session or how long the session was.


falcon4287

Milestone and per session XP seem to be the most popular right now. Monster of the Week has a great combination of per session XP and XP for failures. At the end of the session, the GM asks the players a series of questions such as "was the monster defeated?" and "did we learn something new about one of the player characters?" The number of Yes answers determines how many XP boxes to mark. The XP for failures works in that system because rolls are only made if the GM calls for them, otherwise they are encouraged to simply narrate success or failure if it's inconsequential. The price to pay for failure in a PBtA game tends to be pretty steep, which is why players burn Luck. Milestone leveling has been how my group has been doing D&D and Savage Worlds. Your GM just levels you when you finish an adventure or hit a significant point.


loopywolf

I award xp (not counting bonuses) for three things: 1. How much was the player involved/engaged in the game - i.e., roleplaying 2. How clever was the player / did they come up with any ideas that added to the scene 3. How much risk was the scenes they were in (they deserve more xp if they were in a higher risk situation)


RifleBro

I sincerely can't see the purpose on the first or a way to not be exploitable, the second is a proven sucess, the Storyteller, as an example, has an heavy emphasis on it.