Experience in RPGs

Experience is the ability of your character to get better and more powerful over time. It is a core element of role playing games.

"Bongo Neuläufer sitting" is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. 

In D&D, or Das Schwarze Auge, when you collect enough experience, you gain a new level which comes with improved abilities and new powers. In Midgard, there were different kinds of experience points to track so you could not use spellcasting experience to improve your melee ability, making things more realistic and a bookkeeping chore. More realism does not equal a better game. In the level-free Chaosium system your character elegantly gets better in the skills used during play.

Why experience works

Experience gives a constant stream of rewards for successful play and helps to make the game more fun and addictive, as creators of computer and mobile games, and even community systems like google maps have realized. Collecting points and having level-ups regularly keeps the players engaged in looking for the next one and planning how they can develop their character and become more powerful.

In level free systems like RuneQuest, the power and durability of an experienced character is not that different from the power of a starting character, and the reward effect is weaker. While it in my view is a more realistic way to represent experience, the lack of levels deprives the game of of a source of fun. 

Experience in level based games

In level oriented systems like D&D, you have to roughly match the level the adventure was designed for to the PCs level. It is a lot less work to use adventures of the right level range than to rework all the encounters in an adventure to higher or lower level, if it is even possible -- it would be hard to re-stat an adventure battling giants to low level play. This means, unless you are playing an entirely free sandbox campaign of more or less independent adventures based on locales, you need to control the rate of experience rewards you hand to your players to allow you to play the adventures of your main campaign without too much deviation. 

Ways to track experience

Going back all the way to OD&D, most systems use abstract experience points (XP) and award them for achievements like 

• killing monsters
• finding treasure
• solving puzzles
• overcoming traps
• entertaining play
• witnessing wonders
• achieving story goals

The more challenging the achievement, the more XP. 

An alternative to this is milestone experience -- the GM decides that the PCs gain a level upon reaching certain story goals. This is essentially just using the last bullet on the list above, rewarding achievement rather than the activities leading up to it. You do not even need XP for it.

A different ad-hoc system that works pretty well is to advance the PCs based on how long you have played, typically at milestones between adventures. For example in a typical 3-day playing retreat, we would advance a level in the middle of the retreat, so players go to have the feeling of achievement right there and use their newfound powers, and once at the end, as we closed out the adventures, to capstone it. In spirit this is pretty close to milestone advancement.

Is milestone based experience better?

There are pros and cons to tracking XP, vs just advancing the characters to a new level when they reach a milestone, nicely discussed here.  In essence, tracking XP gives players a regular feeling of progress between levels and better control over their advancement (good things), but it creates laborious bookkeeping and encounter XP planning for the GM, even if he has one of the players help out  (a bad thing), it makes it hard for the GM to control the advancement of the PCs to match the adventures of a campaign plot, causing even more work to adjust those (another bad thing), and it also creates artificial incentives that have no story-logic, driving the players to have their characters do things that generate XP for XP's sake (another bad thing, see below). 

Ready made campaigns are already have calibrated encounter experience for you, but if you want to allow your players more freedom to do side adventures, or mix two campaigns to create a richer, more believable world and difficult decisions for your players regarding what to focus on, you need ways to manage their advancement so the main story will not be too low a level for them if they come back to it. Handing milestone advancement allows you to stay in a level range until the adventures in that range have been played. 

Non-Story based Rewards

As soon as you use XP for anything else but milestone achievement, you are setting incentives for player character behavior. Experience is power, and players will always try to increase their power. This may encourage them to do things that are less fun (a bad thing), comparable to gold farming  in a MMORPG.  Chief among those is unnecessary combat just to grind more experience. 

Each monster has an XP value in the book. In comparison, there are often no strict guidelines how much XP to award for non-fighting encounters, for overcoming traps or solving puzzles. There are example ready-made traps in the DMG, but they lack an XP value. Why is there no trap manual, or puzzle manual?  This leads to play where the only thing players do to gain XP is kill monsters. It is less realistic, and, unless you love D&D as a tabletop tactics game, less fun. 

Experience for Role-Play

I used to hand out XP for good role play, either if a player created some especially entertaining or immersive role play for the table, or if they did stupid things knowingly to their disadvantage, in line with their character's personality. In D&D 5e, Inspiration is used to reward this instead.

Experience for treasure

The OD&D rules awarded one XP per 1 gp of treasure obtained (or, some interpreted it as of treasure spent). I used to think this was a horrible mechanism, as it is super unrealistic. Would not a rich prince with a huge inheritance be automatically high level, even though he never experienced anything or exercised or trained any of his skills or abilities?

Over time I realized that realism is not the only measure for a good mechanism. It also is how condusive it is for fun play, and in how far it poses interesting choices and trade-offs for the player. 

The gold = XP rule from this perspective is great. 

In a much more deadly game like the original D&D, gold XP rewarded you for cleverly circumventing or tricking monsters to pillage their treasure. Fights, much like in real live, were an obstacle best avoided. This leads to a lot more fun and creative play. 

In 5e, this rule is absent, and in 5e D&D you also cannot buy magic items with gold, shutting down an alternative way of converting gold into improved powers. In a game fully focused on individual PC powers, this leads to the myopic view that in 5e, gold has no value.