When playing a gold for XP game, do you ONLY give gold for xp acquired (aside from minimal monster killing xp)?
What about situations where the players do something RP worthy but it actually means they don't get gold? Like turning it down to help an obviously in-need person? Or doing something purely for a selfless reason that's actually difficult but with no gold involved?
Do they just miss out because they were generous?
You're crossing streams. Why would you give someone XP for acting selflessly? Gold for XP is intended to incentivize certain behaviors, specifically amoral antiheroic behavior. If you want to give out XP for being a Big Damn Hero, you're incentivizing a different and often conflicting set of behaviors. Generally, you should pick the one that works best in your game. If it's go for gold, then yes, they'll miss out. They can certainly act in heroic ways, but the world won't necessarily reward them for it.
If you want to reward more heroic actions, then plot or milestone-based rewards might be a better approach. The PCs get XP for saving the prince from the dragon, instead of for the dragon's hoard. Roleplaying rewards or the like can be treated as training multipliers, like in the 1e DMG.
Or you can give in-world rewards for selfless actions. They ought to be getting a good reputation with serious impact.
But I personally don't agree with Pat, both in theory and in practice. In addition for xp-for-treasure and, to a small degree, for monster slaying, I give xp for
* negotiating / befriending / subverting monsters & NPCs
* discovering secrets (a little bit for e.g. secret doors, quite a bit more for uncovering lost history)
* exploration (finding routes to new levels / new ingresses & egresses)
* rescuing prisoners
Are you giving XP for gold to be hard case about it? Or are you doing it as just a convenient way to keep score? If the latter, assign a "this thing would have been this much score" amount to it, just attached with no gold. For example, the penniless villagers absolutely would have been happy to give the party a 100 gold to rescue the mayor, if they had it. Note that even when doing this, it's not automatic. Maybe the villagers don't like the mayor that much and would only grudgingly offer 10 coppers for his return!
Either way, there are still rewards for altruistic behavior if you are having the world react properly to the party--they just aren't (always) XP. It's similar to whether you should give XP for magic items or not. Hard case, no. You either sell it and get XP for that gold or you keep it and the reward is having the item. No double dipping.
There are nuances. This is one of those cases where it is far better to decide what you want the behavior to be and then extrapolate from there how the rewards will work. For example, I'm running a game right now where most of the XP comes from gold, but it isn't a 1:1 exchange--because I wanted the party to be able to advance reasonably fast while staying poor. You can do that with classic XP for gold and making the expenses drain it. This means you have to account for the gold input and expenses. Or you can leave some of the ratio up to the GM, which is the route I'm going. Pulling out a big treasure is worth a major chunk of XP. I'm just applying some GM fiat to the ratio and adjudicating based on how impressive the haul is. Which means I don't need to do as much accounting when placing the treasure and can instead make it a world simulation thing. All where you'd rather put the effort, pick your poison. This is to incentivize pulling out impressive treasures more than valuable treasures. That rare book or tapestry might be worth 100 gp, but it is more impressive than pulling out several mule loads of copper coins.
The birds eye view of the 1E xp system consists of three parts. Challenge, achieving goals, and role play. Role play doesn't come with any XP rewards, but it's a factor in using XP to actually advance a level as it affects time and cost of training. Challenge XP rewarsd in their most explicit form is XP for killing monsters. But the level of challenge also adjusts XP gained for treasure. And there is explicit mention of XP awards for overcoming other challenges, not just killing monsters, it's just that those require a lot more judgement and cannot be listed out the way XP for monsters is.
That last area, XP for achieving goals, is the subject here. It's not just XP for gold. Like XP for monsters, it's simply that it's the most objective, quantifiable, and easily included in game terms. There is an explicit example of this I can point to in the game. XP for magic items. You can still sell them at the end of the adventure and gain XP for gold as usual. But you can also choose not to sell them and still get XP for attaining the item. The amount of XP is a lot lower--about 10-20% of what you would have gotten by just selling it, the idea being that you will benefit from the use of the item.
So that's the guidance I go off of. Rescuing the princess is certainly a goal. Once that task is done, you could conceivably try to ransom her. In that case, you would get XP for any gold you were able to get. Or you could completely selflessly return her. And that would generate a certain amount of good will. That good will might be useful to the PCs, and so it would be similar to keeping a magic item, and would be worth some amount of XP, but only a fraction of what the GP value of the ransom would have been.
It may be worth pointing out the good will is a tangible thing in 1E. Understandably, there is a bonus to Loyalty when liege and underlings have matching alignments. But it's also the case that LG liege and henchmen have much better loyalty ratings than CE liege and henchmen, even when all other things are equal. This is the tradeoff in 1E's alignment system. Evil characters have more latitude in their actions than good characters, but good characters tend to be more trusted precisely because they don't feel free to do some of the things evil characters feel free to do.
What's it all worth? Depends a lot on how important this stuff is in your campaign, which is why the game could not have possibly listed the XP reward. But it's clear to me the intent of the system is to reward attaining goals, not just gold and overcoming challenges, not just monsters.
When I'm running a game that gives xp for acquiring gold, no, I will not give xp for altruistic behavior. This is a major factor is helping players understand the tone of the setting. I only give xp for acquiring gold in grim-dark settings. If I were playing in a noble-bright setting, I would probably reward altruism with xp, but not the acquisition of gold.
There is a different mechanism for relating xp to gold that does not hinge on the acquisition, but rather on the spending. This can be used in both extremes. It involves characters spending the gold (so it exits the game economy) with 1 xp awarded for each gold piece spent. In my sword & sorcery settings, characters dissipate their wealth on carousing and extravagant drunken parties. This boosts their reputation and sets up the next adventure as they are once again broke and in need of coin. The same sort of mechanism can also work in a noble-bright setting. Characters don't get xp for acquiring gold, but do for giving it to charitable institutions or other projects that benefit others (rebuild the town destroyed by the witchlings). Additional benefits of this system are that the accounting of gold for xp is both controlled by the players and accounted by the players. They get choices and it's less work for me.
Basically, I just use xp reward systems to signal the intended tone of the setting. I prefer to use settings that lean heavily in one direction or another, rather than a flavorless middle-ground.
Quote from: Pat on August 04, 2021, 04:19:51 AM
You're crossing streams. Why would you give someone XP for acting selflessly? Gold for XP is intended to incentivize certain behaviors, specifically amoral antiheroic behavior. If you want to give out XP for being a Big Damn Hero, you're incentivizing a different and often conflicting set of behaviors. Generally, you should pick the one that works best in your game. If it's go for gold, then yes, they'll miss out. They can certainly act in heroic ways, but the world won't necessarily reward them for it.
If you want to reward more heroic actions, then plot or milestone-based rewards might be a better approach. The PCs get XP for saving the prince from the dragon, instead of for the dragon's hoard. Roleplaying rewards or the like can be treated as training multipliers, like in the 1e DMG.
I've just seen it pointed out as a flaw in gold for XP since, obviously, any good roleplaying game should care about the players playing their characters in a good way. So if a character is Lawful Good and doing Lawful Good things, isn't that punishing? Or put another way, is there no room for a LG character in such a game?
So I was wondering if people actually stick to this in practice, or if they just bite the bullet and play it as is, or if there's another way of looking at it from their perspective that justifies this kind of thing.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 04, 2021, 09:55:48 AM
Quote from: Pat on August 04, 2021, 04:19:51 AM
You're crossing streams. Why would you give someone XP for acting selflessly? Gold for XP is intended to incentivize certain behaviors, specifically amoral antiheroic behavior. If you want to give out XP for being a Big Damn Hero, you're incentivizing a different and often conflicting set of behaviors. Generally, you should pick the one that works best in your game. If it's go for gold, then yes, they'll miss out. They can certainly act in heroic ways, but the world won't necessarily reward them for it.
If you want to reward more heroic actions, then plot or milestone-based rewards might be a better approach. The PCs get XP for saving the prince from the dragon, instead of for the dragon's hoard. Roleplaying rewards or the like can be treated as training multipliers, like in the 1e DMG.
I've just seen it pointed out as a flaw in gold for XP since, obviously, any good roleplaying game should care about the players playing their characters in a good way. So if a character is Lawful Good and doing Lawful Good things, isn't that punishing? Or put another way, is there no room for a LG character in such a game?
So I was wondering if people actually stick to this in practice, or if they just bite the bullet and play it as is, or if there's another way of looking at it from their perspective that justifies this kind of thing.
In my OD&D game, yes, I stick with gold for experience. I also award it for defeating monsters. I do not award for it for roleplaying one's chosen alignment. It has worked out great.
Reward and punishment are not dependent states. In other words, I do not believe the absence of reward to be a punishment.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 04, 2021, 09:55:48 AM
Quote from: Pat on August 04, 2021, 04:19:51 AM
You're crossing streams. Why would you give someone XP for acting selflessly? Gold for XP is intended to incentivize certain behaviors, specifically amoral antiheroic behavior. If you want to give out XP for being a Big Damn Hero, you're incentivizing a different and often conflicting set of behaviors. Generally, you should pick the one that works best in your game. If it's go for gold, then yes, they'll miss out. They can certainly act in heroic ways, but the world won't necessarily reward them for it.
If you want to reward more heroic actions, then plot or milestone-based rewards might be a better approach. The PCs get XP for saving the prince from the dragon, instead of for the dragon's hoard. Roleplaying rewards or the like can be treated as training multipliers, like in the 1e DMG.
I've just seen it pointed out as a flaw in gold for XP since, obviously, any good roleplaying game should care about the players playing their characters in a good way. So if a character is Lawful Good and doing Lawful Good things, isn't that punishing? Or put another way, is there no room for a LG character in such a game?
So I was wondering if people actually stick to this in practice, or if they just bite the bullet and play it as is, or if there's another way of looking at it from their perspective that justifies this kind of thing.
There's nothing stopping a lawful good character from doing lawful good things, when using a gold for XP system. There's just no mechanical incentive to encourage that kind of behavior. It's a philosophical aside, but I'd argue that makes the good actions count for more, because they're done without the expectation of a reward.
The XP system doesn't restrict what actions are possible. In fact, most roleplaying will take place because of things external to the XP system. Players will play their characters, negotiate, kick open doors, and on because they're fun and interesting ways to engage with the imagined world. What the XP system really does is
require the players to seek certain ends, if they want to get anywhere. In an XP for gold system, your paladin can save all the penniless orphans they want, but if you want to advance beyond first level, at some point you need to acquire some filthy lucre. So even if they do the occasional pro bono quest, it encourages players to make the main thrust of the game about acquiring treasure.
That's why I think gold for XP and plot/quest/milestone system based systems are inherently opposed. Gold for XP encourages players to take a very mercantile, what's-in-it-for-me view of the world. It's not the sole driving force, but by necessity it becomes one of the central features of the campaign. Whereas a system based on story rewards encourages the players to accomplish those goals, which are often the heroic and honorable quests of high fantasy. Again, this doesn't restrict their actions. A player can always go against the incentive structure, and satisfy their character's greed at the expense of some more noble goal. But they won't gain XP, which pushes the players to focus on those dramatic milestones most of the time, instead of simple material satisfaction.
The reason the XP rewards system is so important is because it's a constant, recurrent, push toward certain behaviors. It's carrot rather than stick, but especially in games with geometric progression, it's a very strong (tasty?) carrot. From a design standpoint, you don't need carrots for the things the players are going to anyway. Roleplaying is usually its own reward, for instance. You might offer XP to encourage shy or new players, but it's not something that's needed on an on-going basis, because it's literally the reason why most of the players are there sitting at the table. Conversely, it is useful if you want to run a campaign with a certain tone or theme. Gold for XP is good for encouraging pragmatic, rational, shades of gray antiheroes, like those in sword & sorcery, heist, or even noir stories. Milestones can be good for high fantasy, princesses and ponies, and epic quests and big bads.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 04, 2021, 09:55:48 AMI've just seen it pointed out as a flaw in gold for XP since, obviously, any good roleplaying game should care about the players playing their characters in a good way. So if a character is Lawful Good and doing Lawful Good things, isn't that punishing? Or put another way, is there no room for a LG character in such a game?
If you read a bunch of early writings on the game, a Lawful Good character would be gaining all sorts of advantages for being Lawful Good: NPCs are more likely to trust them, villagers might aid them with free food or lodging, etc. This was an important factor in why many early version would punish a player for changing alignment. It was meant to keep PCs from claiming to be Lawful Good to get the bennies while acting evil when no one was looking.
IOW, rather than giving players XP bonuses for their characters acting in a good faction, PCs that regularly act in a good fashion should be treated better by NPCs than PCs that don't.
As for Quest rewards, personally, I have no problem with XP for Quest completion as long as it's written in advance as part of the adventure and the XP rewards is in-line with what a similar mission would gain if the rewards were pure gold. For example, "I'll pay you 500 gold to go kill these orcs" and "Would you please kill these orcs for us poor villagers?" would both net 500 XP.
I only give experience for gold spent on training. This is not without precedence as the AD&D 1e DMG has 1000 - 4000 x level gp required as training expenses to level up. I just unify the mechanics. I also lean towards have training provided by patrons over large cash hand outs as it gives the PCs a reason to respect their patrons.
I'd award XP for a reward that was turned down, since that's essentially the same as accepting the reward and giving it back, and I don't take XP away for giving away gold.
I don't award XP for good deeds done with no possibility of reward though. The player should undertake such a quest with the same selfless mindset as their character.
To me the purpose of XP for GP is to enhance immersion, not incentivize behavior per se. It's an abstraction of all the diegetic benefits to getting rich that aren't explored by the game. It makes gold matter for the player as it does for the character, without bogging the game down in absurd and tedious shopping trips.
Quote from: Libramarian on August 05, 2021, 01:53:48 PM
I'd award XP for a reward that was turned down, since that's essentially the same as accepting the reward and giving it back, and I don't take XP away for giving away gold.
I don't award XP for good deeds done with no possibility of reward though. The player should undertake such a quest with the same selfless mindset as their character.
To me the purpose of XP for GP is to enhance immersion, not incentivize behavior per se. It's an abstraction of all the diegetic benefits to getting rich that aren't explored by the game. It makes gold matter for the player as it does for the character, without bogging the game down in absurd and tedious shopping trips.
It's more reward for the player that doesn't line up in the sense that... okay, it makes sense for someone to selflessly turn down a reward -- but why is someone being selfish more immersive and equal to them advancing in power faster?
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 05, 2021, 02:00:39 PM
It's more reward for the player that doesn't line up in the sense that... okay, it makes sense for someone to selflessly turn down a reward -- but why is someone being selfish more immersive and equal to them advancing in power faster?
The character unlocks the chest and throws open the lid, revealing the gleam of gold. The character whoops and cheers, thrilled with their newfound riches. In an XP for GP game, the player also whoops and cheers, since their character grows in power. Their emotional states are in sync, resulting in a more immersive experience.
Without this rule, the player stifles a yawn, since there's nothing to buy in this game. They petition the DM for magic item shops and crafting rules.
That part makes sense -- but if it's for immersion wouldn't other things that make the character celebrate also get XP, not just gold? So it does seem to come down to incentive.
I think originally XP for GP had to do with B/X not having much of an economy so the money piled up and piled up with very little to spend it on and it was something to use the gold on besides the largest known 10' pole collection on the continent.
AD&D more or less solved that with needing gold to level along with XP and making and consuming of magical crap and things that would ruin your stuff and make you dump a lot of gold to replace it.
But I'm old and I forget shit and get confused about things so I could be wrong. Terribly wrong.
I'm not a fan of gold-for-XP systems, myself. If you want to incentivize adventuring, give XP for adventuring. Tying XP to gold opens up a lot of degenerate behaviors. Even assuming that you patch the obvious holes of the gold needing to come from a non-PC source to stop PCs from 'losing' their treasure to each other repeatedly, you still run into problems. As noted, you lose the ability to motivate PCs with actual heroic deeds. You, in fact, strongly motivate the PCs to come up with all sorts of hilarious hijinks involving fraud, illusions, forged magic, or even just having everyone roll an elf, start an accounting company, and level very slowly but very reliably with a few centuries of salary.
Training fees raise far more questions than they answer, as well. They don't establish how the original trainers leveled up. And they ensure that if the PCs go through a war-torn region where everyone has been in desperate skirmishes for an entire generation, that they will be absolute pushovers, because no one there actually got better at surviving through experience, and they could only loot the bare necessities of survival. "Well, other people level differently (because I as GM want them to be a given level at a given time), but you're on your own special progression that involves giving money to arbitrary NPCs which then vanishes into the aether." is far more video-gamy bullshit than anything anyone bitched about 4E for.
Now, if you want to lean into this, and actually design and play out a grim world where acting like members of Homo economicus was actually necessary to gain power, Mammon was the final boss as all other demons foolishly horded worthless souls and non-fungible magics and planar real estate, and then leaned into all of the ways the world would be different, that would be a really interesting campaign. But it would not resemble any simple version of D&D. And introducing those rules without making them actually true in the world means you break the link between player and character motivation completely.
And dammit, now I kind of want a game where the actual meat of the game is coming up with ridiculous financial crimes to break reality.
In the game design, "Gold for XP" isn't gold for XP. It is gold is the flavor for the markers that you use to keep score for the XP, which then ties into other parts of the design because it is money.
The GM put a certain amount of gold in the dungeon. That, plus a little XP for the monsters guarding it, is the total XP available (plus whatever "restocking" options are in place). The GM put the gold in the dungeon presumably to bear some relation to the amount of difficulty it would be to get it out, considering the monsters, traps, puzzles, logistics, etc. You don't have a 1 room dungeon with a single orc guarding a chest with 10,000 gp in it.
However, from a design perspective, you can get exactly the same score keeping effect by having I.O.U tags or flags. Having fought their way through the Dungeon of Despairing Death, and crushed the great plaid lizard in the final chamber, the party opens a locked and trapped chest with a ticket saying that it qualifies them for 753 XP each if they can return it to the XP ticket office in town. The only problem is that is kind of stupid and reductionist and also ignores the whole money angle and how it ties into other aspects of the game.
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 06, 2021, 04:42:50 PM
In the game design, "Gold for XP" isn't gold for XP. It is gold is the flavor for the markers that you use to keep score for the XP, which then ties into other parts of the design because it is money.
The GM put a certain amount of gold in the dungeon. That, plus a little XP for the monsters guarding it, is the total XP available (plus whatever "restocking" options are in place). The GM put the gold in the dungeon presumably to bear some relation to the amount of difficulty it would be to get it out, considering the monsters, traps, puzzles, logistics, etc. You don't have a 1 room dungeon with a single orc guarding a chest with 10,000 gp in it.
However, from a design perspective, you can get exactly the same score keeping effect by having I.O.U tags or flags. Having fought their way through the Dungeon of Despairing Death, and crushed the great plaid lizard in the final chamber, the party opens a locked and trapped chest with a ticket saying that it qualifies them for 753 XP each if they can return it to the XP ticket office in town. The only problem is that is kind of stupid and reductionist and also ignores the whole money angle and how it ties into other aspects of the game.
I guess it's a sliding scale. Because once you allow magic and clever tactics (or even mundane, boring-but-logical tactics like besieging a dungeon, building a large bonfire at the tunnel mouth, and suffocating every organic monster within like recalcitrant groundhogs), you can make the getting of treasure trivial.
You also build into the game the assumption that adventuring in general is a sideline. The real money is presumably in building up enough power to disguise your own identity (ideally as a monster or evil warlord you don't like), then either raid the treasury of your local kingdom, or just sack a few mid-size villages. And that's just on the mundane level; you can entirely break the economy of a region if you can forge high-value coinage (which wizards who can cast Fabricate and Major Creation can, trivially). Those wizards can also use fast travel and disguises to keep ahead of news of their perfidious deeds. And even the nice wizards have every reason to use divinations to find mines where the previous occupants delved too greedily and too deep, hose them down with high-pressure DPS, and then start investing in ever-working, never-sleeping construct labor to give them passive income. The more passive income they get, the more XP they get, and the more they can make miner-constructs.
When you make XP for gold central, you centralize tactics like this. The GM, presumably, does not want the players to shrug, do a few rudimentary scouting missions and divinations, and then waltz into the dungeon disguised as the local monsters, spot-assassinate or bypass the vault guards, empty the vault, and leave, allowing the monsters who have presumably been doing the raiding to get this loot around and intact to keep raiding and gathering more treasure.
XP tokens in chests is strange and gamey, sure, but reserving the bulk of the XP award for overcoming the challenge that the dungeon represents, whether by defeating enough of the dungeon's inhabitants that the survivors decide to move on, or by doing a lightning blitz to overcome the boss monster before they can marshal their allies and defenses, or even by managing to negotiate with the monster to provide security to the nearby villages in exchange for continued voluntary payments of treasure, should all be the Ding! moment. Defaulting to awards being gold-based means that you can't effectively set up encounters with solutions like the ones above, and that you can't approach certain kinds of open-ended challenges, unless you as GM are willing to cheat around players getting too much or too little loot.
And, as a side note, if it is known that looting gold powers up adventurers, then you should absolutely have dungeons with random 10,000 gp payouts, which enterprising high-level folks use to power-level their loyal-but-weak chosen minions. Likewise, clever monsters will stake out signs advertising "Dungeon contains less than 500 gp in lootable treasure.", with a pile of burnt art and shattered gems as proof of their intentions. After all, if treasure both attracts adventurers and makes them stronger, why would you keep the stuff around? You're a monster, after all; if you want something that a person would pay for, you just eat the shopkeeper, and get both loot and a meal. (And, of course, if monsters can level by carrying loot out of civilization and into their lairs, then you should get entirely different kinds of monster behavior.)
If you're not interesting in asking these questions at all, because it's assumed that there is no deeper reason to why Item X is in Room Y than "The GM put it there.", then this isn't an issue. But at that level of abstraction, you're not that far from those XP IOUs, either.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 03, 2021, 11:50:24 PM
When playing a gold for XP game, do you ONLY give gold for xp acquired (aside from minimal monster killing xp)?
Basically, yes. If I need to make a judgement call as GM I simply do so - rescuing captives might award the value of their ransom or sale, or if the players turn down a reward, or disberse it as largesse, they might still get the xp value.
None of this requires pre-written rules or agonizing over it, you just do it.
I also consider class awards for things like spell research, duels of honor, heists, etc, but gold is still the biggest source.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 03, 2021, 11:50:24 PMWhat about situations where the players do something RP worthy but it actually means they don't get gold? Like turning it down to help an obviously in-need person? Or doing something purely for a selfless reason that's actually difficult but with no gold involved?
Do they just miss out because they were generous?
Roughly in order -
RP is its own reward. And in the long run its hard to stop people. Even in low-rp games, sooner or later people start developing a character for their character, and making in character decisions. So my feeling is this can take care of itself, it doesn't need handholding from the GM.
"Turning down gold to help an obviously in-need person" won't happen without the GM deliberately setting up that conundrum. In which case you're agonizing over a problem you've created. If its a dungeon with gold in it (the original of xp for gold) then it won't come up.
"Something purely selfless and difficult with no gold attached" - quite possibly no xp award. But the broader context you're missing here is that xp for gold games can naturally have several sessions with little or no reward, with occasional windfalls or hard won victories that level up the whole party at once. So a session or adventure with no major xp award doesn't stand out, its just a normal part of play, and normally the party will get caught up sooner or later.
More broadly still, it sounds like you're coming from a background in quest-based, GM-assigned play sessions. A full game of old school D&D might start with only one dungeon available, but it will either be a megadungeon with multiple destinations or multiple dungeons will be made known as play progresses. Plus there will be an overland map where players might travel or seek out monster lairs. Plus the players might set their own goals, which might include anything from altruistic heroism to breaking and entering in some rich asshole's mansion. AND THEN you can make available the more modern quest hooks of fetching and guarding and going on linear adventures.
If you get past the GM deciding both the quest and how it will be completed then xp for gold makes more sense. If you stay on the GM deciding the quest and the path then you just may get the kinds of problems you're worried about.
Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 07:11:37 PM
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 06, 2021, 04:42:50 PM
In the game design, "Gold for XP" isn't gold for XP. It is gold is the flavor for the markers that you use to keep score for the XP, which then ties into other parts of the design because it is money.
The GM put a certain amount of gold in the dungeon. That, plus a little XP for the monsters guarding it, is the total XP available (plus whatever "restocking" options are in place). The GM put the gold in the dungeon presumably to bear some relation to the amount of difficulty it would be to get it out, considering the monsters, traps, puzzles, logistics, etc. You don't have a 1 room dungeon with a single orc guarding a chest with 10,000 gp in it.
However, from a design perspective, you can get exactly the same score keeping effect by having I.O.U tags or flags. Having fought their way through the Dungeon of Despairing Death, and crushed the great plaid lizard in the final chamber, the party opens a locked and trapped chest with a ticket saying that it qualifies them for 753 XP each if they can return it to the XP ticket office in town. The only problem is that is kind of stupid and reductionist and also ignores the whole money angle and how it ties into other aspects of the game.
I guess it's a sliding scale. Because once you allow magic and clever tactics (or even mundane, boring-but-logical tactics like besieging a dungeon, building a large bonfire at the tunnel mouth, and suffocating every organic monster within like recalcitrant groundhogs), you can make the getting of treasure trivial.
You also build into the game the assumption that adventuring in general is a sideline. The real money is presumably in building up enough power to disguise your own identity (ideally as a monster or evil warlord you don't like), then either raid the treasury of your local kingdom, or just sack a few mid-size villages. And that's just on the mundane level; you can entirely break the economy of a region if you can forge high-value coinage (which wizards who can cast Fabricate and Major Creation can, trivially). Those wizards can also use fast travel and disguises to keep ahead of news of their perfidious deeds. And even the nice wizards have every reason to use divinations to find mines where the previous occupants delved too greedily and too deep, hose them down with high-pressure DPS, and then start investing in ever-working, never-sleeping construct labor to give them passive income. The more passive income they get, the more XP they get, and the more they can make miner-constructs.
When you make XP for gold central, you centralize tactics like this. The GM, presumably, does not want the players to shrug, do a few rudimentary scouting missions and divinations, and then waltz into the dungeon disguised as the local monsters, spot-assassinate or bypass the vault guards, empty the vault, and leave, allowing the monsters who have presumably been doing the raiding to get this loot around and intact to keep raiding and gathering more treasure.
XP tokens in chests is strange and gamey, sure, but reserving the bulk of the XP award for overcoming the challenge that the dungeon represents, whether by defeating enough of the dungeon's inhabitants that the survivors decide to move on, or by doing a lightning blitz to overcome the boss monster before they can marshal their allies and defenses, or even by managing to negotiate with the monster to provide security to the nearby villages in exchange for continued voluntary payments of treasure, should all be the Ding! moment. Defaulting to awards being gold-based means that you can't effectively set up encounters with solutions like the ones above, and that you can't approach certain kinds of open-ended challenges, unless you as GM are willing to cheat around players getting too much or too little loot.
And, as a side note, if it is known that looting gold powers up adventurers, then you should absolutely have dungeons with random 10,000 gp payouts, which enterprising high-level folks use to power-level their loyal-but-weak chosen minions. Likewise, clever monsters will stake out signs advertising "Dungeon contains less than 500 gp in lootable treasure.", with a pile of burnt art and shattered gems as proof of their intentions. After all, if treasure both attracts adventurers and makes them stronger, why would you keep the stuff around? You're a monster, after all; if you want something that a person would pay for, you just eat the shopkeeper, and get both loot and a meal. (And, of course, if monsters can level by carrying loot out of civilization and into their lairs, then you should get entirely different kinds of monster behavior.)
If you're not interesting in asking these questions at all, because it's assumed that there is no deeper reason to why Item X is in Room Y than "The GM put it there.", then this isn't an issue. But at that level of abstraction, you're not that far from those XP IOUs, either.
You are way over-thinking this. GP as XP is a game mechanic, not an in-world phenomenon. The experience from gaining gold is a representation of the abstract growth in character competence. Monsters wouldn't "bait" adventurers nor could rulers "power level" followers, as the acquisition of gold is a short-hand, not a physical process in the setting (you're describing the meta of an MMO, not an RPG). Seriously, you're straining pretty hard to find an objection here...
Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 07:11:37 PM
When you make XP for gold central, you centralize tactics like this. The GM, presumably, does not want the players to shrug, do a few rudimentary scouting missions and divinations, and then waltz into the dungeon disguised as the local monsters, spot-assassinate or bypass the vault guards, empty the vault, and leave, allowing the monsters who have presumably been doing the raiding to get this loot around and intact to keep raiding and gathering more treasure.
XP tokens in chests is strange and gamey, sure, but reserving the bulk of the XP award for overcoming the challenge that the dungeon represents, whether by defeating enough of the dungeon's inhabitants that the survivors decide to move on, or by doing a lightning blitz to overcome the boss monster before they can marshal their allies and defenses, or even by managing to negotiate with the monster to provide security to the nearby villages in exchange for continued voluntary payments of treasure, should all be the Ding! moment. Defaulting to awards being gold-based means that you can't effectively set up encounters with solutions like the ones above, and that you can't approach certain kinds of open-ended challenges, unless you as GM are willing to cheat around players getting too much or too little loot.
And, as a side note, if it is known that looting gold powers up adventurers, then you should absolutely have dungeons with random 10,000 gp payouts, which enterprising high-level folks use to power-level their loyal-but-weak chosen minions. Likewise, clever monsters will stake out signs advertising "Dungeon contains less than 500 gp in lootable treasure.", with a pile of burnt art and shattered gems as proof of their intentions. After all, if treasure both attracts adventurers and makes them stronger, why would you keep the stuff around? You're a monster, after all; if you want something that a person would pay for, you just eat the shopkeeper, and get both loot and a meal. (And, of course, if monsters can level by carrying loot out of civilization and into their lairs, then you should get entirely different kinds of monster behavior.)
If you're not interesting in asking these questions at all, because it's assumed that there is no deeper reason to why Item X is in Room Y than "The GM put it there.", then this isn't an issue. But at that level of abstraction, you're not that far from those XP IOUs, either.
The ideal "Gold for XP" is a middle ground between the two extremes. You don't want to go all the way to "ticket for XP I.O.U." You also don't want to go reductionist, literal "no matter how you get the gold out it counts the same". And in fact, even in the original rules it isn't like that. One of the people that are running it currently will come along here sometime and provide the exact formula, but it amounts to past a certain point the gold doesn't count 1:1 anymore, but less and less.
Sure, to a certain extent that is smoke and mirrors for overcoming quests and challenges. So you can hit an uncanny valley between ticket for XP and get the gold and it all counts where you might as well just do quests and challenges instead. That happens when the GM, for example, decides how much XP they want for the quests and challenges, and then makes it impossible to finish the adventure without getting that exact amount of gold. There's a 1,000 gp gem magically attached to the princess that will be yours when you rescue her and return her to the church where they undo the curse, whereupon her father grants you a 2,000 gp reward. No princess, no 3,000 gp.
In a working version of "Gold for XP", some of the gold is mostly that with a bit more nuance. There's some loose change that you pick up in the course of getting through the thing. Probably difficult to get it all or miss it all. The exact reward depends partially on luck and partially on paying attention. However, the GM has a good ballpark estimate. Then of the remaining potential gold, some of it is a near certainty and some of it is tricky. You might do all the quests and challenges and miss that particular reward. If the GM isn't prepared to employ those kind of nuances occasionally, they are either running a rogue-like dungeon crawl or they probably shouldn't be doing "Gold for XP" at all.
Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 07:11:37 PM
I guess it's a sliding scale. Because once you allow magic and clever tactics (or even mundane, boring-but-logical tactics like besieging a dungeon, building a large bonfire at the tunnel mouth, and suffocating every organic monster within like recalcitrant groundhogs), you can make the getting of treasure trivial.
No - *trivial* acquisition of treasure does not yield XP. ACKS is super-explicit about this, but it's been at least implied in every ruleset I've seen discussing gold-for-XP rationales or rules.
For a commoner, labouring in the forge for many years doesn't increase your level; it might give you "training time" in some relevant skills, but if you never take risks, you'll never become a more powerful adventurer.
Wizard clears out dangerous beasts from mine? Lots of XP.
Wizard invests lots of money in constructs, with chance of failure, possibly disastrous? Some XP.
Wizard sets constructs mining for passive income? No XP.
Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 04:24:49 PM
I'm not a fan of gold-for-XP systems, myself. If you want to incentivize adventuring, give XP for adventuring. Tying XP to gold opens up a lot of degenerate behaviors. Even assuming that you patch the obvious holes of the gold needing to come from a non-PC source to stop PCs from 'losing' their treasure to each other repeatedly, you still run into problems. As noted, you lose the ability to motivate PCs with actual heroic deeds. You, in fact, strongly motivate the PCs to come up with all sorts of hilarious hijinks involving fraud, illusions, forged magic, or even just having everyone roll an elf, start an accounting company, and level very slowly but very reliably with a few centuries of salary.
Yeah, I've run Lamentations of the Flame Princess.... which is basically B/X with a horror edge, and it uses a Silver for XP mechanic (Silver as the coin of the realm). 1 sp recovered from an adventure = 1 xp. The game makes it explicit that xp is rewarded only for "treasure recovered through the course of adventure" (so no accounting tricks!)
There was still a pretty high body count, but the silver for XP mechanic made the characters all scum in the end. Obviously, the PCs were fighting horrific creatures, though the civilians were mostly normal and descent folk. But the PCs were all mercenary scum that I'd just as soon see dead. Eventually, when I couldn't root for the players any longer... I had to switch to something else. It just got too dark!
Quote from: Naburimannu on August 07, 2021, 09:59:54 AM
Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 07:11:37 PM
I guess it's a sliding scale. Because once you allow magic and clever tactics (or even mundane, boring-but-logical tactics like besieging a dungeon, building a large bonfire at the tunnel mouth, and suffocating every organic monster within like recalcitrant groundhogs), you can make the getting of treasure trivial.
No - *trivial* acquisition of treasure does not yield XP. ACKS is super-explicit about this, but it's been at least implied in every ruleset I've seen discussing gold-for-XP rationales or rules.
For a commoner, labouring in the forge for many years doesn't increase your level; it might give you "training time" in some relevant skills, but if you never take risks, you'll never become a more powerful adventurer.
Wizard clears out dangerous beasts from mine? Lots of XP.
Wizard invests lots of money in constructs, with chance of failure, possibly disastrous? Some XP.
Wizard sets constructs mining for passive income? No XP.
Which gets to the point clearly; money isn't the root of the XP. If what you want to reward is taking risky behavior in pursuit of a heroic goal, then reward that. Declaring that when the adventurers raid the tomb of the dread demon Newcomb, and that they can only grab one box of two before the tomb collapses, and that two adventurers that perform exactly the same death-defying feats until one randomly picks one box, and the other the other, meaning that one should get tens of millions of XP, and the other should get nothing, breaks the conceit entirely.
Treasure, ultimately, is not a metagame element. Treasure exists tangibly in the game world. It can be manipulated, stored, horded, and invested, by both players and NPCs. Making a world where treasure has some numinous significance in powering up adventurers is like making a world where certain phases of the moon power up lycanthropes; it should be noted, observed, and reacted to. And, famously, the OCR and other games are meant to be highly focused on player skill and tactical decision making. Just as it is tactical to utilize flanking, ambushes, and striking the right balance of prepared equipment and mobility for your adventuring crew, it is tactical to, in an ACKS world, spend every copper you find build giant X-Crawl courses, shoving monsters that just barely meet the threshold of dangerous-enough-to-trigger-XP-gain, have them 'steal' your treasure, then clear the dungeon you designed and claim it back, getting XP accordingly. Just as it is correct play to engage with the world and system to take the minimum amount of risk or expenditure to gain the maximal amount of reward, in terms of using area-of-effect spells on clustered enemies and saving your big single-target attacks for the strong-but-lacking-active-defense enemies, it is correct play to, when the world rewards you with 10,000 XP for gaining 10,000 GP after undergoing a certain level of risk, to repeatedly gain that 10,000 GP while undergoing as little risk as possible.
What you should do, if this is the style of play you want, is to make looting treasure just one of activities which grant XP. Explicitly grant XP for accomplishing dangerous and heroic deeds in service to a greater goal, and then you've got possible XP awards of looting bandit fort's treasury (if the adventurers are there for money), or rescuing a kidnapped princess from said bandits (if the adventurers are seeking to perform deeds of renown and gain alliances with the princess's kingdom), or killing every bandit in the fort and putting it to the torch (if their goal is to bring law and order to the region themselves), or even to enter into alliance with the bandits and gain a trickle of tribute treasure in return for handling the incoming adventuring parties that the kingdom will be surely sending after their princess (if the party are all lawless rogues themselves).
Focusing primarily on money limits your options so many ways. It makes hexcrawls into actual trackless wilderness boring and tedious; you don't care about natural resources you can't easily loot and carry away, since a massive lode of gold ore is worthless shiny rocks to you; you'd need to build a mine, extract and smelt the gold, leave it fallow to be claimed by monsters of sufficient risk level, and then take it back from them. Any druids or rangers in the party who feel a greater connection to nature, and a lesser connection to keeping close to civilization with its steady supply of currency, will be forever frozen out of advancement.
And, as Zagreus says, a world where you get XP from riskful extraction of resources is a world where a kingdom, in advertising the wealth of its treasury, attracts adventurers coming to slaughter guards, fight their way through castles and fortresses, and claim that wealth. And you can't even pay adventurers of your own to ward them off; if those adventurers accept mere quest-reward gold instead of massacre-and-loot gold, they will be drastically underleveled. And, those adventurers will be able to get that power-boost themselves if they turn on you, fight their way through your other guards, and loot your treasury themselves.
And this calculus applies all the way down the scale. Every merchant who could potentially present a risk to a bandit or brigand would be a massive target; if a merchant with massive net worth but limited actual levels themselves suffers a home invasion and presets enough of a danger to their robber to count as an encounter, then violent home invaders will grow in power over more skilled burglars who focus on houses with no one home. You incentivize bandits who, upon coming across merchants and travellers who would be willing to pay tribute, to start massacring and committing atrocities, to inspire the travelers to fight back and present a minimal threat.
Or, again, you can instead say "You are heroes. You gain XP for deeds of heroism, which can include but is not limited to recovering lost or stolen treasures.", and bam, you're done. Party wages a successful guerilla war against an invading hobgoblin army, drives them back out, and manages to completely loot their baggage train and get the treasure from nearby sacked villages? Gain XP. And if they turn around and give that treasure to the survivors and help them use it to rebuild and re-arm themselves against the next threat instead of keeping it for themselves? More XP.
When gold for XP is really popping, here are some of the characteristics that you get. If you ain't getting this, you ain't doing it right:
Player pursuit of XP is somewhat aligned with character pursuit of gold. Well, duh! However, think about it in terms of sacrifice and greed. What we are really saying is that the player and character have different pursuits that are aligned in their motivations. Which is a good thing. You can't really make players care about the gold that much, which is in genre for the characters. You can make them care that much about the XP--which when they pursue is having the characters be in genre. *
Sometimes they lose out because they have to drop the gold, or leave the gold, or never even get the gold--as a prudential way of, "but we survived to try again." It's a partial fail/partial success. Those are a little difficult to set up for an inexperienced GM, but you with Gold for XP you start getting some of that in the most basic dungeon crawl even without knowing what you are doing.
Even better, sometimes greed causes things to spiral out of control. I mean, that's half the named characters in Vance, Leiber, etc. and sometimes even the antiheroes. You had to get that last score or not drop the treasure or not use some of it to bargain passage--which is why you are now a splattered smear on the bottom of the pit under the rock trap. Not incidentally, this is also the background of the player who will drop the treasure with a later character.
Sooner or later you will get moral decisions setup by the greed, and they will really hurt. As in, I can get out with the gold and make 5th level! Or I can ransom my buddy so that the two of us can stay about the same level and try to come up with a plan for how we are going to replace all the stuff we lost in this delve. It doesn't even matter which way you decide. Because your buddy saw that it was not an open and shut case. :D
* If it's not at least partially in genre that some of the characters will exhibit this behavior, then you shouldn't be using gold for XP. That doesn't make gold for XP bad or illogical--just a bad fit for that particular game.
Quote from: robertliguori on August 08, 2021, 10:01:01 AM
Which gets to the point clearly; money isn't the root of the XP. If what you want to reward is taking risky behavior in pursuit of a heroic goal, then reward that.
No. Just no.
The reason to use gold is because gold is objective. It's not giving out XP based on some intangible subjective determination by the DM. It's giving it out because there were 21,238 gold pieces in the hoard of the dragon you successfully swindled. It's easy to measure, based on something that has an existence in the setting, and while there are a few rare cases where it doesn't apply (passing gold back and forth between party members), they're obviously complete metagamey bullshit that shouldn't be allowed, so it's trivial to make a judgment call. Sure, it's not an perfect 100% match of the behavior it's designed to incentivize[1], but it's very, very close.
[1] Which is absolutely not "risky behavior in pursuit of a heroic goal". Gold for XP is inherently anti-heroic, and it's designed to reward players who come up with creative solutions, not those who take stupid risks. None of your objections to gold for XP are even close to valid, if you accept what it's designed to do. Your problems with it seem more fundamental -- you want to a play a very different game from the ones that gold for XP is designed to facilitate.
Which is fine, but you should really stop making all these ridiculous arguments in an attempt to poke holes in the concept of gold for XP, because none of them are legitimate. Gold for XP is extraordinarily effective at what it does. It's just you want something else.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 03, 2021, 11:50:24 PMWhen playing a gold for XP game, do you ONLY give gold for xp acquired (aside from minimal monster killing xp)?
Yes, because it's a freebooter campaign.
If you don't want a freebooter campaign, that's cool, but be aware that whatever you give XP for will incentivize that behavior as the core of the campaign.
AKA, a superhero game that gave more XP for "doing good deeds" than for fighting would result in significantly different play than a superhero game where the main XP came from beating down villains.
In a D&D-ish game, you set the tone via how XP is gained. If monsters are worth little or no XP, then PCs will avoid combat. If gold is not worth XP, then treasure will be secondary for their PCs. If "completing quests" gives the most XP, then the PCs will seek out and complete quests.
Quote from: Spinachcat on August 08, 2021, 06:59:16 PM
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 03, 2021, 11:50:24 PMWhen playing a gold for XP game, do you ONLY give gold for xp acquired (aside from minimal monster killing xp)?
Yes, because it's a freebooter campaign.
If you don't want a freebooter campaign, that's cool, but be aware that whatever you give XP for will incentivize that behavior as the core of the campaign.
AKA, a superhero game that gave more XP for "doing good deeds" than for fighting would result in significantly different play than a superhero game where the main XP came from beating down villains.
In a D&D-ish game, you set the tone via how XP is gained. If monsters are worth little or no XP, then PCs will avoid combat. If gold is not worth XP, then treasure will be secondary for their PCs. If "completing quests" gives the most XP, then the PCs will seek out and complete quests.
I am all for the freebooting; my concern was if it means there's no place for a LG Paladin type character in such a game.
Think of "paladin in a freebooter" game as a bit of a challenge to the player. Same as playing as land-lubber wizard in a pirate game. Not everyone wants such a challenge. Some that do think they want the challenge might instead be planning to go against the spirit of the campaign, perhaps without even realizing that is their plan. Depends on why the player wants a paladin, right?
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 08, 2021, 11:01:53 PM
I am all for the freebooting; my concern was if it means there's no place for a LG Paladin type character in such a game.
If the party is nothing but paladins, it might be a mismatch.
If there's one paladin in the party, then:
(1) The characters have an in-world constraint to do generally 'good', or at least 'not-evil' things. For a lot of modern players this can make a freebooting campaign more palatable **.
(2) The paladin still earns a fair share of the treasure, and thus a fair share of the xp - they're just not allowed to
retain it (in the behavioural-strictures-for-paladins I recall). Thus they have a drive to engage with the church / the downtrodden; more world involvement.
** The elf wizard in my winding-down campaign was constantly asking "are we the baddies?" when they were dealing with humanoid foes. The paladin is an Oath of Vengeance paladin who gets his powers from a nonviolent god of healing, so doesn't mind a bit of contradiction.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 08, 2021, 11:01:53 PM
I am all for the freebooting; my concern was if it means there's no place for a LG Paladin type character in such a game.
"Gold for XP" doesn't have to be "freebooting", or any other kind of "stealing". The original use of this method suggests salvage more than theft: in a typical Gold-for-XP dungeon some rooms have monsters, some have treasure, and the two are not necessarily associated by any legal or ethical notion of "ownership". Often the monsters are mindless blobs who know nothing about "gold", who just happen to in front of a forgotten treasure chest buried there centuries ago.
Other times of course that same treasure is being accumulated and used by evil creatures for evil purposes. It was probably stolen from the local villagers in the first place. I'd certainly be comfortable with a paladin who sought to recover that wealth for the locals.
I'd also be fine with a paladin who was just into exploring ruins to amass wealth, so long as the gold is ultimately to be used for a noble purpose, such as building a new temple where none exists.
Unless gold is inherently evil in your game world, there are infinite ways that "gold-for-XP" fits fine with good intentions.