Quote from: tenbones;1138749The whole Gold-as-XP thing always seemed meta and lazy to me. In 1e/2e it was trivially easy to control the progress of your PC's. It still is.

Well, the good thing about it is that it gives the players an in-universe, quantifiable way to track their progress. XP as XP has no in-game equivalent, and goals give an ambiguous unknown amount of XP. Also, all types of characters can rally around getting gold for their own causes, good or bad, whereas they may not be interested in saving the orphanage by itself.

Quote from: Tom Kalbfus;1138653In older versions of D&D, your characters gained experience points for the gold Piece Value of the treasure he collected as well as for defeating his opponents. This created a different power arch for a character's climb to high levels, namely that if your character is high level, he is likely rich and probably spends as much time directing troops and giving orders to his hirelings as he does performing character actions. A character like Drizzt is unlikely in this scenario, that is a high level character going from place to place having adventures.

You have different adventures for powerful rulers than you do for high level characters going from place to place like Hercules and Xena.

How do you feel about this?

The D&D version I run is AD&D 1E. And even the other RPGs I play, I'm constantly borrowing ideas from 1E.

I will say that, yes, it is my experience that at higher levels the focus tends to shift towards building your stronghold and followers.

But I don't think that's connected to XP for gold.

Gold gets eaten up from training. In the early levels, it's not uncommon to hit XP caps (1 xp shy of jumping 2 levels) before you can afford the training. XP for gold effectively aligns incentives with goal-seeking rather than indiscriminate monster slaying.

Building up henchmen, hirelings, and followers is its own self-perpetuating reward. Gold comes and goes. And so do some hirelings. But to the extend you build loyalty with NPCs, that keeps stacking.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1138771Well, the good thing about it is that it gives the players an in-universe, quantifiable way to track their progress. XP as XP has no in-game equivalent, and goals give an ambiguous unknown amount of XP. Also, all types of characters can rally around getting gold for their own causes, good or bad, whereas they may not be interested in saving the orphanage by itself.

I'm curious, what do you do about economy?

Because I'm pretty careful about my "bog standard" D&D games. The *vast* majority of most citizenry are on a silver-standard. The assumptions of D&D are that most (at least in 1e/2e) made about 3gp a month in coin/goods for wages. So when my players come across "treasure" and it's hundreds of gold... it's a huge deal. It's funny because when new players that are used to the free-and-loose notion that everything is in these nebulous "Gold Pieces" - then start dropping gold around a village, and everyone starts bending over backwards... they love the attention... until they realize that sometimes they flood the area with gold and it starts "attracting attention".

It puts a social-face on the act of having hard-currency, and sometimes they don't realize that a casual tromp through town doing what they think is no big deal, is the equivalent to the everyday NPC's of rolling up in their Ferarri's and "making it rain" when they drop 2gp for a meal (that costs a copper). I get a lot of mileage out of enforcing the social and economic value of a "gold piece" without having to reward them for XP-per-GP.

I've done it in the past mind you - usually for Rogues and the PC's that help them pull off capers. But generally I don't do it.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1138694By giving out xp for gold, and for exploring and interacting and solving problems, incentivises all the kinds of activites that you might include in your game.

Yes, this is the best approach IME. If I'm giving out a ton of non-gold XP, all I have to do is reduce treasure values a bit (some D&D gem & jewelry values especially seem OTT, so they make a good candidate), and advancement doesn't get too fast. Or I can get a bit faster advancement by doing both; IME not a problem in pre-3e D&D play.

The problem with gold for XP resulting in mega-rich characters can be trivially solved by awarding XP for the full purchase price of found magic items. That will vastly reduce the amount of spendable cash players end up with. There's no need, then, for any new rules like carousing or spending money for training.

Quote from: Shasarak;1138727When I was reading this I mentally inserted gold for goals and then I realised that I could have a character who had a goal to get gold and therefore complete the circle back to gold for XP.

Of course you can, and that's the strength of the goal system. as Ratman_tf points out. But using XP for Gold, you can't really circle back to other types of goals. XP for Gold is just XP for Gold. But XP for Goals is also XP for Gold and XP for every objective that isn't gold.

However, to get nitpicky, I prefer XP for Achievements myself. Because XP for Achievements includes XP for Gold (or at least the task of finding it, if that's the objective), XP for Goals/Objectives and XP for Overcoming Obstacles or any other type of accomplishment that comes up during play that characters did, but aren't necessarily a "goal". So XP for Achievements > XP for Goals > XP for Gold.

Quote from: tenbones;1138749The whole Gold-as-XP thing always seemed meta and lazy to me.

That's another term and sticking point about XP for Gold I forgot about. The whole thing is just so meta, it's almost purely a game conceit rather than something that makes sense outside of "It's a game! Don't think about it too much!"

Quote from: VisionStorm;1138693Same as XP for accomplishments. Except that XP for accomplishments doesn't require using treasure as a middleman (and making characters rich) in order to award non-combat XP through DM rulings.

With XP for accomplishments, you have to balance the XP awards based on how difficult they are and how long they will take to achieve. At that point, you might as well just award XP per session to set the advancement rate you otherwise would get.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;1138866With XP for accomplishments, you have to balance the XP awards based on how difficult they are and how long they will take to achieve. At that point, you might as well just award XP per session to set the advancement rate you otherwise would get.

I don't like using DM fiat very much, I prefer the mechanics of the game determine how experience points are awarded.

I've used XP for GP for decades. It works well. The way I approach it:

• The broad idea behind adventuring is "fortune and glory." That's not set in stone, it's just a kind of default general rule.
• XP for GP is an abstract way of measuring success in the quest for fortune and glory. And it's a goal-oriented reward.
• The rules for XP (and even classes and levels, themselves) are not "laws of nature" that govern how everything and everyone in the game world develops and advances. They're just convenient game rules with PCs in mind.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1138864That's another term and sticking point about XP for Gold I forgot about. The whole thing is just so meta, it's almost purely a game conceit rather than something that makes sense outside of "It's a game! Don't think about it too much!"

The problem I see is that people are taking XP for gold out of context of the campaigns in which it was originally designed. Way back in the pre-AD&D days, the main focus of the campaign was on allowing the players to set they parameters of the adventure. Specifically, how much gold they wanted balanced with how much risk they are willing to take. The deeper in the dungeon they decide to go, the greater the rewards and the higher the risks. In this sort of campaign, the amount of treasure you extract from the dungeon is a direct measure of how successful your dungeon expedition was and, thus, matched perfectly with the awarding of XP.

Almost all modern RPG campaigns are setup using a different approach where the DM chooses the adventure and the players job is to complete that adventure. Here the XP awards are based on completing the assigned scenario and, if using XP for gold, you'd have to reverse engineer the gold awards to match the risk the players took to complete the scenario. Which is an unnecessary step.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;1138866With XP for accomplishments, you have to balance the XP awards based on how difficult they are and how long they will take to achieve. At that point, you might as well just award XP per session to set the advancement rate you otherwise would get.

The Pathfinder Society gives a flat 1 xp per session, and characters gain a level every 3 xp. My brother picked up that idea for his home campaigns.

Personally, I don't like smoothing out xp that much. There's no incentive or reward for taking risks or exploring side quests. I sometimes get in the mindset of showing up to a society game to get my 1 xp and that feels wrong.

So for my approach to xp, I put a value on every encounter, say 50 for a simple encounter, 100 for an average encounter, and 150 for a challenging encounter. I then budget the session for how much xp I expect the characters to earn, on average.
I then include a few things outside the "golden path", like hidden loot, side-quests, interesting features, that kind of thing.
So the PCs can earn the bare minimum expected xp, even if they fail and flop around, they can earn the expected average if they do well, and they can earn above average if they take extra risks, find hidden stuff, and generally do exceptionally.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;1138866With XP for accomplishments, you have to balance the XP awards based on how difficult they are and how long they will take to achieve. At that point, you might as well just award XP per session to set the advancement rate you otherwise would get.

All of this can be said about XP for Gold as well. The difference is that XP for Gold is a metagame mechanic that rewards you only for already having being rewarded with treasure and nothing else, while XP for accomplishments rewards you for actual stuff that you did (ALL the stuff that you did), even if no treasure was ever found. And it's not like balancing XP awards based on the significance or effort involved in the accomplishment is an insurmountable task.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1138872All of this can be said about XP for Gold as well. The difference is that XP for Gold is a metagame mechanic that rewards you only for already having being rewarded with treasure and nothing else, while XP for accomplishments rewards you for actual stuff that you did (ALL the stuff that you did), even if no treasure was ever found.

Because the players don't get any reward for accomplishments beyond XP...
Favors, assistance, social standing, fame and notoriety?
A lot of this spends better than gold.

There are different advancement tables, here are two examples:

Level : Experience points needed to reach
1 : 0
2 : 1,000
3 : 3,000
4 : 6,000
5 : 10,000
6 : 15,000
7 : 21,000
8 : 28,000
9 : 37,000
10 : 47,000
11 : 58,000
12 : 70,000
13 : 83,000
15 : 98,000
16 : 114,000
17 : 131,000
18 : 149,000
19 : 168,000
20 : 188,000

Here is another advancement table
Level : Experience points needed to reach
1 : 0
2 : 1,000
3 : 2,000
4 : 4,000
5 : 8,000
6 : 16,000
7 : 32,000
8 : 64,000
9 : 125,000
10 : 250,000
11 : 500,000
12 : 1,000,000
13 : 2,000,000
14 : 4,000,000
15 : 8,000,000
16 : 16,000,000
17 : 32,000,000
18 : 64,000,000
19 : 125,000,000
20 : 250,000,000

Now which table would you rather use for character advancement if the DM awarded 1 xp for each gold piece value for treasure?
I would pick the second. I think the second table would be a great one for the Dark Albion campaign as that is a low level campaign that the second table presents a soft ceiling to level advancement, as the character's wealth will greatly outweigh his level at high level, and he will have armies at his command to do his bidding at such high levels.

Quote from: Melichor;1138877Because the players don't get any reward for accomplishments beyond XP...
Favors, assistance, social standing, fame and notoriety?
A lot of this spends better than gold.

No, the vast majority of the time PCs literally don’t get any reward for accomplishments beyond XP (assuming XPs are even awarded for accomplishments). Overcoming challenges is largely meaningless as a social resource, unless that challenge was a social interaction to gain favors. And even then that misses the point that the larger discussion here is about effective means of awarding non-combat XP, and that even if we were going to accept this "argument" as an effective counter to what I said that still doesn't exonerate XP for Gold, it merely implicates some aspects (not even the whole of it) of XP for Accomplishments as well. And it does this only at a tenuous level, given that favors, fame, etc. are intangibles that are only a factor if the DM even remembers to bring that into play and PCs strike while the iron is hot rather than wait till a time when NPCs no longer care, while treasure is perfectly tangible and can be stored indefinitely for later use.

But what online discussion would be complete without nitpicking at the edges of an argument for apparent weaknesses that still don't support the other side of the argument, or fully address the argument being countered?