I got bored with XP a long time ago.  Seriously, it's the one part of any monster I always have to look up.  And if I make something up on the fly, what XP value do I define it?  Is it worth more XP to save a wealthy merchant from an orc than a pregnant woman?  Is it even worth XP at all?  What's the point?  I hand it out mostly randomly based on how hard I feel the encounter was and about how interested everyone feels in leveling.  Most people have figured out the "formula" but I'm not overly worried.  As an aside, I really like 13th Age's way of handling it, so that you'd get a bonus from the next level at your current one until you collected them all, then leveled.  Handing out a bonus to people works much better than XP, plus it feels better (I got an extra spell slot, rather than I got some numbers on my sheet)

As an aside, I truly genuinely dislike the "start at level 1" approach in most systems.  Compared to a level 6 or something, this person is a completely useless piece of shit (seriously, a level 6 can take down how many level 1s?  A bunch) so why is the party dragging him along this useless dunderhead? We always have to come up with a set of reasons that boil down to "because obviously".  

QuoteGiving out XP equally to everyone promotes teacup ride players. The players just sit at the same tavern street corner, waiting to be told how great their characters are in encounters that come to them.

If I have players who don't want to play, I don't want to play with them.  Period.  I'm not in school, I don't have to include them in the mandatory group project.   If my players want to sit back and observe, well, fuck them, they're getting pulled in, and if they don't like it they can go elsewhere.

Quote from: Spinachcat;841317I honestly couldn't care anymore. I left the teaching profession for a reason. I am not DM Daddy trying to instill work ethics into my players.

I took that for granted. The question concerns the relationship of this subset to the vastly greater -- and in my experience more significant -- set of ways in which one figure can become "better" than another.

It seems strange to make such a ruckus over the one and ignore all the others, but it seems still more bizarre to follow through consistently and produce a game-world so alien to human experience and natural interest.

I conclude that "levels" somehow have an overwhelming importance  in the game considered. Whatever that may be, it is not the D&D, etc., that I know.

QuoteI always let my players know the score with me: deadly games with high reward. I run dangerous worlds with dangerous foes and shove PCs in the middle of the mosh pit, but the rewards are high and advancement is swift for those who survive. Those who die come back swinging with a new PC as fast as I can rationalize their immersion.



Barbara's player would probably throw a mega hissy fit, but damn that would be an interesting magical poison!

I am going to use that!!!




Why not? It's a fantasy game.

Again, I am going to use that!!!

Must is not the same as may. It's the difference between slavery and liberty.

For my part, playing GURPS liberates me from some of this crap.  The XP system is desperately simple and straightforward -- the thought of having to look up the "XP value" of individual monsters or calculating "Challenge Ratings" is laughable to me.  Having run parties with as much as a hundred-point disparity, it's also relatively free of the "OMG you can't run characters of different levels!!!" fallacy (and I do think it's overblown, even with D&D).

But beyond that, I question why "advancement" is necessary at all.  I was in a large fantasy boffer LARP for many years.  I'd hit the ceiling of how far it was possible to advance in the magic system in 1991.  I was 32 by then, the oldest player in the game, and I sure wasn't improving as a fighter -- by 2000, I was doing two three-hour combat practices a week just to keep my skills from deteriorating too fast.

For the last eleven years I was in that game, I didn't "level up."  Yet I had fun nonetheless.  How could that possibly be?