I'm making a game.

Determining XP for monsters is easy because I can roughly calculate how difficult they are to fight relative to players and each other, more or less.

The most elegant way to do XP for non combat is to award it for recovering gold/treasure. Sounds good. But this requires treasure tables and standards for what you find in the world. I don't have that yet.

Until then, I want to award XP for skill rolls, but it's hard to conceptualize. Ideas? I would generally assume it's a combination of the roll's difficulty, the stakes, and maybe a way to put it on a curve relative to the player's level, maybe. Yeah, it's gamey, but there must be a game that does this well even if it's not people's first choice. Thoughts?

Yeah, part of this is incentivizing my play testers to invest skill points into non combat skills. Maybe that's dumb, there was a thread a while back about why using XP to encourage behavior is bad. But I'd like to try it and see for myself.

Quote from: Ashakyre;963123Yeah, part of this is incentivizing my play testers to invest skill points into non combat skills. Maybe that's dumb, there was a thread a while back about why using XP to encourage behavior is bad. But I'd like to try it and see for myself.

Well, the easiest way to do that is to reward the play testers for goals, and make the goals be such that combat is incapable or suboptimal at achieving some or all of the goals. Gp=xp is really just a very specific version of this.

But if you really want to hone in on the give bonus for using skills, I think Runequest does this.

Consider EXP based on for example talking to someone. Talking down a red dragon from attacking should garner as much EXP as slaying it.

With skill challenges work out a sort of table based on the DC or equivalent. and keep the rewards RARE. Very RARE.

I have a list from Salem World, I use this for most every situation.  The points are low because advancement of a character is done through point buy XP, and it keeps the progress slow.

Experience Rewards
1 - Using a skill / power (even failed)
3 - Playing ones Outlook (alignment)
5 - Playing true to character
3 - Creative ideas (that did or didn't work)
5 - Using a skill / power in unusual ways
8 - Causing harm to self for saving another
8 - Potential Self sacrifice
6 - Causing large effects for outlook play
3 - Playing class correctly
10 - Killing / defeating a powerful foe
5 - Killing / defeating a matched foe
2 - Solving a puzzle / riddle / maze
3 - Good / Evil / Neutral deeds that match Character personality

Just something that works for us

In a game where you're awarding xp for activities and not for session-showing-up, I generally prefer to tie it to goals rather than activities.  XP for GP is an early example of this.

So you get XP for rescuing the princess, but how you accomplish that is irrelevant.

I found the AD&D DMG discussion of "What is an Encounter?" to be tremendously useful in assisting what is a meaningful experience (XP).

Basically, was it a meaningful experience? Did casting that spell, or stealing that item, or using your professional skill, did it lead to a learning experience? Or was it just routine, even if it was a display of power?

Then, instead of designing things too much as a puzzle to be solved, all you have to do is offer complications and see if the PCs approach it in ways that add to their knowledge of the world and their capabilities within it. Or in other words, was it more than a routine expenditure of effort.

The idea of my game is that the hex map is basically a slow motion dungeon crawl. When I finalize rules for factions (which are analagous to monsters) I could award experience for damaging a faction. (Completely destorying one would be unrealistic.) That might be fun. And that would put all the game's skills on an equal footing.

Until then, some chart based in DC, stakes should do, I suppose.

Time.  Reward xp based on how long it took the to accomplish their goal plus the amount of time it took you to craft the puzzle/challenge.  

Or affect.  How much of the world did they shift × how intentional were those effects.  If they drop a torch and burn down an inn by accident which results in bankrupting a Duke by accident they get little xp.  If they know its his last venture and he's in debt up to his eyeballs and they burn it down then tonnes of xp.

Quote from: Ashakyre;963123I'm making a game.

Determining XP for monsters is easy because I can roughly calculate how difficult they are to fight relative to players and each other, more or less.

The most elegant way to do XP for non combat is to award it for recovering gold/treasure. Sounds good. But this requires treasure tables and standards for what you find in the world. I don't have that yet.

This encourages loot and scoot behavior. Which is neither good nor bad. Just something to keep in mind.

QuoteUntil then, I want to award XP for skill rolls, but it's hard to conceptualize. Ideas? I would generally assume it's a combination of the roll's difficulty, the stakes, and maybe a way to put it on a curve relative to the player's level, maybe. Yeah, it's gamey, but there must be a game that does this well even if it's not people's first choice. Thoughts?

I have settled on using the encounter as my base for xp awards. So if you have the amount of XP a combat encounter would be worth, you can use that as a baseline for all encounters. An easy non-com would be worth the low side, a critical non-com would be worth the full or even a little bit more than the usual combat xp award.

QuoteYeah, part of this is incentivizing my play testers to invest skill points into non combat skills. Maybe that's dumb, there was a thread a while back about why using XP to encourage behavior is bad. But I'd like to try it and see for myself.

Yeah, I would not award per skill, as that encourages players to rationalize using skills for solving problems ("I use Horsemanship to research the forgotten ruin...") instead of using the appropriate skill for the task at hand.

Otherwise, I personally like using XP to encourage behavior, you just have to put a bit of thought into what you're awarding xp for.

In D&D 5e I give out 50x the players level in XP for a pure RP session.  With bonuses, or outright monster XP if they negotiate (as in overcome or sidestep) through a potential combat.

But not knowing the OP's base system, I can't add more than that.

Quote from: Ashakyre;963123Determining XP for monsters is easy because I can roughly calculate how difficult they are to fight relative to players and each other, more or less.

The most elegant way to do XP for non combat is to award it for recovering gold/treasure. Sounds good. But this requires treasure tables and standards for what you find in the world. I don't have that yet.

Until then, I want to award XP for skill rolls, but it's hard to conceptualize. Ideas?

Conceptually, a key part of XP as a *game reward* is what the risk is. In combat the risk is typically death, permanent imprisonment, or other grievous outcome. In non-combat challenges, the risk varies a lot more. If players can get a bunch of XP from low-risk activity, then they will be motivated to keep doing that.

The XP system is really about what you want to encourage. A simple default is just to give fixed XP for every session that the player shows up. That only motivates showing up to play, not what to do. Other XP systems will instead motivate particular actions - like trying to get the most gold, for example. If you think that players won't try to get gold and you want them to, then rewarding XP for gold makes sense. However, players may be unwilling and/or unhappy if they consider helping some penniless farmers.

Another option is to award XP based on mission(s) completed - but if it is a fixed amount, then it may encourage the players to take on the simplest missions possible.

If you award them for each challenge, then it should be based on risk, but it potentially is just a lot of arbitrary decisions, and it might be better just to give them a reward at the end based on a subjective scale of the challenges and risks they faced.

I'm as hardcore "Old-school" as they come, yet I am totally in favor of this.

In my own campaign I give out "Exploration points" to PCS who go out of the way to visit that weird city, that obscure ruin in the corner of the map, that mountain that no one has ever climbed, etc. It really keeps things moving, vital, and alive.

In a game like 5e D&D I tend to give out an "Easy" or "Medium" or "Hard" combat challenge XP award for the non-combat equivalent challenge or quest completion, using the PCs' average level. In 5e I cap these awards at the level 10 line since the XP chart gets wonky after that and I'd prefer the PCs not to level up too fast.

Another thing I do in my 5e Pathfinders game is give a flat 100 XP per PC for every 'discovery' such as a new dungeon level, weird room etc.

I occasionally abstract it to "one Easy XP award per hour of play" if the PCs are active but the session doesn't break into clear quests/encounters/etc. A good rule of thumb for me is that if the PCs are active they should get at least 10% of the XP needed to level up in a 3 hour session, or above 10th level/name level in 5e make it 10% of what a level 11 PC would need to advance (ie 1500 XP).

I deliberately avoid giving XP for time spent OOC planning, book keeping etc, I don't want to incentivise not playing the game. But I might give XP for in-character planning sessions esp where NPCs are involved, persuasion attempts are required, etc.

Edit:  The 5e level 10 encounter XP line is:

Easy 600
Medium 1200
Hard 1900
Deadly 2800

If the level 10+ PCs spend the time not in combat I'll typically give 600 XP per hour of non-threatening active play, but a typical achievement gets them 1200 XP each. In practice my online text-chat group typically get around 1800 XP for a 3 hour session sans big combat whereas the tabletop group get more like 3600, mostly because tabletop play is faster and they get more done. I rarely use the Hard & Deadly lines for noncombat awards but I might give 2800 each for something really major.

For reference, level 10 5e PCs need 21,000 XP to level, level 11 need 15,000, and level 19 need 50,000 to reach 20.

For what it's worth, I tend to fall back on a reward system modeled closely after AD&D's. I'm looking at four factors mainly. Challenge, Gain, Loss, and Role.

Challenge is what monsters in D&D represent. You earn XP for killing them. I also award half XP for non-lethal defeat of monsters. Gain is like XP for treasure and magic items in AD&D. The formula for XP reward is Challenge + Gain. However, if there is no possibility for loss, it zeroes out all XP rewards. Role, as it manifests in AD&D, is the measure of how well you played to your character class and that effects training time and cost. When I play Lejendary Adventure (a skill-based RPG), Role comes in the form of skill-specific XP (they can only be used to raise that particular skill)--there is a minimum number of skill-specific XP required to raise the skill without training. So like AD&D, this influences training time (and thus cost).

A couple of other things I do (at the suggestions of the DMG)--XP for gain is capped at challenge. So if 1000 xp worth of monsters guards 20,000 xp worth of treasure, the most XP you can ever get from treasure is 1000 xp. If you kill the monsters and take their stuff, that's 2000 xp total. If you wait for the monsters to leave and steal their stuff, it's 1000 xp total. If you force the monsters to flee or surrender and take their stuff, that's 1500 xp total. Second, all XP values double if you're facing 10-to-1 odds.

So how does this apply to non-combat? Say you're picking a pocket. Well, there are consequences for getting caught, so loss is present, thus you can earn non-zero XP for this. What does it take? Just one pittily skill roll? 5 to 50 XP depending on any difficulty modifier. What's the reward, a 25 gp gem? Okay, that's 25 XP but it's capped by the challenge. Meaning, if it's an easy roll (say, you get a 20% bonus to pick pockets) you only get 10 xp, 5 for the challenge, 5 for the gain. Finally, how does this pertain to the role of your character? In a skill-based game, that might be a small reward for the skill used. In a class-based game, if this is fitting in with the class function and your role in the party, you get a smiley face sticker or a gold star or something.

Quote from: Ashakyre;963123...The most elegant way to do XP for non combat is to award it for recovering gold/treasure. Sounds good. But this requires treasure tables and standards for what you find in the world. I don't have that yet.

I think XP based on gold is pretty ridiculous and obviously inappropriate unless your game world for some reason always has gold rewards that are proportional to the learning available from accomplishing something, which seems bizarre and perversely capitalistic-minded to me. Seems to me that actual life experience has nothing to do with monetary value.

QuoteUntil then, I want to award XP for skill rolls, but it's hard to conceptualize. Ideas? I would generally assume it's a combination of the roll's difficulty, the stakes, and maybe a way to put it on a curve relative to the player's level, maybe. Yeah, it's gamey, but there must be a game that does this well even if it's not people's first choice. Thoughts?...

Like combat, it seems to me that experience should have something to do with how difficult and/or educational a task is. If a game has difficult success rolls to accomplish things, then the severity of the roll might determine experience for it.

I also like experience systems that somehow take into account the ability of the person doing it. For instance, I generally compare the ability of the learner to the difficulty of the thing, including bonuses. So using magic (or otherwise task-easy-making) tools reduces the experience because it made it easier. Another clever way to do this that I first heard invented by a GM was to give exp only on failed rolls, which naturally led to learning from difficulty and reduced learning when you're just doing something you've mastered, without having to do any additional math since it's built into the success system.