Point A to Point B

A peculiar problem is coming up with my D&D game tomorrow, so now is a good time to talk about it, as it directly affects the player. That problem is travel.

As some might remember from this recap last week, the players are tentatively accepting a "request" (not a "quest") to journey down to a certain border between Croatia and the Ottoman territory of Slavonia, a distance of about 140 miles. Not really that far, of course, but still, enough to raise question, how to get the player from point A to point B. Sooner or later, every dungeon master runs into this.

There are three fundamental strategies in accomplishing the displacement. The first method is "poof!" you're there. This might be accompanied by arbitrary costs of travel, the number of rations you have to scratch from your character, even possibly a roll for things that have broken or been spoiled along the way. Oh, and of course, the days of the journey are counted against the calendar. The main logic is that "travel is boring," and therefore, why not just do the Hollywood film cut betweeen the characters turning off the light and leaving their apartment and then getting off the plane, er, the wagon, finding themselves conveniently in Croatia.

Method 2 is the way all my DMs did it when I was starting out, that I myself followed for a long time: count the number of days, roll a random encounter chance for each day, fight out the random encounters (yes, one by one), then count the journey as "earned" as the players reach their destination, tired from having to fight random nobodies. This at least has the sense of the players feeling the journey's weight, if not the actual distance. It's also a good way to discourage long trips.

Method 3 is the video game solution: side quests. Let the players get there, but keep inventing problems along the way that need to be solved by insisting that the party enter this dungeon to get this gem or pour this vial of water into this lost stone bowl in the forest, yada yada yada. Thus, we turn the journey into its own "adventure," yay, so that we have to solve the adventure to have the adventure.

These methods are to get around the problem of having to verbally describe the journey taking place, as the trees and hills and streams and other travellers and houses and toll gates and fences and farms and rocks and flowers and the sun too passing overhead, faster than we are, just go by. A 140 mile version on foot is equivalent to a 35 hour journey by car... just to put it into perspective for those who haven't actually done it. Which includes most, though not all, of us.

Example of a dense map, coincidentally filling the
countryside between where the players are and where
they want to go.

My issue with the "solutions" is that they essentially flatten the world, divorcing it from the one aspect that makes it an actual world: it's a big place, requires time and difficulty to get around, and often that time spent is, yes, actually boring. On some level I'm certainly ready to cut the scene and move on... but there is very little point in my systematically making a very dense map of a region only to then utterly ignore every hex that doesn't include a monster encounter, and then ignore that hex FOR the monster encounter. This seems counterproductive.

Rather, we might as DMs conceive of the land as the experience: rivers have to be overcome, terrain navigated, lakes gotten around or employed as an alternative, hills avoided, uncivilised hexes avoided, the right road taken... while the actual covered ground is comprehended like an actual journey we might take ourselves would do. If you or I were to spend 35 hours walking, starting in Buda and ending up just off the south edge of this map, we wouldn't be bored, right? Our walking tour of Bakony would be enlightening, we'd be staggered by the food, we'd laugh about the people we'd meet, we'd be standing at some crossroads arguing over a map, trying to figure out just exactly what crossroads we were at. And when we returned home, we'd regale our friends with what a great trip it was, and how they ought to do it too, especially this part, and this part... and oh, hey, this part too.

But none of this is possible for several reasons related to D&D... and I'll try and discuss a few in no particular order.

The first, the one foremost on my mind, is agency.

There should be no doubt that I am a firm believer in allowing the players to choose their destiny. I believe firmly that a party should be able to head out wherever they want, do whatever they want, overcome whatever they want... but, uh, well... all this sort of goes to pot where geography is concerned.

See, if you just want to go one hex, a mere six and two-thirds miles, most likely you're not feeling very constrained. Hell, it's right there. From this hill, we can see that hill, and it's just one hex away. Going feels like agency. It feels like we're in control of our lives. It feels great.

But going twenty-one hexes isn't like that. First of all, if you want to get there by the shortest route, and presumably you do, then you have to pretty much take a specific 21 hexes, one after another, on a specific road, that's going to go through specific towns that you have no choice about. And when the DM tells you, oh party member, that this little village is "Totvazsony," trust me, you don't give a damn. No more than you would if you were driving from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City and discovered that you'd just passed through Ogallah, Kansas. Let's be serious... you really wouldn't care.

I may have invested the name Totvazsony carefully, pulling it out of GoogleEarth as a real life place, but that doesn't make it interesting. It doesn't thrill you. What you, the player feel, is a lack of purpose, fatigue, and a strong desire to just get this over with.

Which is, coincidentally, what you're going to feel if you ever have to take a 12 hour flight to take a 2-hour flight to take a 1-hour bus ride to a really awesome hotel in, say, Costa Rica. A bus ride and two flights, incidentally, that you're going to have to take again when you leave your really awesome hotel. Because this is what travel actually is.

When we travel anywhere, we instinctively grit our teeth against it. We retain a certain level of calm as we stand in line, so we can stand in front of another line, then be moved to an area where we might find a bench or have to stand or possibly just say fuck it and decide to sit on our luggage or the floor. We know this is what travel is. Travel is time. Often, a very boring sort of time. Boring for the players, and boring for the DM. Which is what makes the "poof!" option so enticing. Wouldn't it be great if we could just be where we want to go?

I have systematically and brutally set out to bore my players by interminably describing each hex, in order, one at a time, for as long as it takes, to give the right impression of what it's like. Why? Well, why are you beating your head against that wall?  Coming to the end of such an experience is the only way to give travel through the game world an emotional shape. Otherwise, the game world might as well not be one. Or rather, I might just as well make the block house the players have to raid just down the street there, next to the Pyramids one block over and then locate Iguazu Falls the next block after that. I mean, what difference does it make. The teleport spell is irrelevant if the DM is just going to teleport the party anyway.

The argument, however, does not actually solve the problem. If the party wants to "see the world"... and after all, what else is a world for... then session after session cannot be filled with meaningless descriptions of rocks and trees and trees and rocks... and water. There must be game in them thar roadways, else for other reasons they still don't belong.

Before I go on, I'll just check my closets first for the Spanish Inquisition, because they're bound to show up if I write this. No one obviously ever expects them. My question is this: how much "travel boredom" would a player be willing to endure, to achieve the emotional shape of travel, if experience were available?

After all, by definition, experience is "the conscious process of observing, living through or undergoing an event. "Experiential travel" focuses on deeply engaging with a destination's culture, history and environment. Yes, its a real term.

Once upon a time, I considered a system that would reflect the difficulties of travel by assigning a set number of hit points lost by a party per day of actual travel. Let us say 1 point per day, as a base line, merely to express the discomfort of sitting in horse saddles or trudging on foot, the feel of packs on backs, the unpleasantness of not sleeping in a bed, being subject to the weather, not having a decent physical toilet to sit on, etcetera. Theoretically, I imagined, a really nasty rainstorm could drain every member of a party of three hit points in the space of a half-hour deluge; a furious snowstorm, likewise; hail, for instance, might contribute. Losing the party's tent because a mule falls into the canyon, so that even when the tent is recovered, it's ripped asunder.  Steadily, day after day, the party would have to stop somewhere and treat themselves to an inn, a decent meal, a night not under the stars, a new tent, a second tent... and so on.

Two problems killed it. The first was that the effort was going to turn travel into accounting. The second was simply that the system, no matter how refined it became, would be felt keenly and resentfully. For the most part, a party higher than fourth level can largely just obliterate the effects anyway through healing, mending cantrips, the creation of food and so on. So I abandoned the idea. It was too much work to produce the wrong emotional response. It was, essentially, negative reinforcement.

So, okay, why not positive reinforcement? Why not a system that simply awards a set amount of experience for every hex travelled, to provide for the "worldliness" of the player character? 'Course, pure water hexes wouldn't count; they all look alike and most can't tell where they are anyway. And returning again and again to the same hex, well, that doesn't serve either, since we've been there and, reasonably, we can't just make every hex an eternal well of experience. No, the goal's got to be to encourage the players to travel, despite the actual tedium of the journey, so that they feel it's all worthwhile and we can still retain the "it feels so good when it stops" structure. Yes?

Of course yes.

Ah... but how much?

10 x.p. per hex?  Fair when you're first level, and yet it still means a thief would have to tour 125 hexes to do it without combat. There's always the argument that experience ought to be received for "risk," about which I agree, but then travel is a risk. If the game world is dense enough, there are storms, there are chances of getting lost, or meeting encounters, or suffering maladies, if the mechanics for these things exist. We can certainly take Bilbo's words for it:

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door..."

But then, he meant it colloquially, in the sense that the world is so interesting that you may not feel like coming home. That acknowledged, in D&D the premise remains. You enter a new hex, there is always a chance for an encounter to come and take your life. Would that, perhaps, change player opinions about wandering monsters and encounter checks if they knew, every time the check produced nothing, they'd be rewarded?

How about 50 x.p. per hex?  That reduces the 1st level thief to a journey of 25 hexes in order to reach second level. That might be a shade too generous, yes?

Now, I have players who were in what I used to run on the blog and later on a wiki as the "Juvenis Campaign," in Norway. And now they're in Hungary. If I establish such a rule, I'm sure to get a player raising hand and asking, "How many hexes did I travel through between Stavanger and Ozd?"

To which I'd have to answer, "None. You tripped and fell into a gate and came out the other side. You didn't see the hexes in between, so you get no experience for them."

But... there is another way.

In my last session, the players had just started to purchase things in Buda & Pest while considering the next part of their journey. "Buda-Pest" is an enormous city in my game, founded in 89, well before Berlin (founded in 1237), with 188,000 people. It is rich in architecture, culture, concept and aesthetic. I have felt for a long time that any such moment where the players enter a city with at least 50,000 people, or perhaps any city of 25,000 founded a thousand years before (pre-650 AD), ought to be a combination between awe-inducing and revelatory. That, in turn, could be reflected by offering not actual experience, but an experience bonus, say of 2, 5 or 10 per cent, which would last for a few days, a week, a fortnight... even a full month.

For Budapest, I might say 5% for every character's experience for the space of a fortnight, one time only, meaning they'll never get it again from Budapest. They'd have to travel to some similar city to get it again. The benefit of this is that (a) the party has a different reason to travel from place to place; (b) each new place gives it's own bonus; and (c) the party is encouraged, in a specific time period, to do something risky to take advantage of it.

Though the 5% is just arbitrary. What's needed is some calculation that takes size of the city AND age of the city in some way that produces a precise number between 4 and 15%, what I think should be the lower and upper limits of such a bonus. Paris should give 15%, obviously. But imaginatively, the very ancient and very small town of Delos in Greece... well, that must be worth something, surely. I could, I suppose, use a formula, "Presence" = population x age x distinctiveness... with the last being defined by the number of world historical sights present in the city. That is a defensible mechanism, and easily searched. Worth considering.

What if every new hex offered a one-time 1% bonus to experience for a day. That would make actual travel-gained experience better than experience gained in the same dungeon over and over. It might encourage players to want a random encounter. It would mean that travel alone wouldn't be a benefit... not unless the party subsequently risked itself while the bonus was active.

Every new idea needs a shaking out period. Any ideas?

War Stories & Experience

Dead of winter and my orchids are blooming.  At least, when I bought the plant 16 months ago, that's what the tag said.  I don't really know plants.  The plant was flowering when I bought it, but the flowers were just half the size of these seen here.  After a couple of months, the flowers died, the stem died, and all that was left were the plant's fern-like green leaves.

Patiently, however, I maintained the plant, watched it grow several new stems and, some three months ago, it began to grow the stem that became these flowers ... great big white ones, 5cm, or 2 inches wide.  It's funny how small things can produce such pleasure.

Some have asked about the reference I made to the Portuguese treasure ship in a late post.  I don't wish to go into it at length, but okay.  The players contested with a giant octopus of double the book's size, several high level undead and four mind flayers.  The flayers were stripped of their "steal brain" ability, and much reduced in "psionics."   Instead, I gave them three basic abilities: (1) a singler interactive mind, so they could perfectly coordinate attacks; (2) perfect ESP, so they instantly knew the strengths and ability of all the players; and (3) the ability to jointly add to their control one player per round (with save vs. charm).  These powers were enhanced by the players having to fight underwater, and therefore having to do without most of their spells, including the 11th level druid's most cherished spell, conjure fire elemental.  There was far too much dependence in their lexicons on fire and other impractical spells under water, all around; and in any case, the flayers would have known instantly which spells they intended to cast, instantly.

This combination was devastating.  At least half the party's fighting power exists in my daughter's 9th level ranger, whose strength, +2 sword and attacks per round makes her hit like a hammer.  Once the ranger was mind controlled, the party was nearly TPK'd just dealing with her.  Thankfully, the druid has many, many hit points and simply sustained damage as the rest of the party was able to stun or kill all the mind flayers in a given round, so the mage could enfeeble the ranger with a wand and they escape with their lives.  It was very, very close.

The octopus was intelligent, as the players discovered, and did not care about the ship or the treasure; and here's a point worth discussing.  The 2nd level druid in the party, who had just joined the campaign two runnings before, used speak with animals to discuss affairs with the octopus.  She deactivated the octopus with game play, not the druid 9 levels her senior.  In your face, people who think you can't start a 1st level character with a party that's 7th to 11th level.

The party sorted themselves, went back and finished off the mind flayers (and it was close again).  This let them explore the situation.  The ship was entombed in a pile of sand and stone blocks, put in place by the mind flayers, with the stern up and the bow pointed down.  They had discovered the flayer's entrance to this and had explored a small set of rooms and discovered the ship's hull; they'd broken into that to find the bilge and the orlock below the main mast.  With the flayers dead, they perceived where the stern ought to be and used stone meld and brute force to dig down into the Captain's cabin.

That brought the last big fight between the party and a group of 2 spectres and 3 wights, all able to drain experience levels.  The party fought them, made a host of spectacular saving throws and held together their integrity ... but having reason to believe there was more of this kind of thing further into the ship (they'd encountered a wraith earlier that they'd backed away from), the party took the treasure they found in the cabin and vamoosed.

As I said, there was a lot of treasure.  This included piles and piles of boxes and trunks, including an earlier haul of silver and copper they'd found in the bottom hold.  The silver pieces amounted to 300,000 coins and the copper was 370,000 coins.

Since the party had a ship, once they were restored to their ordinary lungs, they parked the ship over the derelict and spent days lifting the treasure out.  One player had a water breathing spell and they'd made friends with the local tritons.  This meant keeping all the relatively worthless coins, since these weren't comparable in value to the jewelry, gems and gold they collected.  The silver is only worth 18,750 g.p. altogether (16 s.p. = 1 g.p.), and the copper only worth 1,927 (12 c.p. = 1 s.p.).

This has pestered me for a month now.  I like giving copper but it's a waste of time, since in gold piece value it's just not important.  Silver, too, as the players have risen, is just as wasteful.

I've made a decision about this, however, and discussed it with the party.  They agree.  The question is whether the coins shouldn't be given more value than their gold piece equivalent, just because they are coins.  In general, should the cold value of items be the only factor in determining their experience?  If I obtain a plate and cup used by an enemy, I have the memory from whence those objects came ... that should have relevance as to the experience I gain as a plunderer.

I propose giving 1 x.p. per 3 silver pieces ... and measuring objects that would normally be listed on the experience table as costing silver coins on these same lines.  If a sack of wheat worth 15 s.p. is seized, then it would be worth 5 experience ... even though it's technically worth less than a single gold.  But not because of what it's worth, but because of what it is.

In turn, 1 x.p. would be given per 5 copper pieces, along these same lines.

Naturally, were this the case, I'd have poured out less than 300 thousand silver.  Or, perhaps, I've have given less actual gold.  The silver would be worth 100,000 experience.

I see great benefits to this.  Small, "worthless" items wouldn't be, and in general I could award treasure without challenging the balance of wealth vs. player costs quite so much, which matters as the players move into higher levels.  I see a similar benefit with low level parties, who could count on meaningful experience returns on smaller amounts: a group of goblins, say, carrying a paltry total of 30 s.p. and 90 c.p.  Altogether, that's 28 x.p. for treasure.  It wouldn't even be 2 if we counted only it's gold value.

As I said, the party's agreed.  Why not?  Experience is experience.

Design for Choice

I received a terrific comment today, unfortunately from an anonymous reader.  As it was made on a post I wrote in 2011, I felt it needed to be reposted where more people would see it:

"I've been using this [advice from the post] for a while now and XP from damage dealt & received has changed the tenor of my game. Additionally XP for treasure instead of plot, the norm by the time when I started playing, really makes a different game. XP for plot points tethers players to the railroad. I've found my group more creative and empowered. The XP helped solved a persistent issue of players refusing to flee when outmatched by bad rolls or unbalanced encounters. Their logic was that all encounters had to be defeated in a railroad like fashion and if they couldn't win then they never could.

"Anyway from all the rules I've adopted this has had the greatest effect."

However I'm re-evaluating the purpose and point of my writing at present, I will continue to argue that adverse changes to the game, such as denying experience for gold or providing experience for plot, makes the game worse, not better.

When making rules for game play, the goal is to shape the player's options so that they have MORE choices, not less.  Experience for hit points caused and taken increases the choice of fighting or running, and when its right to do so, while experience for solving plot points excludes all possible choices except one.  This is bad game design, no matter how many stupid DMs insist that it isn't.

Preliminary to Instruction/Training Rules

This is food for thought.  A lot of the links here won't work for a few days, but I want to get a response on the base information.  The problem has always been to fold ordinary persons into the levelled class system without having to ignore the powers and hit points of that system.  After a lot of thought, I've been feeling of late that I can put this together at last.

Commoner

Representing the bulk of human inhabitants within a civilized region, often possessing a single sage ability of some type, such as farming, fishing or herding. Many other humanoids will also have commoners among their number, but among demi-humans and more primitive humanoids it is far less common to have persons with so little skill in armed combat.

As non-levelled persons, commoners have only as many hit points as their body mass provides, typically 1d8 for males and 1d6 for females. Commoners will die if damage reduces them below -3 hit points.

As combatants they are very poor. They have a morale ranging between 9 and 12, which they must succeed at before they will find the will to enter a combat. Otherwise they will flee, cower or surrender, depending on the circumstance.

Commoners are only able to fight with tools that they use every day, and suffer a -1 penalty to hit even with those. These usually function as a club causing 1-4 damage. With any other weapon they will suffer a -6 penalty to hit. They usually cannot afford armor and are far too clumsy to fight in it anyway. If over 21 years of age, roll 2d6 + 1d4 to determine their ability stats, if these are needed. Younger commoners may yet have better potential, and 3d6 can be rolled for their stats.

A great many hirelings will be commoners, and may find that because of their association with a player party that they will have to fight for their lives. A commoner can gain experience, but in calculating the shared experience bonus, they count as only ⅛th share.

If a commoner is able to accumulate as much as 200 x.p. (which they may gather through accident, injury or combat), they will become hardened; thereafter they are known as comrades.

Anyone with the minimum necessary ability stats, the financial means, a tutor and sufficient time ~ usually a minimum of 5 years ~ may become a character class. This is rare for an adult, as usually only children, between 10 and 13 years of age, are chosen by sponsors.

A player character that has studied instruction may tutor any commoner, if they so wish.

Comrade

These non-levelled characters are tougher and more worldly than commoners. They have more control over their bodies when under stress and always have a standard morale. Often they will possess a mundane sage ability like a commoner, while having a secondary skill they’ve learned, such as foraging, make art, prospecting, sailing or woodcutting. Most in these professions will be comrades rather than simple commoners.

As non-levelled persons, comrades gain a +1 bonus to their hit points above those that their body mass provides, so that males will typically have 2-9 h.p. while females will have 2-7 h.p. Comrades will die if damage reduces them below -3 hit points.

As combatants they are helpful. They do not need to make a morale check before entering combat. They have a 21 THAC0, and are proficient in either a club or a quarterstaff. They suffer a -5 penalty to hit with any other weapon than the one they know. They are able to fight in a helmet and padded armor, but cannot usefully manage a shield. Roll 3d6 to determine their ability stats, if these are needed.

Hirelings that are artisans or heavy laborers will almost always be comrades. Comrades start with zero x.p. and can gain experience, but in calculating the shared experience bonus, they count as only ⅕th share.

If a comrade accumulates 400 x.p. (through accident, injury or combat), they are considered experienced enough for training to be a footman or other man-at-arms. They cannot further advance as combatants, or in other character classes, without this training.

Anyone with the minimum necessary ability stats, the financial means, a tutor and sufficient time ~ usually a minimum of 5 years ~ may become a character class. This is rare for an adult, as usually only children, between 10 and 13 years of age, are chosen by sponsors.

A player character that has studied instruction may tutor any comrade, if they so wish.

Brass Carrots

Gentle readers, no doubt, will have heard of campaigns that eliminate level progression. It is argued that level progression is unnecessary to role-playing and character building, that it creates friction among the players, that too much focus is placed on advancement and that games don’t need level-advancement to be enjoyable.

So we beg the question, what value do levels have?

The title embraces the supposition that levels are a motivation. The characters want more power, so we have created a set of arbitrary plateaus, obtained through an arbitrary award system we call “experience,” which can be adjusted on a whim of the DM at any time by awarding more experience arbitrarily at the appropriate moment.

It is this capriciousness that creates friction. We understand the clear, simple notion that players would like more powers and abilities in the future than they have today. We can lately remember a time when we did not possess a given skill, a well-paying job, a prized possession or other milestone ~ evidence that we’re doing better, that we’re smarter, that our lives are more comfortable and so on. Level-advancement reflects this. The fighter hits a little better, the mage has more spells, the general character is made safer with more hit points and there is status to be gained in the form of titles and game recognition.

But the steps themselves ARE subjective. Why should a fighter advance at 2,000 experience and not 1,500? Why should a given dead monster be worth 100 experience and not 200? And if DMs can just wave a hand and award experience at a whim, they why shouldn’t they, right now, as we’re sitting around the table playing? The very fact that the DM won’t is proof that we’re getting ripped off! We only want what’s coming to us! All we want is our fair share!

So eliminating the level gets rid of all this subjectivity. The players will advance in level when the adventure calls for the players to be a higher level. The players will advance at the beginning of every fifth running. The players will advance when the quest is completed. These principles are still arbitrary, but they’re unilateral, affecting every character at the table the same, and they don’t require nearly as much math.

There is a major drawback, however, that many do not consider a drawback. These substitutions eliminate insecurity. We know we’re going to advance ~ there is no uncertainty about it. Advancement does not hinge on the choices we make, nor the effort we give, nor the risk we’re prepared to take. If we climb aboard, the train will arrive at our destination and the ticket will be stamped.

All the doubt is washed away, as is the frustration we feel as time between upgrades spins out and challenges our composure. We’re not driven to take a bigger risk, to make something happen that doesn’t seem willing to happen ~ and when the achievement is obtained, we don’t think of it as something we did ourselves, accumulating all that experience. We don’t get excited about things we think of as entitlements.

The carrot is a reward, yes, but it is also something we only get after a very long day of dragging a very large load at the expense of our comfort and our privilege. It dangles right in front of us, aggravating us, making our mouths water, while at the same time we can’t get it. In every sense, for anything but a dumb animal, the carrot is a kind of abuse, one we can’t ignore.

The brass ring is a reward also, but only because it is so damn hard to get. We miss it and miss it, leaning out further and further, risking a face-plant in the dirt, because it takes a big risk to win a big reward.

Experience levels work because they’re hard to obtain; and the arbitrary limits we create to put them further out of reach are there to make it very hard. We don’t appreciate anything that is easy to obtain. Naturally, we carp about it. Carping about a lack of something is a part of life.

DMs should not bow to that.

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Mass Experience

Having put up the markets for the online campaign, we can get that content off this blog.  I know you are all interested, but we can go back to other things and the gentle reader can go to the two campaign blogs to see what's going on.

The old campaign: Senex.
The new campaign: Juvenis.

I thought for a long time about what to call them, without the new people feeling downtrodden.  Latin seemed best.  And so did trying to do it on two blogs, as I have tried two campaigns on one blog and it is confusing.  All previous campaigns to now can be found in the back pages of the Senex blog.

Running a campaign is, I think, a huge help in blogging.  It reminds me of things that need to be done, it pushes me to get them done and it pushes me to address issues that players have a tendency to take for granted.

For example, experience.  For those not familiar with my experience rules, for the purpose of this post I suggest reading them.  The key element here is that I award experience for damage caused, not for kills.  This means that two combatants can slam away at one another, then quit fighting, and both get experience for the conflict.

This is critical, I think, to a philosophy of what experience is and how it is gathered.

In the old system, for example, where monsters or opponents have to be killed, experience is a limited resource.  There are only so many monsters and only so many people to kill them, so any experience I gain is necessarily experience you cannot.  Moreover, it presumes that the ONLY experience that can be gained is accomplished by murderers . . . and since we know that the general population do not go out and kill things, it is reasonable to presume that the general population has zero experience.

In my system, however, two boys punching each other out in a schoolyard are gaining experience.  Which is exactly what happens ~ remember that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.  The grit and passion of the British Soldier at Kandahar, in the Sudan and as they marched into the guns at Concord was founded by a school system that supported a degree of physical violence that gave the Brit "mettle."  A combat system for D&D ought to reflect that ruffians and hooligans in a bar, who may not have killed anyone, must still be capable of putting up a hell of a fight.

I challenge anyone to offer evidence that the strength and power of any army was based on how many soldiers it killed; fighting forces are founded in discipline, resolve, a sense of home and family ~ in short, nothing that is measured in actual deaths but everything that is measured in pounding, bruising and kicking a military force into being fit and trim.

Which brings me to the next point.  How much experience is out there?  If experience is awarded according as I've suggested it ought to be, there is no zero sum game.  The amount of experience in the world is a factorial of every person in existence and how much conflict they engender.

To put this into perspective, take the European War that finishes just before the time my world takes place: the 30 Years War.  From Wikipedia:

"The war ranks with the worst famines and plagues as the greatest medical catastrophe in modern European history.  Lacking good census information, historians have extrapolated the experience of well-studied regions.  John Theibault agrees with the conclusions in Günther Franz's Der Dreissigjährige Krieg und das Deutsche Volk (1940), that population losses were great but varied regionally (ranging as high as 50%) and says his estimates are the best available.  The war killed soldiers and civilians directly, caused famines, destroyed livelihoods, disrupted commerce, postponed marriages and childbirth, and forced large numbers of people to relocate.  The reduction of population in the German states was typically 25% to 40%. Some regions were affected much more than others.  For example, Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war.  In the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas, an estimated two-thirds of the population died.  The male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.  The population of the Czech lands declined by a third due to war, disease, famine, and the expulsion of Protestant Czechs.  Much of the destruction of civilian lives and property was caused by the cruelty and greed of mercenary soldiers.  Villages were especially easy prey to the marauding armies.  Those that survived, like the small village of Drais near Mainz, would take almost a hundred years to recover.  The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages, and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns."

Sobering stuff.  For our purposes, I'll try to hedge on the conservative side.  The beginning of the article quoted suggests eight million died.  We'll say that's 25% of the total population involved ~ German, French, Slavic, Polish, Swedish and so on.

My experience system awards 20 experience for every point of received damage; it also awards a 20 experience bonus that is divided among the witnesses of received damage, as well as the casualty or victim. Thus, you get experience just from watching another person die, or suffer a great injury, or otherwise come to harm.  Consider the ramifications.  You also get 10 experience from causing a hit point of damage to another person.

The next step would be to estimate the number of hit points involved in the conflict described above. Remember, we're not just talking about the total number of hit points of people actually killed, but also the number of hit points that were caused in damage, healed, then were damaged again.  Over and over.

We can deliberate upon such numbers all day, but I'm going to offer a conservative estimate.  Let's say that among the 32 million people involved, over the space of 30 years, from 1618 to 1648, each person took an average of 2 hit points of damage per year.  Some of that average is in the form of people who died from the damage and some from people who were only wounded . . . and leaves plenty of room for both high level types who have up to 100 hit points to lose and people who lost no hit points at all throughout the entire conflict.  And here we are only counting damage actually done to people deliberately.  We're not talking about people who fell off horses or who died in fires set by soldiers, or those who perished by disease (though arguably, witnessing someone dying from disease is experience, since most of us who have had something like that with close relatives come away from it being changed deeply)

This gives us a total of 64 million hit points times 30 years, or 1.92 billion hit points.  That is 1.92 billion hit points caused, 1.92 billion hit points received and potentially 1.92 billion hit points witnessed.

We will, however, have to remove a quarter of the hit points received ~ those people who received them are dead, so they are not part of the pool of living experience that we're calculating.  So we are speaking only of 1.44 billion hit points received by people who are still alive.

We could quibble about people who died of other causes over the years, age for instance ~ but this is why I am proposing the very conservative 2 hit points per year estimate.  That is pretty conservative.  The town of Manchester accumulates more hit points damage than that when United wins.

Adding it all together, this gives us a total of 72 billion experience . . . shared, of course, among the remaining 24 million population (not 32 ~ 8 million of those died.).  That is an average of 3,000 experience per person.  Per every person who was involved in that struggle.  Peasants too!

This makes 2nd to 3rd level the average level among people who participated.  That includes every mercenary soldier who came home to Sweden, Norway, Spain and Greece, every bartender in the Holy Roman Empire, every wench, every peddler, every child, every grandmother.

When you walk past a person on a road in Hannover, you have no idea what the person has been through!  What they've seen, what they've had to do, what kind of measures they've taken to keep their family alive, what skills they've accumulated and how dark might be the deepest corners of their soul.  When you walk past anyone on the road, worry.  You don't know them.

I wish I could make this clear to players.  They have a tendency to think they're the only people in the world who ever experienced violence.

Starting at 1st

I'm somewhat hampered.  If I want to make an argument defending my policy of having every new player start a 1st level character, regardless of the present level of the party, it is impossible to do so without incorporating my rule changes.  The way the game is written by the company, it does seem to make sense to start a new character at the same level of the party.  I never did this, however, even when I was playing the original rules - because I think it is blatantly unfair to the standing party.

If I am running in a campaign like mine, and I started at 1st level in early 2014, then I will probably be something like 6th level now.  That is a slow advance for a lot of campaigns but it is typical in mine.  In order to be 6th level, I will have risked a lot, sacrificed a lot and experienced a lot of different trials and gained both friends and influence.  I will have done that through my efforts.  Running against a DM like me means putting in the time and steadily building my characters' value, so that as a 6th level today I feel like an experienced, somewhat grizzled campaign warhorse.

I wouldn't appreciate someone stepping into the campaign and being handed all that for free - particularly if that player hasn't yet proved that they're going to be a good fit for the party and the campaign.  There's good sense in starting off a newbie with less, since humility builds character.

Of course, there are many campaigns where the new player is given the equal level charge because the old players will cheerfully bitch-slap the newbie into obedience otherwise.  Such doesn't happen in my campaigns because I won't allow anyone to be mistreated in that way, as I've recently discussed.  I don't care that the newbie is low level; everyone gets heard and everyone is entitled to approach the campaign with an equal voice.

I don't feel that anyone is entitled to free experience, however.  Everyone at the table earned their experience; I expect the noob to do the same.

And that stands for players that die and have to start again.  If the death of a 8th level ranger means the automatic advancement of the new character to being a 8th level mage, then what does death mean?  Nothing, obviously.  Death has to mean those experience points are gone.  They can't be 'willed' to a new character.

This is harsh - and in my early days I did have one player who did quit the campaign because his 8th level ranger died.  As I remember, every player agreed that he should have started out at 1st level again and felt that the player's loss was a fault on that person and not my policy.  Admittedly, this was before my present henchman rule - which was instituted within a year of the death of that ranger.  The henchmen rule means that the player will probably have a slightly lower level character already worked up from 1st level in my campaign.  This mitigates the pain a little.

There's still the chance that both the main character and any number of henchmen will all get offed in the same combat - it does happen that more than one can die and a little bad luck could mean both are gone.  Still, there is another mitigating aspect of starting off as 1st level among 6th levels that probably doesn't work in a game based off the company's rules - but exists predominantly in my world.

The new 1st level gets a lot of help.

Rather than making an assertion, however, let me build a few statistics to make my point.  I'm afraid that to follow this next, the reader will have to be familiar with my experience rules.

Let's start with a 1st level party: cleric, fighter, mage and thief.  Let's have them all be human and let's give them each a 15 constitution and maximum hit points for their class, plus 3 hit points for their mass (see my rules on hit points and hit points per die).  We can then start with this table:

Since my cleric can only use cure light wounds once per day, I've adjusted it so it does 1d4 +4, rather than 1d8 as it is in the original Players' Handbook.

Looking at the above, we can calculate that the party can take a total of 52 hit points of damage, presuming that no player is reduced to negative hit points.  That potentially adds another 36 total damage more than they could suffer, but chances would be this would leave them all unconscious and eaten by vermin, so let's just play with the number zero as a bottom line.

Experience is gained for both damage done and damage received, so let's suppose that in a given fight (which we'll determine the experience for) that they give as good as they get - so that the thief, for example, causes 10 damage as well as receiving 10 damage.  Then we'll give the extra healing (we'll roll an 8) to the fighter and assume that healing was lost in damage also.  Assuming the players survive the fight and get experience, how much would that be?

base describes the amount of experience received for their personal
achievement (xp for damage caused and taken); this is added
to the bonus to get the subtotal (before adding 10%).

This is a fair reckoning for the most experience a 1st level party is likely to get in a single combat (in my world, obviously), apart from treasure.  It may vary a little if the party gets very lucky and causes a lot of damage, but then they would be have to be facing more enemy than they'd normally plan for to still take the amount of damage I've depicted them taking.  Usually, when a party is lucky, it means taking less damage so that they actually get less experience if they roll great.  Of course, it also means they live to fight another combat right after and they still get that treasure bonus afterwards.  The party above, the unlucky one that has lost all its hit points, won't likely survive the four orcs in the next room, will they?

The key is the bonus.  Let's stage the same combat, only now let's put one 1st level fighter with three characters that are all 4th level (they haven't gotten any henchmen yet, which complicates this unnecessarily for the point of this post).  We can start by updating the first table.  We'll presume the higher-leveled characters have each rolled average for additional hit points.  The 4th level characters gain constitution bonuses for each level and the cleric will probably have added the aid spell (again, my rules).

We can suppose that everyone still takes their full hit points in damage and each still gives as good as they get.  Now here is a point - the fighter is probably going to be the beneficiary of the cleric's aid, since he will probably suffer most from lack of hit points and combat potential, meaning that he's got between 24-34 hit points he can suffer in damage, benefiting from having a 4th level friend in the cleric.  If that's not enough, it might be necessary to dump the cure light wounds on him as well.  Let's presume that's how it happens - and once again, let's say the cleric rolls maximum for benefits, giving the fighter 28 additional hit points, which the fighter then proceeds to lose completely in the upcoming combat.

I don't have to start the fighter as a 4th level to keep up with the higher level characters.  With the help the fighter gets, it won't be long before things even out.  Soon enough, the difference in levels will benefit the fighter less and less until all evens out.

In fact, it was much harder to be that early group of 1st levels than it is for the newcomer starting down there.  The new player gets a break because there's help to be had.  Low-levels benefit from the extra healing, the combat potential of their fellows, the benefit in resources (my players inevitably lend coin to new players to help them get started, rarely asking for this to ever be repaid), additional magical coverage and so on.  If the fighter dies, it is more likely the party will have the means to get the fighter raised (something a party of 1st levels probably wouldn't bother to do).

Incidentally, some will take note as to the mage's poor gain in the above example.  It should be noted that combats rarely drain everyone of hit points like this and that mages often get experience for automatic damage done by spells.  Additionally, my system tends to penalize low-level mages because of the combat vs experience requirement, but higher level mages have shorter waits between levels AND they get more benefits from climbing a level than fighters or thieves get.  I have found it does balance out - even when the fighter gets the lion's share of the X.P. per combat, in the long run this doesn't help them as much.

I recognize that a lot of this will be lost on those players hopelessly mired in traditional 4e or 5e.  Can't be helped.

Please imagine that I'm holding out a hat now.

Distributing X.P. Among Clan Members

Rest assured, I'm coming back to the shaman and the clan.  I just want to take a little detour first.

On the tech 14 post, I included the table on the right.  Now I'm rethinking that table somewhat - not because there are too many levels at the high end but because the bottom end is light.  If I use the number as given, there's a high probability that my proposed clan of 25-40 persons won't have any levels in it at all.

That makes it boring for any party above third level.  What is perhaps a better way of doing it?

Way back in the day, I was playing with different kinds of leveled persons and seeking to develop a system that would tell me how much experience that persons of a given social status should have (to make a relation between age and level).  I imagined that individuals would draw up a certain number of experience per year.  Let's pull up the relevant table from that post and have a look at it:

old table, old colour scheme

Quoting from my old post,

An adherent would have the adequate skills to be leveled, without possessing extraordinary abilities; they would adhere to their class structure, serving as functionaries such as parish priests, city officials, laboratory workers and so on. A zealot would be an adherent who has adopted a particular political or religious calling. An adventurer would include persons who explore or who serve as freelancers. A celebrity, or hero, would be an adventurer who has had notable success. A title holder would include the nobility, or persons who have risen to the highest rank in their profession, such as admirals, bishops, marshals or guild masters. Finally, a liege would include masters of primary political divisions, of religious groups or class-based organizations.

Like most of the ideas I have, this one got shelved.  It isn't so much that it doesn't work, it's just that - like the clan experiment I'm playing with right now - it didn't consequentially add to the effectively describing my world in the actual game.  Still, it's sort of useful now, as I think I can adapt this to propose a different way of calculating out experience for each tech level.

Suppose I take the X.P. per year and multiply that by 0.2%, giving us this table:

new table, new color scheme.  numbers are rounded, so a zero indicated
may yet provide some experience over several years.

Then we can adjust the level form from titles designed for obviously higher tech levels and apply them to the sort of people that represent the clan.  Here's where I have to stretch somewhat, as I did not come up with these titles originally to apply them to very primitive cultures - so if the reader will forgive me, I'll drastically change some of the above.

The liege becomes the chief and title holders are shamans.  Celebrities and adventurers are those warriors in the tribe with varying commitment to wandering about on their own outside the immediate group.  The zealot becomes the aforementioned sea dog, the tribal drummer, the mushroom hunter and so on.  Adherents, then, are everyone else: the workers of the tribe.  I'll republish the table with the change in titles:

Better?

 

Obviously, no worker will ever reach second level.  Moreover, I've been holding back on a system idea I have for starting all untrained, inexperienced youths (age 14 and less) at -1500 x.p.  To get to be combat trained (something that affects morale) a non-level must obtain reach -1000 x.p. through combat or be rigorously trained by a fighter (a sage ability I haven't written/designed yet).  Individuals must gain that second thousand experience to reach 1st level (zero experience), where the players start their characters.

This means that in the above table, all the members of the clan would have to gain a base 1500 experience just to be leveled.  Since the maximum experience in a lifetime a worker would obtain on the table above would be 73 x.p., no worker can even be combat trained.

Our skilled worker (mushroom hunter) is limited to a lifetime maximum of 194 x.p..  Ordinary warriors are limited to 516 x.p.  The quality warriors could gain 1377 x.p., enough to make them combat experienced.  The shaman (who is a fighter, remember) could rise to 3,671 x.p. (making 1st level) and the chiefs are able to reach 9,789 x.p.  This just gets them to 4th level (subtracting 1500 x.p. off the bottom).

Of course, we could always play with these numbers, make them a central average, so that the young adult warrior could earn from 1-28 x.p. per year instead of 14.  This might enable 2nd level shamans, the occasional 1st level quality warrior and more combat trained ordinary warriors.  I'm working on a random table that would produce this sort of result.  Here are rolls for 10 quality warriors, 

And we could create some sort of random chance for a big bonus gain, so that we might actually get a combat trained worker, showing total x.p. based on their ages (with how much they earn at each age range for comparison):

Combat experienced warriors will have at least -1000 x.p.
Leveled characters will have 0 or more x.p.

The way I've designed it, being oldest doesn't necessarily mean the most experience.  H is 70 and yet has 674 x.p. less than E, who is a 1st level fighter.  Obviously, though, being younger than 26 is a serious handicap regarding experience.

I'm not entirely happy with the table above.  The original table concept from 2010 was based on the lowest level form getting 1 x.p. per day; perhaps that premise is too low for what I want to do with it now, and needs to be adjusted.  I'm good with the 1,500 x.p. needed for levelling; this has worked very well in play with my campaigners raising up followers and men-at-arms.

Anyway, just a bit to show where my head is.  I'll get back to the breakdown of the tech-5 clan with my next post.

As Hard As I Can Throw

Speaking only for my campaign, mind . . . there's no chance whatsoever that I would ever adopt the proposal suggested in the previous post.  It isn't a prejudice.  It isn't that I'm old school.  It isn't even that I feel it isn't 'fun' for people who want to play the game that way.

My issues run deeper.

Has the reader ever played baseball for a company league or at a family reunion where it was generally agreed that the pitcher had to throw underhand?  Where it was also agreed that throwing the ball too hard was unfair?  Where people were permitted four strikes instead of three, for the sake of everyone having a good time?  No?

I have.  Uncle Irving is getting along in years and can't hit the ball like he used to . . . but he's a rich farmer and half the participants are in line for Uncle Irving's money in a few years, so whatever - if old Uncle Irving wants thirty strikes, he's going to get them.

Because that's where this sort of thinking goes.  It's the sort of thinking that lowers the badminton net or shortens the distance for bowls; the sort of thinking that demands the better player to sacrifice a rook or a knight before the game starts; the sort of thinking that invented tee-ball so that two-year-old children could experience the thrill of hitting a standing object with a bat.  It is the sort of thinking that says the game doesn't really matter . . . only 'fun' matters.

I've always wondered about this, since in my experience none of these games are much fun at all.  I feel no sense of victory if I've defeated an opponent that was down a rook from the start.  When the distance for bowls gets short enough, I feel like a fool tossing a ball ten feet.  When the baseball game mitigates the rules degree by degree - until I'm being railed against by a family member for selfishly swinging for the fences when Aunt Ruby is in right field - then no, I'm not having any fun.

Ever watch a two-year-old play tee-ball?  They have to be told to swing, then they have to be told to run after the ball has fallen off the post.  Then the poor little tyke is shouted at again, when they've forgotten which direction they're supposed to run - so dad shoves the fellow in the right direction and he sort of stumbles towards another man on the base who is beckoning him to "Come on, come on!"  The tyke's face is a picture of bewilderment, as intimidated he finally reaches his destination as parents laugh and cackle in the stands about how "cute" the little darling is between declaring, "Aw, the darling doesn't know where to go!"

Is the darling having fun?  He doesn't look it.  The parent at first base has to keep pulling him back onto the bag whenever he tries to wander away, keeping him corralled  - where he stays unhappily, since he has no idea what's happening.  Surprised that he's being shouted at again, he turns, falls down - gets a belly laugh from the audience and a round of applause as he wobbles to his feet again - then he's off to second base, as confused as ever.

Watching this sort of thing repeated, I cannot help but think hell keeps a whole tee-ball level where participants are made to play in perpetuity without any understanding why or how it matters.

This is my problem with circumventing rules about distribution or reward for the sake of 'fun' or ensuring that player entitlement to rise up a level every two or three sessions is ensured.  It isn't a reward any more.  It isn't even a measure of relative game play.  After all, what if the characters never went up?  What if the level was perpetually 5th, without any experience whatsoever?  Would it mean there were no goals to fulfill?  No achievements?  No threat from battle?  No reason to play?

Or is it possible, just possible, that we could all agree not to care about levels?  Suppose the game simply had no sense of improvement, the players just acted upon their agency or in the stories the DM fabricated . . . would it be any less of a game?

For after all, going up levels only means the monsters grow harder, the options grow wider, the plethora of weapons and magic increases and the challenges more difficult to face.  In effect, the balance remains.  Play as a 5th level forever or as a 15th level forever, the sense of overcoming obstacles, solving problems and achieving triumph would be the same, would it not?

What is it that makes the level matter?  Is it the entitlement of knowing that it is owed to us for agreeing to play?  Is it the change it will bring to the campaign?  Or is it the sense of finally reaching something through suffering, anguish and pain, uncertain that it even could be reached, after an indeterminate time, perhaps a time that has been long in coming?

What sense of achievement is cousin Levin getting if he needs five swings to hit the ball?  Or is it that  Levin's issue is the inevitable decay of the flesh, the stark cold reality that he's 55 now and every reminder of it brings a painful sorrow.  Is it that Levin, no longer playing in college when his body was strong and he had the freedom to practice, hasn't quite learned any lessons about acknowledging his limitations and coming to terms with them.  It isn't so much the 'fun' Levin expects to have . . . it is the removal of his disappointment, the temporary appeasement of his reality, the removed reminder of his inevitable death that demands that one extra swing and the pitcher's halting slow steps towards the poorly hit in-field grounder that Levin needs.

I don't want to give experience away simply for the sake of succoring my player's sense of dissatisfaction with how little time they have to participate in my world.  I run my world for the players, yes, but to provide opportunities for ambition and for their reclamation, not for the sake of charitable pity.  I would feel dirty to give experience simply because it was Tuesday and they had managed to find a sitter.  I would feel a little disgusted at a player that pouted and wallowed because it had been six runnings and the player still hadn't gone up, which was even worse now because the player had to head out to the company plant for the next two months and was going to miss everything!  I don't want to hear myself saying patronizingly, "Well, okay, you've been a good girl . . . here's 2,000 x.p."

I'm not interested in players whose attention span depends upon advancement.  If I had a player who felt it wasn't worth making plans to attend my campaign because recently there hadn't been much opportunity for experience and treasure, since the party had chosen a safer course that did not guarantee it, then I would show that player the door.  I do as much as anyone to ensure chances for gain and triumph, but I run a world based on player agency, not player entitlement.  If the players don't go up levels, then by gawd and bloody turnips that is their fault and the die's fault and not mine.

I run a world.  I place things in it, I introduce the people and show the pathways.  I provide the hooks and manage the strange happenstance that drives tension, hilarity and drama.  I fill the coffers that pour out when the coffers are found and I put the monsters and other things between the players and coffers when necessary.

But I guarantee nothing.  Zilch.  The party misjudges the enemy or rolls a string of bad numbers and that is going to be the ball game.  Three strikes, that is all anyone gets, and yes, get ready because the pitches are going to be overhand and as hard as I can throw.  There ain't no packed lunch, there ain't no sympathy in the big city, there ain't no sanity clause and nobody rides for free.

If that ain't the way my players want to play, then they can go head on down to the WOTC clubhouse and have it all handed to them, with gravy on it.  Down there, they can learn to suck eggs with grammie.  Up here in the big leagues, however, we play for keeps . . . and if you lose your bee-swirl pee-wee aggie, that's just too damn bad.

We want no casual players 'round here.

An X.P. Proposal

Allow me to say, first of all, that this post is not intended to be sarcastic or mocking.  I mean what I say.  I would not take the position suggested alone for my own campaign, but I offer this as an idea to deal with a social issue that some apparently seem to have.

Something said by Carl Nash on the last post caught my attention:

"I don't care too much one way or the other about rate of PC level advancement, but my players do... and it is not uncommon at all for several sessions to go by without a combat as the PCs are busy doing all kinds of other things in my world. With our schedules leading to infrequent sessions, if I leveled up by the book there would be basically no advancement at all for years of real life at a time."

Personally, I have never experienced this 'busy-ness.'  The most time-intensive period of my life was when I was going to university, holding down a job, raising my 5-year-old daughter and taking care of my physically-impaired spouse.  This included attending classes, studying, taking my daughter to school, bringing her home, cooking and cleaning the house, putting my wife to bed at night and working day shifts in a restaurant when I was not at school.  I had help, of course; two sets of grandparents to help look after my daughter and a part-time nurse to give my wife her meals twice during the day and keeping her clean and healthy.

And I still ran D&D.  Hell, I would have gone mad without that release.

But I do understand that people can't or more precisely won't adjust their schedules if it challenges the possibility of promotion, acquisition or perceived responsibility to a child's sports or academic advancement.  I grew up in a time when my participation in sports happened in the immediate community, which could be enabled by walking to the rink, pitch or diamond, where we would gather to be driven to visitor games in three or four cars.  I know that today every parent takes every child individually in a separate car to a game and that many such activities that used to exist in every neighborhood now demand journeys of up to fifty miles or more by car.  Moreover, the helicopter-mentality in the raising of children has meant that parenthood is by far a more time-intensive activity than it was for my parents or for me.

So I won't judge or condemn.  You and your players, for whatever reason, are condemned by circumstance.

I propose, however, that rather than attempting to link experience-for-play to some artificial standard of game play, that the experience should be directly linked to the actual time that the player spends attending the campaign.

Theoretically, any DM could establish that the experience gained by the players for their characters should be equal to 10 points per level per minute of playing the game.  This would mean that a first level fighter needing 2,000 xp (sorry, I'm perpetually stuck in e1) would need to play for 3 hours and 20 minutes in order to advance to second level; it would then take 1 hour and 40 minutes to advance to 3rd, 2 hours and 13 minutes of play to advance to 4th, 4 hours and 10 minutes to advance to 5th and so on.

Thus, the players, regardless of what activity they participated in, combat, gaining treasure, talking the green swamp monster into helping the town build its walls, whatever, would be rewarded for just showing up.  No other specific behaviour would be required.  This would enable the participants in the campaign to consciously be aware that their failure to attend would mean definitively falling behind others in the group - and yet they would know that by adjusting their schedules somewhat, two or three runnings would advance their characters at least one level.

Of course, once passing 5th level the time necessary to advance each level according to the arithmetic I've proposed would get quite lengthy - but undoubtedly an exponential increase of some kind, which the individual could work out for their own campaign, would solve that problem.

As I say, not meant sarcastically.  If advancement is this important and circumstances for play all that unfriendly, then why not just tie the experience level to the level of participation?

Limitations

Patience, there's a lot to mull over.

Is it fair that I claimed yesterday that XP rewards for non-combat begin with a reluctance to enter combat and kill things?

I don't think so.  It is usually presented that way.  Killing is boring, killing is munchkinism, killing doesn't require any special expertise, "We saved the kingdom and we didn't have to kill anything," etcetera.  I simply don't hear players say, "I wanted to use diplomacy and not my sword because I wanted greater skill at being a diplomat" or "because I felt the best way to get experience was to parley."

Getting experience from not fighting is always expressed in terms of what the party did not have to do - that is, roll dice, risk hit points, indulge in repetitive combat round syndrome (RCRS).  Once a discussion on the subject begins, then arguments about skills and character are invoked . . . but somehow, the subject is never led with these arguments.

But let's shelve that and talk about skills, since that is a legitimate argument.

Matt rightly pointed out that 3rd Edition did create skills that were not combat based but were tied to the combat mechanic of experience.  I won't argue the rationale of this, since I have also created non-combat mechanics and I have also connected these to experience.  So why?

A two-part answer.  First, in my world, gaining experience is something that happens slowly.  In the last four years, the highest levels of the party have only gained two levels.  For the most part, they have moved from 8th level to 10th; in some cases, from 7th level to 9th; and in the case of the ranger, Falun, from 7th level to only 8th.  Rangers in AD&D need a lot to reach 9th level.  They've been running for round about 8 years and they have reached an average of 250-300 thousand experience.  That's all.

For most campaigns, this is a brutally slow progression.  It happens in my world partly because I am cheap on treasure, particularly on magic, and partly because once players begin to mass three or more characters (main character and henchmen), the experience shared tends to get thinner and thinner.  The party knows this.  They would get more XP if they fought battles without their henchmen, but they love their henchmen; and anyway, while the main characters go up levels slowly, the henchmen move upwards in level regularly.

This slow progression helps encourage the ideal that, since it takes a long time to move upwards, it is reasonable to assume masses of knowledge are being acquired before the next level.  Thus the pacing of my game - not the actual rules, but the pacing - helps the functional rationale of my sage system.

The second answer is more applicable to the general audience.  We attach things to experience for a number of sound reasons.  First of all, like hit points and coin, X.P. is measurable against activity.  While yes, there are numerous methods for calculating X.P., once a DM settles on a calculation, it is predictable and rational, for the most part, where it comes to combat.  The orc has a settled X.P. value - it doesn't matter who kills the orc, what level they are, what weapon or spell they use or ultimately how difficult it was to achieve the killing given the circumstances . . . that's what the orc is worth.

Of course, Gygax tried to fuck with this, rating player role-playing ability according to how he felt a fighter should act or how 'tough' the orc was in comparison to the character, but virtually everyone ignored p.85-86 of the Dungeon Master's Guide because it's so obviously written by a frikkin' idiot.

How can I say that?

Imagine a rule in Monopoly that said that a property's value increased or decreased according to how much money the player had.  Or how about a rule in RISK that adjusted the value of Africa depending on whether you also controlled Europe?

Of course, now that I think about it, there is a rule in Bridge where if you win, you're 'vulnerable' . . . but I always thought that rule was silly, too.  Not every Bridge convention uses it.

But I digress.

The benefit of a universal measuring system based on firm, non-opinion based actions in a game are vital to that game's structure and ultimately the behaviour of those participating in the game.  Once the rules are known, perfectly, then the challenge in the game is in playing through the functionality of the game according to it's limitations.  Movement is limitation.  Attempted actions are limited by the available dice the player can roll in the given situation.  Success is uncertain and therefore failure is very definitely a probability that the player can mitigate but not eliminate!

Wealth limits how much the player can buy.  Hit points limit how long the player can survive an uncertain number of rolled dice.  Experience points limit how many options the player has according to the number of levels obtained.

Before I can produce another measurement for the game, I must know what that measurement is going to limit.

Let us say, for example, that we're going to make a limitation based on the player's 'diplomacy' skill.  What is that limitation going to be?  How are we going to define what limits 4 points in the skill against what limits 8 points?  How are these points going to be gained.  What is the value of convincing an orc to do . . . something.

Because that is now the world we're in.  We need to convince the orc to do something.  Could be anything.  Depends on the situation.  I'm at a loss to describe what, precisely, defines a 'win.'

Typically, this would be defined as the player getting what the player wants.  We know how this plays out in combat - the player makes a judgement call on his hit point reserve and his capabilities defined by level against what the player can guess about the orc, makes the decision to start the fight and hopes that he'll be tough enough to win.

Apply that to diplomacy.  What is the orc's diplomacy reserve?  What capabilities does the orc have?  Upon what basis can the player judge those capabilities before the diplomacy starts?  What are the negative effects if the player loses?

Incidentally, this is where my idea for Conflict Cards failed.  I created the reserve.  I defined the orc's capabilities.  I gave a structure that would allow the player to sort of judge the orc.  But there was no 'lose' scenario except 'failure to win.'  There was no consequence.  Thus the players could attempt to win repeatedly at no specific risk to themselves.  What was needed was some rule that stated, "If the player fails to convince the orc, the player must acquiesce to one demand made by the orc, hand over 50% of their cash on hand, agree to a proposition and then carry it out, etcetera."

Diplomacy and many of the other 'skills' in 3E suffer from the same nonsense.  There's no consequence.  Experience for combat has a consequence.  The player may not live to the next level, and therefore there's a chance that the player will never become a better diplomat because the player will be dead.

Incidentally, failed diplomacy in the real world has enormous consequences; jail time, for instance, merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; giving the wrong information (ie., too much) to the wrong people; making enemies; getting blacklisted; pissing your career away; public scandal. These are not consequences in a role-playing game, except for making enemies, which in the game only means having to fight when you'd rather talk.

Once the DM begins to give experience away for talking where no real consequence can result (no consequence that will matter to the player's character, at any rate, since the consequences of diplomacy don't measure themselves as a loss of freedom, like in the real world), then the value of the experience structure is compromised.  Now the player can very much count on living as long as the player chooses to gab rather than risk.

Thus everyone who has ever found themselves at a table with a player who tries to talk their way through every problem.  These are merely players who have found that they are able to hack the system, since they know DMs are a) impressed; and b) suckers for a schmott guy.  Who can blame them.  If the game is hackable, the hacker will surface.

Point in fact, the principles of the above argument is the basis for why my sage abilities are more about 'knowledge' than 'skill.'  I'm not trying to create a series of abilities that provide die rolls for overcoming problems.  I'm concentrating on what the character knows.

Occasionally, yes, this translates to skill.  If you 'know' how to swim, you can swim.  But 'diplomacy,' 'bluffing' and 'intimidation' are not knowledge-based contributions to your character - they are functional shortcuts to reduce the amount of gaming time necessary to deal with player-vs-npc interaction.  Of course we all know how to 'bluff.'  Doing it well is an entirely different thing than possessing the knowledge for how it works.  Moreover, who you bluff and upon what basis the bluff is carried forward is massively dependent on your personal experience.  You may find it easy to bluff your friends at poker; this may help you bluff strangers.  It does not help in 'bluffing' your way onto a military test base as a nuclear physicist (though, of course, television would have us believe these are the same thing).

Skills like bluffing, diplomacy and intimidation are not actually skills, they are composite skill sets acquired through familiarity and experience with specific circumstances, where the character will have probably spent most of their lives.  Where my sage abilities are concerned, I am struggling to stay away from such short cuts and skill sets in the hopes of promoting the character's decision-making process.

I haven't succeeded entirely at this.  Influence, for example, is a very definite short-cut.  Thankfully, it has an extremely limited application for the game structure I'm augmenting.  It would not, for example, be of any value to a character attempting to influence a bartender into offering a free drink, or any other similar tactic.  It is a short cut designed to limit what job a player can obtain - without in turn guaranteeing any success at that job.

I learned through the Conflict Card fiasco the errors in player mechanics that don't include negative consequences.  Similarly, I chose with that fiasco to embrace the principles of players receiving rewards that were NOT experienced-based where it came to talking themselves out of trouble.  If the players want to stop a war in my world, great!  Will it get them rewards?  Yes!  Status, power, perhaps a bit more land, credit, friends, opportunities, contributions and gifts.

But experience?  No.

I think part of the reason why experience IS given for diplomacy, talking, getting out of scrapes without fighting and so on comes from the DM's inability to make any other reward matter.  If I were to run a world where any of the things I just named would offer no meaningful change in terms of what the player was empowered to do in the campaign, then yes, I suppose I would have to give experience for talking, too.

Just think about it.  If the campaign is ALL adventures and modules, ALL quests and story arcs, then what good does status do, except as a series of empty titles?  What good is influence, since the only power that helps the player is in getting to the end of the next mission?  What good is land if it has to be left behind for another dungeon?  What good does credit do the player if there's no reason to borrow money?  What use do the players have for friends that aren't part of the adventure they're on?  What do they need with opportunities since the narrative provides that anyway?  What good are contributions or gifts if the treasure offered is three times as much?

None.  None at all.  Which leaves nothing for the DM to give except experience.  Everything else has an extremely limited appeal.