Earning Rewards

The common implementation of character advancement, or "leveling up," in most tabletop RPGs drove me to start hacking my RPG experience in the first place. Specifically, the idea of character optimization and "builds." Chris McDowall articulates the idea of how "external engagement" can interfere with the enjoyment of the game more eloquently than I would in his blog Bastionland.

The old school D&D chassis - something like B/X - looks boring on the surface to the modern player. They will wonder where they can find all of their cool abilities. They don't exist in the rules because they depend on the fiction that arises during play. Characters will earn them during play by acquiring magic items, making deals with extraplanar beings, or stealing from a powerful wizard.

However, the old school rule sets could be more explicit in this expectation. My hacked rules leverage the fact that players anticipate leveling up. The modern gamer knows that leveling up is a good thing; that they'll get cool stuff. But, it generalizes the specifics of the advancement process. 

It doesn't distinguish between classes. A character can become anything they want depending on how they adventure and where they spend their money. It doesn't give the player a list of abilities, skills, or feats to choose from. There aren't rules for multiclassing or tables that spell out when you get this and that cool thing.

I embrace the act of discovery as the core feature of my games. Players know they're going to level up, but they don't know exactly how. I hope that curiosity will drive them in a way that realizing a character build would not: by incentivizing them while simultaneously drawing them into the fiction.

A wizard who has leveled up one too many times (art by Erol Otus)

Here are my current rules for character advancement:

1 - Your character must complete an adventure: steal from a tomb. Fight a monster. Discover a secret. Solve a mystery.

2 - When your character returns to town, they choose how they will share the tale of their exploits: carousing. An exclusive party. A lecture at the wizard school. A confession to the priest.

3 - Choose how much to spend during your retelling, and how you'll spend it: pints for the whole bar. Colorful decorations for the party. An offering to the church. 

4 - Once they tell their tales, they make a CHA check. Spending more grants them advantage. Spending little imposes disadvantage. Good results yield some sort of minor boon. Average results uncover a rumor. Bad results cause a complication.

5 - Regardless of the result of the check, when they wake up the next day, characters roll additional HP and gain Hit Dice.

But wait ... "what about my abilities?" you cry. They're earned. In my hack, I list a lot of the best ideas that I've had or seen in the past to inspire the referee. But, the exact specifications of the reward should depend on what happened during the previous adventure.

For example, last week my players advanced to Level 2. During their Level 1 adventure, one of them miscast a spell and ended up promising babies to a demon prince. So, during his downtime in town, a minor fiend offered its services as a familiar, stating that it did so because the spellcaster performed a great service for his demon lord.

The players discover their abilities during play, and those abilities arise out of the fiction. So far, I like where this approach is taking my game.