Creating Tension through Character Advancement Rules

A few days ago, user Ryan on the Necrotic Gnome Discord server asked if anyone used a simpler version of 3d6 Down the Line's "Feats of Exploration" XP rules, something without its extra calculation steps. I shared my campaign's rules for gaining experience through exploration, and the subsequent conversation led me to ponder the role of character advancement rules in adventure and campaign design.

There's always treasure inside the giant skull (art by Carlos Castilho)

Your rules for character advancement should reflect what's important in your campaign, and should reinforce the campaign's tone and hammer home its general vibe. Experience points for treasure sets this precedent. It incentivizes players to do anything for gold, and thus they become the very scoundrels and antiheroes of Sword & Sorcery that early TTRPG innovators sought to emulate.

XP for GP turns PCs into Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. XP for slaying monsters turns them into Geralt of Rivia. XP for stepping out their front door and going on an adventure turns them into Bilbo Baggins. You get the idea.

Let's be real, though: XP for GP is the best of these. But why? When PCs delve into the dungeon, they push deeper and deeper to accumulate more and more loot. Most importantly, the players strive to accumulate as much loot as they can in a single trip. Because, every time they leave and return, they must ...

1. Ascend back to the entrance of the dungeon safely
2. Travel from the dungeon back to town safely
3. Resupply for another trip
4. Travel back to the dungeon from town safely
5. Deal with new threats that have moved into the dungeon

All just to get back to where you made it last time. Who wants to do that? These serve as cons against leaving the dungeon for both the player and the character. The character has to spend more money to resupply and risks more random encounters. The player has to spend more play time retracing their steps and dealing with logistics.

Don't get me wrong: spending play time on logistics can be fun. My current campaign revolves around exploring an uncharted continent; trust me, we love logistics. But, it's not something you want to keep doing over and over in a short period of time. You want each expedition into the dungeon to be worth it.

All of this comes together to give the adventure a sense of velocity; momentum pushing the players in one direction. Keep delving, get as much treasure as we can possibly carry. Hire retainers and buy mules just to carry more treasure per trip. Open another door and risk another encounter.

Along with this momentum comes increasing risk, which in turn gives the game an intoxicating sense of tension. As you delve deeper, characters use up more resources. They carry more treasure: heavy bags of coins and bulky golden statues that slow them down. And, they attract more attention with their light and noise.

Rules that primarily grant experience for slaying monsters don't typically provide the same combination of velocity and risk that creates this delicious tension. If your goal is to slay monsters, then running into monsters isn't exactly a con. This leaves resupplying as the only valid con from the list above, and when a system trivializes resource management with powerful spells or simply hand-waves it altogether ... well, then the tension evaporates completely.

So, when you grant character advancement via means other than treasure, your game benefits if you can recreate that same velocity-risk cocktail. In my campaign, with its emphasis on wilderness exploration and discovery, I did this by granting an exponentially increasing amount of XP for every fully explored area (or, a 6-mile hex). Exploring that first area grants only 200 XP. By the fourth area, the character can earn 1,000 XP just for pushing on into the fifth.

Earn XP for Exploring the Wilderness!

This drives the players toward longer expeditions that go further from home. It encourages them to spend just one more night in the wilderness only to stumble into a new faction's territory the next day. During my campaign, this has yielded multiple exciting races to get home, where players have gone without food and rest in a mad dash to get to safety before they starve to death or get caught by monsters.

By customizing the game's source of character advancement while maintaining the same tension inherent in using XP for GP, the players themselves have chosen to go on exactly the sort of adventures that I have yearned to portray. And, they've done it for diegetic reasons that maintain a sense of coherency within the fiction.