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.

Gaining Experience

I removed the concept of "experience points" from of my current game. To advance, PCs must go on an adventure, return to town for a full rest, and waste coins proclaiming their deeds. This basically amounts to "xp for gold" without bothering with the mechanics of exchanging one for the other. So far, I like it.

But, at the same time, I have also been theorizing how I might include several similar mechanics that could combine to form some sort of mutated XP system. The mechanics are:

Hero Coins (ICRPG) / Inspiration (5e) / Bennies (Savage Worlds)

A form of currency that players can spend to re-roll dice. Pretty simple. Usually awarded for "good roleplaying," whatever that means.

Experience Points for Failing (Dungeon World)

The concept that you gain experience through your failures, trial and error, etc. Dungeon World grants this XP for any roll that isn't a partial or complete success (6 or less on  2d6 roll). I would either map it to critical failures or rolling 6 or less on any d20 roll (which aligns nicely to my d20 reaction roll results).

GM Intrusions (Cypher System)

A mechanic that gives the referee permission to introduce a complication while awarding the players with additional XP. I have the least experience using this, but I like the Alexandrian's take on how this mechanic can help to embrace the "rulings not rules" style of play.

Adventurers captured in mid-experience (art by Matt Morrow)

Unifying these concepts together yields an XP system that looks something like this:

PCs gain experience points in three ways:

• Show Up: Every PC receives 1 XP to start a session.

• Learn from Your Mistakes: A PC receives 1 XP when they critically fail.

• Take Risks: A PC receives 2 XP when they accept an Intrusion.

Once earned, PCs can spend experience points to:

• Re-roll an ability check or save

• Refuse an Intrusion

• Advance to their Next Level

During character advancement, PCs trade in all of their experience points. They must have experience points equal to at least double their new Level.

That isn't too cumbersome of an addition, at first glance. The caveat that players lose all XP when leveling up no matter how many they have provides incentive to spend some as opposed to hoarding them all for later use.

I might introduce this during my next adventure.

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.