A lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to describe what the 'old school' approach to role playing is in a nutshell. Quite a lot of people have boiled it down to XP for gold, which I think is pretty close. I would, however, nuance and broaden that a bit. The reason why XP for gold works is that it is the easiest way to operationalise an endogenous system of advancement. If getting gold is the thing that gives your PC XP, then it means firstly that advancement is based on something that has reality within the fiction (gold pieces are a 'real' thing within the game world), and secondly that it is not dependent on external judgment of value: the PCs want gold not merely because it results in advancement, but because it actually allows them to do things in the game.
Everything within the OSR 'style' of play is founded on this, because it is how you make a sandbox environment work (the PCs naturally want to go adventuring in order to get gold in order to advance) and how at least ostensibly you give the PCs agency (they choose how they go about the matter of adventuring). Other methods of awarding XP (for example, story goals, good roleplaying, etc.) do not work in anything like the same way. They are contingent on the players to a certain extent acting so as to please the DM or jump through exogenous hoops that he has put in place. They might be happy with that - no judgement is being made - but the result will be something very different to what OSR gaming is all about.
It follows that you can more or less 'OSRise' any game if you can introduce into it a similar endogenous system of advancement. The best way of doing it I think has to be based on the gathering of money or items of a certain useful type, because this fulfils the requirement that the gathering of the thing has use within the gameworld rather than being a matter of chasing after otherwise meaningless tokens. That could be anything from gathering spells or some other type of magic item, say, to capturing sprits or monsters that provide some benefit; the important point is only the endogeneity of what is being pursued.
There are other systems of what one might call semi-endogenous advancement systems, being based on achievements that are quantifiable on the basis of actual activities within the game world - the number of hexes visited, the number of miles travelled, the number of monsters of a particular type killed, and so on. But these are not I think perfectly endogenous, because there is no particular usefulness to the PC of performing the activity in question beyond the fact that it provides advancement. They are not like the system of XP for gold, in which the getting of the gold is itself useful in addition to the XP it generates.
It would be interesting to put the reasoning into effect in the context of other games, such as Cyberpunk 2020, Call of Cthulhu and so on. CP:2020 obviously lends itself to the XP for money dynamic; Call of Cthulhu much less so, but it could be made to function on an 'XP for mystic knowledge' basis. Other games will vary; to repeat, the idea here is not to create a 'better' way of playing those games, but a way to make them more 'OSRish' if that sounds appealing.
Never was a fan of gold = XP. Never ran a campaign doing that. What you did was what XP was based on.
ReplyDeleteThe same was true for me, but I like the way XP for gold works better.
DeleteI think so.
DeleteIf the gold (or equivalent) is sufficiently useful, is the XP even necessary? I'm thinking of Traveller, which doesn't award XP for credits. But credits provide advancement by themselves, as you can buy better weapons, equipment, and ships.
ReplyDeleteWell, within the context of D&D it's important because it's how you advance in levels but I take your point that in other games that might not be necessary. Which raises the question as to whether advancement in the sense of XP is even a necessary feature of an RPG that purports to be usable for long-term, opeen-ended campaigns.
DeleteYour analysis is reflected in some systems that give XP, not for gathering gold, but for spending it - even if only on profligacy.
ReplyDeleteI played in a campaign that had that rule once - I liked the idea but it did make advancement very slow.
DeleteI ran a campaign with this rule and found the key to making it work was wrapping it in with domain management. Give the PCs a lot of gold, but also give them a lot of things to spend it on. Castles, feasts, dowry's and armies are all expensive and an excellent outlet for the gold found while dungeon crawling.
DeleteYes, although that rapidly changes the nature of the campaign. Nothing wrong with that necessarily of course.
DeleteInteresting. Call of Cthulhu's tomes of forbidden lore do sort of work this way already, though I hadn't considered it that way. It also makes me wonder, as I often have in the past how something like XP could be made to fit in with Traveller, and if lack of advancement somehow makes it very not OSR friendly despite how old it is.
ReplyDeleteI have to get to know Traveller better. I have read and played it but not in a very, very long time now.
DeleteThe trick with Call of Cthulhu of course is that Cthulhu Mythos sort of equals experience, but it lowers your Sanity and essentially brings your doom closer. A wonderful example of worldbuilding within rules, I think. (The other way you ‘advance’ in BRP games, by making skill rolls and then maybe getting more points in the skill, also makes logical sense but is soooooo slow and incremental.) - Jason Bradley Thompson
DeleteYeah, it's a really clever way of realising Lovecraft's bleak vision actually.
DeleteA topic nearly as old as the hobby! I like the distinction you are making, but I think it falls through partly, for D&D, when poked. Sure, gold is valuable in the fantasy, but there is nothing inherent in gold that grants power to PCs—which is the automatic in-game outcome of collecting gold. There are, of course, house rules for D&D that require the expenditure of gold on things that might conceivably grant power to each character in his respective class (most obviously, training) but, as Ken St. Andre put it in the late ’70s, there’s no reason that stumbling on a gemstone and walking out of the dungeon with it should make the lucky finder a more durable warrior.
ReplyDeleteIn my view, the XP for gold rule, without further rationale, is an example of built-in *metagaming*: the PCs act on player knowledge of a game system that is not an obvious part of the fantasy world. What’s peculiar in D&D is that PCs are expected to play via this kind of metagaming. It certainly makes sense that treasure-hunters want treasure, but there is no reason to think that imaginary treasure-hunters would assume they’d become better fighters, wizards, or devotees of a strange god merely by accumulating gold, which is what the PCs seek. For this reason, I would not concede full endogeneity, to use your term, to the XP for GP rule. It does come closer to your endogeneity than the “just show up at the table” rule and some other advancement rules, though.
For what it’s worth, the now-venerable touchstone of Matt Finch’s Quick Primer for Old School Gaming doesn’t mention gold for XP, except to connect it with time pressure versus wandering monsters who don’t carry gold. It appears you disagree with that Primer, then.
If adding a rule like this is "old-school," then most of the oldest games in this hobby are not old-school, which is an odd usage, to my mind.
Still, the quest to make it make sense is a noble one.
The difference is that you aren't just getting XP for the Gold you get. You have to obtain the gold through a challenge such as delving a dungeon. If there was no challenge in getting the gold, IE through a owned ruby mine, then you do not get XP. Your adventuring to get the gold makes you a better warrior, and the gold is a measure of the challenge overcome.
DeleteThat's a good point, Anthony. That works as a rationale. But if getting gold is just a symbolic reward for challenges in the fantasy, it's not directly the "endogenous" system of advancement. It's not the end in itself, not the source of advancement itself. The characters are motivated by gold to take on challenges that lead to improvement, and in-fantasy rationale for XP for GP is not direct. Quantities of gold become the GM-given advancement tokens predetermined for specific challenges at the whim of the GM, similar to milestone advancement. Note that I'm not saying people shouldn't give out XP for GP. It clearly works to do that. I'm suggesting that it's not as cleanly an in-fantasy rationale for advancement in power as the blog post suggests. By your take, PCs *should* be able to improve by challenges even if they don't get the gold, if we wanted an "endogenous" rationale. It's the journey, not the goal, that confers advancement, in the take you articulated.
DeleteYou might be right, Tom, that it isn't perfectly endogenous. Which makes me wonder what would be?
DeleteDoesn't the fact that non-martial or magic-using NPCs tend to be 0 level with 4hp or whatever (even if they are wealthy merchants) imply that its only gold gained via adventuring or risk that count for XP? Or are PCs an entirely different type of thing from everyone else in the world, which would seem a bit more story-gamey than OSR?
DeleteLamentations of the Flame Princess explicitly says that gold (for XP) must be gained exploring weird ruins and stealing treasure from dungeons. I like that they just come out and say it. - Jason Bradley Thompson
DeleteIn the Book of the New Sun, Wolfe implies that coins are inherently holy because they symbolize the sun. Westerns are D&D's secular inspiration and there you have gold fever and the golden glow of the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. Beowulf pits the two against one another, the hero shares the dragon's love of gold and is doomed because he is born too soon to love God, and Tolkien modernizes it for the D&D audience: the Shire is a nice place to spend some coin, but reaching into your pocket and finding gold could turn you into Gollum or Saruman.
DeleteGood point, dave dow. Also good point about Wolfe, Tavis.
Delete"there’s no reason that stumbling on a gemstone and walking out of the dungeon with it should make the lucky finder a more durable warrior"
Deleteif only there was a game in which the gold you earned to "level up" was spent on training costs, an action that absolutely would make someone better at their job. Surely Gygax never thought of such an idea
Haha! The funny thing is that his rule on training time and costs to level up, on p. 86 of the DMG, contradict what he said on the previous page: that such a rule would be conducive to boredom. I never met anybody who used the rules on p. 86, but I'm sure that some faithful AD&D fans have insisted on it, delaying the gratification (and hit points) due from heaps of hard-won gold coins.
DeleteBack in the daily I wasn’t aware of any gold for xp rules and my players were still super greedy and full of murderlust anyway.
ReplyDeleteHa! Yes, same here. But then I wonder if that isn't a kind of cultural osmosis effect.
DeleteThat's just the social contract of the game - we are all here to play, so you play. Gold for XP is a fine motivator in a vacuum, but most game tables don't need that kind of motivation, because of the game social contract. The guy who says "I'm not going into that place unless there's treasure to be had" is akin to the guy who says "I'm not joining the party because my character is a lone wolf type" - they're in flagrant violation of the social contract of the game, and so they either adjust or are left behind, no janky "I fight better because I'm rich" logic required.
DeleteXP for gold works ok for first couple levels and then spirals into needing everything encountered to hoard ever increasing ludicrous amounts of treasure which becomes less and less logical compared to the implied economics of the settings (assuming a baseline OD&D/AD&D campaign). The nice thing is by then the players have usually organically developed other goals to pursue with their characters. How to reward these continuing actions with xp in a diagetic manner as you describe is the trick.
ReplyDeleteYeah, this is something I have struggled with - there are only so many priceless items of jewellery one can find before it begins to seem strange. At times I have toyed with imagining the inflationary consequence of all of this cash suddenly appearing in local economies!
DeleteSome years ago, I ran a campaign in which fragments of in-setting lore could be found scattered across dungeons in the setting - and/or traded as valued treasures with potentially hostile factions, etc. The PCs got lore for every ## fragments of lore they found; it was then on them to piece together the order in which the lore fragments fit. Once they had enough fragments and understood the setting's backstory, this enabled them to understand the BBEG's long-term plans, and move to confront the baddies for a campaign finale. This worked quite well. I suppose in that instance the lore-fragments were your kind of "endogenous" recoverable piece - though here, as with Tom's comments about gold, the lore didn't *directly* make people better Fighters, etc. But it did give them more intelligence about the situation, which made them better able to accomplish their goals.
ReplyDeleteI was writing something along those lines for somebody but couldn't quite make it work (at least to my eye).
DeleteGold for XP!! Man do we still have to keep f**king this chicken in the Foul Year of Our Lord 2024?
ReplyDeleteNothing personal gang, but GP=XP just *works*, and has for decades. Call it metagaming if you must. Gary thought of all your objections already, they're in the DMG. Nobody has improved on it since that I've seen, and most attempts have made the game demonstrably *worse*.
Chicken? Not my type! Seriously, though, I don't think anybody here said XP=GP doesn't work. It does. Nobody is objecting here, and we can shake on it. The blog post, though, is about matching the players' motivations on behalf of the PCs with the motivations that make sense in the fantasy setting, the "endogenous system of advancement" idea. Noisms' proposal is that this can be applied to other games to OSRise them.
DeleteAbout the DMG, Gygax says exactly what would make sense for "in-fantasy" advancement, and but responds by saying, "But it's a game, and those other ways are boring!" That's very close to calling it a metagaming concern, though I doubt the term metagaming had been applied yet to D&D. Tastes do vary, though. There are thousands of other games with many other ways to do it, with many millions of players.
For what it's worth, I think that Gygax was responding to C&S1e in this passage to which you refer. It was perceived as the main competitor at the time to D&D. A lot of passages in the DMG are swipes at C&S.
I doubt Robert Weaver would call himself the ambassador for Traveller, but he has written about this a couple of times ( http://ancientfarfuture.blogspot.com/2021/03/another-perspective-on-not-using.html ) . The game doesn't have 'leveling up'; any advancement is in-world advancement, better gear, friends in high places, etc.
ReplyDeleteReading play accounts, one side effect may be that people don't hold on to characters for as long. If there's no advancement, there's less reason not to roll up another character suited to different types of adventures.
Yes, interesting observation about that side effect.
DeleteOnly fighters are GP for XP. Magic-users, as per Alex Dzuricky’s “Electrum is Underdark Money,” (https://knightattheopera.blogspot.com/2019/09/electrum-is-underdark-money_20.html) are EP for XP. Thieves are SP for XP, all the easier to wash – and ever been stuck with only a high denomination bill and nobody to break it? As to why on earth clerics are CP for XP I have no idea – perhaps it has something to do with the daguerreotype and how so using and with much repetition and expense (in copper, mind) you can take a portrait of the gods themselves and nail it up in your narthex.
ReplyDeleteNice idea Theo!
DeleteWell, collection plates would be filled with copper pennies for the most part ...
DeleteSurely anything but copper would be unfittingly immodest.
DeleteYou can expand this idea into a general principle of game design; if you want the players to engage in a specific activity, you simply need to incentivize them to engage in that activity. XP and other kinds of mechanical incentives (skill points, etc.) are one possible type of reward, but the same thing applies to rewards in the game world itself. In D&D this includes, as you pointed out, the monetary value of the treasure itself as well as magic items.
ReplyDeleteThis all seems obvious in hindsight but it was a big revelation for me with regard to CP2020. I recall one online discussion where another poster commented that cybernetics in CP2020 are like magic items in D&D. The more I thought about this the more it made sense; since improving skills using the BTB method is so slow, installing new cybernetic enhancements is the primary method of character advancement. Taking the default 'edgerunners' campaign hook as an example, the PCs take on jobs to make money to buy cybernetics to take on more difficult jobs, forming a default game loop that gradually increases character power. The result is a structure that actively encourages the PCs to seek out risky high-paying jobs, which is the kind of game experience I think the designers wanted to encourage ("living on the edge" and all that).
You can see a similar sort of design principle at work in earlier Call of Cthulhu modules as well, where the designers make sure to include rewards for a successful investigations in the form of spells and magic items. The investigators solve supernatural mysteries so they can obtain tomes, spells, mythos knowledge and magic items so that they can more effectively solve supernatural mysteries. The wrinkle with CoC is that the default campaign hook is highly specific: the players are expected to make characters who are very motivated to investigate supernatural mysteries, and since the game mechanics actually punish the players for investigating the mythos (sanity loss, high lethality, etc.) this motivation has to be external to the game itself. Delving into the mythos is explicitly portrayed as a self-destructive pursuit, so the typical Call of Cthulhu investigator is on some level a fundamentally irrational actor. Contrast this with the baseline D&D adventuring party, who in a sandbox campaign are generally cast as free agents, allowing the players to make decisions as self-interested rational actors.
I have never thought of CP2020 in that way but totally makes sense actually - I like that way of thinking about it, although I suppose the loss of Humanity puts a natural break on it.
DeleteHas anyone mentioned training yet? That fits well with XP for gold, as you need money to pay for training, and I think everyone would agree training does plausibly improve your skill. This can be integrated with story awards: if you rescue the duchess, she puts you in contact with her good friend the master warrior, who trains you for free. Indeed you could argue it is just personal taste whether characters get a 2000gc reward, or 2000xp and benefits. Taxes are also useful in this context: those who pay are in good standing, and get introductions and opportunities.
ReplyDeleteI use training currently in both RQ and epic 3.5. Neither has the neemd for characters to burn thru gold that made it work in low level 3.5 where we used GP transferred from wilderness to town=XP, and when the RP gang played OD&D with carousing rules we chose to spend it on stuff that looked like AD&D training as often it did Blackmoor wenching. Even in games where you don't need to burn through GP it makes things more endogenous, you have to connect with the world in order to advance. It also slows the calendar and helps with the problem of going from hero to zero always being an overnight sensation.
DeleteI did mean to mention training but evidently forgot, Good ideas here.
DeleteEveryone knows gp for XP works but it is fruitful to think about why, and endogenous is a great term. GP helped spark the early D&D community because it is universal. Everyone wants it and it is present in all D&D worlds, so my guy can get more of it by playing in Tom's campaign on Friday and at D&D club on Monday. Making it not universal solved a problem in my current epic campaign. If everyone wants the quanta of advancement like they do gold, the world is the battle royale familiar from low levels. That would mean the PC has to grow in worldly power because everyone in the world is competing for the same thing, and this campaign is about an omnipotent dude who mostly wants to be left alone to pursue their own whims. "Semi-endogenous" allows for asymmetry in the goals of PCs and NPCs.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to imagine a setting in which the monsters get more HD by amassing more gold....
DeleteAll my 1:1 campaigns are in Greyhawk, which arrived under the Xmas tree at the right age to be our Book of Gold. Gary wrote himself in as a mad wizard who became a god and has L. Ron Hubbard in his Appendix N. The players from his campaign who we see naming spells after themselves seem to be depicted at various stages of their own ascension to demigods. In Dragon Magazine he's publishing stat-blocks for adventurers who go to the Wild West to get sixguns and beco me hero-deities (although I now understand those weren't actual PCs but part of an elaborate head-fake to conceal the real Greyhawk under a re-imagined one so it stays secret from his players). My friend and I were raised on this stuff and always into playing monsters as PCs, so we were very receptive to 3E's mechanical implication that gods are just monsters or heroes who amassed enough gold to get all the HD and powers you could read about in the book that told you fighting gods was bad-wrong fun. Now that 3E is no longer the new school and Pathfinder has taken that impulse to mechanize as far as it will go, I will ride hard for the delusionally ambitious, inescapably broken, and quickly .5'd out of canon Savage Species and Epic Level Handbook: they at least tried to do what I wanted D&D to do since I was a tween.
DeleteSo are dragons dragons merely because they are richer than, say, kobolds?
DeleteOne riff on this rule I liked is GP = XP, but GP wasted on frivolous things carries over to your next character.
ReplyDeleteThe thing about GP is that it's so easily quantified. I'd love to have an RPG in which reputation = XP but reputation is so much harder to quantify than XP. Maybe "number of people who have heard your name/think you're awesome" so things like getting a famous bard to praise you would net you a bunch of XP but even that is a lot harder to quantify than GP.
Yes - sadly the more subjective things are, precisely, subjective.
DeleteIt’s strange that XP for monsters killed seems to fit here, considering it’s usually disavowed even by the versions that effectively use it as the primary measure (D&D 3E tries to emphasise it’s actually about challenges overcome, monsters can be chased away, avoided, turned into allies, challenges can be of a different kind… but realistically, most challenges are going to be defeating monsters).
ReplyDeleteThe amount of monsters killed, and the danger they pose, seem something quite concrete in the fiction, and it seems to fit your criterion of being useful in itself, apart from advancement, in that it removes threat.
I have a post planned on the 'monster kills economy'.
DeleteI have yet to try it in play, but this is what makes the boast system of advancement in Wolves Upon the Coast so intriguing. It would seem to drive PCs to adventure in a sandbox environment so as to succeed at their Boast. It would also give the PCs agency, putting them in control of the Boasts they make. On its face, it doesn't appear as "objective" as XP for GP, but in practice, whether the DM decides where the biggest loot piles are or whether a boast is of properly heroic proportions, maybe it's not so different.
ReplyDeleteI think the difference is that, yes, the DM does in some sense 'decide' wheter the biggest loot piles are but there are ways to make this decision as objective as possible - done using random treasure tables and also done in advance of play, so he has no control over whether the PCs find the biggest piles or not, or in what order.
DeleteInto The Odd and derivatives have an interesting level-up mechanic. At first, it's based on surviving adventures. At the mid-levels, it's about training up an apprentice and taking leadership roles. At upper levels, you advance by establishing your legacy and achieving long term goals.
ReplyDeleteIn gold-for-XP games, there are still options for rewarding role play. In Mausritter, you double the XP by spending your treasure on the community instead of yourself. Some games reward you for blowing the loot on a blackout-drunk party. Some games reward spending gold and time for training (which has the advantage of actually making sense). Other games encourage you to found a business or raise your own mercenary war band (a different sort of business).