Progress Should Make Sense - How Else a Player Character Can Advance

Adventure! It's what calls our characters in Dungeons and Dragons, and every table top role playing game, for that matter, out into the wilderness. We charge the hidden temples, negotiate political disputes, and hold our ground in a siege, all to progress our story. At the end of a session, or an encounter, or whenever a generous Game Master feels like it, we may share around the greatest treasure of them all: Experience Points.

Experience is great. It's a numerical way to keep track of how lived our characters are. The more fights they prevail from, against lowly goblins and mighty dragons, the XP will always help our characters grow in the ranks. It's been a staple for progression in this game and countless others. Even a game I play all the time, Genshin Impact, has multiple different kinds of XP (specifically Character XP, Adventure XP, and Reputation XP).

We all love grinding our levels for XP. There's just one problem with Experience Points: they don't make sense. Let's unpack why and what the alternatives are.

XP Makes No Sense

Let’s look closer at the numbers on these things - careful study by Scott M. Fischer

Experience Points have been used since the beginning of tabletop gaming. In fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons, it sums up the difficulty of certain opponents. Once they're defeated, a number of Experience Points based on how much that monster had is divided up between each character that fought it. Or each player gets that amount at the end of the encounter, like how I used to run things for a very high power game.

The crunching of numbers and striving for a new total is always something gamers want to do. The many friends of mine who grind achievements on Play Station or Xbox certainly know this. The need to fill in a progress bar or hit a completion threshold is incredibly satisfying.

This kind of progression makes total sense for a much simpler kind of game. A classic hack and slash style RPG we may get in an arcade, or a retro style Roguelite.

Here's our problem when it comes to table top role playing games. Experiences like Dungeons and Dragons can very easily be a theatre of the mind Roguelite. One thinks of the Meat-Grinder styles of dungeons that the fine wizards at Nerdarchy are known for. This is but one of many ways to play a TTRPG, and a way few people actually do. The vast majority of players who enjoy a TTRPG play it as a collaborative narrative experience.

As such a collaborative narrative, we can easily go multiple sessions without a character picking a fight with anything. That's normal and to be expected. In the real world, we're taught to avoid starting physical confrontations, and that's true for the fantastical worlds we role play in; even if we cover our characters in armour, weapons, and destructive magical powers.

So in sessions where our characters don't pick a fight with a rival faction or wandering monster, but instead debate, deliberate, and discuss the fate of the realm with a bloodthirsty dragon or solve a myriad of puzzles, they don't grow as people? Of course they do. The problem is that the way the game is currently constructed, they don't mechanically grow from that.

Then again, we get the exact opposite extreme. Sometimes the only way to grow in this system is to be as violent and murderous as possible. This reminds me of the conversation our very own Satine Phoenix had with hilarious and character driven DM Brennan Lee Mulligan. Watch the video below, but the general message was that Wizard schools would resemble a barrack more than Hogwarts. Time to slay some goblins to practice your evocation magic. Why study? Get XP by blowing things up! To take this metaphor further, would the other schools of magic have even been explored if there was no incentive for Wizards to grow as individuals outside of wanton magical murder?

Clearly the mechanics of our high fantasy dice game require a lot of thought. But this disparity of flavour and function is immense. So how do we remedy that?

How Do We Grow Keeping Our XP

Make the pen and the sword mighty gro! - enthusiastic Study by Jesper Ejsing

When we wonder how best to progress our characters in this brave new world of Dungeons and Dragons, we have to ask ourselves is it with Experience Points or without. There's real merit to both. It all depends if you want to make your games more grindy and number crunchy, like a videogame RPG, then there may be more flavourful ways to inject Experience Points into through other means.

In an honourable mention, I want to mention something I'm going to shorthand as the Matt Mercer Method. He once described a method for handing out XP for social interaction and role play. Whenever a player does something interesting or true to their character, make a tally somewhere in your mass amounts of notes that you took about the session. At the end, take that number of tally marks and multiply it by ten. That's how much extra Experience they get for doing a good job staying in character.

That's what I used to do when I used XP while Game Mastering.

Another fun way to apply some character growth while keeping the Experience Points flowing is to build your NPCs like monsters. A lot of NPCs have an associated challenge rating. When your Player Characters approach this individual with the need for something; to get information, to intimidate them out of a course of action, or gain favours; there may be more weight on those other rolls.

With this method, we can make the assumption that social encounters happen alongside combat ones to ensure that the sessions feel balanced and the difficulty can be there. As the party progresses through the campaign and gains further levels and skills, the combat experiences they go through mount up in difficulty, as should their social encounters. In the early days, a particularly corrupt Lord or unintelligent Guard may make for an easy mark and free XP to everyone involved in the encounter, but when it gets to higher levels, gaining the tens of thousands of Experience Points for negotiating with a Dragon or appealing to the immense greed and blood lust of Demon Lords will bring great rewards to everyone.

Who knew talking things through brings forward progress?

How Do We Grow Without XP?

The other primary way to gain Experience is a way that's explained very clearly in the Dungeon Master's Guide. It's also the version I use to progress the characters I GM for. Milestones.

For those who don't know, Milestones are key moments in the story of the game where the characters level up. Defeating a great enemy, overcoming grand odds, uncovering a great secret my be a great point to embed a Milestone.

As an alternative to Experience Points, it's worth asking why are Milestones good as an alternative. I recommend using Milestones in any game that's heavily story driven. Long ongoing campaigns are a good example of this. There may be strange cases where your players swarm a cavern of little bad guys or pick their arguments against a slew of non player characters to build up mass amounts of XP, shifting the power well outside of what you had initially planned. The old school video game farming route.

Milestones takes this option away as it allows you, the GM, to control the trickle of progression. Much like with Magic Items or other boons you wish to bestow on your characters, whole levels or even whole class powers are yours to share when the characters are ready to receive them.

A Grand discovery can make a great milestone - You Find the Villains' Lair by Gabor Szikszai

A few provisos on when a Milestone should be used is key. This kind of progression gives the GM a lot of power, and should not be taken lightly. The growth should be equal among all characters. If all the characters participated in the story beats that were heavy enough that they could learn from in story terms, then they should assuredly gain some Experience from it.

There should also be a fairly regular trickle based on how long your expect your campaign to last. Your few week turbo game, make them level up every session or even a few times a session. Your magnum opus set to take the characters on a narrative lasting years, should take a reasonably long time between levels.

If you're a player and your GM uses Milestones, question them on their method so they don't forget or gatekeep your progress; if your characters deserve a growth after their hardships then they should get it.

Now we want to hear from you. Do you use Experience Points to progress the characters you Game Master? Which system do you prefer, XP for interactions or just Milestones? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG. On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree.