#195 – Awarding Experience Points

Breakfast puppies.

This podcast contains adult language and content and is meant for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised. You're listening to the Glitter Boys. This episode's topic comes from one of our listeners and Discord hanger outers. But a fellow by the name of Beat Magnet posted this question back on July 2nd. It was a very, very, very, very long post about questions on how we handle experience points in our home games and our thoughts on the Palladium version of that.

So I've— when I'm running Palladium games, actually when I'm running pretty much any role-playing games, I have for multiple reasons Most of which, uh, calculating experience points per encounter, per thing you've killed, per cool idea is nice, but from a GM perspective, it's a time management thing. And a lot of times when I'm looking at the story that I want to tell, and it doesn't really matter the system, I want the players to feel accomplished. I want them to do the cool thing and be rewarded for what the table, not just me, but the table thinks is good behavior. And so a lot of times I've walked away from individual experience points, which rules as written is very different than most of your games. And I reward them in kind of, okay, you've done some cool things, you all level up. Go ahead and level up next week and next week we'll come in. Some players respond to that really well, some don't. And I actually think a lot of this started developing when I first read the experience point tables in my first Palladium book.

Yeah.

Because it was the first time that you literally are called out. The most experience points you can get is a critical plan or action that saves the entire group or, and/or many innocent people. 400 to 1,000 experience points. And at lower levels, that's up to half of a level.

Yeah.

Just doing one cool thing. So I'm like, wow, that's really neat. That is not your D&D, you get one experience point for hit point you kill or gold point you collect or Whatever. So yeah.

From a tabletop gaming viewpoint, specifically Palladium being my first RPG that I ever actually sat down and rolled dice and played, that was my first exposure to how a tabletop game handles XP. Now, I had played video games, like before I played RPG tabletop for the first time, I believe like the games that I played a lot were like Dragon Warrior on the NES, and you got XP only for killing things.

Oh yeah.

So I was surprised. I was expecting that. I was expecting, okay, this is a game where I'm gonna kill a bunch of metal slimes and get some XP. Nope. You get XP for, for doing stuff and exploring the world and having cool ideas. In fact, the experience that you get for defeating monsters is some of the lowest on the table.

Yeah. And that, that can be really surprising when you're— when the first time you look at it, you're like, well, we just killed a bunch of big demons. Cool. They were, they were major menaces. You get a couple hundred experience points each. Yeah. But you save the entire village. That's where you get 1,000 experience points.

Yeah. Yep.

Like, oh, that's how that works. Yes. Murder hobos are murder hobos. Village saviors are the awesome people. Right.

Right. I know, and that's one of the things I loved about the rules as written of Palladium when I first encountered them, is it put kind of a natural throttle on murderhoboism. The flip side to that is what sort of game are you running? Because if you're running a player-driven narrative where the players are laying out their own plans and that sort of thing, Mm-hmm. You suddenly run into the conundrum of, is this actually a major goal of theirs or not? How well have they articulated what their plan is? How well have they articulated what their objectives are? And so sometimes if you're running very player plan, player objective driven games, it can be a little bit more decisive.

Yeah.

there can be some tension around that because like the GM's understanding of what the player's goals are and the player's goals are, could be out of alignment. Or as I have run into more often than not, the players have different alignment around their own goals amongst themselves.

Yeah. And that can get, it makes it much more subjective on how they're being rewarded. I know I've been in games where one player is feeding the GM ideas and the GM is feeding the player ideas. And the rest of us from an out point are like, what's going on here? Are they, do they need us here?

Right.

And that one player gets a lot of rewards.

Mm-hmm.

And then if you trust the player and the GM that they're not doing something weird, 3 sessions later, the payoff happens and you're like, oh, this makes so much more sense now what's going on. Right. But it can look— it can feel very uncomfortable for the rest of the people at the table if they, if they don't have the inside track.

Right. So let's step back a little bit because I imagine there could be some people listening here who are still a little bit confused about the particulars of what we are discussing. Experience points in a role-playing game, traditional old-school style role-playing game, which Palladium is heavily rooted in that style. is points that you are rewarded. They're these ephemeral, nonexistent points, merit points, gold stars that you are rewarded at the end of a session or an adventure arc or a campaign, even depending upon your GM, that will you then apply to your character. And if you reach certain milestones of XP that get increasingly higher and higher, then your character gains ability. So in Palladium, the— well, okay, I'm gonna pull up here the 1st edition book because that's my jam. In Palladium Fantasy 1st Edition, your characters— I think this is, this is ultimately where all the experience tables started. So let's take a look at the classic mercenary fighter. Mercenary fighter needs 1,900 experience points to complete their level 1. So from level 2, they need 3,800 to get to level 3, then 7,600 to get to level 4, and it goes all the way up to level 15.

Wow.

Now you need 320,000 points to get your fighter in Palladium Fantasy 1st Edition to level 15. This leads to a strange occurrence on the Palladium skill tables, which is why are there experience points given for level 15? Because once you reach level 15—

That's it.

So then it says level 15 is from range 320,001 to 370,000. Well, what happens at 370,000? It's at the end.

We're not playing in Krynn. You don't get elevated into the heavens by the gods.

You get kicked out of the— kicked off the planet because you're too powerful. Right. Um, that's, that's definitely, uh, Dungeons and Dragons and, uh, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons influence on the Palladium way of thinking. I mean, it's, it's not a straight lift, but The experience point tables, they're, they're not really logarithmic. They're definitely, they're really weird.

Right.

Really weird.

They're really weird.

I've run. So I have spent an extraordinary amount of time converting all of these things to spreadsheets and running calculations on them for my own home gaming. There's no rhyme or reason to them. No, like there is no pattern other than this one's just plus X and this one's plus X. And for folks who say that they're is like extensive calculation going into balancing them, I recommend you take a look at the XP table for the witch.

Yes.

The witch XP table specifically disproves that entire theory because every single level of the witch's XP ends with 666.

Yep.

Right. No, I'm sorry. There's nothing you can prove. You can say that will tell me that that was formulaically generated. These— okay, so one part of the question was how do we feel about the Palladium experience system? So I feel that in order to answer that, it's— there's 2 parts that we have to consider: the actual ways to earn XP and the actual ways to apply XP. I like the ways that we earn XP in Palladium if we're— if we are going to be playing with a more nitpicky style of rewarding. I find the Palladium Experience tables a little— they don't really make all that much sense to me.

Yeah, the tables are— they're batshit. Let's be honest. Like the same example here. So let's see here. A 15th level, let's see, robot pilot, 339,000. 15th level from, from original, uh, Rifts. Um, the 15th level dragon, 800,000, right? Like 800,000. You're like, uh, what? Now arguably they're all within 10-15% of each other all the way across the board until you get to dragon, right? Now, now granted, I think depending on how you play, a 15th level dragon hatchling is pretty freaking powerful, but I don't know if he's any more powerful than a 15th level uh, shifter or a 15th level, uh, leyline walker, right? Yeah, right. It's, it's, again, it kind of goes back to they kind of eyeballed it. And I'm sure over time, um, one of the great things I was going— I was looking through the, the, the, uh, the Rifts, uh, Game Master Guide, and I had totally forgotten that in the back of the Rifts Game Master Guide are all the experience tables for all the classes up to that point, up to like 2003 or 2004. Yeah, yeah, right. So you're looking at them and you're like, Huh, some of these are literally just cut and pastes of other tables.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you're like, oh, you know, and most of them, they don't break 500,000 except for the ones we've talked about. Um, you know, like corrupted high mages, the ninja, the mystic ninja, you know, stuff like that. So the tables, I, I'll be honest, most of the time in the tables, I just set aside and I create some sort of like unified table, um, that we're going to use in my tabletop game. Um, and I've done it a few times depending on what it, what it feels like on how quickly I want the characters to progress. One thing to keep in mind with any of the Palladium systems is that the vast majority of all Palladium character classes are front-loaded, well front-loaded. And so you're awesome. Even the Vagabond, which, you know, is actually one of my favorite OCCs that you can play, are front-loaded when you start.

You're cool.

You're a hero. You're not a 1st level D&D character who's going to die. Who Who won, you're the wizard, you'll run out of your one spell and then you'll shoot someone with a crossbow and save the party with your staff, right?

Depends on edition, not all magic users could use crossbows.

You're mostly right, and especially increasingly so with games like Rifts or any of the mega damage systems. But when you look back to fantasy, or when you get to the, even Fantasy 2nd Edition, and you look at some of the basic classes, And even the vagabonds, a good example of this one, they, they might get a few things up front, but they are heavily reliant on their skills for the rest of their increases.

Okay.

Very fair.

Like a mercenary fighter is a hand-to-hand combat skill.

Right.

That's where they get their bonuses from, those in weapon proficiencies. So you get your mercenary fighter alongside your corrupted and that corrupted is like, okay, I'm going to start the game and I'm the most badass person in the world. And the mercenary fighter is like, all right, come on, level Level 7, can't get here soon enough. Yep. Yeah.

I totally concede that that is absolutely accurate, especially with some of the ones that really rely on the various hand-to-hand formats.

Yeah.

Then, and you, you'll, you'll know them like at 4th level, you get that extra attack and that's huge. Right. And things like that will start clicking up and your skills. Absolutely. Your skills will like, you know, as you go up, you get that 2 to 5% every level and you're like, that's what you feel like you're doing really cool. You know, when your skills are up there higher. Now, now kind of take it back a second. We've talked about the tables, the reward table on the scales of experience points. I've always thought that that was actually very well done. Like it gives you some ranges. It gives you lots of ideas on how to reward players. If you want to go, you know, rules as written, here's a bunch of things that, you know, guides and none of them are set values.

Mm-hmm.

And you don't have to really, and it's not hard to go, Killing a minor, killing or subduing, again, built— you don't have to be a murder hobo. You could just defeat them in some way, make them run away, and you get experience points. A lot of other systems, no, you pretty much have to kill them to get the experience points, rules as written, right? Like, one of the things that I used to run into certain GMs, it's like, oh, well, you cast Banish and you made the creature go away. You didn't actually kill them, so you don't get the experience points. And I'm like, what?

Right.

Like, I learned How to defeat him or her or it or whatever. And when they come back bigger and badder, I should get the experience points again if I figure out how to defeat them again, you know? And that's— I love how this is built into it, right? It's already there.

You're causing me flashbacks. We won't go into the side tangent, but remind me to tell you the story of at a con where I had to shut down a table as a con runner.

Oh, geez.

Let's just put it this way. Does turning undead count as defeating them?

I mean, it depends. It depends.

If they run away, no. If you blow them up, yes.

But what if you turn them and they run away and fall into a pit of lava?

Then the lava gets the experience points. Now you have like level 10 lava.

But what if that was your intention the whole time? Oh, well, now, you know, there's it all again. That's why I like the clever plan approach as to the defeating the monster approach.

And I will say the one that always fascinated me is the 500 to 700 points for a genuine life and death self-sacrifice in a situation where the character's heroism seemed likely or almost certainly to cost his life.

Mm-hmm.

Right there in the game. Hey, this is a game and you want to do heroic stuff.

Yeah.

And you're going to be rewarded. Now you're going to be dead. And a house rule that I've always had is that I would probably buff that up and give it to directly applied to the next character you made if your character actually dies.

Right.

That, that's, that's personally how I always played that. If you do something that cool, if you go out in that blaze of glory and you save the whole party or save the town, karma will come back to your next character in some cool way. Uh, but it's right there, you know, it's, it's like, There aren't, I don't know of any other experience point systems in any other games that, especially not then, that would like reward you for that type of superheroic type of activities.

I can think of a couple offhand, but yeah, you're right. It was uncommon.

Yeah.

So I would also like to point out the very first thing on the list, 25 experience points for performing a skill successful or not.

Yeah.

So my question that I've Always wondered, because I've known about this for years. I've known about this since the day I started roleplaying, with the day I read this table, and I've known about it and I always forget it myself because who wants to keep track of that shit?

But every Call of Cthulhu player out there.

So let's get to that in a bit when we'll talk about different styles of earning XP and applying it. But right now we're sticking to the acquire points, level up kind of thing. 25 experience points to perform a skill, successful or not. This is a very skill-heavy game. Now I hear stories of people who have played like, you know, every week and they, even after 10 years, they only got to level 4 or 5 or something. I was like, then you're not getting XP for those skills, are you?

Yeah, how?

You use, if you use 10 skills in a session, that's 250 XP. That at least, that doesn't include the other session rewards. So here's something that I did as a house rule back in the day because we were running first ed Palladium and I gave the players this option. This was put in place to both counteract the, cut back the need to track each one of those and also balance out the whiff factor at the start of the game.

Okay.

And that is whenever you perform a skill before you roll, you get to choose. You gain 25 XP for it or you add 25 to your skill percentage.

Oh, is that—

And every single time they added the 25 to their skill percentage.

Yeah, I could totally see that.

Because you suck when you're skill-based at first level, especially when you're going with the Palladium, these fantasy tables.

Oh yeah, you suck.

You fail at everything.

Yeah. Which is, in a story at first level, you're not going to be awesome, especially in the original Palladium Fantasy. So you're going to level up actually pretty quickly because you're going to fail at your skill. You're going to keep trying it. I got to chop this wood.

All right.

I'm going to make my woodcraft. Oh, nope. I failed. Okay. I'm going to do it again. I failed.

Okay.

I did it again. I've done it 20 times now and I figured out how to make a fire finally.

Cool.

Okay. I've gone up a level. Right? You could, you could almost do that even if you succeed. I mean, cause originally it was succeed or fail. You got 25, right?

It is pass or fail. You get the 25 XP.

Cause in different revisions, it's 10 to 25. There's a scale and some of them, depending on which revision you're looking at, but at a flat 25, like you're going to get the experience points pretty quickly. Yeah.

But I was like, I'm giving you the option, right? You can have the bonus. Or you can track it. It's up to you. You got to keep track of it. And everybody was like, no, we'll take the bonus. Thank you. Yeah.

I have played in a game, uh, or twice, one or twice where the GM was, we'll call it old school and would run a tally of, and they'd have graph paper and they'd run a tally of all the different things you were doing. And at the, you know, usually you'd get them the next session, how many experience points you got or whatever. depending on how much time you had. And it was a little arduous, but it wasn't horrible because they were used to running old school D&D where, you know, they were trying to calculate everything. Uh, and it was cool. Like a good 4-hour session. You got quite a bit of experience points.

I was that game master.

Yeah.

I was that game master in Palladium.

I believe you.

I was— The beard proves it.

Yeah. The beard proves it. Uh, I stole that from a graybeard who I had played 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons with and brought it over to the first real serious Palladium campaign I ever ran, which was actually Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. And yes, exactly. And pre-written graph sheet with all of the categories like This is pre-Excel days, literally.

Hand-done WordPerfect 3 and then—

Graph paper, baby.

Mimir graph paper.

Handwritten on a graph, like an Apple IIe could not do this shit for me.

Handwritten on a graph paper, and here's how it works. So you draw it out and you get it and everything's perfect, and then you use it in a session, and then you're like, okay, now I need to use it for another session. You're like, God, I was stupid. So then you hand draw the whole damn thing out again. And then the second time you go to the library and you pay 25 cents a copy and then you get those copies because you were dumb.

Or you were smart and got your dad to take it to work on the midnight shift and abuse the company copier. And I had 30 sheets every 2 weeks.

Or you're the son of a public school teacher and you use your tax dollars.

I mean, No, no, no. Those are called job perks.

Job perks.

Public school teachers get shit. So you, you take stuff from work, damn it.

I will say that the graybeard I stole the idea from was a public school employee and was doing it off the mimeograph machine.

I was going to say, the mimeograph machines. For those that don't know what a mimeograph machine is, be thankful.

Look it up.

Look it up. It's hilarious.

So now let's move into talking about other experience systems. We've talked about the Palladium one, and the Palladium one is really one of the 2 most common of the main— of the various experience systems out there. The other of the 2 most common is commonly referred to as milestone system. The milestone being that you don't get XP for anything, the GM just levels you up when your group reaches a milestone.

And that's how I kind of started. And I've moved to that in a lot of the GMing that I do is milestones. Um, it takes a lot of the bookwork off of you. It helps you move more quickly or slowly. If I don't know, many of you, it depends on your groups. I have a couple of standing groups that I've been playing with for a long time and schedules being what they are, that first session after 2, 1 or 2 people have been gone for a couple of weeks, we don't get a lot of gaming in that session. It's a, it's a kind of a catch-up BS session, to be honest. It's, yeah, the informal, you know, men's group, right, type thing.

Yeah.

Um, because we happen to all be dudes. And, uh, so you really wouldn't reach a lot of milestones in that. But then there are those nights where we're all laser-focused on the game and we're blasting through big things. It's like, oh, you've killed 3 of the big bads, discovered 4 of the main plot points, And you're about to save the world. I don't know what I'm going to do the next month because you just did all the material. That's awesome. You go up 2 levels or 3 levels or what have you because you've just blasted through all the material. And they, everyone feels super accomplished, not only for what they did, but now their characters reflect what they accomplished in the story. And you're not just counting points.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And they both to me are very valid ways of doing it. It comes down to your group and your GM, your players, how you all want to handle it.

I personally, I've used the milestone methodology more than once. I always feel incredibly lazy when I'm doing it. The one nuance I've added to it is there's the milestones for the story that I'm trying to tell the milestones for the players as a group, and then there's individual per-player milestones that is unique to their specific characters. At that point, I feel far more fulfilled, and honestly, from the feedback I've gotten from my players, they feel more fulfilled because it doesn't allow the strongest personalities at the table to be dictating the course of the game as much. You do have to balance out individuals' objectives with the group's objectives, with the story you're trying to tell, but you're always doing that to some extent. But if you run milestone experience under that system, you actually find yourself paying attention more to what everybody at the table is doing and find adventure hooks scattered throughout the table.

Mm-hmm.

And it it works real, real well.

I find that a really good way to boost that, to assist that further, is the post-session vote where you have to, you get to nominate people for XP, but it has to be someone other than yourself. I've really, I have introduced that to more traditional groups in the past who, this back in like the D20 days, of 3rd ed groups that were like super into 3rd ed that were not quite on, not quite fully on board with my new hippie style of XP giving from all the indie games that I've been playing. But I was like, okay, we're going to try something here. And by indie, by, by hippie indie games, mind you, for this group, it was Savage Worlds. That's what they thought a hippie indie game was.

That's so far out.

I mean, that's living on a commune with 50 of your closest friends running around in burlap sacks.

But I would do, I would have a post-session reward. And so, you know, Pinnacle Savage Worlds has its own XP system. I switched it from the 5-point scale to a 13-point scale. And, but I also gave more. So it ended up balancing out. But with 13-point scale at the end of a session, it'd be like, okay, there's 5 different things that we can vote on. Who did the best thing? Who did the best thing of these things?

Mm-hmm.

And that encouraged people To like do cool shit. And it was, it was really great. And but it, but it also wasn't entirely who did the coolest thing. It was also who was underappreciated this session or stuff like that. So it had players think about it. And then one of them was a random question each time. It wasn't always the same. So I had like a stack that I had printed off from the internet of like You know, questions for XP. And so they would just all be very different. No one knew what that 5th one was going to be. And so they always had to think about it. And that was fun. But of course, this was also back when we had more free time and when the end of a game wasn't the end of hanging out. So the game would conclude, we'd handle XP stuff, and then we'd have a pizza or go out and get a beer.

Watch Blood of Heroes. Yeah. I've done the same thing under the 2 experience systems we've discussed so far. I have pulled back on it and I use it as a supplemental, but not the core of experience giving.

Yeah.

Just because over the years I just came to realize it always ended up boiling down to one of 2 things. Ended up being either a popularity contest at the table or a pity party at the table, and groups tended to wildly swing between the two one way or the other.

We played with such different groups. Most of the groups that I've had basically since my 20s have all been like very copacetic groups.

Oh yeah, like I, I would— if I were to run for my own old Shadowrun group Today, I would use the system as you described because of the personalities involved.

Because that's where I started it, actually. The karma system was perfect for it.

The karma system was absolutely perfect for it. And the group of players was perfect for it. You know, as I've gotten older and I've— during the period where I was less choosy about who I ran for it, I backed away from that and use it as a supplement, but not the core of the experience system.

What do you think, folks, about XP systems where the XP is fully player-driven? As in not just based on their actions, but they know it, they have to do it, GM doesn't reward it, doesn't keep track of it. And by that I mean, first off, the Valley of the Pharaohs basic role-playing style, you use it, you advance it system where the player keeps track of it. But also, Many of the Powered by the Apocalypse games and those that have derived from that use a system where you have on your character sheet, you gain XP when X happens. And those are the only times you gain XP. There aren't generic, like you gain XP for defeating a monster. It's you gain XP for showing someone up, or you gain XP for pulling the rug out from under an enemy.

Right.

Or something. What do you think about those?

So I first encountered that concept in Star Frontiers, 1982. So we're talking weird branch that existed, uh, it's about the same time Palladium was rolling on the scene. And it, short of my preferred method of player advancement, it is probably my favorite. I, well, Powered by the Apocalypse has some innate shortcomings. The entire concept is very solid. And I kind of like that as long as it lines up with the game you're trying to run, both from the player's point of view and the game master's point of view. It can be done well. It can be done badly, just like anything else. It's just one where there's got to be far more harmony in what the players and/or the game master are going for in the game.

So the only time I've actually seen this myself, um, was when I was running a MUX, which was a text-based online game, pervasive world. And the only way you could normally get experience points is to have another player vote that you did something cool. And so only the players could vote other players and you had so many votes per week. Because—

fascinating.

Yeah. So, so, so the good behavior that we saw was that people would— were really encouraged to go roleplay with as many people as they could every week because it was tallied once a week. The bad behavior that we saw was the people who played favorites with the same 4 or 5 people, and they would spread out their 5 votes against those same 4 or 5 people. And it was really easy to track it every week and kind of figure out how you would correct this, but it was a very different environment than your normal tabletop environment, right? This is a literally anyone can play at any time and is for all intents and purposes a text-based MMO. But because it didn't have automated combat, Yep. You had to talk with people and run the story and drive the story. In a tabletop game, applying it that way, I've not played Powered by the Apocalypse. I've seen it several times. offered, I need to get in a game with it to kind of get an experience. The closest I got was some of the older Call of Cthulhu where you'd keep track of all your skills that you would use, right? And you'd make your little tally marks every time you use a skill. And then at the end of the session, you'd roll to see if your skill went up, which really was helpful for the GM because they kept— you just assumed everyone was honest and their skills would go up as they would use them. The more you used a skill, the more it would do.

Yeah.

And I like that idea a lot. Anything that can spread out some of that burden onto everybody of bookwork so it's more fun.

That is my new hotness. Like, for y'all have been doing it for years with the BRP and all that stuff, but my recent exposure and obsession with Valley of the Pharaohs has made that my— that this is my— this to me, it's the way. This is the way. As a game master, I don't even have to think about it. That's the best part. I don't have to keep track of what you did. You have to keep track of what you did. That's great. I just have to put you in situations and then you got to figure out how you're going to apply the skills that you want to, to get those XP tags. It's fucking delightful.

Which, I mean, that almost takes us a little off the beaten path because so much of experience tables, methods of awarding experience, et cetera, et cetera, is so driven by level-based systems. When you step away from level-based systems, you suddenly have—

Yeah.

A whole new set of options, and more to the point, a whole new set of problems. Many, many, many skill-based progression systems where there's no levels end up feeding more into survival and that sort of thing. But there's one super, super easy fix for this, and I've done it myself.

And that is?

Using basic role-playing primarily, but a couple others including the aforementioned Star Frontiers where I started doing it.

I'm tapping my veins here, Jacob.

Tell me. You can do it one of two ways. Drawing it out to make the, the newly, the new addict just start sweating and shaking.

Where's my knife?

I have a meth addict as a co-host at the moment. He's getting out the big knife. But your— if your progression is driven by skill improvement, the primary way that usually works is you fail a skill, you get a check, or you use a skill, you fail, you get a check, and then at the end of the session you roll to improve.

Yeah.

If you have a major success in the story, whether it's a story gate of some kind, or something that just amazes the players and the GM, you just throw out some free ones that the players can use on whatever skill they want.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I used basic roleplaying for an extended series of mercenary games and basically loosely based on the Merc 2000 ruleset, which is a derivative of Twilight 2000. And the— that worked so, so well. If you've ever seen the movie Three Kings.

Oh yeah, yeah, great movie, so underrated.

So I basically ran that movie, but when they got all the refugees across the border, everybody got 5 skill improvements that they could spend on any skill they wanted.

Yeah.

So where we've kind of detoured is into how would we change in some ways, or how would we choose to run the Palladium experience points?

Right.

I don't think there's anything wrong with running it as it is, but there's a lot of opportunity because it's, it's, you know, Kevin has said specifically, do what you want with it. Have fun.

Right.

And he doesn't care. It's the creator of the game wants you to have fun. And so if the experience point system as it's written isn't fun for you, figure out what makes it fun for you and your table.

Yeah.

And the, the biggest part here that we've kind of not said explicitly, and I'm going to, is that get buy-in from the players at your table, the GM at your table, and say, hey, we're going to try this different way of doing experience points and see what people think. You start— if you've never done it before, you're a brand new GM, the framework is there. to follow and use, but there's a lot of other things out there and just have fun adapting them because that's, that's really half the fun for figuring out how the system is going to work for you. And it can, it can open up some role-playing opportunities you might not have otherwise seen.

So here's something that might blow some people's minds. You don't have to get XP. There are other rewards for gaming.

Mm-hmm.

Now just put that on a track and repeat it to yourself a few hundred times as you go to sleep. You don't have to get XP. There are other rewards for gaming. I know, I know, we're so laser-focused on those XPs and getting our characters better, but there's other ways to improve. There's other benefits. There's, okay, well, okay, taking it back to my hippie stories, there's the benefit of friendship, which we found all the way. There's the benefit of enjoying time with your friends.

Mm-hmm.

There's the reward that comes from achieving something in the story that your group has been trying to do. That in and of itself is a reward that you should not downplay. I'm not necessarily saying you should not get another reward for it, but don't miss one reward because your eyes are on that pointless intangible number that is going up on your sheet. And don't get that upset when the GM is like, hey, you know, y'all didn't really do much this session. So I'm not going to give you any XP, but you made some good financial investments and those are going to reward. So you get some money instead, or you go into the dungeon, you kill some monsters, but you don't really get some XP because the GM's like, I don't know, I think the Holy Slayer and the Ruten Knife that you found are going to be reward enough for this session kind of thing.

I have oftentimes in Palladium and other games as well, as a player, not cared as much about the experience points. Flat out, I don't care. Like, especially—

I don't care personally either.

Right.

Yeah.

But the, the, the rune sword that I'd really like to get in the game, that became all of my motivation in character is I wanted that sword. Right. I wanted that item because my character needed it to survive. Um, may have been slightly possessed by said rune sword, but, you know, um, needed it to survive because that was his whole being. was to get that thing. And so the experience points wasn't the driver, wasn't the motivator, um, for the character at all. You know, as you said, you know, I once played a vampire character in a Vampire: The Masquerade game. He spent 3 sessions on the side developing his financial resources for the future because he assumed he was going to live forever. So he had to put a bunch of money aside into long-term mutual funds. And people are like, what are you doing? It's like, well, I'm going to live a couple hundred years. I want to be really, really wealthy in a couple hundred years. And I'm just gonna start putting money aside. And the GM thought I was crazy. Um, and it ended up paying off dividends later, which was awesome. But so those were the rewards that I was getting. Um, so Nathaniel, you're spot on. You're spot on.

Small caveat on that one. Uh, just make sure that the players are copacetic with your—

Absolutely.

We will not bring up the cross-country riffs game that ended up, uh, Retrieving one rune weapon that ended up with a party not talking to each other for the next 3 weeks.

You mean the one you just brought up?

Oh, Phil, if you're listening, I still side with you.

All right. So that out of the way, our user Beat Magnet said that, uh, it did get a 20-minute episode out of this. We're at 40 and we're not even done.

We're not even done.

Let's, let's start to address some of these questions here. And some of these are focused on how, on things that you have observed other GMs doing. What have you seen a GM doing that you liked that you never thought of yourself? Something new, something exciting, something interesting.

Well, I already brought up the stealing the sheet.

Yep.

From the graybeard, who I refer to him as a graybeard because for the life of me, I cannot remember the man's name. It kills me. There's been some other ones. The, my first introduction to the Gateway or Story Point or whatever you want to call it XP system. I originally ran into a college student I was playing with. in '89, '90, uh, had the idea. He was a literature major, uh, literature major, creative writing major, and he brought in the concept of story beats into gaming and was trying to figure out how to put story beats into a gaming experience. So that was my first experience with that. I stole that wholeheartedly. Um, other things I've seen that I really liked, uh, specific to the Palladium system is the game master having a bunch of colored poker chips at the table. And because a— if you look at the— it was Palladium Fantasy. And if you look at the table, there's a lot of those Did you use a skill? Did you defeat a minor, major, yada, yada, yada? It's really easy to do with 5 colors of poker chips, which is the standard poker set is 4 to 5 colors. As it happens, just flip poker chips out to players as they earn things. You don't have to tally it. The math is simple at the end of the night. It made it super simple. It was like, oh, skill. Well, there's a white chip. Skill. There's a white chip. Skill. There's a white chip.

Yeah.

Oh, uh, mook a level enemy, have a nice blue one, you know, and, and go through that. That made the bookkeeping super simple until some SOB spills their Mountain Dew and suddenly everything's being grabbed off the table willy-nilly. But you know, that, that happens.

Um, lids are good.

Lids are good. So both those are some of the best ones I've ever seen utilized.

I can think of one of the worst ones that I've seen.

Oh, well, if we're going to go there, I have a couple.

Yeah. I mean, the ones that I've already said, like all of the things that I do now are things that ultimately I think I saw other people doing that inspired me. I can't even remember who they were. The only GMs that I specifically remember, remember these days are the bad ones, unfortunately, because I play so rarely that it was either a good one-shot game with a friend and I don't remember exactly who or what it was, or it was a terrible campaign with one of the worst GMs I've ever had that I stuck with because there was no other game around. You know, I've been through a few of those with a few different GMs in a few different cities, and those stand out the most.

So, um, for me, I did have one GM had no memory and, uh, we ran our, we ran our experience points as we were playing.

Mm-hmm.

You do something, you say, uh, 25 experience points, 50 experience points, 100 experience points, and it would just throw out the experience points for individuals or the group as we were going through the game. And it broke some of the immersion a little bit, but at the end of the night, you knew exactly if you were going to level or not, right? If you were running it. And a lot of us were engineers, and so we had our TI-81s and our HPs, and we were running a tally on the side. So we knew exactly how many experience points we had at all times.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and he went even to the end that if you leveled mid-session and you could quickly do it, you could try to level mid-session. That part I did not like because it just broke. I mean, the game would just break down, right?

Yeah.

Especially if you had 2 or 3 players that were like in the middle of stuff, it would like, okay, the session's over. Cool. All right. We're going to all level here and then we'll continue with the story. Um, that was almost like as close to a video game as you get in real life because it's just a little weird.

In high school though, our group had that shit down.

Yeah.

No, we did the same thing. If you got XP, you applied it immediately and you could, if you want, you could level if you could do it in 5 minutes.

Right. Yep.

And we were hardcore about it too. It wasn't like, oh, you can do it in 5 minutes, 30 minutes later. It's like, no, you need to do that in 5 minutes or we're moving on and you're leaving you behind. We got, this was also the same, we same group where we would just sit and pump out characters, just pump them out every day. 2 to 3 new characters. We'd talk about it at lunch or after work, after smoking a bowl after school, and we would just pump out Palladium characters. Now let me tell you something, folks. Everybody says character creation in Palladium takes a long time, and it does, unless you're a high school stoner with nothing else to do with your time.

So my question is, after you smoked that bowl, how many techno wizards did you make?

Myself? It was dog boys.

So, uh, I—

Entire extended family.

Frequently—

Pit bulls and terriers. Yeah.

One, I'm gonna use the word interesting because I, to this day, still don't know entirely how I feel about it because I have very mixed feelings about it. I had a game master once who was, well, at the time, well, still is, 22 years older than I was, and I was 18. And Their primary gaming group, they ran to 2, was dealing with the realities of being an adult. And he went through, it was actually a Beyond the Supernatural game. He went through and multiplied the entire experience table by 5. If a player didn't show up, their character was gray bubbled. Their skills were unavailable. Their resources were unavailable. Whatever. They were off the table.

Yeah.

But for that session, the experience earned by the group was divided by the numbers of players there.

So—

But that player wasn't there.

But that player, right, he wasn't there. So one of the conceits there is he ran for 5 people. Yeah. So the experience bonuses or the experience, but the experience rewards were multiplied by 5 and then divided by the number of players who showed up.

Gotcha. Oh, okay.

So, and I see. Yeah.

Okay.

5 players, everyone got their fair cut. 4 players, 3 players, you got a bigger cut.

Well, at that point it's like a heist. You got to start figuring out who you're going to off.

You slash someone's tires, you get some more experience points.

Okay, here we go. Now I fundamentally believe it was a combination that he was dealing with the realities of being an adult gamer. And having some really freaking flaky players in the other gaming group, which was the primary one.

I can guess where this went. Let me guess. You were the youngest player. You had less to do with your time. So that meant you showed up every time. So that meant you got the most XP. So by the end of the campaign, you're like top of the mountain.

Surprisingly, no. I was number 3 on the regular attendance list just because we often played on days that I had, I either had a scheduled rock climb that day or a scheduled match that day. And every once in a while, an extra shift at work.

Yeah.

But it was a reality. It was reality. And I, I still don't know how I feel about that one. It, it had its ups and it had its downs. And I've come across a couple situations with a couple groups where I've been very tempted to throw it out there. It's especially good if you have a story you're trying to tell with a lot of player input because it like forces the track and forces the investment to a certain degree.

That's also a bad thing. So I'm going to talk about one of the worst XP reward systems I've ever seen. And again, this is one of those I was only even in this game because it was the only game I could find. It's the only game around, and other people were only in it for the same reasons. And, you know, I've, I've actually hung out with the game master socially. Okay, fun dude. The way he ran his game was like almost like a different fucking human being. And I'm just gonna call this man— let's just call him Raven Darkblood. Raven Darkblood, the game master. would award bonus points. Like you do something cool, you said something funny, you get a bonus point. People started trying to get those bonus points. Like, oh, one of those bonus points. I found out years later that a bonus point was equal to 1 experience point. We were playing AD&D 1st Edition where he had doubled the amount of XP it required to level it up.

Oh.

1 experience point. We were, we were bickering over 1 experience point. single experience point in a system that already could require up to a million or more XP to get to the highest levels. One XP point. But he didn't tell anyone that. He just said it. So he never lied, but the way that he did it made you think it was something fascinating. I—

it was AD&D, right?

Yep.

There was a series of articles in Dragon Magazine with this proposition over the years and different schemes for doing it. And I'm wondering if he— oh, I never— none of them were as low as 1 point. They were like, I think my vague foggy recollection is like 10 experience points. But yeah.

He, he gave you XP for sucking up to him.

Yep.

Gobs of it. gobs of XP for bringing him food, for bringing him stuff, or for whatever. He would do it for things that were done outside of the game. Like, oh yeah, can you give me a ride to the mall? I'll give you 100 XP.

Like, that's—

it was just, it was awful. And he did one thing, one thing that I thought was really cool, which inspired— which did inspire me later, was that he would reward XP if you made If you made or wrote or did something in character, made it manifest. And by that, I mean, you wrote an in-character journal entry about the last session, or you showed up in costume, or you had an animal representing your pet or something. That was okay.

Yeah.

But dear God, that game, like all of the ways that he had players constantly trying to outdo each other. It got antagonistic. I also made some of my best friends of my life in that game because we, we shared that strife.

I apparently have had way better GMs over my years than you two because I only can think of one person and it was a scheduled conflict thing. There were 4 or 5 of us in the game, um, plus the GM and the 2 or 3 people who had all the free time would do stuff outside of the sessions.

Mm-hmm.

And got rewarded for stuff they did outside the sessions. And the others, we came together and we said, hey, we don't have that sort of time. We're being penalized because we can't go have lunch with you for 4 hours on a Thursday and basically get an impromptu session, right? Where you got rewarded some sort of, not just an area, not necessarily experience points, but some sort of in-game tangible thing. Um, we're not playing an MMO. Right. Yeah. We're all supposed to be there. And that it was interesting to see the reaction from the players that were benefiting and the GM, because they didn't realize that that was a bad thing necessarily. And it became really down to having some good conversations about what the expectations were for the players. Now, had they been more transparent about it or whatever, totally could have been differently taken. I've heard of groups where if you write fan fiction for your game, you get experience points per word. Right. You know, you're like, oh my God, I could write. Oh yeah. I'm going to be 30th level tomorrow. You know, it's like no problem. Right. Um, so it, it, it can get, it can get dark. And I'm, I'm really thankful for some of the experiences that I've had.

So. I've had players that I probably could have awarded per word XP for their unrequested amazing journal entries that they gave me. Players that just surprised the fuck out of me with their dedication to it. And in fact, this is— I will have a personal moment here where we're talking about shitty GMs. I, I wish to apologize. JP, if you were listening back in the day, I was an awful player and I thought you were one of the worst GMs I ever had. And in hindsight, you were one of the best. You changed fundamentally the way that I look at gaming and storytelling and role-playing. No matter how hard I fought against it, you changed it. And I thank you for that. You're not listening. I know, but yep. He did XP based on role-playing and stuff. And I was so, I was so taken with 3rd Ed, which had just come out. that it warped my perceptions. It took me away from a style of gaming, which I have come back to. And he, he, he, he pushed against it and I pushed back and sorry, dude.

I came, like, I became an adult role-playing during a time when blue booking was popular. For those of you who do not know what blue booking is, back in college, you could actually walk into the college bookstore. There was Literally stacks upon stacks upon stacks of these blue, very, very thin stapled together notebooks. They were parts of the ways college did— colleges did assignments at the time. They were dirt cheap. You could usually find them for free half the time. And a lot of games I was in, between sessions, people would do that. It would write out things about what had happened and stuff and throw it to the GM and would get experience on that.

Yeah.

I've always been a huge proponent of things like that. First of all, it helps me get more player hooks. Second of all, it gets— allows people to continue to engage in the game. Third of all, it's a great just developing yourself as a person thing that you can sneak into a game because people are practicing writing and that's a skill everyone needs to practice.

Yeah.

And going on to some of the other things we mentioned, I make no bones about it. If you are the person who's constantly doing the note keeping for a group, uh, you're getting extra XP. I've just—

Holding it out like dollars.

I will be—

yeah, it—

I, uh, you are a stripper and I got singles for you.

Exactly. Um, yeah, yeah. Um, those naughty, naughty session reports.

And I've seen it extend to other things that I am not opposed to and have done myself a time or two. I had a gaming group where whoever picked up the pizza that we all shared got a little extra something-something XP-wise that night because we were all making the one night a week we could work— we could make work, and people's schedules were always kind of topsy-turvy on that. So We'd quick exchange text messages and whoever could swing by Lee's Pizza to grab 2 large Lee's pepperonis was getting an extra, I think at that point in time, oh yeah, we were playing Palladium. So it was, I think we had it as extra 100 XP per session if you were the pizza delivery boy that night.

Yeah, 100 XP rounds out to what we would pay for somebody bringing Gondolier's Pizza over. Yeah.

Yep.

So, um, speaking, we were talking about rewards outside of XP. And one of the things one of my groups has been doing is we have a list of those, those types of roles. Who tracks initiative on the dry erase board? Who is the note taker? Who's the quartermaster? And they become roles so that not one person gets stuck with them. And there's an in-game benefit for being that person. And it's actually really kind of cool. It's a little bit meta. But it helps spread that, that workout. And you also feel like you're getting, you're contributing to the group and you're getting a reward for that contribution.

We should make that a whole episode. The concept of player table roles, because that's something I could talk about for a long time.

Going back to the old, old days.

Okay. We are now over an hour.

So I'm glad it was only going to be a 20-minute conversation about experience points.

Honestly, I think we have indirectly answered most of his questions. So hopefully this has been a very, uh, educational, enlightening, and maybe even entertaining discussion on how we do XP. Let's do a quick round about the table though. Current favorite XP system. Start with Jacob.

Oh, simple. Do away with levels and go to skill-based progression as your only system. There you go. End of story. It's the best. I, it's a hill I'm willing to die on.

Yeah.

For me, It comes down to what, what does the table want? Do they want straight up points? They want a point-based system? I've seen both be awesome, but really it impacts on how the table does the game. And I want, and this is a cop-out answer, but, um, I personally prefer a point-based system of some kind. Um, but I've seen both games work so awesome because the players are into it and that's what they're shooting for. Yeah.

Currently, my 2 favorite XP systems are very similar. The one, the game that I played for, I know I've played Palladium for many years, but the game I think I know better than Palladium would be Shadowrun 1st through 4th edition. And the karma system to me was chef's kiss. It was perfection. And I think now that I am so enamored with this, you, you, you learn by doing approach to skill-based individual skills raising as you use them.

Yeah.

It's neck and neck, but I think the, I think the, the do to improve is winning out. Yeah. In fact, I've converted Palladium to it.

I think this actually puts a seed for a future conversation. How much of what we get out of video games these days fill the need for that point-based that we see with experience tables and such. And how has—

New achievement!

Right.

That kind of stuff. The dopamine hits.

Yeah.

As someone who literally just within the last week spent 3 hours crafting metal foundations because it was the fastest way to get 5 more levels on my ARK character.

Well, that could be a much longer discussion, but I think we should at least leave this part in. And that is to say that I remember in my youth playing, again, this is when we would crank out dozens of characters a week, hundreds a month, and playing and almost never level anyone. And it was fine.

Right.

We didn't care. We played to do cool shit and to have fun and to hang out with each other. But now if I were to propose that to a group of players, I think they'd They'd grab their pitchforks and hang me in a gibbet outside of town. Like it's so anathema to the way that a lot of people play now. They need those dopamine hits. This is old man me ranting right now.

For me, it's what I want from that session or that game or that group. When I go to, when I go to conventions, it's a one-off. I'm going to be awesome in the one-off and then I'm never going to think about it again.

Yeah.

In my weekly game, I want a story to continue. I don't really necessarily care that my character is getting better and better and better. I want the story to keep going. And, and what's gonna happen? What's beyond the next hill? What's through the next door? What's the next cool thing we're gonna do and see? And oh, you went up a level. Okay, cool. Next.

I'm playing in the Rifts game that, uh, Kyle is running for us right now, and I don't give a fuck about XP. I just want to do cool shit and be a cat. It's great.

That, that also opens up a potential further future topic, uh, the evolution of a gamer.

Uh, yeah, you know, we need to get some people of different generations on to join us for that discussion because I think our views are very skewed.

Right.

So let's close this one out for now and leave the table open for discussion of the things that we have talked about because I think we've got more than one splinter episode With its roots in this discussion.

And, uh, if, uh, Beat Magnet, if we didn't address all your questions, blame MTC.

MTC.

I mean, it's always easy to blame the NPCs, you know?

Um, and, you know, tell us what we didn't answer and we'll, maybe we'll come back to it again.

As an NPC, I'm used to not leveling up.

That's right.

So let's close this out. If you haven't figured out, I'm NPC.

I'm Just Jacob.

And I'm Matt.

And we wish to invite you, if you have not already, please drop by our Discord and you can ask us these deep, thought-provoking questions. And if you post them in like 20-line questions, we'll probably devote an entire episode to them like we have this one, which is not to encourage everybody to start spacing out their posts in 20 lines because that could get annoying. But, um, okay. At least for the next week, I will allow it. Uh, but yes, please drop by our Discord. Say hello, ask questions, join the conversation. Just keep in mind, we do manually approve everybody until I figure out a way to automate it that I don't have to pay for that doesn't suck. Then it's still manual approval. And I was just thinking, actually, I was just thinking maybe I should just drop that. Maybe I should just approve everyone and then Within 3 days of that mental discussion with myself, 3 of the other servers I am on just got hit with a flood of spam bots for, uh, what do you call it? For Bitcoin, Bitcoin spammers. So I was like, nope, not doing it. So sorry, folks, you do still have to say hello, but we try to be pretty quick with approval and then you can join in the conversation. And we look forward to talking to you. Thanks for listening.

But how many XP, XP do I get for this session?

Tell you what, I will start awarding XP for each new user that you validate.

Awesome.

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Have a good one.

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