I mean there's very few ways not to gain XP in D&D. The primary mechanisms of the game are pointed at getting you XP.
Compare that to a game that wants you to roleplay for your XP, or wants you to end up in bad spots, or simply won't inherently give you XP for going down the rail that the GM has laid you, and I think you'll see a lot more actively going for it.
I mean, D&D hasn't really been the majority or games I've played in the last decade. This is a generally applicable thing. If XP requires people to go out of their way, they simply will... not get XP. If XP comes from following the story as it unfolds naturally, or from doing RP that already aligns with their character in normal scenes, people'll be happy to get some extra XP to buy up some skills. But if you give a party a dilemma like "you can either save this one character that matters to the plot or grab a bunch of treasure that gives you XP", nobody is really going to pick the second. The power gains are an incidental thing, they're not an *objective*.
A lot of games train you to think of xp as relatively passive, it just happens to build up and then you use it.
Heck even narrative games aren’t often super strict about bare minimums to be passively okay.
Part of what makes Blades fun is the troupe aspect to gang stuff meaning that both the hyper burst, risk taking pc who has to spend a bunch of sessions healing and the stable pace passive xp income pc are valid.
I mean there's very few ways not to gain XP in D&D. The primary mechanisms of the game are pointed at getting you XP.
Compare that to a game that wants you to roleplay for your XP, or wants you to end up in bad spots, or simply won't inherently give you XP for going down the rail that the GM has laid you, and I think you'll see a lot more actively going for it.
I mean, D&D hasn't really been the majority or games I've played in the last decade. This is a generally applicable thing. If XP requires people to go out of their way, they simply will... not get XP. If XP comes from following the story as it unfolds naturally, or from doing RP that already aligns with their character in normal scenes, people'll be happy to get some extra XP to buy up some skills. But if you give a party a dilemma like "you can either save this one character that matters to the plot or grab a bunch of treasure that gives you XP", nobody is really going to pick the second. The power gains are an incidental thing, they're not an *objective*.
Sure but that's a false equivalence.
What if you told them they could save one plot important character and gain XP or go get a bunch of treasure? What if you told them they could save one important character (gaining XP) or save a different important character (sans XP)?
Or what if you never gave them any power gains and kept making the situations they faced more difficult? What if the only way to gain XP was to sacrifice an important person?
To be clear, the situation as you have described it is a good one - a lot of folks would kill to play with people invested in their plots in that way. But it doesn't mean that they're not invested in XP, it just means that they're not more invested in XP than they are the plot itself, either because of the quality of the plot or because they don't feel as if they have to be invested in XP (or some combination of both).
I like that you can take a skill as a "regular guy" in Monster of the Week where if you get kidnapped, you get XP
Like in Buffy, when they save a normie, that character is more competent to help the Scoobie Gang in a later episode?
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
edited February 2023
Nah that's just a bystander
It's like an ability Xander takes as the designated normal guy
Monsterhearts has some similar stuff for the Mortal, their equivalent of the same - I believe their version is getting XP for poking your nose into supernatural affairs that you have no place in
I think it’d be neat to do, let’s say, a Viking themed game (could be anything), where levelling up is convincing someone else to join you. You gain their signature skill and increase a collective HP pool each time you get a new guy. The classic level draining undead is any enemy that can deal a killing blow.
A level 10 Fighter is literally ten dudes piling into the dungeon.
It's like an ability Xander takes as the designated normal guy
Monsterhearts has some similar stuff for the Mortal, their equivalent of the same - I believe their version is getting XP for poking your nose into supernatural affairs that you have no place in
Yeah, it's a way to encourage you to really play into the tropes present in that type of setting. It also gives you some degree of agency as a player in something that otherwise could be really annoying.
One thing I like about the Monster of the Week rulebook is how it embraces the tropes of the genre in a way where it also gives you the tools to use them to create stories. The sample mysteries it gives you will present an NPC and give them a personality, then say, "they're meant to be an impediment to your investigation," but that impediment might be that they're too eager to help and keep getting in your way, as opposed to how you'd normally think an impediment as, say, a corrupt sheriff trying to keep you from the truth. It's nothing groundbreaking, but in a more narrative focused game I appreciated the notice that you have multiple ways to present a challenge to overcome
I mean there's very few ways not to gain XP in D&D. The primary mechanisms of the game are pointed at getting you XP.
Compare that to a game that wants you to roleplay for your XP, or wants you to end up in bad spots, or simply won't inherently give you XP for going down the rail that the GM has laid you, and I think you'll see a lot more actively going for it.
I mean, D&D hasn't really been the majority or games I've played in the last decade. This is a generally applicable thing. If XP requires people to go out of their way, they simply will... not get XP. If XP comes from following the story as it unfolds naturally, or from doing RP that already aligns with their character in normal scenes, people'll be happy to get some extra XP to buy up some skills. But if you give a party a dilemma like "you can either save this one character that matters to the plot or grab a bunch of treasure that gives you XP", nobody is really going to pick the second. The power gains are an incidental thing, they're not an *objective*.
Sure but that's a false equivalence.
What if you told them they could save one plot important character and gain XP or go get a bunch of treasure? What if you told them they could save one important character (gaining XP) or save a different important character (sans XP)?
Or what if you never gave them any power gains and kept making the situations they faced more difficult? What if the only way to gain XP was to sacrifice an important person?
To be clear, the situation as you have described it is a good one - a lot of folks would kill to play with people invested in their plots in that way. But it doesn't mean that they're not invested in XP, it just means that they're not more invested in XP than they are the plot itself, either because of the quality of the plot or because they don't feel as if they have to be invested in XP (or some combination of both).
Or, to use a historical example: you're playing AD&D 1E, and find a Wand of Magic Missiles (it has ~90 charges, and can spend a charge to cast a 1d4+1 magic missile. It can do this twice a round.)
Would you rather keep the wand and get a token 4,000xp, or sell the wand for 35,000gp and 35,000xp?
(For a scale reference, 4K XP is level 1 Magic-User to almost level 3. 35K XP takes you straight from 4 to 6. A goblin is worth 13xp, an ogre is worth 185xp, and slaying the mortal form of Asmodeus will net you 70,965xp or a little more than twice your wand. If you fully loaded your literal pack mule from a dragon's hoard of gold pieces, that would net you 6,000xp.)
Or to use a newer story game, since this thread got me hooked on Fabula Ultima: would you invoke your bonds or traits to intentionally fail a check if that meant that you got a bennie that, when spent, turned into 1xp at the end of the session? (You get 5xp automatically after each session, with 10xp meaning you level up.)
I know that this is IIRC taken from FATE, but it's a very distinct example of "do you choose to do the thing, or do you choose to intentionally fuck up for roleplay reasons because then you get a fate point?"
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I like that you can take a skill as a "regular guy" in Monster of the Week where if you get kidnapped, you get XP
Like in Buffy, when they save a normie, that character is more competent to help the Scoobie Gang in a later episode?
Yeah. It incentivizes playing the Xander/Cordelia character who has no special powers and often one of their primary contributions to the plot is getting kidnapped, but occasionally they get to do something super cool or punch above their weight.
True unlimited power is the No Dice, No Masters system that Dreams Askew and related games use. In that system everyone picks a bit of the world (the digital realm, the psychic maelstrom, the scarcities, the earth itself) and plays a character (the arrival, the iris, the hawker) at the same time, and you trade chips back and forth to succeed and fail.
So the new One D&D playtest packet makes it so that Paladins can only smite only once per turn in exchange for letting them smite with any weapon, including their fists.
So the new One D&D playtest packet makes it so that Paladins can only smite only once per turn in exchange for letting them smite with any weapon, including their fists.
Smiting with fists? We all know the soundtrack for that, don't we?
True unlimited power is the No Dice, No Masters system that Dreams Askew and related games use. In that system everyone picks a bit of the world (the digital realm, the psychic maelstrom, the scarcities, the earth itself) and plays a character (the arrival, the iris, the hawker) at the same time, and you trade chips back and forth to succeed and fail.
When I've ran games I just give XP in terms of level fractions. Look, I don't really give a shit about adding up XP from enemies.
We did something like minor to moderate, 1/4 a level. Mid range importance or spectacle or whatever 1/2. The climax of a story or a dungeon, 1 level. Then bonuses based on individual performance or roleplaying.
I am in the business of saving lives.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
In other news, I'm very excited to see what MCDM comes up with in regards to their RPG. Sounds like they'll be kickstarter ready sometime this year. I've really enjoyed the Beastheart class for 5e so far.
So the new One D&D playtest packet makes it so that Paladins can only smite only once per turn in exchange for letting them smite with any weapon, including their fists.
and ranged weapons, as well, which should allow some fun builds
In other news, I'm very excited to see what MCDM comes up with in regards to their RPG. Sounds like they'll be kickstarter ready sometime this year. I've really enjoyed the Beastheart class for 5e so far.
Given that he mentions a heavy emphasis on movement and forced movement and that he was running a D&D 4E game last year, I'm gonna go ahead and bet that this will be fairly strongly influenced by 4E. Plus his new 5E book Flee Mortals looks heavily 4E-inspired. If so my interest will be piqued.
EDIT: I noticed that the image brought up when he says "nonsense from the seventies" is the adventuring gear table from thr 5E PHB. Kind of curious what his specific bone to pick with that is.
Hexmage-PA on
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
In other news, I'm very excited to see what MCDM comes up with in regards to their RPG. Sounds like they'll be kickstarter ready sometime this year. I've really enjoyed the Beastheart class for 5e so far.
Given that he mentions a heavy emphasis on movement and forced movement and that he was running a D&D 4E game last year, I'm gonna go ahead and bet that this will be fairly strongly influenced by 4E. Plus his new 5E book Flee Mortals looks heavily 4E-inspired. If so my interest will be piqued.
EDIT: I noticed that the image brought up when he says "nonsense from the seventies" is the adventuring gear table from thr 5E PHB. Kind of curious what his specific bone to pick with that is.
I assume the fact that it's completely irrelevant to 99% of D&D groups. No one is tracking pitons, and even if they do decide to track equipment like that the economy of D&D renders the costs on those tables irrelevant.
In other news, I'm very excited to see what MCDM comes up with in regards to their RPG. Sounds like they'll be kickstarter ready sometime this year. I've really enjoyed the Beastheart class for 5e so far.
Given that he mentions a heavy emphasis on movement and forced movement and that he was running a D&D 4E game last year, I'm gonna go ahead and bet that this will be fairly strongly influenced by 4E. Plus his new 5E book Flee Mortals looks heavily 4E-inspired. If so my interest will be piqued.
EDIT: I noticed that the image brought up when he says "nonsense from the seventies" is the adventuring gear table from thr 5E PHB. Kind of curious what his specific bone to pick with that is.
its a reference to another video of his. Admanb basically has the point of it. In the video he suggests that the reason charts like that(which has very little meaning regarding the kinds of games most people play nowadays) still appear in 5th edition books is because its something of a shibboleth for older fans. It "proves" that this edition is still dnd even if practically no one has any real use for this chart after character creation.
I'm extremely jazzed for the MCDM game. It sounds like exactly what I want out of a tactical RPG. Yes please give me a reason to care about which weapon I pick.
Monster of the Week is one of those systems where I'd like to play it because I like a lot of what it's doing, but realistically the only way it'll hit the table is if I run it myself, and I'm not terribly well-versed in the genre. I do like how leveling up works in the game, in that you hit like, 5xp and then check a box that can be like...a stat upgrade, or "your character now has a library," and once you level up five times you could check a box that's like "the next mission has to be me hunting down the monster that killed my wife, GM" or "my character retires"
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited February 2023
5E has a small mountain of rules and charts they could delete from the PHB, replaced with nothing or a far simpler system (DW-style adventuring gear with X users) and then bury somewhere in the DMG for weirdos and perverts who still want to pretend D&D is a simulationist RPG.
But they spent way too much money hiring a rapist and an fascist to not put in charts no one’s looked at in 20 years.
I mean there's very few ways not to gain XP in D&D. The primary mechanisms of the game are pointed at getting you XP.
Compare that to a game that wants you to roleplay for your XP, or wants you to end up in bad spots, or simply won't inherently give you XP for going down the rail that the GM has laid you, and I think you'll see a lot more actively going for it.
I mean, D&D hasn't really been the majority or games I've played in the last decade. This is a generally applicable thing. If XP requires people to go out of their way, they simply will... not get XP. If XP comes from following the story as it unfolds naturally, or from doing RP that already aligns with their character in normal scenes, people'll be happy to get some extra XP to buy up some skills. But if you give a party a dilemma like "you can either save this one character that matters to the plot or grab a bunch of treasure that gives you XP", nobody is really going to pick the second. The power gains are an incidental thing, they're not an *objective*.
Sure but that's a false equivalence.
What if you told them they could save one plot important character and gain XP or go get a bunch of treasure? What if you told them they could save one important character (gaining XP) or save a different important character (sans XP)?
Or what if you never gave them any power gains and kept making the situations they faced more difficult? What if the only way to gain XP was to sacrifice an important person?
To be clear, the situation as you have described it is a good one - a lot of folks would kill to play with people invested in their plots in that way. But it doesn't mean that they're not invested in XP, it just means that they're not more invested in XP than they are the plot itself, either because of the quality of the plot or because they don't feel as if they have to be invested in XP (or some combination of both).
I mean, we were discussing specifically about using XP to motivate players to do things.
I was pointing out that XP doesn't motivate players all that much in my experience. If you give it for doing stuff they wanted to do already, they will happily take it. But if there's ever a choice between More XP or Stuff They Wanted To Do, option B is going to win every time. There might be some grousing at having to skip the XP, but it will basically never be enough of a factor to actually tip the scales. In your hypothetical, chances are they would agonize a bit and go for whichever character they like better in the end, for example (or, more likely in my most regular group, try to find some way to save both, these people are not fans of just accepting the trolley problem as inescapable).
Heck, the normal thing seems to be that they forget to take it even when it DOES align with what they're doing. Running The One Ring I'm the only person in the game that actually remembers to tell people to mark XP for doing stuff. And since I'm running everything else too, I'm pretty sure my players have less XP than they should have simply because I forgot it while running.
Creating meaningful rewards was a running issue in my Dungeon World campaign, which is something I hope to make easier in the new system I'm building.
The setting for my RPG is a broken ringworld where humanity has been thrown into a technological dark age. Advanced weapons, armor and artifacts are thus as rare and expensive as magical items in traditional fantasy settings. Since there are no true spellcasters in the world, what would be utility spells in a fantasy setting can only be achieved through items. The closest type of characters the setting has to wizards are able to cobble together temporary versions of these items, essentially giving them a sci-fi equivalent to a spellbook and spell slots. If you need to be able to fly, either find and buy an expensive set of jetpacks, or have your tinkerer learn to make scrap jetpacks. Higher quality items might require rare schematics to make, and the highest quality ones are impossible to craft.
As for combat, both permanent upgrades in terms of weapons and armor and consumable items like special ammo and grenades will let players invest money to make themselves stronger. I'm considering adding what would almost be a kind of multiclassing through items, by creating limited use weapons and items that mimic an ability or attack from a class but using a different main stat.
Finally there's ships. However rich the players get, there's basically no limit to the amount of cash that can be spent buying bigger ships, upgrading them to improve their base stats and adding new weapons and abilities.
None of that is too far off what you'd see in something like DnD and I'm intimitated by the challenge of getting an even vaguely balanced economy, but I think there's potential. One thing I like is that you can easily use environmental challenges to create story hooks and payoffs. If the group wants to go on an adventure that promises a lot of fighting in microgravity, they'd better have some decent jetpacks. That might involve doing missions for the local tech warlord to get them as a reward, a scavenging mission to find blueprints for the group's tinkerer, or if the group has saved up enough money they might just be able to buy them outright. The most lucrative scavenging can be found in the cold and dark region known as Night, and the technology required to handle its intense darkness, cold and vacuum might require an entire campaign to gather.
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
well, Derek's Party attacked a boat and killed everyone on it. they were bad guys, but seeing as there's nobody alive to interrogate, kinda gonna seem like we murdered a ship full of sailors and stole all their stuff.
the DM is a good DM but he's one of those guys who, when everybody is getting real into an RP, pops in to say "oh no you don't." so he wouldn't let us, the Party with 4 experienced sailors, take control of a ship out in open water.
luckily, they had cannons and an ample supply of black powder in the hold. so the rest of the party dropped a lifeboat and rowed a bit away, I had our halfling mage Shatter the hull, leaving a big hole, and I grabbed him, spun around and spit a line of fire at the stocks of black powder and jumped out the hole, the black powder ignited just in time to propel us forward for a kickass escape.
thus any evidence sank to the briny deep and we got to watch a ship burn, which is a view I would recommend to anybody.
we thought it best to flee Baldur's Gate after this, so we headed to Beregost, where Derek immediately peeled off to get drunk and seduce a lady at the bar with a crit persuade on "hey girl, I saw you lookin' around. you lookin' for somethin' tall, dark, and scaly? I might even have compatible genitalia!" fade to black
I haven't decided if Derek has a cloaca, and I know it's gonna come up, because we're that kind of gaming group.
I’m going to run half a damn campaign based on a single 5line monster entry that follows none of the rules and I just keep throwing twists on the core frame.
Latest twist: they eat air supplies. Their first attack at living creatures is to grapple, if they succeed they eat a random amount of minutes off of that targets air bubble. Like with a crazy mechanized predator style face. If they fail the first attack they just follow up with a d6 bludgeoning attack.
The players have now turned off the system that produced that version
So now the weirder shit can come out of this moon base and not get beat up by those robots. Now I just have to think of other weird attacks and abilities to give the base model.
I'm extremely jazzed for the MCDM game. It sounds like exactly what I want out of a tactical RPG. Yes please give me a reason to care about which weapon I pick.
well, Derek's Party attacked a boat and killed everyone on it. they were bad guys, but seeing as there's nobody alive to interrogate, kinda gonna seem like we murdered a ship full of sailors and stole all their stuff.
the DM is a good DM but he's one of those guys who, when everybody is getting real into an RP, pops in to say "oh no you don't." so he wouldn't let us, the Party with 4 experienced sailors, take control of a ship out in open water.
luckily, they had cannons and an ample supply of black powder in the hold. so the rest of the party dropped a lifeboat and rowed a bit away, I had our halfling mage Shatter the hull, leaving a big hole, and I grabbed him, spun around and spit a line of fire at the stocks of black powder and jumped out the hole, the black powder ignited just in time to propel us forward for a kickass escape.
thus any evidence sank to the briny deep and we got to watch a ship burn, which is a view I would recommend to anybody.
we thought it best to flee Baldur's Gate after this, so we headed to Beregost, where Derek immediately peeled off to get drunk and seduce a lady at the bar with a crit persuade on "hey girl, I saw you lookin' around. you lookin' for somethin' tall, dark, and scaly? I might even have compatible genitalia!" fade to black
I haven't decided if Derek has a cloaca, and I know it's gonna come up, because we're that kind of gaming group.
Oh he most definitely has a cloaca, all lizards do.
Monster of the Week is one of those systems where I'd like to play it because I like a lot of what it's doing, but realistically the only way it'll hit the table is if I run it myself, and I'm not terribly well-versed in the genre. I do like how leveling up works in the game, in that you hit like, 5xp and then check a box that can be like...a stat upgrade, or "your character now has a library," and once you level up five times you could check a box that's like "the next mission has to be me hunting down the monster that killed my wife, GM" or "my character retires"
My only experience was watching all of Fringe, once, and I think I did ok. It definitely cribs the most from Supernatural and Buffy, and the next-most from X-Files, but Fringe is workable. And my game wasn't even Fringe-y anyways. My players were various faculty, staff, and students from a fictional second-rate university in our actual city.
well, Derek's Party attacked a boat and killed everyone on it. they were bad guys, but seeing as there's nobody alive to interrogate, kinda gonna seem like we murdered a ship full of sailors and stole all their stuff.
the DM is a good DM but he's one of those guys who, when everybody is getting real into an RP, pops in to say "oh no you don't." so he wouldn't let us, the Party with 4 experienced sailors, take control of a ship out in open water.
luckily, they had cannons and an ample supply of black powder in the hold. so the rest of the party dropped a lifeboat and rowed a bit away, I had our halfling mage Shatter the hull, leaving a big hole, and I grabbed him, spun around and spit a line of fire at the stocks of black powder and jumped out the hole, the black powder ignited just in time to propel us forward for a kickass escape.
thus any evidence sank to the briny deep and we got to watch a ship burn, which is a view I would recommend to anybody.
we thought it best to flee Baldur's Gate after this, so we headed to Beregost, where Derek immediately peeled off to get drunk and seduce a lady at the bar with a crit persuade on "hey girl, I saw you lookin' around. you lookin' for somethin' tall, dark, and scaly? I might even have compatible genitalia!" fade to black
I haven't decided if Derek has a cloaca, and I know it's gonna come up, because we're that kind of gaming group.
Oh he most definitely has a cloaca, all lizards do.
The real question is if he has hemipenes or not.
You're not a true Bard until you're playing a shark.
I had a cool moment two sessions back in my 5e campaign. Traveling south through the desert, they learned of an adventurer who had been badly injured in a fight and drank a healing potion. He got obsessed with healing potions after this, and would spend all of his share of the loot buying them, and would drink one every night: it was implied that by the end he might have been stealing them from his party members, too. Eventually, he was killedin a battle, but he got right back up as a crazed healing-monster and murdered most of his party.
The players decided to track him down, as adventuring heroes are wont to do. Along the way they discovered that he kept exploding, leaving living chunks of his body regenerating and crawling away from the blast zone. They burned the small chunks and kept after what appeared to be the main chunk, eventually tracking our guy down. My plan for the fight was that the guy would have a chance to spread his healing curse, which would cause them to gain temporary hit points until they, themselves, exploded. Fun times.
However! The cool moment came when the cleric was like "I will heal this man," and strode right up to him, arms wide, promising the Goddess of Light's healing upon him. I explained that Lesser Restoration wasn't gonna do it, but the player wanted to go for it. So I looked up the rules for the cleric's Diving Intervention ability, pondered a moment, and said "you hear the voice of the goddess in your mind, asking a simple question: Do you trust me?"
The player, of course, trusted his deity, and I told the table "ok, here's how this is going. I'm gonna roll this in front of the screen. 14 or under and he's healed." Why 14? Because I had to pick a number quickly to keep the momentum going. I threw the die, it came up like a 9 or something, and now the healed man is a devoted disciple of the cleric, spreading the word to everyone they meet.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I'm extremely jazzed for the MCDM game. It sounds like exactly what I want out of a tactical RPG. Yes please give me a reason to care about which weapon I pick.
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5E is that clown at the doctor’s joke but it ends with:
“Ask your DM.”
“But doctor, I am the DM!”
I mean, D&D hasn't really been the majority or games I've played in the last decade. This is a generally applicable thing. If XP requires people to go out of their way, they simply will... not get XP. If XP comes from following the story as it unfolds naturally, or from doing RP that already aligns with their character in normal scenes, people'll be happy to get some extra XP to buy up some skills. But if you give a party a dilemma like "you can either save this one character that matters to the plot or grab a bunch of treasure that gives you XP", nobody is really going to pick the second. The power gains are an incidental thing, they're not an *objective*.
Oh my god.
Stealing this. My friends will laugh their asses off.
Heck even narrative games aren’t often super strict about bare minimums to be passively okay.
Part of what makes Blades fun is the troupe aspect to gang stuff meaning that both the hyper burst, risk taking pc who has to spend a bunch of sessions healing and the stable pace passive xp income pc are valid.
So close! It’s by getting wrecked!
Whenever you’re reduced to 0 blood (HP in a more Blades sense), you get wrecked. You’re downed. It’s very harrowing.
Next you roll on a big table of severed limbs and getting your eye poked out.
Then you level up and get right back to fighting, stronger than before.
The snag is you add +1 every time you get wrecked, and the deeper you go on the table, the more likely you are to outright die.
Honestly, the game is full of dumb stuff. It’s not good, per say. I think it works by having so many dumb ideas it looks confident.
Sure but that's a false equivalence.
What if you told them they could save one plot important character and gain XP or go get a bunch of treasure? What if you told them they could save one important character (gaining XP) or save a different important character (sans XP)?
Or what if you never gave them any power gains and kept making the situations they faced more difficult? What if the only way to gain XP was to sacrifice an important person?
To be clear, the situation as you have described it is a good one - a lot of folks would kill to play with people invested in their plots in that way. But it doesn't mean that they're not invested in XP, it just means that they're not more invested in XP than they are the plot itself, either because of the quality of the plot or because they don't feel as if they have to be invested in XP (or some combination of both).
Like in Buffy, when they save a normie, that character is more competent to help the Scoobie Gang in a later episode?
It's like an ability Xander takes as the designated normal guy
Monsterhearts has some similar stuff for the Mortal, their equivalent of the same - I believe their version is getting XP for poking your nose into supernatural affairs that you have no place in
A level 10 Fighter is literally ten dudes piling into the dungeon.
Yeah, it's a way to encourage you to really play into the tropes present in that type of setting. It also gives you some degree of agency as a player in something that otherwise could be really annoying.
One thing I like about the Monster of the Week rulebook is how it embraces the tropes of the genre in a way where it also gives you the tools to use them to create stories. The sample mysteries it gives you will present an NPC and give them a personality, then say, "they're meant to be an impediment to your investigation," but that impediment might be that they're too eager to help and keep getting in your way, as opposed to how you'd normally think an impediment as, say, a corrupt sheriff trying to keep you from the truth. It's nothing groundbreaking, but in a more narrative focused game I appreciated the notice that you have multiple ways to present a challenge to overcome
Or, to use a historical example: you're playing AD&D 1E, and find a Wand of Magic Missiles (it has ~90 charges, and can spend a charge to cast a 1d4+1 magic missile. It can do this twice a round.)
Would you rather keep the wand and get a token 4,000xp, or sell the wand for 35,000gp and 35,000xp?
(For a scale reference, 4K XP is level 1 Magic-User to almost level 3. 35K XP takes you straight from 4 to 6. A goblin is worth 13xp, an ogre is worth 185xp, and slaying the mortal form of Asmodeus will net you 70,965xp or a little more than twice your wand. If you fully loaded your literal pack mule from a dragon's hoard of gold pieces, that would net you 6,000xp.)
Or to use a newer story game, since this thread got me hooked on Fabula Ultima: would you invoke your bonds or traits to intentionally fail a check if that meant that you got a bennie that, when spent, turned into 1xp at the end of the session? (You get 5xp automatically after each session, with 10xp meaning you level up.)
I know that this is IIRC taken from FATE, but it's a very distinct example of "do you choose to do the thing, or do you choose to intentionally fuck up for roleplay reasons because then you get a fate point?"
Yeah. It incentivizes playing the Xander/Cordelia character who has no special powers and often one of their primary contributions to the plot is getting kidnapped, but occasionally they get to do something super cool or punch above their weight.
I’m not ready though. It is too strong.
Except for spellcasters who can get that feat that lets them cast spells as OAs.
Smiting with fists? We all know the soundtrack for that, don't we?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I'd play some NDNM...
We did something like minor to moderate, 1/4 a level. Mid range importance or spectacle or whatever 1/2. The climax of a story or a dungeon, 1 level. Then bonuses based on individual performance or roleplaying.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
and ranged weapons, as well, which should allow some fun builds
Given that he mentions a heavy emphasis on movement and forced movement and that he was running a D&D 4E game last year, I'm gonna go ahead and bet that this will be fairly strongly influenced by 4E. Plus his new 5E book Flee Mortals looks heavily 4E-inspired. If so my interest will be piqued.
EDIT: I noticed that the image brought up when he says "nonsense from the seventies" is the adventuring gear table from thr 5E PHB. Kind of curious what his specific bone to pick with that is.
I assume the fact that it's completely irrelevant to 99% of D&D groups. No one is tracking pitons, and even if they do decide to track equipment like that the economy of D&D renders the costs on those tables irrelevant.
its a reference to another video of his. Admanb basically has the point of it. In the video he suggests that the reason charts like that(which has very little meaning regarding the kinds of games most people play nowadays) still appear in 5th edition books is because its something of a shibboleth for older fans. It "proves" that this edition is still dnd even if practically no one has any real use for this chart after character creation.
But they spent way too much money hiring a rapist and an fascist to not put in charts no one’s looked at in 20 years.
I mean, we were discussing specifically about using XP to motivate players to do things.
I was pointing out that XP doesn't motivate players all that much in my experience. If you give it for doing stuff they wanted to do already, they will happily take it. But if there's ever a choice between More XP or Stuff They Wanted To Do, option B is going to win every time. There might be some grousing at having to skip the XP, but it will basically never be enough of a factor to actually tip the scales. In your hypothetical, chances are they would agonize a bit and go for whichever character they like better in the end, for example (or, more likely in my most regular group, try to find some way to save both, these people are not fans of just accepting the trolley problem as inescapable).
Heck, the normal thing seems to be that they forget to take it even when it DOES align with what they're doing. Running The One Ring I'm the only person in the game that actually remembers to tell people to mark XP for doing stuff. And since I'm running everything else too, I'm pretty sure my players have less XP than they should have simply because I forgot it while running.
The setting for my RPG is a broken ringworld where humanity has been thrown into a technological dark age. Advanced weapons, armor and artifacts are thus as rare and expensive as magical items in traditional fantasy settings. Since there are no true spellcasters in the world, what would be utility spells in a fantasy setting can only be achieved through items. The closest type of characters the setting has to wizards are able to cobble together temporary versions of these items, essentially giving them a sci-fi equivalent to a spellbook and spell slots. If you need to be able to fly, either find and buy an expensive set of jetpacks, or have your tinkerer learn to make scrap jetpacks. Higher quality items might require rare schematics to make, and the highest quality ones are impossible to craft.
As for combat, both permanent upgrades in terms of weapons and armor and consumable items like special ammo and grenades will let players invest money to make themselves stronger. I'm considering adding what would almost be a kind of multiclassing through items, by creating limited use weapons and items that mimic an ability or attack from a class but using a different main stat.
Finally there's ships. However rich the players get, there's basically no limit to the amount of cash that can be spent buying bigger ships, upgrading them to improve their base stats and adding new weapons and abilities.
None of that is too far off what you'd see in something like DnD and I'm intimitated by the challenge of getting an even vaguely balanced economy, but I think there's potential. One thing I like is that you can easily use environmental challenges to create story hooks and payoffs. If the group wants to go on an adventure that promises a lot of fighting in microgravity, they'd better have some decent jetpacks. That might involve doing missions for the local tech warlord to get them as a reward, a scavenging mission to find blueprints for the group's tinkerer, or if the group has saved up enough money they might just be able to buy them outright. The most lucrative scavenging can be found in the cold and dark region known as Night, and the technology required to handle its intense darkness, cold and vacuum might require an entire campaign to gather.
the DM is a good DM but he's one of those guys who, when everybody is getting real into an RP, pops in to say "oh no you don't." so he wouldn't let us, the Party with 4 experienced sailors, take control of a ship out in open water.
luckily, they had cannons and an ample supply of black powder in the hold. so the rest of the party dropped a lifeboat and rowed a bit away, I had our halfling mage Shatter the hull, leaving a big hole, and I grabbed him, spun around and spit a line of fire at the stocks of black powder and jumped out the hole, the black powder ignited just in time to propel us forward for a kickass escape.
thus any evidence sank to the briny deep and we got to watch a ship burn, which is a view I would recommend to anybody.
we thought it best to flee Baldur's Gate after this, so we headed to Beregost, where Derek immediately peeled off to get drunk and seduce a lady at the bar with a crit persuade on "hey girl, I saw you lookin' around. you lookin' for somethin' tall, dark, and scaly? I might even have compatible genitalia!" fade to black
I haven't decided if Derek has a cloaca, and I know it's gonna come up, because we're that kind of gaming group.
I’m going to run half a damn campaign based on a single 5line monster entry that follows none of the rules and I just keep throwing twists on the core frame.
Latest twist: they eat air supplies. Their first attack at living creatures is to grapple, if they succeed they eat a random amount of minutes off of that targets air bubble. Like with a crazy mechanized predator style face. If they fail the first attack they just follow up with a d6 bludgeoning attack.
The players have now turned off the system that produced that version
So now the weirder shit can come out of this moon base and not get beat up by those robots. Now I just have to think of other weird attacks and abilities to give the base model.
NGL, this post is a tiny bit concerning:
Does anyone know what kind of dice he's talking about? Is it like the dice that DCC RPG uses?
Oh he most definitely has a cloaca, all lizards do.
The real question is if he has hemipenes or not.
My only experience was watching all of Fringe, once, and I think I did ok. It definitely cribs the most from Supernatural and Buffy, and the next-most from X-Files, but Fringe is workable. And my game wasn't even Fringe-y anyways. My players were various faculty, staff, and students from a fictional second-rate university in our actual city.
The players decided to track him down, as adventuring heroes are wont to do. Along the way they discovered that he kept exploding, leaving living chunks of his body regenerating and crawling away from the blast zone. They burned the small chunks and kept after what appeared to be the main chunk, eventually tracking our guy down. My plan for the fight was that the guy would have a chance to spread his healing curse, which would cause them to gain temporary hit points until they, themselves, exploded. Fun times.
However! The cool moment came when the cleric was like "I will heal this man," and strode right up to him, arms wide, promising the Goddess of Light's healing upon him. I explained that Lesser Restoration wasn't gonna do it, but the player wanted to go for it. So I looked up the rules for the cleric's Diving Intervention ability, pondered a moment, and said "you hear the voice of the goddess in your mind, asking a simple question: Do you trust me?"
The player, of course, trusted his deity, and I told the table "ok, here's how this is going. I'm gonna roll this in front of the screen. 14 or under and he's healed." Why 14? Because I had to pick a number quickly to keep the momentum going. I threw the die, it came up like a 9 or something, and now the healed man is a devoted disciple of the cleric, spreading the word to everyone they meet.
I think they’re gonna be FFG-style custom dice.