NichG
2012-09-18, 02:27 AM
I had a weird thought about an alternative way of handling XP rewards in D&D that would in some sense allow the players more responsibility for determining their rate of advancement, and would explicitly avoid the "1-20 in a month" thing that can happen.
The idea is: you never gain XP for adventuring, overcoming challenges, etc. You only gain XP for extended periods of downtime spent practicing, studying, etc. There is one additional requirement, which is that you must maintain a sufficient lifestyle (mages need to buy books to read, fighters need to maintain their gear and pay for lessons, etc). This parameter determines to what degree money is going to motivate the campaign - it can be set high to be a wealth sink and to motivate adventuring, or it can be set low for a campaign that has more of a time-limited nature. It might be something like 100gp times your level^2 per interval, for example (it probably shouldn't be flat or linear due to WBL scaling in normal 3.5 D&D, but if you're running a low magic/low wealth campaign it could be).
The DM picks a time-scale appropriate to the campaign and a range of levels that the game will cover, and divides that time-scale by the number of levels in the range. The resultant number is the base amount of downtime needed to gain a level. This number should then be adjusted down by about 20-30% to account for downtimes spent on other things than training, periods where money and training won't be available, etc - the point is to give the PCs some freedom to choose the schedule of their advancement, after all.
So, now we have a time interval T - lets say for example that this is 3 months. Lets say we have a Lv10 character; he needs 10000xp to level up, so he gets that xp continuously over the course of the time interval, so he gets 10000/90 xp per day. An 11th level character would get 11000/90 xp per day, and so on.
Okay, so what's the point? This interacts with a non-status-quo world in an interesting fashion, in that the PCs can basically determine the difficulty of the game for themselves by taking more or less table time at a given level. If the PCs want to, they could sit down and level up 6 times before the next session, but then they'd be 6 levels down on WBL and out a few years of in-character time. Similarly, they could basically stay at a given level and amass excess wealth for that level if they felt the need. In a system like this, aging could actually matter depending on the timescale you pick.
There's also an interesting correction this makes from the point of view of magic item creation. Normally in D&D 3.5 if you have people selling magic items, you kind of have to handwave away where they're getting the xp (or you basically make some assumption like this one, that shopkeepers and item-crafting mages and the like get xp slowly over time for doing their job).
Furthermore, if you think about intentionally going out to get XP, in the normal system its far easier for a Lv5 wizard to make a magic item than for a Lv20 wizard to make the same item, in the sense that the Lv5 wizard has to go out and kill a troll or something, whereas the Lv20 wizard has to go out and kill some pit fiends. To them individually the challenge might be the same, but to an external observer its weird. With this system, the Lv20 wizard actually has an easier time of it than the Lv5 wizard (more xp per interval), which makes some sense. Of course you could also use fixed xp per interval, so Lv3 to Lv4 takes less time than Lv19 to Lv20.
It would be important though for the campaign to either be wealth-limited or time-limited, so that there is still some causal connection between going out and doing stuff and improving (in the wealth-limited case, its fuel for the leveling engine; in the time-limited case, you can't just sit and level up because the BBEG will win or something).
The idea is: you never gain XP for adventuring, overcoming challenges, etc. You only gain XP for extended periods of downtime spent practicing, studying, etc. There is one additional requirement, which is that you must maintain a sufficient lifestyle (mages need to buy books to read, fighters need to maintain their gear and pay for lessons, etc). This parameter determines to what degree money is going to motivate the campaign - it can be set high to be a wealth sink and to motivate adventuring, or it can be set low for a campaign that has more of a time-limited nature. It might be something like 100gp times your level^2 per interval, for example (it probably shouldn't be flat or linear due to WBL scaling in normal 3.5 D&D, but if you're running a low magic/low wealth campaign it could be).
The DM picks a time-scale appropriate to the campaign and a range of levels that the game will cover, and divides that time-scale by the number of levels in the range. The resultant number is the base amount of downtime needed to gain a level. This number should then be adjusted down by about 20-30% to account for downtimes spent on other things than training, periods where money and training won't be available, etc - the point is to give the PCs some freedom to choose the schedule of their advancement, after all.
So, now we have a time interval T - lets say for example that this is 3 months. Lets say we have a Lv10 character; he needs 10000xp to level up, so he gets that xp continuously over the course of the time interval, so he gets 10000/90 xp per day. An 11th level character would get 11000/90 xp per day, and so on.
Okay, so what's the point? This interacts with a non-status-quo world in an interesting fashion, in that the PCs can basically determine the difficulty of the game for themselves by taking more or less table time at a given level. If the PCs want to, they could sit down and level up 6 times before the next session, but then they'd be 6 levels down on WBL and out a few years of in-character time. Similarly, they could basically stay at a given level and amass excess wealth for that level if they felt the need. In a system like this, aging could actually matter depending on the timescale you pick.
There's also an interesting correction this makes from the point of view of magic item creation. Normally in D&D 3.5 if you have people selling magic items, you kind of have to handwave away where they're getting the xp (or you basically make some assumption like this one, that shopkeepers and item-crafting mages and the like get xp slowly over time for doing their job).
Furthermore, if you think about intentionally going out to get XP, in the normal system its far easier for a Lv5 wizard to make a magic item than for a Lv20 wizard to make the same item, in the sense that the Lv5 wizard has to go out and kill a troll or something, whereas the Lv20 wizard has to go out and kill some pit fiends. To them individually the challenge might be the same, but to an external observer its weird. With this system, the Lv20 wizard actually has an easier time of it than the Lv5 wizard (more xp per interval), which makes some sense. Of course you could also use fixed xp per interval, so Lv3 to Lv4 takes less time than Lv19 to Lv20.
It would be important though for the campaign to either be wealth-limited or time-limited, so that there is still some causal connection between going out and doing stuff and improving (in the wealth-limited case, its fuel for the leveling engine; in the time-limited case, you can't just sit and level up because the BBEG will win or something).