Game Design 101: Experience Points

What Role Do Experience Points Play In An RPG?

Experience points (XP) exist to provide a method of character advancement. That's really just another way of saying a way to reward players and to give them the feeling their characters are alive because they can change and grow in response to their experiences.

So the first, and obvious, use of XP is to give the player's a reward and to show that the game world is not static, that their character's have a reward motivation for doing what they do, and to let the player's feel like they are getting somewhere. Character's progress in ability, perhaps from neophytes capable of only the most basic and simple operations to hardened professionals (or feudal lords and mighty wizards, depending upon the genre).

Less obvious, but no less important (and moreso to the GM), is the notion that a system integrating experience points progresses the game world. Not only do the character's grow in capability, but the game world adapts to that change by constantly providing them with 'just right!' challenges that match their level of power. In a spy game, this would take the form of new agents becoming experienced and then eventually creme-de-la-creme '00' agents with a license not only to kill, but to engage in massive, thrilling, over the top spy-thriller action.

But how necessary are XP? Are they a needed mechanic? How do we best implement them?

A lot depends on the sort of game system you play under. Some are very granular and have skills that go up regularly by very small amounts but have no levels (or do have levels but the skills still operate in a similar fashion). Some are less granular and have skills but increases are fewer and further between. Some have levels and levels bring skill gains, feats, new aspects, class advancements, you name it!

Experience points aren't necessary for short story arc games with a very limited number of playing sessions. In longer campaigns, it is almost a certainty that the game will benefit from characters who can grow and change. How you implement XP best would relate to the particular mechanics of your game system, but here are some general thoughts that you might consider...

• Tracking XP towards skill advancement or level advancement can be a simple thing with one broad award for a game sessions result which was arrived at fairly simply or can boil down to painstaking calculation of XP returns from each adventure goal, class action, item of treasure, etc. throughout the session. In the intensive form, there is often a task in partitioning off awards for each character and a lot of bookkeeping.
• XP can be determined in a very granular fashion with intense attention to what exactly and precisely was done or much more generally in terms of how the story progressed. You can guess which method is faster.
• XP can also be determined in a narrative-driven fashion by deciding just how many sessions you want to have between each advancement, either as a function of a pre-conceived advancement rate (for example 4 sessions per level in a level dependent game) or based on how many sessions you wish an entire campaign arc to fit in (50 weekly sessions to get to level 15, so 3 sessions to a level). In skill dependent systems, this would translate to how many skill-specific XP you might want to award in a session.
• You can decide (if you are scheduling advancements) whether they are 'everyone up at once' or staggered (if one class might need more XP to level or if some player is clearly better than the others at the table for instance).
• Ultimately, my experience has been (as someone who calculated painstaking individual awards and then later just made arbitrary decisions on when to level people up) that the end results are about the same, the only difference is a big one in how much bookkeeping you do. If the players never see what the GM does exactly, they are honestly none the wiser.

I have found, in my experience, that just deciding on a progress rate (in a level based game) and levelling up characters either all together or one or two sessions apart (to reward good play or show that some classes are harder to level in) is just as effective and feels the same to the players as doing all the painstaking bookkeeping. What's more, they never need know you did this. Or you can just tell them, if they won't fuss.

In a skill based game, if you know you want character skills (looked at on a per-skill basis) to go up at a particular rate, the same logic applies. Award increases (or skill tallies, if you need to let the players see the progress between skill level gains) in accordance roughly with that schedule and player gameplay.

In the long run, by doing advancement in a somewhat arbitrary but considered fashion, you eliminate bookkeeping for the GM and players, the outcome feels good at the table, and you can significantly reduce the amount of column-inches in game rules covering XP awards. (Which is simpler: XP totals for each monster, each encounter, each class or alignment correct action, some of these pooled then divided out to players and some calculated per player... or just deciding when it is time for a player to advance?)

Conclusion

Your XP concept only really needs to exist insofar as it lets the players feel progress and growth in the characters and the players can grow to allow their challenges to grow bigger, building tension and cresendo as the campaign reaches its climactic moments. As long as the players feel their PCs are developing (and the developments are fair in proportion to player choices of class or actions at the table), then the mechanics (or lack thereof) of XP awards are largely irrelevant.

Advice: Go with the less pain option, spend the time on stories and characters in your game rather than accounting.