Kill Your XP Rules

Surpise! Thought you saw the last of me?

I’m baaaaaack!

A while back, I told everyone to kill their combat rules. Today, I’m going to put another RPG staple on the chopping block: rules for experience points.

Experience points are generally the only way players have to develop their characters in a tangible way. Start out at level 1, and work to level 20. Start out with 0 XP and accumulate more to spend on different character abilities. Most RPG systems give XP for one or more of the following:

• Showing up
• Killing monsters
• Solving puzzles
• Being “in character”

The thing about XP is that players will do what they’re rewarded for. If they’re rewarded for killing monsters, they are going to devote time and resources to become better at it. If they’re rewarded for “being in character,” they’ll put their energy into that. I won’t say which one is better than the other (hint: whichever one you enjoy the most), but a consistent problem in most RPGs is that the things they want players to do are not the things players are rewarded for.

Most of us like roleplaying games for the chance to try on different identities and put ourselves in situations that we couldn’t or wouldn’t in real life (for good reason–I may want to tell stories about mafia hitmen, but I definitely don’t want to get to know one). If there’s some ass-kicking along the way, that’s good too. But most of us get into RPGs for characters and stories and settings. What happens if the system rewards things not crucial to your character? Well, then, you’re shit outta luck.

But there’s a way out.

I had the pleasure of joining a Star Wars game run by my friend Bankuei, a hack of The Shadow Of Yesterday.

One of my favorite features of this game is the Keys mechanic. If you’ve been following Deeper In The Game, you’ve probably read about Flags. In a nutshell, Flags are “game mechanics which explicit aspects of a character designed for players to tell the GM what kind of stories and conflicts they want for their characters.”

In our Star Wars game, Flags are called Keys. Keys define those things that mean the most to us. They can range from our obligations (Key of Duty) to our relationships (Key of Friendship) to our passions and ambitions (Key of the Dark Side).  Each of these Keys had specific in-character actions that granted 1, 3, 5, or 10 XP. The amount of XP each action got depended upon the magnitude of the action.

Here’s an example modified from the actual game rules:

Key of Friendship

• 1 XP: Help a friend
• 3 XP: Take a risk for a friend
• 5 XP: Sacrifice for a friend.
• 10 XP: Turn your back on your friend. Lose this Key and choose another.

If you want games where what makes a character tick means as much as or more than what they can do, you should use a similar mechanic. You can alter the amount of XP each action gets order to determine the rate of advancement. However, the system works best if you’re not stingy about XP. The idea is to reward players for showing what makes the characters tick, not force them to jump through hoops to move increments.

You also want to make enough Keys so that players have options, but not so many that they have no idea which Keys to pick. For our game, we used a limited number of Keys,more than 5 and less than 10. This a good idea for two reasons: 1) it helped us focus on the major themes and issues of Star Wars, and 2) it didn’t paralyze us with too many options.

Let me know what you tried in your game and how it worked.