- Mechanical incentive to adventure.
- Puts treasure collection over massacre.
- Gives the whole party a shared goal.
- Simplified bookkeeping.
As someone growing up in the era of widespread video games, I can’t help but wistfully desire a system that had a greater focus on actual skill development. I think that Chivalry & Sorcery takes a pretty good stride in this direction, but I also have zero hope of finding a group of live players willing to approach it. The trade-off for ‘realism’ is not worth it for a game like D&D. If pressed between the old-school method and the more modern system of encounter-by-encounter level advancement (either in terms of monster extermination or in terms of milestones), then I will pick the former every time. That said, I don’t like running the system on its own. While it does turn down the overall blood-lust of the party vs. a modern system, it doesn’t necessarily encourage role-playing so much as it does simple avoidance. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but one which I would think requires far more engaging stealth mechanics than D&D presents. So there are a few steps I like to take besides these.
Allied Treasure
Principle: When you befriend a faction in an adventuring site: Your party splits Experience equal to the full value of all treasure held by that faction at the time. No double-dipping!The meaning of this: Should the party get a few luck reaction checks and establish peaceful contact with one group in a dungeon (bandits, beast-men, a lone giant, etc.) then they may turn it into an opportunity for acquiring experience. For these purposes I define “befriending” as essentially one step further up the reaction scale than an initial “Friendly” disposition. In-game terms, this implicates that there still exists some task the party should accomplish to fully win the trust of their potential partner (and sometimes more than just the one). There is no benefit for double-dipping here. If the party already earned experience from treasure held by a monster in this manner, they won’t gain experience again. However, they will still gain the more tangible benefit of having the physical treasure in their possession, which they can potentially pawn of for the sake of training, research, carousing, or the simpler purpose of resupplying.
Thus a sort of trade-off persists here: The party could put the bandits they met on the first dungeon level to the sword, or they could form an alliance with them, expanding their influence of the first floor. The former means both the piddling experience awarded for defeating a group of monsters (or men) and a bit more gold for the party’s coffers, while the latter implicates a much lower present risk of harm in battle, and perhaps a lower future risk of travels through that area in the future. Overall, this serves as a method of encouraging role-playing, and helps to provide a form of meta-game reward for a different suite of player skills. Both of these I find entirely in tune with the old-school ethos. On a related note, if further amplifies the benefits of a high Charisma score at the lower levels, where avoiding combat is at its most critical, but the funds to pay off a henchmen or hirelings are at an all-time low.
Quests
Principle: Completing missions of note results in experience awards.This should be prefaced: Much like the rules for allied treasure, there is no double dipping here. If the king offers a reward of 5000 gold coins to bring the head of a dragon, that is the reward. Quest rewards are applied more for those situations where the circumstances are noteworthy, but the material reward is limited. The general scale that I use for quest experience is to treat it more or less as a monster, in terms of risk. Demogorgon, the highest ‘threat’ in AD&D, is weighted at a bit over 75,000 XP, which I suppose serves as good of a baseline as any as the ‘absolute highest’ (though the number would amount to 3750 XP in my home-game, which operates a bit closer to the silver-standard in terms of price modeling). I wouldn’t offer any awards less than 100 XP.
In practice: The party meets a young boy who lost his dog near an old ruin. The party is already going in there, but decides to keep an eye out, out of some strange sense of kindness. If the ruin in question is relatively barren, save perhaps a few rats and goblins (the dog being kept in a pen with the intention of being made into a meal), the reward would be an extra 100 XP for the party. Greater complications, such as a wizard being caught up in the affair, could potentially boost it up to 250. On the other hand, a more crazy quest (something like “G3”) could be closer to 10,000. The most ludicrous of tasks (and here I refer to the likes of H4) are where numbers of 50,000 or higher come into play.
Merit-Based Awards
Principle: Do things to gain experience.There are a few things that I do to give out experience, taking a bit of inspiration from Arduin in this regard. The general list of things I use, excluding spur-of-the-moment bonuses, is summed up as follows:
- Undergoing a resurrection, reincarnation, or similar trauma.
- Being the sole survivor of an expedition.
- Defeating a stronger opponent in single combat.
- Coming within a few points of dying.
- Leading a successful expedition.
- Taking up the point guard/rear guard position.
- Mapping the dungeon.
The numbers here aren’t very high – No more than some 500 XP as a bonus and as little as 50 XP. But those numbers can certainly add up over time, and mean something at lower levels. Unlike Hargrave, who apparently disliked treasure as a source of experience, I prefer not to award XP on the basis of individual actions: casting spells, disarming traps, etc. If you’re choosing to cast spells or disable a trap at all, then (in theory) you’re already doing for a tangible benefit of some other form. Instead, these rewards are for those things which already go ‘above and beyond’ the call of duty.
