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SilverLeaf167
2014-03-19, 01:44 PM
Note: I'm specifically using D&D 3.5, but I'm quite sure the subject is applicable to most games in one way or another.

Have you ever tried to integrate experience points as an in-universe concept, one the characters are aware of, into a setting? How did it go?

Since in my D&D setting all souls come from an equivalent of the Astral Plane, and drawing power from the plane in different ways is quite common, I think the people of the world might also have a concept of "experience". Study, practice, everyday life and combat all strengthen one's soul's bond to that plane, making them noticeably more skilled, resilient and capable of more powerful magic.

They wouldn't think of it as "points", or be able to count them; they also wouldn't have a concept of feats, levels etc. They'd just realize that actual experience is indisputably the most straight-forward way of becoming better at pretty much anything, even in things that might not be directly related to that experience (like physical resilience). Most people wouldn't even know this much; they'd just live their lives as usual. Adventurin' life would hardly be affected, either, but there would be a new motivation for it.

What do you think? I think it might explain some verisimilitude problems (people really do become inhumanly tough, and get better at crafting by killing stuff) and add some interesting character traits. On the potential downside, it might encourage some metagaming (or at least quips) among the players.

Aedilred
2014-03-19, 03:06 PM
I've never tried it, nor felt the need to, but there could be ways to make it work, sure. If all creatures are possessed of some sort of arbitrary life force and that can be released into nearby creatures by killing them (like the Quickening in Highlander, although that was only Immortals) then it makes a sort of sense.

The question to ask yourself is: is this necessary? Is the arbitrary nature of XP a sufficient problem for you and your group that you require an in-universe explanation for it, or is it just a break with verisimilitude you can look the other way on?

SilverLeaf167
2014-03-19, 03:19 PM
I've never tried it, nor felt the need to, but there could be ways to make it work, sure. If all creatures are possessed of some sort of arbitrary life force and that can be released into nearby creatures by killing them (like the Quickening in Highlander, although that was only Immortals) then it makes a sort of sense.

The question to ask yourself is: is this necessary? Is the arbitrary nature of XP a sufficient problem for you and your group that you require an in-universe explanation for it, or is it just a break with verisimilitude you can look the other way on?
I considered the killing thing, but that would require actually altering the XP system and force the players to kill everything, which I don't want.

I don't think this is strictly necessary. The abstraction has never been a notable problem. I was just wondering whether it would in fact be an interesting addition to a setting. I definitely wouldn't mind it explaining the occasionally-odd progression of character power, either. :smalltongue:

Rhynn
2014-03-19, 03:28 PM
If you want to specifically build a setting and game around this sort of idea, a la Demon's Souls/Dark Souls, sure. Generally, though, these ideas ("in-character experience points") are pretty much universally unnecessary and bad. They're mostly not a solution to a problem, not very interesting, and often sort of silly or vidjagame-y.

JeenLeen
2014-03-19, 03:49 PM
We had a homebrew game where experience was explained by the world having ambient energy around it. You slowly collected this just by aging, and the harder you worked and/or the more danger you were in, the more quickly your body accumulated this energy.

Thus, adventurers level rather quickly, while a shopkeep might hit level 10 after several decades.

--

In World of Darkness Mage, most xp was not understood, but we decided we needed some IC rationale about how permanently increasing your stats via Life 3 (or Mind/Corr 5) hindered your growth in other ways. Nobody really understood it, but it was understood to give some IC reason not to spend favors to boost all our stats to the human maximum.

We also said that, for similar unclear reasons, we understood that collecting and using items of power (requiring buying the background (houserule that backgrounds cost xp)) hindered learning somehow.

--

For most games, though, we just handwave it and try not to let it bother us.

Anxe
2014-03-19, 04:55 PM
KOTOR 2 also worked that way. I kinda liked it, but that was a video game, not a real game. Can't say how it'd work in game. It might be horrifying if you're only getting stronger due to soul sucking your defeated foes. (It'd also give an explanation for why you lose a level on being raised from the dead.)

Jay R
2014-03-19, 05:34 PM
Back in the 1970s, I wrote up a system in which the Archetypes of Heroism existed, and people could align themselves to these archetypes. But like energy levels of electrons around atoms, they could only exist at certain quanta of energy. That's why you went up in levels - because there was no way to exist at halfway between level 5 and level 6.

GungHo
2014-03-20, 08:33 AM
I imagine roleplaying out Highlander's quickening for every goblin you behead would get really old after awhile.

Tengu_temp
2014-03-20, 08:46 AM
In Earthdawn, it's an in-world thing that legends have power, and as the legends and stories around you grow longer and more well-known, so does your strength. Coincidentally, it uses the term Legend Points for XP.

Joe the Rat
2014-03-20, 08:56 AM
I don't think you'd want to establish a quanta for it (be able to count the number of Experion particles in something's aura... it's over 9000!), and setting Experion Valences (levels) might be a little too tongue-in-cheek, but the idea of gaining power through experience, practice, and surviving trials does appear outside of gaming. Using said personal energy to infuse magic into things (D&D 3.5: Item crafting XP costs) comes up sometimes as well.

Levels in class-and-level systems can also be used to reflect proficiency (Rank) in your field. Train and demonstrate a level of prowess, advance to the next rank in your discipline. Like the Belt rank system used in some Martial Arts. This works best if training is required for level-up, or you'll need to be okay with being at X level of ability without being formally recognized as being at X level.


I imagine roleplaying out Highlander's quickening for every goblin you behead would get really old after awhile."There can be only one!" ...at least it's not Monty Python quotes. And sooner or later, the players will start eyeing each other.

Now, if you were actually playing a Highlander game...

Actana
2014-03-20, 08:58 AM
In my previous game (D&D 4e), whenever the players defeated a being of sufficient power they absorbed its soul, which effectively granted them a level. The source of the death didn't matter, as long as they were able to extract the soul from the body (souls were naturally drawn to the nearest subject because they couldn't pass to the afterlife at the time of the game).

The 5 PCs did have to divide the souls amongst themselves, so they didn't gain equal power that the original bearer had, only a fraction (ie gaining a level). In the end of the campaign they had the souls or around ten or twelve beings, half of which were the souls of the gods which they had been eliminating.

Experience points weren't really an in-game concept, but levels and the method of acquiring them were and I think it worked rather well.

erikun
2014-03-20, 12:43 PM
Faery's Tale Deluxe actually takes an interesting angle with this. Given that it is a sidhe/fae setting for the characters, it makes sense that the rewards characters get involve "favors" from NPCs and such. Characters can exchange these favors for permanent improvements for their character - basically, using them as XP for new skills or upgrading existing skills.

The system itself is very light and probably not what most people are looking for, but it's an interesting way of looking at "experience points".

Lorsa
2014-03-20, 06:27 PM
Back in the 1970s, I wrote up a system in which the Archetypes of Heroism existed, and people could align themselves to these archetypes. But like energy levels of electrons around atoms, they could only exist at certain quanta of energy. That's why you went up in levels - because there was no way to exist at halfway between level 5 and level 6.

Sounds fun! Was there also something in place where there could only be one person per archetype per level, to go with how there can only ever be one electron per energy level. Theoretically you could use male/female as spin so there can be one female and one male per level per archetype. :smallsmile:

NichG
2014-03-20, 11:24 PM
I've played a character in such a setting. Furthermore, in that setting, one could learn to pull out 'XP', invest it into things or transfer it to other people, bank it and earn interest, or even condense it into physical materials (it tended to form either a sort of fragile pale crystal or an extremely durable and much denser blue crystal).

One player opted to stay at Lv4 for most of the campaign in order to explore the magic of compound interest.

Incidentally, you could spend XP for all sorts of things, not just leveling or crafting; one such thing was that you could pay 1000xp to have a permanent portal made from a central hub location to 'anywhere you can describe', even places that did not exist until you purchased the portal. So in effect, 1000xp let you create a new plane of existence if you didn't mind the details getting genied by the portal maker.

The Oni
2014-03-21, 12:34 AM
Honestly, a system like this would explain the whole concept of people who are truly, utterly and unabashedly Evil with a capital E. Looks like the quickest way to Level 20 is murdering people by the townload? Well nothing personal guys...

NichG
2014-03-21, 12:44 AM
Honestly, a system like this would explain the whole concept of people who are truly, utterly and unabashedly Evil with a capital E. Looks like the quickest way to Level 20 is murdering people by the townload? Well nothing personal guys...

Even worse, the quickest way to Lv20 and beyond is to create a situation where heroes strive against great evils and grow more and more powerful... until you use a custom epic spell to steal their XP.

Aedilred
2014-03-21, 10:55 AM
Honestly, a system like this would explain the whole concept of people who are truly, utterly and unabashedly Evil with a capital E. Looks like the quickest way to Level 20 is murdering people by the townload? Well nothing personal guys...
On that note, anyone seen the detective show Luther? A slightly simplistic treatment of gaming, perhaps, but a not dissimilar idea. Although I don't think they believed they would actually get empirically more powerful as a result; they might just start using better weapons.

Jay R
2014-03-21, 02:00 PM
Sounds fun! Was there also something in place where there could only be one person per archetype per level, to go with how there can only ever be one electron per energy level. Theoretically you could use male/female as spin so there can be one female and one male per level per archetype. :smallsmile:

It wasn't that detailed. And there could certainly be more than one (or two) first-level Fighters. Presumably they can have the same experience level, just as two electrons around different atoms can have the same energy level.

In fact, it didn't affect the game at all. It was just an explanation for discrete experience levels of experience - why a fighter with 7,999 experience points had the same abilities as one with 4,000, but very different from one with 8,000.

In the same universe, I had a reason for the world being medievaloid, with monsters from lots of different cultures.

The world was like our Earth until 1066, when the light from the supernova in the Crab Nebula reached Earth. I posited that that light also brought the first manna to Earth, so magic started then. But it was raw, unharnessed magic. The first effects were that slowly, things people believed in started to exist - so we started to have bogey-men first (children's beliefs are stronger than adults') and then eventually goblins, elves, dragons, chimeras, etc. This also explained inconsistent multiple pantheons.

The things started growing more and more wild, except around great heroes who could impose their wills on the world. By doing so, they eventually established the archetypes of Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Thief, etc.

The only aspect similar to your question about not sharing energy levels were the fact that only one person can be a Monk of a certain level, or the highest Assassin or Druid. I assumed that far fewer people had helped form those archetypes, so they were harder to attune to. Again, this was just to justify the rules as they were.

It's not possible for science to develop in a world in which repeated observations do not have consistent results, and there's no incentive to change in a world in which the only safety is where great heroes are holding onto an idea of the world as it is now, so the technology level never went above the medieval.

I also posited that since the archetypes were created by humans, even while new races were first being created, the new races could not be fully attuned to the archetypes. This was my explanation for racial limits.

And as I said, it didn't change the play of the game. It was merely an attempt to justify the D&D structure to myself.

Knaight
2014-03-21, 02:30 PM
If you want to specifically build a setting and game around this sort of idea, a la Demon's Souls/Dark Souls, sure. Generally, though, these ideas ("in-character experience points") are pretty much universally unnecessary and bad. They're mostly not a solution to a problem, not very interesting, and often sort of silly or vidjagame-y.

I'd also note that there's not much to explain away in most games. D&D's ridiculous hit point bloat could use some sort of explanation, but in lots of games you have characters getting marginally tougher, or marginally better at a skill, or whatever else.

Rhynn
2014-03-21, 03:11 PM
I'd also note that there's not much to explain away in most games. D&D's ridiculous hit point bloat could use some sort of explanation, but in lots of games you have characters getting marginally tougher, or marginally better at a skill, or whatever else.

Yeah. I think that if one really likes the idea (either in Demon's/Dark Souls style or Highlander style), actually building a system (and setting) for and around it would be a much better idea than sticking it onto D&D or some other game. Make it actually part of the mechanics rather than unnecessary fluff for how the mechanics already work.

Knaight
2014-03-21, 04:06 PM
Yeah. I think that if one really likes the idea (either in Demon's/Dark Souls style or Highlander style), actually building a system (and setting) for and around it would be a much better idea than sticking it onto D&D or some other game. Make it actually part of the mechanics rather than unnecessary fluff for how the mechanics already work.

It works surprisingly well for D&D though, particularly 3.5 and 4e. Though I would be inclined to change it some - starting with being able to flat take the resource through ways other than just harvesting corpses, being able to increase yields in various ways, etc. Poisoning people so that their souls slightly fade and trying to collect said fade, elaborate magical rituals that make some areas good for harvesting, cooking the corpses of your enemies in particular ways to eat them and gain their powers, etc. Though it requires buying into setting ethics or playing pretty nasty characters.

Frozen_Feet
2014-03-21, 04:30 PM
We have XP in real word. They're called "hours of focused practice".

It takes hundred to go from a total newbie to knowing the basics of a thing.

Thousand to be able to do that thing as a job.

Ten thousand, to be a master in that thing.

And fifty thousand, to achieve the true peak.

Hilariously enough, if we assume equivalence of "1 hour of practice = 1 experience point", then these values correspond roughly to achieving 1st, 2nd, 5th and 10th level in d20 games.

But in general, if no other rules for what XP stand for in-universe are given, I default to "time of practice". Because it makes sense, yo.

Other games I've seen tend to be pretty abstract of what invidual experience points are, but achieving them is generally tied to some concrete in-game event. Equating experience to wealth spend for training is a classic. So is awarding experience points for miles travelled in unknown terrain. One new favorite is granting XP for completed mission objectives - basically, you can determine XP of a character based on lifegoals they've achieved. Again, stuff that just makes sense.

"Don't mess with that guy. He's spend coffers of gold to travel across the world and train with masters in all seven continents. It's said he's been undefeated for twelve tournaments in a row now."

Arbane
2014-03-21, 05:35 PM
In Tales of Wyre (the only epic-level D&D game I've seen that seemed well, EPIC), spellcasters had come up with the concept of the 'reserve'. At least one villain forced her minions to drain off their reserves making things and helping with epic-level spells so that they couldn't become powerful enough to threaten her.