EXPERIENCE POINTS AND LEVELING
After 15 to 20 years, given the new super-cool 5th edition and transglobal communication technology, a handful of college friends and I are going to give playing D&D again a go. And as much as I would like to play a character that I can develop and have fun with, I’m more inclined toward DMing. I like creating stories and mysteries and playing a myriad of NPCs, which also contributes to my fiction writing, of course. In fact, I’m combing the fantasy settings of two novels I had in mind to use in the game, and will no doubt get even more ideas from the adventures we have playing together.
And while I honestly think 5thEd is the best version to date, there are a few house rules I’ve come up with that I want to use in our game. The biggest is a revised Experience Points and Leveling system.
The 5th edition team put a lot of work into the new xp system, though it still resembles the previous ones a bit too much for me. Most of your xps come from killing monsters and taking their treasure, and while I certainly want combat to be the most exciting aspects of my game, I don’t want it to be the only aspect. You can, I admit, also go through a nice mathematical matrix to determine how much some of your non-combat encounters are worth, which is great, but still an awful lot of number crunching. It’s more accounting than I would like to do.
So I came up with a different way.
Under my system, your xp currency is basically “chapters,” which is pretty damn close to saying “sessions” or “adventures,” though where we end up breaking off in gameplay might not necessarily be where the chapter would end. The chapter as a unit is basically a story segment of the campaign where the group has completed a story objective, and/or reached a transition into the next episode of the campaign. These would roughly, ideally, be about the same thing as a gaming session, but not always.
The level you are now is how many chapters you must accomplish to level-up.
The experience chart might look something like this, with blocks you fill in as you go.
1st | ||||||
2nd | ||||||
3rd | ||||||
4th | ||||||
5th | ||||||
6th |
“I’m halfway through 4thlevel. Two more ‘chapters’ and I’ll be 5th. Yipee!”
On this chart, you just fill in the blocks as you achieve chapters. When you’ve filled in your current row, you move to the next level.
So you’d be 1st level just as long as it takes to complete the first chapter/story objective. Then two more and you graduate to level 3. Then 3 more to reach 4, etc. Each level takes proportionately more time to advance through.
Pretty simple, right?
You can also get a bonus chapter block by finishing off a story arc. For example, if “Which Witch of Witch Mountain?” (a Disney-brand D&D adventure) has 4 chapters, when you finish the last one and complete the whole story by saving the right good witch and killing the correct bad witch, you complete chapter 4 and get a “story completion” xp block, so the whole story arc is really worth 5 xp blocks/chapters.
You might also achieve more than one chapter objective in a session, which would speed up the progress a bit in the higher levels. And being super-duper at those levels, you’re more likely to knock out multiple story objectives in one session, ‘cuz you so bad ass.
Subplots could contribute as a character-driven chapter as well. Say you have started your own tavern and it burns to the ground. Rather than chase the clues for the next adventure your DM has given you, you’re so pissed off that you decide to investigate the fire further and your Investigation roll is so high that the DM decides (even though they hadn’t planned on it) that you’ve discovered arson! So we spend a gaming session chasing that down and turn that into an adventure of its own, which certainly worth an xp block when completed.
I’ll blog the other minor adjusts I’m making too, and might comment on our game from time to time (only planning to play once a month at this point – we’re busy grown-ups now, after all). But I won’t be giving too many details, as again, I might be using some of this material for story and novel substance later on and wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise…