2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Fifty

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary!

Today (02/19/2020) is the 50th day of the Year of Blackmoor!

Today I am going to start looking at this post XP Versus Milestone Advancement—At Least We Can All Agree That Awarding XP Just for Combat Is Terrible at the DM DAVID blog.

First of all I am going to disagree with DM DAVID on part of the title of the blog post. Awarding XP just for combat is perfectly fine for those that prefer a murder hobo game. While it is not something that I have any interest in, if you do I would just suggest tweaking the XP awards to generate more XP. Now does it work for other game styles, no it does not, but to say it is universally terrible overstates the case.

Now into this post:

When Dungeons & Dragons arrived in 1974, players rated experience points (XP) as one of the game’s most irresistible features. Now, all of D&D’s official adventures ignore the experience point system, and the official Adventurers League campaign has dropped XP.

In the place of experience, the official adventures and the league substitute what folks commonly call milestone advancement—leveling after story-driven accomplishments. The Dungeon Master’s Guide (p.261) calls this method story-based advancement.

Then he comments that DMs like milestone advancement because it is less work. Then he adds his little caveat that really what it does is give 

DMs lazy and total control over when characters advance.

I think this is hilarious! Why? Because I have read forum and blog posts galore where people do not like an old style D&D game because of that "terrible" thing called DM fiat. They do not like house rules, they do not like rulings instead of rules and yet in a paroxysm of (IMO) hypocrisy they embrace the complete DM fiat of "milestone advancement." Why do they embrace this? I believe it is simple, they embrace it because in practice most DMs use adventure modules and advancement becomes automatic and unrelated to being a good player that is able to use their wits to survive, instead that has been replaced with 99.99% cannot lose encounters in canned railroads. That is to say, in this system good players and bad players advance at the same time and there is no real penalty for being a drag on the rest of the party. Yes, a lot of groups complain because they have THAT guy in their game. When you give players this kind of game you rob them  (IMO) of the opportunity to grow, to learn and to become good players. I am not saying there are no good players, I am saying in this kind of game there is no reward for being a good player and no culture to help you get there.

Again please note I am not saying this is bad wrong fun, because it is not bad wrong fun. If you enjoy playing this way, please do. But as for me and my table, I do not want anything to do with this. My table my choice, your table your choice. Just because I have zero understanding of how playing that way could be fun, does not mean it is not fun. It probably just means I am old and set in my ways. Shrug, I will cop to that with this caveat, when I set down and run my game I will match my creativity and flexibility against any canned railroad.

Then he says:

While DMs dislike accounting for XP, adventure writers hate fitting XP in their designs.

As a ref I find accounting for XP to be part of the fun of being a ref. It is not hard to do, of course I have 45 years of practice at it as I only run OD&D.

He continues:

Designers who wanted fewer fights could add XP awards for accomplishing story goals, but these awards lead to the same outcome as just telling players to level up. Just telling players to take a level skips the math and planning.

Sorry I do not see the attraction of this. I give individual XP rewards to players based on what their characters did. I do give XP for gold (silver base in my game) that is divided up among the group and then I give individual XP for a whole slew of things headed by role-playing. My players know that creative fully engaged and immersed role-playing is rewarded.

Then he says this:

Experience points come weighed with another negative: Everyone agrees that the XP system commonly used for D&D’s last 30 years is terrible. Those three decades began when D&D’s second edition stopped awarding experience for winning gold, leaving the notion that characters only gained XP for killing monsters. That has never been strictly true, but players, organized play, and designers most often treated XP-for-slaying as the rule.

Dropping XP for gold had the possibly unintended consequence of encouraging DMs to run all encounters as combat only no other options and encouraging players to view it the same way, often given no option of viewing it any other way. I say possibly because I am not sure that the consequences were unintended at all. An all combat game may have been the goal. 

More tomorrow.

Watch: The Secrets of Blackmoor - The True History of Dungeons & Dragons