Painful Experience

Role-playing games traditionally reward player characters with experience points for their successes. In Dungeons & Dragons, of course, this usually means acquiring treasure and defeating foes. If it is true, however, that we learn the most valuable lessons from our mistakes, then perhaps experience points should be awarded to player characters for their failures. That is not to say that failing should be made desirable in itself, but perhaps something good should come from the battering adventurers routinely take. It should, after all, make them tougher if they survive it. Therefore, I am proposing a new optional rule: For every hit point of damage a character sustains, he or she automatically gains 10 experience points. I doubt this would be an incentive to anyone to get intentionally injured (although I could be wrong), but it would acknowledge that one of the surest signs of experience is the battle scar.