Old School XP Heresy?

I enjoy both old school aesthetics and the very old school mindset of relying on one's own inventiveness, but I am not an idolator and there are certain aspects of the Original Fantasy Adventure Game I have always been more than willing to entertain the notion of tossing into a sphere of annihilation. One such thing is the concept of experience points—how they are gained, how they are calculated, how many are needed for levelling up. I have no use for it. If I were to run the earliest edition of Dungeons & Dragons or return to Swords & Wizardry White Box, I would be strongly tempted to use the experience system from Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, create my own, or just wing it free-form-style. Anything, to my mind, would be better than the pitiless bean-counting obstacle of fun and adversary of immersion that is the traditional experience point system unless it serves the fictional genre and/or can be referenced in character (such as video games or game shows). It may be heretical to the "rules as written" tribe, but I have always subscribed to the philosophy of necessary rules tinkering: If something doesn't work for you, replace it with something that does. When it hits your table, it's your game. You can craft it to suit the needs of your gaming group. It's the original old school way.

Where Does Experience Point?

Question: If one chooses to use a form of character advancement wherein all player characters are granted an equal meta-rule improvement (such as experience points, attribute boosts, luck points, etc.) whenever they reach a benchmark (such as completing an adventure, accomplishing a mission, surviving a session, etc.), does it undermine the concept of rewarding player characters for clever play?

Answer: No. The meta-rule award satisfies the player for playing the character. The character's reward arises from the fictional setting itself as a result of the character's interaction with it. The player gets to see the benefits of levelling up, improving a skill, or gaining more ability to improve the odds, but the character gets to see the benefits of in-character choices based on whatever definition of success is important to the character, whether it's accruing wealth, building a reputation, gaining followers, attaining a position, solving a problem, promoting a social movement, exploring the unknown, telling new tales, or any other goal. The character's reward is what the character can perceive, not what only the player can perceive. Therefore, it is perfectly justifiable to allow player characters to improve at an equal rate with regard to meta-rule improvement, whilst basing their in-character advancement on their interactions with non-player characters and circumstances within the setting. Three characters who divide a treasure hoard three ways will be regarded very differently if one is a miser, one is a spendthrift, and one is a philanthropist. This is where experience points.

Table: Variable Experience System

The premise: Each adventure, roll on the table below to determine how experience points will be gained.

Variable Experience System

Roll 1d12

1. Treasured gained.
2. Treasure donated.
3. Monsters defeated.
4. Monsters encountered.
5. Monsters befriended.
6. Puzzles solved/traps avoided.
7. Perils escaped.
8. Magic acquired.
9. Victims rescued.
10. Wrongs righted.
11. Plots thwarted.
12. Roll twice on this table. Re-roll duplicates.

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.