Character Advancement vs. Style of Play

#1

Dungeon World introduced me to the idea of marking experience points at the end of the session by answering yes-or-no questions. I was intrigued, but as our campaign wore on, we realized that the questions rewarded a certain style of play… Or relied on certain expectations anyway.

Encountering this approach to XP elsewhere, I became intrigued with the idea of having multiple tracks of questions. Each track rewarded a particular style of play:

Mechanical: for those players that like to crunch the numbers
Narrative: for those players that focus on advancing the story
Role-Play: for those players that embody their character

I can see the argument for rewarding ALL of these things, but experience at my table shows that such an expectation can deflate some players. Since I GM a kids table, too, this has been especially true there.

A few months ago I came up with this idea, having questions based on the style of play. It took this form because it was clear that some questions addressed more than one style of play. I assumed that a player would need to declare which track they would want to be evaluated on.

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I post it here in case there’s some interest in experimenting with it, or expanding upon it. I’d love feedback on the idea, and the questions themselves.

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#2

For the pair of questions that occupy the non-overlapping center of each style, do you get one XP for a yes to either, or 1 per yes?

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#3

The intention was they would get XP for each “yes” response. I was working from an assumption that every player had an opportunity to answer 5 questions. There’s no particular rationale for that.

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#4

This is a really important part of what XP does. It rewards certain actions, and therefor drives players toward taking those actions. That is, XP is usually the designer saying “why don’t you try playing like this, that’s where the fun is.” Similarly, as a player, looking to XP triggers can be a good “what to do when you don’t know what to do” action. Blades wants players to take Desperate actions because that’s where consequences and drama exist, so you get XP just for rolling a desperate action. Dungeon World wants you to explore fantastic worlds and slay mighty beats. Hence…

As a designer, there’s value in using XP to push players out of where they’d feel comfortable. For example, in Night Witches (the crowd groans), Advances are given for BIG UNCOMFORTABLE actions, like walking away from a burning wreck. XP on failure is a version of this, it pushes players to use their less-good stats in an effort to fail, and thus drive up XP, which is partially what the game wants them to do. I think you can get a log more mileage out of your prompts than you currently are. As it stands, they’re all a bit of a given, and it seems to be a case of the XP following the players around (see especially: advance the story, describe an action). With the examples you’ve given, XP doesn’t appear to be driving any specific behaviour, it’s all very generalist. Especially if you’re letting players choose their “track”, I’d personally make the prompts dictate the flow of game that you want, or just disregard XP and use milestones or something.

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#5

Thanks. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’m especially intrigued by the idea of discomfort and its role in our game designs. I’m asking myself questions like, Does a game have to make the players uncomfortable to be rewarding and fun? What are the meaningful differences between being uncomfortable and seeking out challenges? Does a narrative game need to offer options for tables that thrive on discomfort and tables that don’t?

This is great advice. I love the image of “XP following players around.” You’re suggesting the XP triggers should be more of a carrot, dangling in front of the players to encourage them to weigh their choices. I hadn’t thought about advancement in that way before.

Advancement is one of those areas of game design that I think hasn’t been perfected, and it’s a fun problem to turn over.

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#6

I like to think of XP more broadly as rewarding engagement with the game. For some games, this can be making uncomfortable choices, for other games it can mean playing to your character, even when it got them into trouble, for other games it can just be about overcoming obstacles and challenges.

If, at the end of the game, you can look around the table and say, “hell yeah, we really played that game tonight!” you should also be coming away with more XP.

So it’s not necessarily a carrot to get the players to do what they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s more a way to reinforce, “doing these things is what this game (and in your case, this play-style) is all about.” As @SidneyIcarus says, “that’s where the fun is.”

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