Negative Space: rewards and experience
- Experience and Advancement in Role-Playing Games
- Kill monsters. Take their stuff. How has character advancement in role-playing games changed over the years? Starting with original D&D and on up through a handful of modern games, I’ll be surveying methods of experience and character advancement over the years.
- Rewards and improvement in Dungeons & Dragons
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Kill monsters. Take their stuff. How has character improvement in D&D changed over the years? This article in the RPG experience series looks at changes in experience point acquisition from early D&D through later versions of the game and later games by the authors.
- Experience in Generic Role-playing Games
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After D&D, it seemed as though anyone could write up game rules and publish them—and many did. From Tunnels & Trolls through GURPS, how did these games deal with experience and character advancement?
- Experience in world-based role-playing games
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In the eighties and through the nineties, people started writing games where the world was more important than the rules. In theory, this should make for a different kind of character advancement as well.
- Experience in thematic role-playing games
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Thematic games combine a love of rules with a love of setting. In these metagames, the rules are the setting, and the setting is the rules. Further, acknowledging the rules makes it easier to remove them. Such games are usually acutely aware that character advancement is a reward encouraging the actions that incur the reward and which move the game towards a specific conclusion.
- Reward system discussions elsewhere
- Looks like reward systems are in the air now, with discussions popping up around the net.
- Facets of character improvement rules
- Character advancement invariably rewards something, whether the reward comes for showing up for the game or doing certain kinds of things within the game. Role-playing games may not have winners and losers, but there are things to win. There are results worth fighting for.
- New, improved experience rules for Gods & Monsters
- Characters in Gods & Monsters will gain experience points for performing difficult archetypal actions, for engaging planned encounters, for conflicts, and for acquiring excess loot.
