What I've observed from four decades of gaming is it has never really been about treasure or experience points, but largely boils down to engagement and personal investment. The best campaigns are the ones where the players genuinely care what happens to their characters and how their stories turn out, for better or worse. And fostering that mindset is highly dependent on the DM who also must be invested in fleshing out his game world as much as possible for the players to interact with as well as indulging them in realizing the goals and backstories of their characters.
While I do this is the ultimate reason for why players leave or stay. The DM has to dangle those hooks in front of the players to see if they bite, and that's treasure, also a reason why you should let them own properties in the game world (personal stakes), meeting favorite NPCs, leveling up and getting stronger, obtaining cool magic items, and the narrative of the world. If you don't have these it will be harder for the players to find a reason to come back.
Excellent video! I started with the Blue Book and was hooked with its simplicity and danger. That the odds were never in our favor added caution and urgency. We never questioned why we always started in a tavern, travelled through the forest and arrived at the dungeon. After Search of the Unknown, it was all about The Keep on the Borderlands. Our eyes were open to the adventures awaiting us. Gold, silver, gems, +1 magic items… we grew confident and arrogant and… died 😢. It was great!!! 5 minutes later we had a brand new Level 1 party! Look! We found the remains of our previous party, but we were looted. 😮 Wait, they missed that…🎉
Interesting topic that illustrates how different individual approaches to play can be. My earliest memories of playing D&D ('70s) are about "finding out". The "adventure", the mystery or a discovery was the main draw of playing. My character was just a tool to "adventure" and I don't recall having much attachment to any single character. Roleplaying didn't really figure into dungeon delving. It took Call of Cthulhu to get me thinking about roleplaying a character. Later on the draw was getting to socialize with friends and the game was just a structure that brought us together. Cheers!
Excellent video! I'm designing an open-world campaign right now, and I'm aiming to have 6 major "quest lines" available. 3 will progress without the players, 3 will require player input, and each questline will have about half dungeon (roll-play) and half story (role-play) missions. I'm not writing more than 25% of each questline in advance, so all of this is available for players to discover and dip their toes in in the first few sessions, then progress down one or two main paths while the other become more like side quests with less detail and less impact
I wholeheartedly agree that no one remembers the details of the fights, the exact moments of the dungeon delve itself. It's the highs and lows, the funny parts, the "oops I forgot to put an NPC here" last minute NPCs that the players fall in love with! The responsiveness of the world, that it reacts to the players' actions, has always made the players feel like they matter. And that keeps 'em coming back to the table! :D
I do XP by gold, but also I give exploration and quest XP. So each party member gets 10 XP per new hex explored and each dungeon room exploded. If they take on a quest they get XP if they complete it. Be it slay the manticore in the hills, stop the evil wizard from poisoning the town, or rescue the maiden from the giant spiders. I give somewhere between 500 and 2000 XP for a quest like these. And that is per character XP.
I run games inspired by pulp sword & sorcery, and in this genre the protagonists (e.g. Conan, Fahfrd and Gray Mouser, etc.) always seem to start each new adventure flat broke and in need of some quick cash. To simulate this I award experience not for gold recovered, but for gold squandered. At the end of each adventure the characters are afforded the opportunity to finish off the session with a bout of carousing to celebrate their success. They choose how much gold they want to squander carousing, and receive an equal amount of experience in return. They may choose to save their gold instead if they need to make a big purchase, but usually they blow as much gold as possible carousing. Either way, this ensures that they start each new session hungry for gold and eager for the next big score. I also employ a table of events to determine what happens during each character's night of debauchery (wake up naked in the Viziers harem, win a mysterious item at the gaming tables, etc.) This is a fun way to plant adventure seeds and create personal sub-plots for the characters. It always seems to be everyone's favourite part of the session.
I use an XP system, but each Player gets 1 XP per session, no matter if their character survives or not. Start at 0, 1xp to lvl 1, then 2 more sessions till lvl 2, 3 more sessions till lvl 3 etc. It's played in shadowdark, and any new characters made by the player can be built at their level or lower. We have fun with it.
@@BanditsKeep it's going well. Steady group of four. They did a little hex crawl and now we are in a city street crawling. It's been exploring Shadowdark through play.
I don't remember my first dungeon adventures as much as I remember the interaction with friends and the entertainment provided. I couldn't tell you how far we got into Greg's dungeon or how high we leveled. The hook was coming back and playing a fledgling hero with some pretty cool people and never being bored doing so. That was the 80s gaming mindset I remember.
It was late 1E early 2E where I remember the view that giving out lots of gold was Monte Hall, and low treasure/keep the PCs poor was somehow the more sophisticated way to play, but as Daniel states, the whole XP structure of the game was built around the PCs getting lots of treasure. Another way to look at it, The rules were written with the assumption that when PCs reached name level they would build a castle, which means it was also assumed the PCs would have enough gold to build a castle, which is a lot of gold.
I just ran a Stars Without Number game. I used a modified form of the suggested XP. The book suggests to give everyone 3xp per game. I would give them 3xp per game but I would have it gated behind accomplishing something major within the game. For instance, fully exploring a cloning lab and actually reviving the last clone body using ancient alien technology. I would then take how many game sessions it took to go through that location and then give them the 3xp per session as a lump sum. By the end of 2.5 years, they were all at 7th level. A few of the games I didn't award as much XP for if they dithered. It was a drop in drop out game so if you were not there, your character became my NPC. That way we didn't have to cancel any games and everyone agreed beforehand. I still gave them xp to keep everyone roughly the same level. I tried to run them as close to the players wishes as possible, or I would find a place to park them until the next game session the player attended. It was easy on a massive space station the size of a city. Maybe not so easy in some unihabited alien planet. I've gravitated more towards games with no levels like d100 Magic World and here in a few weeks, Mythras. You gain levels by using skills or picking a skill to level after during experience rolls. Going full on murder hobo doesn't get you more experience, nor does finding a horde of treasure. Combat is always dangerous so you think twice about just jumping into a fight.
The hooks for me were playing the grand game of pretend plus taking a character up the ladder. Monsters and treasure were the fun way to do those things. A sub-hook, if you will, was getting magic items. My favourite magic item that I ever got as a player was my ranger's Sword of Dancing.
When I think back about all the people I have ever played with, the draw of D&D (or any RPG, and by extension, fantasy in general), was to get an opportunity to do things (or be exposed to things) that players could never do in real life. So this meant two things: combat (and by extension, perhaps being a hero?), and using special powers. It was never gold - gold was only a means to buy more "cool stuff", i.e.., tantamount to gaining more special powers - MAGIC ITEMS. That's why leveling was so important - you got to do more "cool stuff" as your character became higher level. It got to the point where players were incredibly disappointed if they didn't gain a level after a session of play. That's why no one ever wanted to start off as 1st level, where the characters are fragile and have few resources. The players want to start off with having "powers" immediately. So my experience is that most campaigns began with characters beginning at least at 3rd level - and often higher than that. Most of the best D&D modules were for characters of higher level than that, anyway. You want to fight demons? Dragons? "Cool" opponents? Well, you gotta be more powerful than 1st or 2nd level, that's for sure. Who wants to spend 8 sessions of play fighting giant rats and kobolds? "Oh, you can fight some of the cool monsters in the "Monster Manual" once you gain 4 more levels." That didn't fly, lol. Today's D&D is almost incomprehensible to me; it's seemingly become the domain of theater kids, who want to act everything out, the hammier, the better. (thanks a lot, Critical Role!) Combat seems secondary. Negotiating - or even speaking - with a humanoid like a goblin was unthinkable back in the day. It was invariably KILL ON SIGHT. All the years I played, players had to be almost strong-armed into doing actual role play. The first (and second) impulse of every player was to say, "my character does this, my character does that", NOT "I perform this action, I do X, Y, Z." But then again, there were no women who would go near the game, so the whole "let's pretend" aspect seemed to be minimized as much as possible. Not a criticism, just an observation.
That’s really interesting, from the beginning I as a player, and my friends went for sneaking and negotiating over combat. It’s amazing how different the same game can play. I know you said you were not criticizing, but “for theater kids” is 💯 a dig. I find criticizing other was of play to be unnecessary. Thanks!
I started playing back in and around 2001 and back then I remember being really interested in the "early years" of the game and trying to find stuff associated with it (which was hard cause I was a teenager and the internet was kind of primitive) and having a lot of trouble doing so. This may be anecdotal but one thing I do remember coming across a lot of was "joke" game system made to mock 70's and 80's D&D and almost all of them had a joke about Monty Haul gaming and the game being focused on collecting treasure and magic items before anything else. Looking back now it almost seems like a rebellious phase where people playing the game at the time were openly mocking what came before them and I have to wonder if this zeitgeist was part of what drove adventures to have less treasure and be less treasure-hunting focused overall in the 2000's and since. Like, people were so eager to prove how "mature" their gaming was that they fundamentally altered how adventures were written and this later bled over into the OSR and the idea that combat should be avoided and treasure scarce. Weird.
Gold for XP, while it seems stupid, is actually brilliant. Look at Fritz Leiber's stories. Almost every Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser story begins with them on their last few coins in the Silver Eel, and deciding to go on an adventure so they can get more money to spend away on booze/wenches/gambling.
A Quest: Some Gold (100%) Exploration: Some item and some knowledge maybe (50%-50%) Playing Hero: Some coin and some item maybe (50%-50%) Character Goal: Personal happiness (100%)
I am looking to adjust the Basic rules to make low level characters and humans generally hardier but essentially capped so that it is dangerous but manageable to stay at levels 1 to 3 longer and with rare magic and monsters its more gritty human foes so a party can move through an entire campaign of the early modules without going beyond them. So XP and levels become less vital but other than fun I have no real substitute for gold equals XP!
I have started leaning in more to what excites the players. In just the same way a party may be uninterested in your carefully crafted NPCs, but will die for that random goblin with the funny name/voice. The Old School use of rumours and downtime, are great for gauging where those interests may lie. ...and now Blues Traveller is stuck in my head.
My players motivations do change over time. At first they are newcomers to an area known for adventure. They probably met the other PCs travelling there. Then it's money / survival. No one wants to be poor in town or stay in some hovel outside town :) Levelling happens when it does typically due to dungeon delving (money = XP). Survival is easier then. They begin making local contacts, some friends or enemies and get involved in affairs in town. Hex crawling is a thing then (close at first then further out). Then comes establishing themselves as locally important. I don't think my players have ever saved the world. The town, yes, the local duchy, kind of. Then too, my players topped out at about 12th level in a D&D, AD&D game. So, yeah, motivation changes over time.
Totally have to agree on the campaign way, at least that's what works for me. Can't say on one shots, my one shots always turn into campaigns so no experience there.
What I've observed from four decades of gaming is it has never really been about treasure or experience points, but largely boils down to engagement and personal investment. The best campaigns are the ones where the players genuinely care what happens to their characters and how their stories turn out, for better or worse. And fostering that mindset is highly dependent on the DM who also must be invested in fleshing out his game world as much as possible for the players to interact with as well as indulging them in realizing the goals and backstories of their characters.
While I do this is the ultimate reason for why players leave or stay. The DM has to dangle those hooks in front of the players to see if they bite, and that's treasure, also a reason why you should let them own properties in the game world (personal stakes), meeting favorite NPCs, leveling up and getting stronger, obtaining cool magic items, and the narrative of the world. If you don't have these it will be harder for the players to find a reason to come back.
Sure, that makes sense, I think advancement generally leads to investment though.
Welcome to Bandit's Keep, I'm Daniel.
So am I!
It's a powerful starting quote!
Excellent video! I started with the Blue Book and was hooked with its simplicity and danger. That the odds were never in our favor added caution and urgency. We never questioned why we always started in a tavern, travelled through the forest and arrived at the dungeon. After Search of the Unknown, it was all about The Keep on the Borderlands. Our eyes were open to the adventures awaiting us. Gold, silver, gems, +1 magic items… we grew confident and arrogant and… died 😢. It was great!!! 5 minutes later we had a brand new Level 1 party! Look! We found the remains of our previous party, but we were looted. 😮 Wait, they missed that…🎉
Nice!
Best RPG content on TH-cam
Thank You!
Interesting topic that illustrates how different individual approaches to play can be. My earliest memories of playing D&D ('70s) are about "finding out". The "adventure", the mystery or a discovery was the main draw of playing. My character was just a tool to "adventure" and I don't recall having much attachment to any single character. Roleplaying didn't really figure into dungeon delving. It took Call of Cthulhu to get me thinking about roleplaying a character. Later on the draw was getting to socialize with friends and the game was just a structure that brought us together.
Cheers!
Cool
Excellent video! I'm designing an open-world campaign right now, and I'm aiming to have 6 major "quest lines" available. 3 will progress without the players, 3 will require player input, and each questline will have about half dungeon (roll-play) and half story (role-play) missions. I'm not writing more than 25% of each questline in advance, so all of this is available for players to discover and dip their toes in in the first few sessions, then progress down one or two main paths while the other become more like side quests with less detail and less impact
Cool
I wholeheartedly agree that no one remembers the details of the fights, the exact moments of the dungeon delve itself. It's the highs and lows, the funny parts, the "oops I forgot to put an NPC here" last minute NPCs that the players fall in love with!
The responsiveness of the world, that it reacts to the players' actions, has always made the players feel like they matter. And that keeps 'em coming back to the table! :D
For sure
I enjoy all of Bandit’s Keep videos 🎉🎉😂
Thanks!
I do XP by gold, but also I give exploration and quest XP. So each party member gets 10 XP per new hex explored and each dungeon room exploded. If they take on a quest they get XP if they complete it. Be it slay the manticore in the hills, stop the evil wizard from poisoning the town, or rescue the maiden from the giant spiders. I give somewhere between 500 and 2000 XP for a quest like these. And that is per character XP.
Cool
I love gold as exp. You hit the nail on the head, big homie!
Thank You!
I run games inspired by pulp sword & sorcery, and in this genre the protagonists (e.g. Conan, Fahfrd and Gray Mouser, etc.) always seem to start each new adventure flat broke and in need of some quick cash. To simulate this I award experience not for gold recovered, but for gold squandered. At the end of each adventure the characters are afforded the opportunity to finish off the session with a bout of carousing to celebrate their success. They choose how much gold they want to squander carousing, and receive an equal amount of experience in return. They may choose to save their gold instead if they need to make a big purchase, but usually they blow as much gold as possible carousing. Either way, this ensures that they start each new session hungry for gold and eager for the next big score. I also employ a table of events to determine what happens during each character's night of debauchery (wake up naked in the Viziers harem, win a mysterious item at the gaming tables, etc.) This is a fun way to plant adventure seeds and create personal sub-plots for the characters. It always seems to be everyone's favourite part of the session.
Nice
Your channel and Matt Colville are my inspiration as a DM of DC20. Thank you for all the suggestions and guidance for running classic style games.
Thanks so much, I’m glad you enjoy the channel.
I use an XP system, but each Player gets 1 XP per session, no matter if their character survives or not. Start at 0, 1xp to lvl 1, then 2 more sessions till lvl 2, 3 more sessions till lvl 3 etc. It's played in shadowdark, and any new characters made by the player can be built at their level or lower. We have fun with it.
Great video Daniel. I have a similar philosophy about allowing the players guide the game. Let it grow organically through actions or inaction.
Absolutely! How’s
Your Shadowdark game going? I see it pop up always as the worst possible time for me to catch up.
@@BanditsKeep it's going well. Steady group of four. They did a little hex crawl and now we are in a city street crawling. It's been exploring Shadowdark through play.
I don't remember my first dungeon adventures as much as I remember the interaction with friends and the entertainment provided. I couldn't tell you how far we got into Greg's dungeon or how high we leveled. The hook was coming back and playing a fledgling hero with some pretty cool people and never being bored doing so. That was the 80s gaming mindset I remember.
For sure
Thanks for posting this great discussion starter!
Glad you enjoyed it!
It was late 1E early 2E where I remember the view that giving out lots of gold was Monte Hall, and low treasure/keep the PCs poor was somehow the more sophisticated way to play, but as Daniel states, the whole XP structure of the game was built around the PCs getting lots of treasure. Another way to look at it, The rules were written with the assumption that when PCs reached name level they would build a castle, which means it was also assumed the PCs would have enough gold to build a castle, which is a lot of gold.
For sure
I just ran a Stars Without Number game. I used a modified form of the suggested XP. The book suggests to give everyone 3xp per game. I would give them 3xp per game but I would have it gated behind accomplishing something major within the game. For instance, fully exploring a cloning lab and actually reviving the last clone body using ancient alien technology. I would then take how many game sessions it took to go through that location and then give them the 3xp per session as a lump sum. By the end of 2.5 years, they were all at 7th level. A few of the games I didn't award as much XP for if they dithered. It was a drop in drop out game so if you were not there, your character became my NPC. That way we didn't have to cancel any games and everyone agreed beforehand. I still gave them xp to keep everyone roughly the same level. I tried to run them as close to the players wishes as possible, or I would find a place to park them until the next game session the player attended. It was easy on a massive space station the size of a city. Maybe not so easy in some unihabited alien planet.
I've gravitated more towards games with no levels like d100 Magic World and here in a few weeks, Mythras. You gain levels by using skills or picking a skill to level after during experience rolls. Going full on murder hobo doesn't get you more experience, nor does finding a horde of treasure. Combat is always dangerous so you think twice about just jumping into a fight.
Cool
The hooks for me were playing the grand game of pretend plus taking a character up the ladder. Monsters and treasure were the fun way to do those things. A sub-hook, if you will, was getting magic items. My favourite magic item that I ever got as a player was my ranger's Sword of Dancing.
Nice!
I come back every week to get xp. I will kill for it, steal for it, study for it. Xp, xp, xp. I can never get enough.
BTW, I play a points-buy homebrew game where every xp I get can be spent immediately on my character. We don't generally have level ups.
Nice
When I think back about all the people I have ever played with, the draw of D&D (or any RPG, and by extension, fantasy in general), was to get an opportunity to do things (or be exposed to things) that players could never do in real life. So this meant two things: combat (and by extension, perhaps being a hero?), and using special powers. It was never gold - gold was only a means to buy more "cool stuff", i.e.., tantamount to gaining more special powers - MAGIC ITEMS. That's why leveling was so important - you got to do more "cool stuff" as your character became higher level. It got to the point where players were incredibly disappointed if they didn't gain a level after a session of play.
That's why no one ever wanted to start off as 1st level, where the characters are fragile and have few resources. The players want to start off with having "powers" immediately. So my experience is that most campaigns began with characters beginning at least at 3rd level - and often higher than that. Most of the best D&D modules were for characters of higher level than that, anyway. You want to fight demons? Dragons? "Cool" opponents? Well, you gotta be more powerful than 1st or 2nd level, that's for sure. Who wants to spend 8 sessions of play fighting giant rats and kobolds? "Oh, you can fight some of the cool monsters in the "Monster Manual" once you gain 4 more levels." That didn't fly, lol.
Today's D&D is almost incomprehensible to me; it's seemingly become the domain of theater kids, who want to act everything out, the hammier, the better. (thanks a lot, Critical Role!) Combat seems secondary. Negotiating - or even speaking - with a humanoid like a goblin was unthinkable back in the day. It was invariably KILL ON SIGHT. All the years I played, players had to be almost strong-armed into doing actual role play. The first (and second) impulse of every player was to say, "my character does this, my character does that", NOT "I perform this action, I do X, Y, Z." But then again, there were no women who would go near the game, so the whole "let's pretend" aspect seemed to be minimized as much as possible. Not a criticism, just an observation.
That’s really interesting, from the beginning I as a player, and my friends went for sneaking and negotiating over combat. It’s amazing how different the same game can play. I know you said you were not criticizing, but “for theater kids” is 💯 a dig. I find criticizing other was of play to be unnecessary. Thanks!
I started playing back in and around 2001 and back then I remember being really interested in the "early years" of the game and trying to find stuff associated with it (which was hard cause I was a teenager and the internet was kind of primitive) and having a lot of trouble doing so. This may be anecdotal but one thing I do remember coming across a lot of was "joke" game system made to mock 70's and 80's D&D and almost all of them had a joke about Monty Haul gaming and the game being focused on collecting treasure and magic items before anything else. Looking back now it almost seems like a rebellious phase where people playing the game at the time were openly mocking what came before them and I have to wonder if this zeitgeist was part of what drove adventures to have less treasure and be less treasure-hunting focused overall in the 2000's and since. Like, people were so eager to prove how "mature" their gaming was that they fundamentally altered how adventures were written and this later bled over into the OSR and the idea that combat should be avoided and treasure scarce. Weird.
I believe you are referring to Hackmaster - and the comic that spawned it Knights of the Dinner table.
@@BanditsKeep I believe you are right, it included Hackmaster and the ttrpg version of Munchkin that I was thinking of.
Gold for XP, while it seems stupid, is actually brilliant. Look at Fritz Leiber's stories. Almost every Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser story begins with them on their last few coins in the Silver Eel, and deciding to go on an adventure so they can get more money to spend away on booze/wenches/gambling.
So true!
A Quest: Some Gold (100%)
Exploration: Some item and some knowledge maybe (50%-50%)
Playing Hero: Some coin and some item maybe (50%-50%)
Character Goal: Personal happiness (100%)
Indeed
Love your Channel man
Thank You!
Great point around 4:13 I wonder how many people are making OSR / OSE adventures similar to how their Icespire Peak game went?
I’m guessing a decent amount
I am looking to adjust the Basic rules to make low level characters and humans generally hardier but essentially capped so that it is dangerous but manageable to stay at levels 1 to 3 longer and with rare magic and monsters its more gritty human foes so a party can move through an entire campaign of the early modules without going beyond them. So XP and levels become less vital but other than fun I have no real substitute for gold equals XP!
That can be tricky, games like into to odd do a decent job at what you are looking for IMO
I have started leaning in more to what excites the players.
In just the same way a party may be uninterested in your carefully crafted NPCs, but will die for that random goblin with the funny name/voice.
The Old School use of rumours and downtime, are great for gauging where those interests may lie.
...and now Blues Traveller is stuck in my head.
True, downtime/rumors are great tools
Hexploration is what I heard instead of exploration
Indeed - could have been a slip
@BanditsKeep Hexploration could be a great name for an exploration supplement
good vid Daniel
Thank You!
My players motivations do change over time. At first they are newcomers to an area known for adventure. They probably met the other PCs travelling there. Then it's money / survival. No one wants to be poor in town or stay in some hovel outside town :) Levelling happens when it does typically due to dungeon delving (money = XP). Survival is easier then. They begin making local contacts, some friends or enemies and get involved in affairs in town. Hex crawling is a thing then (close at first then further out). Then comes establishing themselves as locally important. I don't think my players have ever saved the world. The town, yes, the local duchy, kind of. Then too, my players topped out at about 12th level in a D&D, AD&D game. So, yeah, motivation changes over time.
That sounds like my group
Totally have to agree on the campaign way, at least that's what works for me. Can't say on one shots, my one shots always turn into campaigns so no experience there.
That’s a good thing I’d say!