The XP Bowl and XP Bubbles
One of my favorite parts of designing an OSR game is recognizing which rules are vestigial and then making a conscious decision about whether to keep them. Not all that is vestigial must be removed; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, so saith the folk-wisdom. Some people live happy and full lives without their appendix (the body part, not the miscellany at the end of books) even threatening to burst. But sometimes you feel a sharp pain in your side caused by a rule that doesn’t jive with the rest of the game as it has evolved over time. When that time comes, it may be time for some game surgery. I recently performed an appendectomy on my own system, the Prismatic Wasteland, and the patient is thriving.
Prismatic Wasteland no longer has a vestigial XP and leveling system. Prismatic Wasteland, like so many games before it, began life as a hack of another game. It was a hack of SEACAT (as presented in the Ultraviolet Grasslands, which is more akin to a stripped down 5e than the current, in-process incarnation) and Freebooters on the Frontier 2e (a Powered by the Apocalypse game that attempts to capture that elusive old-school vibe). It is now as unrecognizable to its forebears as I am to one of my distant, simian ancestors (that is, more recognizable than I probably think). As part of this evolution, I changed how I awarded XP a while back. However, only recently did I realize that there was still another vestigial rule lurking within. After a eureka moment (the kind that only seems to occur when you are doing something else like operating heavy machinery), I realized a more elegant way to handle it. And now I have a system for XP and leveling up that I am pretty happy with! So I am going to walk you through both ideas: the XP Bowl and XP Bubbles.
The way XP works in the typical OSR system is perfectly functional. You get XP for accomplishing tasks (most often, for the acquisition of treasure) and you add it to your current XP. You check your XP total against various thresholds and once you exceed a given XP threshold for a level, you ascend to that level. It is a very flexible framework—how much XP each task awards and the XP thresholds for each level are easy enough to jigger with, and this is why most OSR systems walking the Earth have this mechanism more-or-less in tact. But this method, while functional, lacks a bit of pizzazz. My main sticking points with the ur-XP system are (A) XP and leveling up interrupts the flow of my sessions, (B) tracking XP is not particularly interesting, and (C) the space for tracking XP on the character sheet sees a lot of erasing and updating that can be aesthetically displeasing.
The XP Bowl
This rule began as so many of my rules do: thievery. When discussing rules for XP with friends, Elias Stretch suggest the following:
“One idea I had a while back for XP, this was for a DCC games, was that for every obstacle the players overcame, throw a die in a bowl. d4 if it was easy, d6 or d8 for harder challenges etc. At the end of the night the players could roll the dice to get the total XP amount. Obviously probably better for table use but you seem to like playing with ways the players can escalate situations.”
I adopted this idea with relatively little modification. I more strictly assigned dice values, ranging from d4 to d10 (for instance winning a combat might be a d4, but discovering a new region of the Wasteland would be d10), and one other change discussed below, but otherwise the gist is the same. The primary benefit is that I suffer no more (or at least less severe) interruptions in the midst of my games. At Permanent Cranial Damage, Ava writes about how some rules rely on memory differently than others. The way XP tends to work is extemporaneous—it relies on the referee or players remembering to ask “hey, should we get XP for that?” And if they do remember and, heaven forbid, the XP puts them over the next level threshold, they may want an immediate hiatus of adventuring to level up their characters (ideally that shouldn’t take too long, but it depends on the game and on the players). This really interrupts my flow, or at least it does on the occasions I remember to give out XP. More often than not, I realize several sessions have gone by without doling out XP. A nervous player might remind me and we are left with either trying to recall what XP they should have earned or handwaving it and just giving an arbitrary amount of XP, and neither alternative is particularly satisfying. So XP counting systems really work best when you remember to award XP throughout. What a hassle. The XP Bowl is easier to remember because it can be ritualized.
I have a few rituals when I run games. The first is that I open my sessions by asking the players what they remember from last time. This serves as a “Previously on…” moment and is good for getting everyone back into the mindset of the fiction. This is not a novel practice. And neither is the ritual of awarding XP at the end of the session. Most often with Powered by the Apocalypse games, Forged in the Dark games or other games of that ilk, you have a procedure for awarding XP at the end of the session by reflecting on what the characters did and whether that triggered any XP. These two rituals are nice bookends to any session. There are myriad benefits to rituals in games, but that isn’t the purpose of this post (perhaps I will pontificate further at a later date). All that is to say, with the XP Bowl, it is less of a hassle to remember (because there is a physical object in the center of the table, a constant reminder to throw in XP dice when XP is earned), it is less disruptive to the flow of play (you just add in a die; it’s quick and easy) and it provides me with a nice end-of-session ritual of rolling all the accumulated dice. If the players level up, it is at the end of the session, where it belongs. They can level up right then and there or they can do it between sessions.
My primary change to what Elias suggested was to allow any player to take one of the XP dice out of the XP Bowl and roll it to replace the result for a die that had been rolled but at the cost of not using that die for XP purposes later. What this does in practice gives players a choice between an immediate reward (typically getting to reroll a critical failure or other undesired result) versus something with a more long-term payoff (the potentiality of leveling up at the end of the session). I tend to enjoy this dynamic as a player. If CHOICE is the one of the keystones for OSR-style play, surely tradeoffs and risk versus reward are its cornerstones. It will take some playtesting to whether players actually ever take advantage of this tradeoff, but I suspect it would at least be a consideration for a crafty player that uses every advantage at their disposal to maintain their character’s longevity.
The XP Bubbles
I hate bookkeping in games (also outside of games). When I come to the table as a player, I do so to play a dashing wizard or a beefy fighter, not an accountant. So when I do track numbers, which is somewhat inevitable, I want those numbers to matter. But every so often, the little boxes on my character sheet that I am expected to constantly erase to add the latest total rarely reflect anything other than a high score, be it XP or gold pieces. Anne of DIY & Dragons made a persuasive case that, for some games, tracking gold is meaningless:
“And if you're not keeping track of your arrows, and the things the game offers for sale are things like arrows, things that cost the barest fraction of the treasure you hauled out your very first session, why keep track of those purchases? Your food is already free, your room every night is already free. What is there left to spend money on? And if you can't spend it fast enough to ever, even for a moment, be in danger of running out of it, why bother tracking it at all? (Yes, I realize I just asked "why track gold in D&D?" but if you aren't trading gold for XP, and you always have as much gold as you need for routine purchases, and routine purchases are the only kind of purchases you can make ... then why track gold in D&D?)”
Similarly, why track XP? The answer is obvious—it is necessary to compare your current value against the various XP thresholds for levels. But do the XP numbers themselves matter? No, they are only given meaning in the context of the XP thresholds, which are themselves only given meaning in the context of the associated levels. Initially, when the players rolled the XP dice in the XP Bowl, they would simply sum these up and add it to their total XP. But what if each roll of an XP die mattered, not just the aggregate value spit out by someone’s phone calculator? Enter the XP Bubble system.
Like taking a scantron test, each character has four “bubbles” on their character sheet to denote progress to the next character level. When all bubbles are filled in, you increase your level and erase the bubbles. However, the amount of XP dice required to reach each level is not a static value; lower levels require less XP dice to level up and higher levels take longer. This dynamic isn’t novel, but the way I accomplish this works very smoothly (in my opinion, of course). Here are the rules for rolling the XP dice, we will talk a bit about how it works afterward:
At the end of each session, the players roll each XP die in the XP Bowl at the end of the session. For each XP die, if it rolls above any character’s current level, all such characters mark one XP Bubble. Once all four XP Bubbles have been filled in, that character advances to the next level. For each XP die, if any XP die results in a 1, each character increases their HP by 1.
Because this method requires the players to roll above their level, each XP die becomes less likely to level up a character as they progress. It also caps level progression at level 10 (since the highest XP die is a d10). However, I wanted all XP dice to be useful even at higher levels. A level 5 character cannot level up by getting a d4 XP die, but it does give better odds of getting more HP than a d10. I should note here that this is the only way to get HP, removing that component from the leveling up process.
Based on a number of assumptions, I expect a character to take two to three sessions between each level from levels 1 to 4. After that, progression slows down: taking four sessions to get from level 4 to level 5, five sessions to get to level 6, seven sessions to get to level 7, 12 sessions to get to level 8, 25 sessions to get to level 9 and 45 sessions to get from level 9 to level 10. All told, that adds up exactly to 100 (a happy little math accident). So if you play weekly, it would take around two years to fully level-up in Prismatic Wasteland. More if you play less often. I intend Prismatic Wasteland to support the sort of years-long campaigns I prefer to run, so I consider these numbers to be a success. In terms of the new method for increasing HP, it roughly tracked my methods for increasing HP via leveling; it ran slightly behind on HP in the lower levels but higher in levels 8 through 10. Because it takes a while between levels at that range, I am okay with this disparity. Each session, the characters are still making some advancement (increasing their HP and their stats) even if progress to the next level is slower.
I suspect you aren’t rushing to your own game system you might be homebrewing to rip out its leveling system and jam this blog post in its place. I wouldn’t expect that; there is a lot still to be fleshed out here (e.g., assigning XP die to activities) which probably won’t be seen until their final form until Prismatic Wasteland is ready for playtesting. But my hope is that this at least got some gears spinning in the heads of my fellow system-tinkerers. Coming up with new ways to accomplish old tasks keeps the spongy matter between my ears limber and ready to tackle new design challenges when they arise. May your brain remain limber and may you progress to your next level as a game designer.
