Now, character deaths are outside of the scope of this blog post. While they usually also result in a net negative session, they occupy a somewhat different category of issues. Losing a character means you reset back to a starting character, losing XP means you can regress below a starting character.
DOGS and gambling with your XP
Advancement in DOGS works like this - when you are in a conflict, you spend your dice back and forth. When you are forced to spend 3 or more dice at the same time (due to being hit by a strong attack), you get Hit and take Consequence dice. The number of those dice is equal to the number of dice you had to spend at one go, and the type of dice depends on the type of conflict you are in (for example D4s for stuff like talking, D6 for chasing, D8 for beating someone up, and D10 for trying to kill someone). At the end of the conflict, you roll all of your Consequence dice. If you rolled any 1s, you experience Growth (your character improves), but if the total of the two highest dice exceeds 7, you get Long-Term Consequence (your character degrades, or worse).
If you're rolling D4s, it's generally not too bad - you are more likely to roll at least one "1" than have a pair of 4s, but as soon as you hit the D6 territory, the odds are against you! We had some players that hit both Growth and Consequences at the same time a few sessions in a row (meaning they were shifting dice from one place to another), and a session where two characters just suffered Consequences and nobody advanced one bit.
Sure, showing character's lateral growth can be interesting to an extent and somewhat thematic, but tying character progression to a random dice roll feels like a system is asking you to game it.
New World of Darkness and losing dots
New World of Darkness differs from its successor, the Chronicles of Darkness, in one crucial way - it has linear XP cost, rather than flat XP cost. Due to that, it's a very minmaxy system. It also lacks a very neat system - the Sanctity of Merits.
In nWoD, you can invest your XP into things external to your character - Merits in forms of Retainers, Contacts, etc. A 5 dot Retainer can cost you 30XP, and you can earn 1-4XP per session roughly. So that's about 8 sessions invested in one (very powerful but still mortal) person. If they happen to get into a firefight trying to protect your character and die, that's a large investment down the drain. At least with Sanctity of Merits you'd get the XP back, but that concept hasn't been invented until the CoD system.
Similarly, your character can lose their Morality due to being exposed to trauma or the supernatural. You start at Morality 7, but if you lose it and try to buy that 7th dot back, the linear XP cost will set you back 21XP for that single dot. You are out 6+ sessions worth of XP to get back where you started.
In Chronicles of Darkness, flat XP costs means you don't lose too much, and Sanctity of Merits refund you any Merits you lose. At worst you might lose about 1 session's worth of progress due to Morality loss, which isn't too bad.
Conclusions
People are pretty loss averse. The pain of losing something outweighs the joy of gaining an identical thing. Having your character suffer a setback that reverts their progress back multiple sessions can be an unpleasant experience, especially if you measure yourself against other players that didn't suffer the same adversity.
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