Gaming and solving the fun out of RPG systems

Over the last few years my group and I have played a number of systems that had mechanics you could game to get XP or other advantages, or had some of their mechanics boil down to a solvable math problem. Both of those situations ended up detracting from the experience, either drawing more attention to themselves rather to the game being played, or just being bland mechanics.

RPG mechanics as math problems

The first category of mechanics are essentially math problems - mechanics that for any given situation have a correct solution on what to do to maximise your outcome.

oWoD Automated Fire

First one of these is Automatic Fire from Vampire the Masquerade:

This attack basically gives you a lot of extra dice to a roll, but makes the roll Difficulty higher. It's basically a move you want to use either when you need a hail mary, or the Difficulty is already so low it doesn't matter much. For other scenarios, whether or not to use this move would require running the numbers, but there is still a definitive yes or no answer to whether using it is a good move or not. Figuring it out for certain however requires some complicated math of using your AnyDice-fu.

DOGS Growth

DOGS presented a similar math problem to its players when it came to Growth.

DOGS is a system in which you have stats that take form of multiple dice of a given size - "3D4", "4D6", etc. When you undergo Growth, you get to either increase the number of dice for a given stat, or increase the size of those dice - so from "3D4" you can go into either "4D4" or "3D6". Turns out there is an optimal way of progressing through those dice to get the best result on average:

So for example, 3D6 gives you on average 0.5 higher roll than 4D4, while 5D8 is better than 7D4 by 5 whole points on average. The game doesn't explain those concepts to the players and it's simple and abstract enough that these things shouldn't matter, but for a problem-solving player it's a solvable mechanic.

Mouse Guard and optimal combat

Mouse Guard is a system with its own little combat / conflict engine that relies on picking actions (Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre) and seeing how they interact with one another. Attack lowers opponent's Disposition (HP essentially), Defend heals your Disposition, Manoeuvre is a way to get an advantage on next rolls, while a Feint is like an Attack with caveats - if played against an Attack, Feint does nothing, but if played against a Defend, Defend does nothing.

During our first game of Mouse Guard we soon learned that this setup creates a simple First Order Optimal Strategy - just always Attack. Attack vs Attack or Defend gets you closer to resolving the conflict, Attack trumps Feint, and Manoeuvre often isn't useful enough to trump dealing damage to an opponent. Attack, Attack, Attack!

FOO (First Order Optimal) Strategy

Towards the end of the game this has ended up being such a simple and optimal strategy that for our next game of Mouse Guard we had to switch the rules to give Attack a hard counter not to devolve every conflict of any type into "press A to win if you press it faster than your enemy".

Cortex and marginally useful SFXs

Recently our group picked up the modular system Cortex. We only played a few sessions of it so far, but one thing that stood out to me was how "starchy" (boring) some of its special powers were.

First of all, Cortex is another mixed-die system that puts a big emphasis on making pool of dice and manipulating your dice. So if you're Iron Man, you can have say, Eccentric Billionaire at D10, Ganius Scientist at D12 and Mk1 Iron Man Suit at D6 and roll those all together to do something.

On top of that, one module you can use in Cortex are Power SFX (special effects). Those are some extra powers your character can use that are tied to a Power Set that can alter the game a bit. So for example you can be Tony Stark with Iron Man Power Set, and one of your SFX could be "Immunity" where you spend a Power Point to negate a specific attack, simple enough.

However, a lot of those SFX are boring dice manipulators. For example - Focus lets you take two dice and turn them into one bigger die. Boost lets you shut down one power to increase the die on another die. Dangerous gives you an extra small die to roll, but changes the size of other dice. Multipower lets you use more than one dice from a given pool but they all are decreased a step or more. Versatile lets you split one die into two or more smaller dice. The list goes on.

I've ran some numbers and a lot of these powers are marginally useful. Say, turning 3D8 into 2D8+2D6 with Versatile gives you an average roll that's 0.42 higher, but gives you 0.45 smaller Effect and 0.2 more Hitches. Without going into what those are, those numbers are marginally useful. Sometimes the numbers increase marginally, sometimes they decrease, but from what I've seen it's not a big effect overall.

Unfortunately to get those numbers I had to spend a few hours programming and debugging a Cortex dice simulator. It's hard to make an informed decision as to whether a power is useful or not without a chart, and trying to play a game well that's filled with unknowable probabilities would just be the case of blind luck.

One way or another - the stat-focused SFX and similar mechanics can be one of two things - either boring because they don't change much about the roll, or having an optimal way to play it, in which case you're not engaging with the mechanics, you're solving a math problem. Either way the mechanics become irrelevant because they're either "use them always", "don't bother with them ever", or "use them under specific circumstances". Since Cortex is based on complex math with no glaringly obvious answer, I honestly can't be bothered to use these SFX.

Honourable mention - Exalted, Paranoia Combat

Honourable mention in this category should also go to Exalted. I won't elaborate much on it since this section is already getting long, but there are two things that are worth mentioning that make this epic game of sword and sandal capital H Heroes boring: Paranoia Combat and Minuscule Incremental Charms.

Paranoia Combat was a strategy from 2nd edition Exalted where the optimal way of winning the Rocket Tag combat was to turtle up and play in the most boring way possible.

Minuscule Incremental Charms were special powers you could buy with XP that would give you just small bonuses to rolls or change tiny things that were rather boring in themselves. Things like Triumph-Forged God-Body that gave you double-9s on Athletic rolls instead of double-10s, or Wyld-Forging Focus that started wyld-shaping at a higher phase. All of those were such small tweaks that they might not be worth the mental load, and weighing their effect vs XP cost would be a small math problem in itself.

Gaming mechanics for profit

Most RPG mechanics that you can game for profit I've come across were focused on being able to farm XP, or at least streamline the way you earn XP. While not a problem in itself (who cares if the party got more XP if they're having fun doing it - you're not competing with anyone), it can start to become a problem when it draws too much attention away from doing things in the game and having fun and onto "brrrr the number goes up"

Chronicles of Darkness - punch me in the face for XP

I've covered this one before in the "Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system" article, so I won't repeat much here. Basically, in Chronicles of Darkness you can basically earn XP by being beaten up a bit at the start of every scene, and some systems like Mage the Awakening 2nd Edition even call out a similar way to farm magic XP.

In a similar vein, the systems also let you earn XP by a number of other ways, like turning fails into botches. This can create some animosity between players when someone is invested in some scene going well, while other players are there to mess things up just to farm up some extra XP - "I failed to impress this character, I opt to botch it instead and make them hate us. Too bad they knew something about your lost sister, guess we'll never find what they knew!".

DOGS - Growth vs Consequences optimisation

Another entry for DOGS, this time about maximising the rate at which your character growths, as opposed to optimising how they grow.

DOGS is a system where you Grow when you suffer Consequences as a result of a conflict you had. To become stronger, you have to get into conflicts, get beaten up a bit, etc. However, Consequences can also have lasting effects if they are bad enough - if you roll too high on them, you may even have to step down your stats, essentially netting you zero, or potentially giving you some net negative sessions. Once again, there is a mathematically optimal way of playing:

Which is basically to get a 3D4 Consequence - it has the best chances of being a net gain. You get such small Consequences by essentially keeping non-violent in conflicts, which to an extent is a "mechanic as a metaphor" for the system.

Mouse Guard and farming Checks

Mouse Guard is a system where you grow your character by practice - aka the more you use a skill, the better you get essentially. As with any such system, the first way of farming it is by doing things all the time, which can encourage you to hog the spotlight. This can be a bit of a problem, but then there is more.

The game is broken up into two parts - the GM turn and the players' turn. During the GM's turn (which lasts about half of the session, not "a turn"...) you can earn "Checks", which you spend during the players' turn to do things and make rolls. You earn those Checks by using your Traits against yourself ("I am Small, therefore I have problems lifting this large log!"). You can use a Trait against yourself once per roll, which means the more you act and roll on GM's turn, the more Checks you can earn to act more during the players' turn.

Moreover, during a conflict you can easily earn a lot of Checks if you play in a very boring way. Essentially, during a conflict you pick actions to take - Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre. When you Defend, you essentially try to recover your HP. Since the conflict only ends when one of the party's HP goes down to zero, if you turtle up you will be rolling for a long time, letting you earn Checks for every roll. In a lot of cases you can also earn a lot more Checks during a fight under specific circumstances - breaking a tie in enemy's favour or giving an enemy more dice in a vs conflict. So if you play like a turtling asshole and have enough dice, you can in theory earn a lot of Checks.

This strategy has one counter though, Feinting makes you unable to roll Defend. You can try anticipating it though by throwing an Attack that trumps Feint into the mix to make your opponent have to Defend and recover. It's not perfect, but it can work...

While that turtle Defence is an extreme example, I have played in some sessions where a less extreme form of Check farming was involved, which later resulted in pretty neat things being accomplished during the players' turn.

Conclusions

There are a number of games out there that rely on math obscurity to give a sense of depth or agency. However, solving the game mechanic from a mathematical sense is only so fun, and once solved the complexity is replaced with an optimal way to play the game, which isn't fun. Making the math behind it harder is not making the choices more meaningful, just the decisions harder to make informed. Try pruning such mechanics from your game if possible.

Similarly, there are games that can be exploited by players to gain some disproportionate amount of XP and what have you that detract from the game by rewarding boring play.

Or in other words - if you are designing a new game system, try asking a math nerd or a game developer to break it. They might do the math and show you how balanced your system can be, and you can guide your players to playing the game well with that math as well.

Related Articles:

• Categories of XP Systems
• Meat and potatoes of RPG powers
• Manage your game's mental load
• Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system
• Net negative sessions

Categories of XP Systems

For some, the XP systems are the lifeblood of the campaign, the juicy reward you work for through your adventure. However, as with any system, the Experience Points can be much more than a simple carrot to dangle in front of your players. Ideally, it would be one of the systems used to reinforce the themes of the game and the intended playstyle.

In a well designed system, any system should reinforce the intended set of playstyles or general things to happen in a session. Human brains are designed to optimise a reward-seeking behaviour, so if the characters in our game get rewarded with XP for doing something, we are naturally encouraged to do that thing more to get the same reward. If you get XP for killing monsters, you will seek out more monsters to kill, etc.

Below is a large compilation of various XP systems that I tried arranging into a somewhat cohesive whole. However, because sometimes the systems have odd edge cases with how XP is given out, some of them might not fit as neatly. I've also tried briefly explaining any important mechanics relating to XP in any given system, but by no means is it an exhaustive explanation - that would take too long. Finally the various sections feature an insight into what the given XP systems might encourage from the players and the game as a whole.

Goal-Based XP - Dungeons and Dragons, Stars Without Number

Goal-Based XP systems are very focused on characters accomplishing set goals.

Dungeons and Dragons is a staple when it comes to Goal-Based XP rewards. Most of you should have come across this infamous XP table for how much XP to reward based off what sort of adventure the party is having:

You use it to figure out how much XP to give out per encounter the party completes, and you multiply it by factors such as the number of monsters and so on. It's very cut and dry this way. In short - you have your goal ("a monster is attacking you, stop it") and you get XP for completing your goal ("kill the monster").

The Dungeon Master's Guide also gives you a few alternative ways to reward XP - for completing noncombat challenges, for reaching significant milestones, or per-story / per-session rewards. All of those are a variation of "Goal-Based XP".

Stars Without Number features a similar system. By default, you get flat XP per session, but you can change it to getting XP for achieving a personal goal, completing a mission, or more interestingly - loot. The group can decide they would tie their character progression based on how much money they get, or how much money they "waste" on things other than themselves.

All in all, Goal-Based XP encourages the players to think of the game as a series of challenges to overcome in a vein of more modern computer RPGs - "here is your quest, do a quest, get reward". It is a fairly straightforward system, but it doesn't encourage much nuance - you're not really rewarded for having an introspection as a character, having some meaningful interactions or the like.

XP by Practice - Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu, Mouse Guard

A different approach to gaining XP is to reward a player for using a particular skill. A few old-school and more modern RPGs use this system.

In Cyberpunk 2020, characters have a list of skills, stuff like Rifle, Drive, First Aid, Personal Grooming, etc. When a character uses that skill in a session and succeeds, they mark it, and at the end of the session the GM awards the player skill-specific XP (called Improvement Points) based on how critical that skill was to the character or the party this adventure. If you accumulate enough Improvement Points for that skill, you level it up.

While you will get the bulk of your IPs from using a given skill, you can also get some basic IPs from studying or training that skill as a way to get at least a few ranks in a skill in a safer environment.

An interesting paradigm my old GM pointed out in regards to this system is that you tend to get more IPs the more you fuck up a mission (while if you succeed a mission you get more cash). Surviving by the skin of your teeth by driving away action movie style is more important to the character than driving away from a heist that went smoothly, so it nets you more IP. If GM is generous, if you are the last person alive from the party, you count as the entire party, ergo netting you even more IP for critical successes.

 A similar but less bombastic system is in play in Call of Cthulhu. Whenever the character uses a skill successfully, the GM can prompt them to mark it. At the end of the session you roll for every skill you have marked - if your roll fails (aka - more often for things you are bad at, and less often for things you are good at), it goes up. Simple and straightforward.

Contact has a system where you get a flat XP (based on your int) for using a skill, whether it's a pass or fail (critical successes double the XP, critical failures net you a 0). When you accumulate enough points, your skill goes up. You can train / study for another flat XP gain.

Mouse Guard adds a twist to the formula - you track how many times you have succeeded and failed in a given skill separately, and you have to get both of those numbers high enough in order to level up that skill. During the GM turn you have to pretty much go with the flow as to whether you can succeed or fail, but during the players' turn, you can influence your odds by doing harder or easier challenges to get that specific pass / fail you need.

All in all, XP by Practice encourages the players to be active - to be the person that drives, shoots, talks, gets into trouble, etc. The more rolls you make, the better your character becomes. While this solves the issue of players being passive or not wanting to take initiative, it can be a dangerous tool if you have an attention hog in your party. The system encourages you to be active all the time, even if that would be hogging the spotlight from someone else. Even if that is not an issue in your party, it can encourage hyper-specialisation - "you are the best healer, therefore you should roll to heal. Because you rolled to heal, you become better at healing". You can break up the monotony by forcing characters into a situation where they have to roll out of their comfort zone, but if you are behind on some skill, you have to put in a lot of effort to catch up.

Character Growth XP - Apocalypse World, The Veil, Star Trek Adventures

Systems that use Character Growth XP tend to focus more inwards. The adventure of the session is a way for the player characters to reflect on themselves and the characters around them. These XP criteria can get a bit complicated, so please bear with me.

In Apocalypse World, you get XP for rolling a highlighted stat (stats that best highlight the character), but more importantly - for getting your relationship with another player character (the relationship is called Hx) to "roll over and reset" (either by being very positive or very negative). You gain relationships with other characters either by causing that character to get hurt, or at the end of the session by selection a character that "knows you better than they used to". You lose relationship if someone "doesn’t know you as well as they thought". You also get XP for being manipulated by another PC, or by a few other moves. All in all, the system revolves around relationships with other characters and moving them up or down, even if it has a few other things going for it.

In The Veil, you get a point of XP when you attempt to do something for your own benefit and fail, but also more importantly for things revolving around your Beliefs. A Belief is what it says on the tin - a belief that drives your PC. If your Belief is tested, you get an XP, if it gets you into trouble, you get 2XP, and if your Belief is erased, resolved or changed after being tested - you get 3XP. The system thus encourages you to have Beliefs that would be challenged every session so you can see what ideas will persevere.

Star Trek Adventures is another big and a bit complicated system. First, the character can earn Normal Milestones for challenging their Values ("duty above all else", "we will persevere", etc.) and Directives ("The Prime Directive", "Seek Out New Life", etc.), using those two in a positive or negative way, or getting hurt by an attack. These encourage you to test and question your beliefs and to better yourself - the reward for getting Normal Milestones is usually a shift in focus and replacing your Values, rather than adding more things onto your character.

Characters that were particularly prominent during an adventure receive Spotlight Milestones. Those are used to further shift the focus of your character, but also to alter your Ship's stats as well (refocusing it based on the major events of the adventure). Every few Spotlight Milestones you get an Arc Milestone, which allow you to improve yourself or the ship (by adding points, rather than shifting them around).

Similarly, your character can also gain and lose Reputation based on their actions. They gain it for acting according to orders and Directives, preventing combat, establishing an alliance with an enemy, saving lives and acting above and beyond the call of duty. You lose reputation for challenging a Directive, personnel under your command getting killed, resorting to lethal force without cause and taking unnecessary risks. Reputation is used to gain ranks, privileges and responsibilities in the Starfleet and it is a mostly roleplay progression.

All in all, Character Growth XP is pretty useful when you want the game to focus on the characters at play. Everything loops back onto them and their relationships with themselves and each other, and the adventures of a session are useful mostly when they let the characters have those moments of introspection.

Cinematic XP - Broken Worlds, Fellowship, Chronicles of Darkness

Systems with Cinematic XP put an emphasis on things you would see in a movie or TV show.

In Broken Worlds, you can get XP by using a Train move (which is required to actually level up), but more importantly you will be getting XP at the end of the session for "failing in some regard", "exposing yourself to danger, cost or retribution through your actions" and "progressing your story in a meaningful way". Those three things you could easily see in any TV series - you want the characters to fail because that builds more complicated stories. You want them to expose themselves to danger, since playing safely is boring. And finally, you want all of that to have a meaning to the overall story.

Fellowship has a similar system, although it could just as accurately be described as Goal-Based XP. At the end of the session, you progress if you "saved or protected a community in need", "strike a blow against the Overlord and their minions" and "learn more about the world and its people". The system fits the narrative structure of the Fellowship where you're supposed to be on a somewhat serialised quest like Avatar the Last Airbender.

Finally, there is Chronicles of Darkness, a system with many ways of earning experience. Firstly, a character can get XP for fulfilling or making significant headway towards an Aspiration. Aspirations are either short-term, or long-term things you as the player want to happen with the character. This distinction is important - Aspirations are a Doylist choice by the player, not the character ("my character Watson doesn't want to get hurt, but me, Doyle the writer want him to get into trouble"). For Vampires, some of their aspirations revolve around the vampiric world, and some around the human world instead of being short-term and long-term.

Then, you earn XP for dramatic things that happen to the character - when they get hurt badly enough to be in danger, when a Condition ("Guilt", "Fugue", "Spooked", etc.) impedes them or gets overcome, or when you make your failure a dramatic failure. These generally denote some serious complications the characters might face.

CoD gives you a standard 1 Beat (partial XP) automatically at the end of the session, any dramatic scene can reward additional Beats at storyteller's discretion, and similarly exceptional roleplaying, tactics or character development might merit another Beat.

Another major source of Beats is risking a Breaking Point - when you challenge what it is to be human, when you are faced with supernatural forces beyond your comprehension or the like (appropriate to the supernatural type you are playing), you get a Beat. The Breaking Point check usually also results in a Condition that gives more Beats.

Some supernatural splats also reward different kind of Beats. Playing a Mage you can earn Arcane Beats for following your Obsessions (Mage Aspirations), dealing with consequences of your Magic (Act of Hubris, Paradox), being tutored or tutoring others, and encountering supernatural creatures. Playing a Demon nets you Cover Beats for living under the radar, acting according to your Cover (fake identity / skin you wear to hide in plain sight), or for forging demonic pacts.

This long long list should about cover most of the Chronicles of Darkness splats and systems.

So all in all, Cinematic XP is focused on creating "cinematic" moments in your sessions - moments of high tension, high drama and high consequences. Your story might be one of beating up baddies wuxia style, being the hero that rises up against an evil Overlord, or of a film noire detective getting beaten up on the curb. Whatever it is, it is your story to tell.

Hodge Podge XP - World of Darkness, Exalted

For the sake of completeness and to contrast against the Chronicles of Darkness, lets have a look at Old World of Darkness (Vampire the Masquerade, etc.) / New World of Darkness (Chronicles of Darkness 1st edition - Vampire the Requiem 1st ed, etc.). The system presented by these systems is a bit hard to categorise. You get XP for completing a session, for your character learning something new, for roleplaying your character well, and for acts of heroism. At the end of a story arc, you get additional XP for succeeding at the adventure, for surviving dangerous situations, and for displaying wisdom and coming up with clever plans. In nWoD, you would also get bonus XP when a Flaw you took would impede your actions.

All in all, it's a bit of a Hodge Podge when it comes to categorising. Some are for Character Growth, some are for Cinematic, and some could be considered Goal-Based. The system generally seems to just give you rewards for things you are expected to have in an RPG, without any special focus.

A bit of a more focused Hodge Podge XP system can be found in Exalted. In the 3rd edition, you get a flat mount of XP per session. You also get a bonus Solar XP for two things - Expression and Role Bonus. Expression Bonus comes in when you are impeded by a Flaw, reveal something about your character by expressing / supporting / engaging their Intimacies or being challenged, endangered or harmed while protecting or upholding your Intimacy. Role Bonus comes into play when you cede your "spotlight" and let another character shine in their Caste, or by doing something impressive in accordance with your Caste.

Exalted's Hodge Podge system, despite drawing from Character Growth and Cinematic systems, works much better than World of Darkness since it is used to highlight the key mechanics of the system. Intimacies are important in the system, so you get rewarded for engaging with them. Castes are important to what the characters are, so you should express yourself with them. Sharing the spotlight is important, so even if you don't get to shine, you still get rewarded for not interfering with someone else's moment to shine. It's quite coherent in its design.

Conclusions

Well, that was a long and varied list. If anything, this goes to show how varied the RPG experience can be. You can try to draw a number of conclusions from the comparison.

First of all, if you are designing or homebrewing / homeruling a system, take a moment to think about the XP system and see what sort of games and sessions it encourages. Are those elements congruent with the themes of the system? If so - great! If not - you might want to tweak them. XP system is like any other part of the game you're playing - a tool to help you tell the stories you want to tell. It's best when it encourages the playstyle and experience you want to get, not work against it.

Secondly, you should be aware of what sort of playstyle is encouraged by the game you're playing. Just like other mechanics and themes of the game, it will shape your play. Keep that in mind.

Thirdly, if you are playing a system where the XP system feels bad or like an afterthought, you should probably change it to suit your individual playstyle. In our game of Exalted vs World of Darkness we did exactly that - we threw away the oWoD XP system and made our own that encouraged us to keep looping back into the core themes of our game (it being a game set in high school, we were encouraged to engage with the high school and home life setting, despite being avatars of ancient demigods that fight vampires on the regular basis).

Finally, comparing the systems, it seems that mostly "XP by Practice" could be a detrimental system for an overall constructive play under the wrong conditions. All other systems can be made to serve your story just as well. You can mix and match elements from either to create the perfect experience for your game as long as you are aware of what purpose a given system serves. You want an XP system to reinforce your themes and other mechanics, even if you have to draw from different inspirations. That is fine.

All in all, your XP system will shape your game to a greater or lesser extent. Just like with any tool in your arsenal, make sure it is aligned with the vision of what you want your game to be.