Exp and such

I signed up for the forum specifically for this topic. It seems there's some oddities in terms of how one gets experience in this game. The big example came last session when I created a lvl 1 elf wizard.

One cleric spell gave me the ability to learn cure light wounds which turned out to be one of the most useful spells to use at this point in our campaign being that we have no healer for the group. After choosing the good alignment, we ran into a bit of a problem. It seemed that every battle I was getting anywhere from 5+ experience just because I cast cure light wounds every action. Not to say I was PGing for the exp, just that I had pretty much nothing else useful to do (having one spell memorized meant that I could either keep my party alive and be useful, or I could do other actions and let people die. obvious choice.).

The big issue is that I gained about 9 xp in a very short amount of time. Other class alignments have some amount of vagueness to what gives them exp; killing a defenseless enemy, harming an innocent person. What constitutes defenseless and what constitutes innocent. The mage's good alignement says "when you cast a spell that benefits someone else, mark xp".

Whether that is intended or not is the main issue. The main question here is how fast a character should be gaining xp from alignement/ marked stats. After that session, we kinda decided to nerf the amount of xp that I was gaining, simply because nobody else would be able to keep up and it seems a bit ridiculous for our game anyway, but I would very much appreciate some insight into how other groups are doing xp and such. Thanks!

First off, thanks for playing and posting!

The exact pace of XP comes down to how you play, and how you play to your alignment. We figure 7-9 XP per session is pretty typical, with second level being in range in the first session. If everyone is tending to get more or less than that, no problem.

The vagueness is intentional, actually. Most of the alignments will prompt discussion, and that's fine. The wizard's Good alignment is probably a bit straightforward, and it's definitely something we'll look at. Off the top of my head, I might suggest "When you use magic to protect or defend an ally ..." There aren't many spells that directly do that directly, but there are many ways to indirectly do that via magic. I'll mark this alignment as one of the problem spots and hash it out with Adam, he's great at alignments.

Just thought I'd point out Good Bards as well.  Not that I found it to be a problem (mostly because I forget about the alignment XP and the player apparently isn't paying attention either) but "Power of Music" from a Good Bard seems like a double-dip every time.

I Love Love Love to look at the 'flip' sides of alignment when coming up with 'hard' moves as DM and announcing future badness.

Oh, so you mark experience when you heal someone out of the goodness of your heart? Cool. What happens when you don't heal them? You've failed (or perhaps your god) has failed to heal them. How do you feel about that? Are you worthy? Are they evil? Have you been corrupted by the taint in their soul? What does that mean?!

The story is endlessly prompted by the moves and their iterations. I don't play to kill shit and power up. That's D&D. I play to make cool moves and see where the story goes. That's AW. DW straddles the two quite nicely.

There's a lot of implied stuff in the rules.  For every "you get a bonus for doing X" there's a "you better look out if you do Y"

Sometimes you'll have a session where there's a glut of XP and sometimes you won't.  All in all, we've found (with the exception of a few fixes-in-progress "broken" xp moves) things progress pretty steadily.