Gold for XP ?

Hi,

I'd like to try DW, taking inspiration from some OSR books I own (Isle of the Unknown among others). I really love the rogue mentality that the gold for XP induces in old school play.

Do you think some variation of gold for xp would work instead of highlighting stats in DW ? Did someone ever try that ?

Thanks for your help,
Antoine

Have you seen the gold for XP discussion over at Story-Games?

I did it today and it allows you to pace advancement as the GM and not as a Player.

It's less random. It's easy to remember and most of the leveling happens at the end of the session / downtime.

Player-controlled advancement is a feature though.

A much maligned 'feature'.

A Player-controlled to the extent that they can determine which moves to make when but not the sorts of situations and frequency with which they might make them. Some parts of play are move heavy, with lots of snow balling and such. Others are lots of saying yes and exposition.

Having played and run a great deal of AW and now some DW, I find the Highlighted stat thing to generally be unfun for my players. It's uneven, often forgotten, and gives extremely uneven advancement within a group. The idea only works if player's actively pushing to make Moves with the highlight Stats and are focused on or mentally prioritizing advancement. This is great for aggressive players that are constantly seeking to engage the mechanics and don't prize consistent character immersion. However, I find that it's typically one-in-five of people I've actually played with. Those same people are typically people who are also GMs and also post on internet forums about RPGs. They aren't my typical players, though. For the casual or character driven player, it's a headache and distraction.

Having it be a Spent-Gold-for-XP thing means that the whole XP thing is taken care of during the shopping downtime between adventures and remains largely abstracted. It also reduces handling time while making moves and keeps moves about the fiction and not pressing to make move to get XP. Plus it's a core motivation for the whole dungeoneering thing.

The Alignment Keys are great though. You get to pick them as a player, helping you inform your character vision, and since they're simple, fixed and mechanically isolated, they're easier to keep in mind. But there's not much of a penalty for ignoring them if they're not the main source of XP.

If it ain't broke for your group, that's cool but it's been a really great patch for they people I play with.

In my games, I love the Alignment XP Moves, which I feel really drive the players to role-play their characters.  And I will keep the XP for Bonds going to 4.  I'm not crazy about the gold = XP equation, but rather award everyone XP as they accomplish some minor milestone in the game.  This keeps everyone more or less level, and places a premium on problem solving and advancing the story, rather than collecting gold.  After all, the PCs might survive some harrowing ordeals that SHOULD grant them XP, but might not net them any gold.

I love the GP=XP rules in the old BECMI D&D games. I thought it was clever. Back in the day, there was no "roleplay XP" or "story XP" in D&D: you got XP either by killing things, or taking their stuff.

Your goal as a PC was to amass glory and wealth. XP was glory and wealth both. Glory you got by killing foes, and amassing insane amounts of wealth. The fact that high level PCs got automatically access to castles and such was linked to that : if you were high level, either you were known enough so someone gave you a castle ("I heard you were a great warrior: here's a keep on the borderland, go and defend it in my name") or you were wealthy enough so you bought one.

Always made sense to me.

So, yeah. Maybe some custom moves that let you gain XP when you spend insane amounts on gold in training, research, viral marketing and such.

There's also been some general discussion of XP for gold spent.  The idea being that spending the gold is what's glorious and that you get all your XP at the end of the adventure when you get back to town. 

I could see this being a problem because, you know, what if you want to save up your money for something big?  First you languish behind everyone else with fewer player moves, doing less damage, being less able to help out (I'm actually OK with this part) but then you buy your expensive precious and then you might be able to jump multiple levels at once.

On the other hand, there are problems with gold for XP too.  What if the thief is the first one on the scene and takes all the gold?  No XP for anyone else?  What if the theif steals your gold?  Does the gold deliver XP again?  What if you find 20 gold and a magic item?  Naturally, one of you gets the item and others get gold.  Does the magic item give XP based on its value or do you have to choose between XP for gold or the item?  If an NPC takes your gold and you take it back do you get XP again? 

I'm not saying XP/gold or XP/gold spent are bad ideas, just that there are some potential situations that would have to be playtested and commented on in the rules.

Any Gold-for-XP/XP-for-Gold system would have to explicitly state how it expects treasure to be divided and/or tweak that system for each particular game.

For example, as Marshall points out, does your table allow the thief to steal gold from the party? Do characters keep what they find or does everything get pooled and split at the end?

Play to find out! Colour first!

Also, I have a formula about balance and fairness between playbooks:

XP = Barter = Gold = Minor Qualities = Moves = Stats = Magic Items = Crap