this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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I run a Monster of the Week game and my players get experience throughout sessions, as well as at the end. The mechanics are basically:
I think other PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse - systems inspired by Apocalypse World) systems do something similar.
Isn’t the simple fix to this to just distribute experience points as soon as they’re earned?
Your system sounds like the way that skill-based video game RPGs (Elder Scrolls games and Arcanum come to mind) handle experience.
In a lot of games I’ve played, I’d rather get experience for in-game accomplishments immediately and to be able to train skills like this during downtime - generally between games.
I could see people being interested in it. You get instant gratification and a bit of extra crunchiness. A lot of players enjoy that.
With the right skill system I could see this being useful. My main concern is that if you put this on top of a system with relatively few skills, it could encourage people to game it by grinding. There are ways to mitigate that, though.
In a system with fewer skills, instead of just being experience points, the “currency” you earned this way could be used for temporary power ups related to the skill in question.
You could also limit it so you only rewarded players for story-related tasks.
The overall skill trees I was working on were huge and skills were tiered, linked to class/profession.
An easy example: a magic using character.
Magic requires mana and spells burn specific amounts of it to be cast. A player could invest their experience several ways: spend their experience to increase their mana pool, spend experience to improve the grasp of a spell (better understood spells would be easier to use, quicker, last longer, etc), acquire new spells within a college or access another magic college (a magical healer could access offensive magic, like fire/lightning based spells, as a quick example, or defensive, like barriers).
It was fun to think about it, then.
I think the better question than “Does the experience system sound like it has potential,” then, is “Does the overall concept / system have potential?”
My gut is probably, but it depends a lot more on what you’re willing to put into it and what you want out of it. What’s your metric for success? If it’s something you want to run yourself and to share online to have a few groups use it, then that’s a lot more achievable than being able to get a publishing deal, for example. And in-between, publishing on drivethrurpg or something similar, at a nominal cost (like $2-$5), would take more effort than the former and less than the latter; and the higher the cost and the higher the number of players you’d want, the higher the effort you need to put in (and a lot of that isn’t just in system building, but in art, community building, marketing, etc.).
From what you’ve shared, it sounds like an interesting system. I could especially see it working in an academy setting where grinding skills to be able to pass practical exams is one of the players’ goals. I also could see it working well by a loosely GMed play by post system, with the players self-enforcing (or possibly leveraging some tools built into the site to track resource pools, experience, rolling, etc.), though I haven’t played in a forum game myself, so I might be way off-base.
Did your system have classes or was it completely free-form in terms of gaining access to those skill trees?
Primary objective: fun.
I'd share my work for free. At best, I'd add a little "If you had fun, consider sponsoring me. If you can't, share it with others and keep having fun and causing mayhem."
I'd laugh my head off if someone told me they used a Fire Wave in a narrow alley to take down a group of mobs and in the process burned a hole in the city wall or torched half the town.
Yes, it was created with classes/professions in mind and each class has a unique skill tree and some even have subclasses or class specific skills.
As an example: a magic user would need to choose which college it would start with - healing, fire, water, etc - and as the character evolves it can access higher tiers with more complex spells and skills. I had an idea to also cross skills to unlock others, as in having a given skill in the college of water and by acquiring a skill under the college of life, it would unlock a mixed nature spell/skill.
There was a lot of thought thrown into it. I wanted some very complex under the hood yet easy to play and approach by any person and get gratification by getting into the game, in the moment.
I only get to GM for a couple of hours a week. I'd hate that to involve narrative grinding. Although it'd be fair for a character to do it during downtime.