Ok, so I asked for opinions on this over at Dragon’s Foot, but I’m curious if anyone over here has any experience with it.
I’ve seen different versions of the gp=xp that require spending the gold, not simply walking into town with it, to get the xp.
I’m wondering if anyone has tried it this way and if so, what, if any, effect did it have? I lean towards this method as I think it would make players immediately start thinking of themselves in the context of the world economy, which I like. But I also realize it might be a bit more fiddly and could result in some hijinks if I’m not careful. So, any thoughts?
We playtested “spending gold for XP” in the early playtests of ACKS and rejected it, for these reasons:
- It was incompatible with the method of assigning XP we planned to use for campaign activities, which had a GP Threshold.
- It increased book-keeping.
- It kept adventurers so impoverished that they had trouble accumulating funds for campaign activities.
- It felt anti-climactic that, upon getting back to town, there was no “Ka-ching” of XP. Instead players went shopping. Aesthetically the group didn’t like this.
- It was easy to game.
I’d recommend you try the rules as written - XP for gold brought home from adventures, XP for (gold - GP threshold) for campaign activities, and gold spent wastefully yields Reserve XP.
The New York Red Box groups give XP for both getting it out of the dungeon and also for spending it, in a limited way. It works great for us - I plan to present a version of the carousing system we use for this in the ACKS supplement based on my White Sandbox campaign - but as Alex says it doesn’t fit into the framework of ACKS; characters who use this XP system won’t be like the NPCs who are assumed to have risen to positions of power using the ACKS XP rules as written. A historical perspective on this idea is here, http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/wine-women-and-song-experience-points/
I haven’t encountered the concerns people are talking about on Dragonsfoot. We often take care of carousing in between sessions via forums or email, and even when we resolve it at the start of a session, people are pretty uniformly glad to quickly add some color to the setting, some depth to their character, and then get down to dungeon-crawling. The hijinks sometimes become adventures in their own right, but that’s for me some of the appeal!
I think the “get XP for returning to civilization with gold //and// get Reserve XP for spending it” dynamic has been wonderful for our campaign.