Like everyone who got Arden Vul from Humble Bundle, I have started up a campaign. We’re using Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised as our ruleset, and while I’m generally OK with XP for GP and XP per monster defeated, I’d also like to award XP for general exploration during sessions where the party learns a lot but doesn’t kill or loot anything.
Anyone have a rule of thumb for how much they award for such things? I’m sort of winging it at 100 xp for discovering a new keyed location and another 100 for thoroughly exploring it. But if anyone’s already tested this sort of thing in gameplay, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
i completly scrapped xp for gold or enemys beaten
I instead give out
50xp per thing learned about the world
100xp per discovery made
200xp per thing players are proud of
I let the players decide for themselfs what they count.
This method gives you a nice inside into what the players took away from each session.
I know there have been a lot of variations on this theme. One that always seemed interesting to me was scaling the amount of XP gained per area explored to encourage a “push your luck” decision. If the first area you explore gives you 50 xp, the second 100 more, the third 150 more and so on, the incentive to go deeper is always greater even as you expend your resources.
Something to note about the canonical methods of XP is that they scale with level/risk - the higher HD of monsters you defeat, the more XP they return. The deeper into the dungeon you go, the more treasure you might find.
Having a raw 100-200XP per region explored will likely speed up the early portions of the game, but may approach “not worth tracking” status once you get to the middle portions of the game. This may be especially so once you begin operating at domain level, where the exact specifics of keyed locations may be reduced.
In that regard you may want to scale the explored site by some means, although how to do so might not be obvious. In dungeons, this could just be the depth of the dungeon, with some sort of cap so you don’t have beginning players booking it as deep in a megadungeon as possible to dig through a single closet.
But in the wilderness you might need a notion of proximity to “safe” locations, somewhat similar to BECMI’s three zone method, counting hexes out from a friendly, stable town or fortress.
This is a method that’s used by Zzarchov’s Neoclassical Geek Revival, but importantly: The amount resets if you turn back and you don’t earn for areas explored prior. This really incentivizes the tough decision point of “Push further” or “Cut our Losses.”