When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.

Experience points tell you a lot about what a game is about. They’re very blatantly a reward to incentivize certain actions.

While it’s certainly arguable, there is a theory in OSR style play that combat is a fail state. In other words, if a fight breaks out, that means you already screwed up. You could die.

So what happened between that and 5e that changed things?

See, in older editions of D&D, the majority of your XP came from the treasure you brought back to town. 1 gp = 1 xp.

That means that you didn’t have to fight to advance in levels. If you could trick the monsters or barter with them, it was just as good.

Monsters had a reaction roll – when you first met one, the DM would roll to see their attitude. They weren’t just there to be cannon fodder.

Now I wanna say this really started to happen in 3E, but in truth, I’ve never played it. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong.

XP became solely derived from defeating monsters in combat. If you wanted to go up a level, you had to kill. That makes it a very different game.

About two years ago, I concluded a campaign of 5e that ran from levels 1-20. The group wanted to do it the classic way of xp for levels (instead of milestones). The higher up in levels they went, the more XP was needed.

This fostered a very grindy campaign style. I would drop dungeons into the game that were just large concentrations of monsters to try and get them all that xp so they could finally level up.

Combat is fun in 5e – the game is very much built around it to the detriment of much else. Just look at all the powers PCs can gain as they level – most of them are combat-cetric.

But too much of it begins to feel stale and, quite frankly, kind of annoying. When every encounter is a combat encounter, you lose so much of the richness that is an RPG.

That same group has started a new campaign. They want to do Milestone leveling. In short, when they reach major “story beats”, they gain a level. This has it’s own issues (which I’ll discuss in tomorrow’spost), but it does free the game up to focus more on puzzles, social interactions, factions, and other nonsense.

Now, instead just a hammer, they have a wrench, a prybar, and a bunch of other tools in the it.