Tons of games use XP rewards to incentivize player behavior. But I think XP is often too intangible a reward to truly motivate players to act differently, and doubly so when there’s a time delay between their action and reward (such as to the end of the session with end of session XP triggers).
I’m going to lay out some examples, talk through them, and then talk about what I think are better alternatives for designers to use as carrots for player behavior.
Examples
I think of Apocalypse World as an obvious example of this: other players highlight two of your stats each session, and you get XP when you roll either one, encouraging you to act in a way that will make use of those stats.
I play a lot of Blades in the Dark, where you get end of session XP if you did things related to your playbook: if you’re a Lurk, you get XP if you “addressed a challenge with stealth or evasion.” Plus everyone gets rewarded if they “expressed your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background” and “struggled with issues from your vice or traumas.”
Also in Blades, when you make a Desperate roll (when you make a roll in a real tough situation), you get XP for it.
Monster of the Week and Thirsty Sword Lesbians give you XP on any failed roll.
These all felt like great carrots to me at first glance, but I’ve seen them be wildly different in effectiveness in actually modifying player behavior.
Analysis
Let’s take the Blades end of session triggers for example. By far the most frequent way I see these triggers playing out is: we get to the end of the session, we walk through the questions player by player, and people are like “uhhh… gosh, what did I even do this week. I guess I did XYZ? Is that even enough to qualify as struggling with my vice?” And then everyone else encourages them to just take the XP and stop being so hard on themself.
Now, I think this is effective at a number of things. It’s a nice ritual out of play and back into being humans. It recaps the session and helps convert what happened into canonical story material (a topic for a whole other essay). It encourages players to reflect on their character and let everyone else at the table know what’s most important to them in the story (especially the GM who might be planning future storylines). But almost everyone starts with “uhh, what happened here again?” Those are not the words of people who were looking to their XP triggers during the session to decide how to act.
This isn’t universal, of course. I personally regularly modify my Blades PC’s behavior to try and maximize my XP, especially early in a campaign, I just see it rarely in the people I play with.
But even with something like Apocalypse World’s highlighted moves, in which the reward of XP is immediate for the change in behavior, I rarely see character behavior change. Partly I think this is because the highlighted moves mechanic feels a little clunky in practice, but more importantly I think the problem is that XP is itself fundamentally a time delay between action and reward. When you’re 5 XP away from an advance, what good is XP to you? But if you’re one XP away, suddenly you start trying to remember what you’ve got highlighted or, if you’re playing Monster of the Week, you’re hoping you fuck up a roll. Because the carrot is no longer nebulous XP, it’s a whole new move you can make or a stat boost or something else super exciting.
In campaign games, this problem becomes even bigger the deeper into a campaign you get, because (in my experience) people start having all the moves and stats they want. Advancement itself stops being a carrot, let alone XP!
Aside on OSR Games
I swear I know literally anything about the OSR. 😬
Many OSR games link XP to gold, thus incentivizing you to actually go into dungeons and do the thing, and to stick around even when you get in a tough spot. And I think this incentive actually works! But the difference in play philosophies completely change the context, and I think that’s the reason why.
In my experience, advancement isn’t that important in OSR games. A creative idea on how to approach a problem is much more valuable than +2 on a stat or something. I think this leads to XP and gold accumulation operating almost as a running score rather than an advancement track. I want XP in an OSR game for the same reason I want my name in the highest slot on the local Pacman machine. Nothing wrong with that! But the purpose of XP isn’t to motivate character behavior the way I’m talking about in story games.
Alternative Carrots
So if you want to incentivize players to act in a particular way and XP isn’t getting the job done, what should you do instead? I have two suggestions: replace XP with some other candy-sized thing to hand out, probably a meta-currency of some kind, or remake XP into something that feels more tangible, immediate, and worth fighting for.
Let’s start with the easy thing of alternative candies. My favorite is bonus dice. If you want people to play to their “beliefs, drives, heritage, or background,” just give them a bonus die to rolls where they incorporate such a thing.
Devil’s Bargains, also from Blades, are a great example of this: you take a guaranteed consequence and you get a bonus die! Is it worth it to take the consequence for a small percentage increase on the roll? Almost never. But it feels good, it’s an immediate bonus, and so players love to do it.
I accidentally included several of these in my own game Space Train Space Heist, a one shot Blades hack. In addition to Devil’s Bargains, you get bonus dice when you describe a cinematic detail of the scene because I wanted people to do more of that. It’s a free die basically, but it means everyone’s constantly narrating the cool cinematic shit they’re doing. Works like gangbusters.
Meta-currencies are also great. Dream Askew // Dream Apart is the gold standard for this: you’ve got weak moves that put you in a bad spot but give you a token, and you’ve got strong moves that get you out of trouble but you have to spend a token to make. Easy. People are incentivized to get into trouble in a bunch of ways flavorful to their playbook, and they embrace it. I personally love to “play for the high score” in Dream Askew where I just make weak move after weak move to rack up my token count for its own sake.
But my favorite implementation of this is the game’s Lures mechanic. Every playbook has a Lure that offers up a way for anyone else to earn a token by making themself vulnerable to you in a flavorful way. For example, the Iris (a creepy psychic) has a lure that says “whenever someone invites you to use your psychic gifts on them, they gain a token.” Boom! People want that candy those tokens, and the designer wants them to develop unhealthy codependencies. Done and done.
(I do have a quibble with Lures, which is that people are forgetting about them all the time because they live on other people’s character sheets, but I think that’s a solvable problem.)
Fate tokens from (checks notes) Fate work basically the same way. If you play into your character’s weaknesses, you get a Fate token that you can later spend for a bonus on a roll. It’s a great method.
Reworking XP
Let’s talk my other suggestion: keep using advancement as an incentive, but rework XP to make it juicier.
The cleanest, most exciting version of this I’ve recently seen is in The Exiles. In that game, each XP you get is a Memory, literally an important moment from play that has stuck with you. It’s like you do Stars & Wishes but your Stars get written down on your sheet as XP. It’s so clean and elegant, it feels like it must have been done before in some game I don’t know about. Suddenly if you’re offering me the opportunity to enshrine a moment in a Memory, I will do whatever you want to make it happen because it feels important and full of gravitas. But mechanically all I did was mark an XP and write a couple sentences in my session recap doc.
The other minor rework of XP I’ve seen that I like is Jaded in The Watch (or more recently Ruin in Apocalypse Keys). This is a track like XP, where when you get to a certain point you get to take a new move just like with XP. But when you get too much of it, you’re fucked. Your character retires or becomes super evil or otherwise implodes. Suddenly every point feels important because you know you only have so many you can take. Does this incentivize me to take more Jaded or lean against it? I dunno. Depends on the player and how far we are into the campaign and whether I really just need one more Jaded move, just one more I promise, oh but these both look cool… Jaded is emotionally charged. It’s a carrot and a stick. It’s real interesting.
Moving even further afield, you can rework what advancement looks like entirely. In Stewpot, a Firebrands game about retiring from your life of adventuring to open a tavern, you start with a bunch of Adventure Experiences that you gradually trade in for Town Experiences. When you’ve traded them all in you go full NPC, retire to a happy life, and the game is over.
This doesn’t work like XP at all. It’s not clear that you’re getting better. But your character is clearly arcing somewhere as you trade experiences. Plus you have a very small number of these, so trading each one feels like a pretty big deal. (Or in keeping with the flavor of the game, it doesn’t, and you wake up one day wondering where the time has gone and how do I work this and where is that large automobile).
In a hack of Stewpot I’m working on called Space Fam, you’re a found family on a spaceship doing Cowboy Bebop things. You start with a bunch of Fears, and as you learn not to let them rule your life, you slowly gain Beliefs. Once you’ve got more Beliefs than Fears, you decide it’s time to go fight the evil Company instead of remaining in your relatively safe and cozy life. In the meantime, you can use Beliefs almost like special abilities to be more effective while doing action stuff. So there’s a player incentive to pick up Beliefs, and every time you do so you it feels momentous. You don’t need five nebulous XP to get to that payoff.
Sticks (AKA the Masochist’s Carrot)
If XP isn’t a good carrot, you can always head in the other direction and find ways to discourage behaviors. There’s some of this in Jaded, for example. Or you can be super blunt: look at how most OSR games make combat terrifying to incentivize players to come up with more creative solutions to problems.
I think this is typically less interesting. People kinda know what they don’t want to do already. If you’re trying to keep them away from something they want to do… maybe ask why you’re doing that? I think most designers understand this, because I see a lot more carrots out there than sticks.
That said, remember that a stick for a character might be a carrot for a player. Some people don’t need that bonus die dangled in front of them to put their character into a horrible situation; that’s the whole point of the hobby! My players will take basically any Devil’s Bargain I throw at them not because of the bonus die but just because it sounds like fun.
A Successful XP Implementation
Before I go, I wanted to call out one place I’ve seen traditional XP work really well for changing behavior. Also from Blades in the Dark, this is when a PC makes a Desperate roll (tl;dr: when they make a roll in an especially tough situation), they get XP. Without the XP trigger there, more people would balk at the idea of taking action that was going to leave them open to huge consequences. But with the XP trigger, I instead see many people using the XP as an excuse to indulge in an ill-advised plan. That’s exactly what the game wants!
At its best, this mechanic is even better than that: it becomes a tough choice for the player. Do you want to do the thing that’s going to get you in real deep trouble because you really need that XP? Or are you willing to play it safe but know you’re that much further away from an advancement? Attaching XP to an immediate choice is XP at its best.
You Can Do Better
It might be another whole essay to get through why I think the whole XP-based advancement system is overrated creatively as well as mechanically, but this hopefully provides some ideas for better ways to mechanically motivate player behavior.
If you’ve got other good examples of incentives, especially about how any of this plays out beyond a PBTA framework, hit me up.