After almost a decade in scifi, I finally started fantasy gaming with D&D 3e (though I bought some 2e books in the early to mid 90s for lore/art reasons) so treasure as XP is something that I was never personally familiar with. When the Shadowdark kickstarter started making news, I heard about the carousing mechanic and decided to look further into similar systems which, to my surprise, included some of the earliest versions of D&D. What other systems use "carousing" and other mechanics as a way to convert currency into character advancement (i.e. gold into xp)? I believe Xanathar's introduced some downtime activities for D&D 5e though the focus there was more on the downtime as the main metacurrency rather than actual currency/gold into xp. What downsides do you see in using those systems as opposed to the more common (nowadays) parallel xp/gold rewards? What benefits do you see in using it instead?
I don't believe that I'd like a straight conversion from one to the other (which I think early D&D used) and instead prefer a middle step where players must incorporate some roleplaying middle step usually involving chance (i.e. a die roll) with the conversion. Also, by "xp" I mean general character advancement whether that translates into levels in systems that have them or attribute/skill/power/etc advancement in those that don't. Spending money to hire an instructor to buff your melee skill? That counts in my book. Spending money on lavish parties to gain new contacts or buff your charisma equivalent stat? Sure, that counts! I'm curious how other systems that I may not have tried might have used similar mechanics beyond just a simple (meta)currency conversion.
While Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign contained rules similar to carousing, they really weren't popular until the OSR was trying to solve the non-problem of players having too much cash (which, incidentally, is a result of most old school games dropping XP for magic items).
And while Arneson's rules did include XP for spending money on wine and women, it was part of a bigger system where players would specify a goal which could include things like raising animals, donating to a church, or even hiring NPCs to spread tales of your exploits.
As far as money for training goes, early games like Runequest or Bushido relied entirely on this. Bushido was actually cool in this respect because finding a teacher was an important part of adventuring and some could even teach you secret techniques like cutting arrows or throwing swords. But both of those games were different from D&D as their skills were advanced separately instead of as part of a class (Bushido had both classes and skills but skills didn't increase as you gained levels).
Personally, if you give out XP for the cash value of magic items, the players will no longer have enough GP to where a carousing rule is necessary.
Thanks for the reply. I didn't realize the original Arneson D&D rules were broader and more inclusive of various activities. When I was first (admittedly late!) introduced to the idea of carousing, the wannabe game designer in me instantly thought that something like that should be more universal for fantasy (especially sword and sorcery) settings.