I think originally XP for GP had to do with B/X not having much of an economy so the money piled up and piled up with very little to spend it on and it was something to use the gold on besides the largest known 10' pole collection on the continent.

AD&D more or less solved that with needing gold to level along with XP and making and consuming of magical crap and things that would ruin your stuff and make you dump a lot of gold to replace it.

But I'm old and I forget shit and get confused about things so I could be wrong. Terribly wrong.

I'm not a fan of gold-for-XP systems, myself.  If you want to incentivize adventuring, give XP for adventuring.  Tying XP to gold opens up a lot of degenerate behaviors.  Even assuming that you patch the obvious holes of the gold needing to come from a non-PC source to stop PCs from 'losing' their treasure to each other repeatedly, you still run into problems.  As noted, you lose the ability to motivate PCs with actual heroic deeds.  You, in fact, strongly motivate the PCs to come up with all sorts of hilarious hijinks involving fraud, illusions, forged magic, or even just having everyone roll an elf, start an accounting company, and level very slowly but very reliably with a few centuries of salary.

Training fees raise far more questions than they answer, as well.  They don't establish how the original trainers leveled up.  And they ensure that if the PCs go through a war-torn region where everyone has been in desperate skirmishes for an entire generation, that they will be absolute pushovers, because no one there actually got better at surviving through experience, and they could only loot the bare necessities of survival.  "Well, other people level differently (because I as GM want them to be a given level at a given time), but you're on your own special progression that involves giving money to arbitrary NPCs which then vanishes into the aether." is far more video-gamy bullshit than anything anyone bitched about 4E for.

Now, if you want to lean into this, and actually design and play out a grim world where acting like members of Homo economicus was actually necessary to gain power, Mammon was the final boss as all other demons foolishly horded worthless souls and non-fungible magics and planar real estate, and then leaned into all of the ways the world would be different, that would be a really interesting campaign.  But it would not resemble any simple version of D&D.  And introducing those rules without making them actually true in the world means you break the link between player and character motivation completely.

And dammit, now I kind of want a game where the actual meat of the game is coming up with ridiculous financial crimes to break reality.

In the game design, "Gold for XP" isn't gold for XP.  It is gold is the flavor for the markers that you use to keep score for the XP, which then ties into other parts of the design because it is money.

The GM put a certain amount of gold in the dungeon.  That, plus a little XP for the monsters guarding it, is the total XP available (plus whatever "restocking" options are in place).  The GM put the gold in the dungeon presumably to bear some relation to the amount of difficulty it would be to get it out, considering the monsters, traps, puzzles, logistics, etc.   You don't have a 1 room dungeon with a single orc guarding a chest with 10,000 gp in it.

However,  from a design perspective, you can get exactly the same score keeping effect by having I.O.U tags or flags.  Having fought their way through the Dungeon of Despairing Death, and crushed the great plaid lizard in the final chamber, the party opens a locked and trapped chest with a ticket saying that it qualifies them for 753 XP each if they can return it to the XP ticket office in town.  The only problem is that is kind of stupid and reductionist and also ignores the whole money angle and how it ties into other aspects of the game. 

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 06, 2021, 04:42:50 PM
In the game design, "Gold for XP" isn't gold for XP.  It is gold is the flavor for the markers that you use to keep score for the XP, which then ties into other parts of the design because it is money.

The GM put a certain amount of gold in the dungeon.  That, plus a little XP for the monsters guarding it, is the total XP available (plus whatever "restocking" options are in place).  The GM put the gold in the dungeon presumably to bear some relation to the amount of difficulty it would be to get it out, considering the monsters, traps, puzzles, logistics, etc.   You don't have a 1 room dungeon with a single orc guarding a chest with 10,000 gp in it.

However,  from a design perspective, you can get exactly the same score keeping effect by having I.O.U tags or flags.  Having fought their way through the Dungeon of Despairing Death, and crushed the great plaid lizard in the final chamber, the party opens a locked and trapped chest with a ticket saying that it qualifies them for 753 XP each if they can return it to the XP ticket office in town.  The only problem is that is kind of stupid and reductionist and also ignores the whole money angle and how it ties into other aspects of the game.

I guess it's a sliding scale.  Because once you allow magic and clever tactics (or even mundane, boring-but-logical tactics like besieging a dungeon, building a large bonfire at the tunnel mouth, and suffocating every organic monster within like recalcitrant groundhogs), you can make the getting of treasure trivial.

You also build into the game the assumption that adventuring in general is a sideline.  The real money is presumably in building up enough power to disguise your own identity (ideally as a monster or evil warlord you don't like), then either raid the treasury of your local kingdom, or just sack a few mid-size villages.  And that's just on the mundane level; you can entirely break the economy of a region if you can forge high-value coinage (which wizards who can cast Fabricate and Major Creation can, trivially).  Those wizards can also use fast travel and disguises to keep ahead of news of their perfidious deeds.  And even the nice wizards have every reason to use divinations to find mines where the previous occupants delved too greedily and too deep, hose them down with high-pressure DPS, and then start investing in ever-working, never-sleeping construct labor to give them passive income.  The more passive income they get, the more XP they get, and the more they can make miner-constructs.

When you make XP for gold central, you centralize tactics like this.  The GM, presumably, does not want the players to shrug, do a few rudimentary scouting missions and divinations, and then waltz into the dungeon disguised as the local monsters, spot-assassinate or bypass the vault guards, empty the vault, and leave, allowing the monsters who have presumably been doing the raiding to get this loot around and intact to keep raiding and gathering more treasure.

XP tokens in chests is strange and gamey, sure, but reserving the bulk of the XP award for overcoming the challenge that the dungeon represents, whether by defeating enough of the dungeon's inhabitants that the survivors decide to move on, or by doing a lightning blitz to overcome the boss monster before they can marshal their allies and defenses, or even by managing to negotiate with the monster to provide security to the nearby villages in exchange for continued voluntary payments of treasure, should all be the Ding! moment.  Defaulting to awards being gold-based means that you can't effectively set up encounters with solutions like the ones above, and that you can't approach certain kinds of open-ended challenges, unless you as GM are willing to cheat around players getting too much or too little loot.

And, as a side note, if it is known that looting gold powers up adventurers, then you should absolutely have dungeons with random 10,000 gp payouts, which enterprising high-level folks use to power-level their loyal-but-weak chosen minions.  Likewise, clever monsters will stake out signs advertising "Dungeon contains less than 500 gp in lootable treasure.", with a pile of burnt art and shattered gems as proof of their intentions.  After all, if treasure both attracts adventurers and makes them stronger, why would you keep the stuff around? You're a monster, after all; if you want something that a person would pay for, you just eat the shopkeeper, and get both loot and a meal.  (And, of course, if monsters can level by carrying loot out of civilization and into their lairs, then you should get entirely different kinds of monster behavior.)

If you're not interesting in asking these questions at all, because it's assumed that there is no deeper reason to why Item X is in Room Y than "The GM put it there.", then this isn't an issue.  But at that level of abstraction, you're not that far from those XP IOUs, either.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 03, 2021, 11:50:24 PM
When playing a gold for XP game, do you ONLY give gold for xp acquired (aside from minimal monster killing xp)?

Basically, yes. If I need to make a judgement call as GM I simply do so - rescuing captives might award the value of their ransom or sale, or if the players turn down a reward, or disberse it as largesse, they might still get the xp value.

None of this requires pre-written rules or agonizing over it, you just do it.

I also consider class awards for things like spell research, duels of honor, heists, etc, but gold is still the biggest source.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 03, 2021, 11:50:24 PMWhat about situations where the players do something RP worthy but it actually means they don't get gold? Like turning it down to help an obviously in-need person? Or doing something purely for a selfless reason that's actually difficult but with no gold involved?

Do they just miss out because they were generous?

Roughly in order -
RP is its own reward. And in the long run its hard to stop people. Even in low-rp games, sooner or later people start developing a character for their character, and making in character decisions. So my feeling is this can take care of itself, it doesn't need handholding from the GM.
"Turning down gold to help an obviously in-need person" won't happen without the GM deliberately setting up that conundrum. In which case you're agonizing over a problem you've created. If its a dungeon with gold in it (the original of xp for gold) then it won't come up.
"Something purely selfless and difficult with no gold attached" - quite possibly no xp award. But the broader context you're missing here is that xp for gold games can naturally have several sessions with little or no reward, with occasional windfalls or hard won victories that level up the whole party at once. So a session or adventure with no major xp award doesn't stand out, its just a normal part of play, and normally the party will get caught up sooner or later.

More broadly still, it sounds like you're coming from a background in quest-based, GM-assigned play sessions. A full game of old school D&D might start with only one dungeon available, but it will either be a megadungeon with multiple destinations or multiple dungeons will be made known as play progresses. Plus there will be an overland map where players might travel or seek out monster lairs. Plus the players might set their own goals, which might include anything from altruistic heroism to breaking and entering in some rich asshole's mansion. AND THEN you can make available the more modern quest hooks of fetching and guarding and going on linear adventures.

If you get past the GM deciding both the quest and how it will be completed then xp for gold makes more sense. If you stay on the GM deciding the quest and the path then you just may get the kinds of problems you're worried about.

Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 07:11:37 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 06, 2021, 04:42:50 PM
In the game design, "Gold for XP" isn't gold for XP.  It is gold is the flavor for the markers that you use to keep score for the XP, which then ties into other parts of the design because it is money.

The GM put a certain amount of gold in the dungeon.  That, plus a little XP for the monsters guarding it, is the total XP available (plus whatever "restocking" options are in place).  The GM put the gold in the dungeon presumably to bear some relation to the amount of difficulty it would be to get it out, considering the monsters, traps, puzzles, logistics, etc.   You don't have a 1 room dungeon with a single orc guarding a chest with 10,000 gp in it.

However,  from a design perspective, you can get exactly the same score keeping effect by having I.O.U tags or flags.  Having fought their way through the Dungeon of Despairing Death, and crushed the great plaid lizard in the final chamber, the party opens a locked and trapped chest with a ticket saying that it qualifies them for 753 XP each if they can return it to the XP ticket office in town.  The only problem is that is kind of stupid and reductionist and also ignores the whole money angle and how it ties into other aspects of the game.

I guess it's a sliding scale.  Because once you allow magic and clever tactics (or even mundane, boring-but-logical tactics like besieging a dungeon, building a large bonfire at the tunnel mouth, and suffocating every organic monster within like recalcitrant groundhogs), you can make the getting of treasure trivial.

You also build into the game the assumption that adventuring in general is a sideline.  The real money is presumably in building up enough power to disguise your own identity (ideally as a monster or evil warlord you don't like), then either raid the treasury of your local kingdom, or just sack a few mid-size villages.  And that's just on the mundane level; you can entirely break the economy of a region if you can forge high-value coinage (which wizards who can cast Fabricate and Major Creation can, trivially).  Those wizards can also use fast travel and disguises to keep ahead of news of their perfidious deeds.  And even the nice wizards have every reason to use divinations to find mines where the previous occupants delved too greedily and too deep, hose them down with high-pressure DPS, and then start investing in ever-working, never-sleeping construct labor to give them passive income.  The more passive income they get, the more XP they get, and the more they can make miner-constructs.

When you make XP for gold central, you centralize tactics like this.  The GM, presumably, does not want the players to shrug, do a few rudimentary scouting missions and divinations, and then waltz into the dungeon disguised as the local monsters, spot-assassinate or bypass the vault guards, empty the vault, and leave, allowing the monsters who have presumably been doing the raiding to get this loot around and intact to keep raiding and gathering more treasure.

XP tokens in chests is strange and gamey, sure, but reserving the bulk of the XP award for overcoming the challenge that the dungeon represents, whether by defeating enough of the dungeon's inhabitants that the survivors decide to move on, or by doing a lightning blitz to overcome the boss monster before they can marshal their allies and defenses, or even by managing to negotiate with the monster to provide security to the nearby villages in exchange for continued voluntary payments of treasure, should all be the Ding! moment.  Defaulting to awards being gold-based means that you can't effectively set up encounters with solutions like the ones above, and that you can't approach certain kinds of open-ended challenges, unless you as GM are willing to cheat around players getting too much or too little loot.

And, as a side note, if it is known that looting gold powers up adventurers, then you should absolutely have dungeons with random 10,000 gp payouts, which enterprising high-level folks use to power-level their loyal-but-weak chosen minions.  Likewise, clever monsters will stake out signs advertising "Dungeon contains less than 500 gp in lootable treasure.", with a pile of burnt art and shattered gems as proof of their intentions.  After all, if treasure both attracts adventurers and makes them stronger, why would you keep the stuff around? You're a monster, after all; if you want something that a person would pay for, you just eat the shopkeeper, and get both loot and a meal.  (And, of course, if monsters can level by carrying loot out of civilization and into their lairs, then you should get entirely different kinds of monster behavior.)

If you're not interesting in asking these questions at all, because it's assumed that there is no deeper reason to why Item X is in Room Y than "The GM put it there.", then this isn't an issue.  But at that level of abstraction, you're not that far from those XP IOUs, either.

You are way over-thinking this.  GP as XP is a game mechanic, not an in-world phenomenon.  The experience from gaining gold is a representation of the abstract growth in character competence.  Monsters wouldn't "bait" adventurers nor could rulers "power level" followers, as the acquisition of gold is a short-hand, not a physical process in the setting (you're describing the meta of an MMO, not an RPG).  Seriously, you're straining pretty hard to find an objection here...

Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 07:11:37 PM
When you make XP for gold central, you centralize tactics like this.  The GM, presumably, does not want the players to shrug, do a few rudimentary scouting missions and divinations, and then waltz into the dungeon disguised as the local monsters, spot-assassinate or bypass the vault guards, empty the vault, and leave, allowing the monsters who have presumably been doing the raiding to get this loot around and intact to keep raiding and gathering more treasure.

XP tokens in chests is strange and gamey, sure, but reserving the bulk of the XP award for overcoming the challenge that the dungeon represents, whether by defeating enough of the dungeon's inhabitants that the survivors decide to move on, or by doing a lightning blitz to overcome the boss monster before they can marshal their allies and defenses, or even by managing to negotiate with the monster to provide security to the nearby villages in exchange for continued voluntary payments of treasure, should all be the Ding! moment.  Defaulting to awards being gold-based means that you can't effectively set up encounters with solutions like the ones above, and that you can't approach certain kinds of open-ended challenges, unless you as GM are willing to cheat around players getting too much or too little loot.

And, as a side note, if it is known that looting gold powers up adventurers, then you should absolutely have dungeons with random 10,000 gp payouts, which enterprising high-level folks use to power-level their loyal-but-weak chosen minions.  Likewise, clever monsters will stake out signs advertising "Dungeon contains less than 500 gp in lootable treasure.", with a pile of burnt art and shattered gems as proof of their intentions.  After all, if treasure both attracts adventurers and makes them stronger, why would you keep the stuff around? You're a monster, after all; if you want something that a person would pay for, you just eat the shopkeeper, and get both loot and a meal.  (And, of course, if monsters can level by carrying loot out of civilization and into their lairs, then you should get entirely different kinds of monster behavior.)

If you're not interesting in asking these questions at all, because it's assumed that there is no deeper reason to why Item X is in Room Y than "The GM put it there.", then this isn't an issue.  But at that level of abstraction, you're not that far from those XP IOUs, either.

The ideal "Gold for XP" is a middle ground between the two extremes.  You don't want to go all the way to "ticket for XP I.O.U."  You also don't want to go reductionist, literal "no matter how you get the gold out it counts the same".  And in fact, even in the original rules it isn't like that.  One of the people that are running it currently will come along here sometime and provide the exact formula, but it amounts to past a certain point the gold doesn't count 1:1 anymore, but less and less. 

Sure, to a certain extent that is smoke and mirrors for overcoming quests and challenges.  So you can hit an uncanny valley between ticket for XP and get the gold and it all counts where you might as well just do quests and challenges instead.  That happens when the GM, for example, decides how much XP they want for the quests and challenges, and then makes it impossible to finish the adventure without getting that exact amount of gold.  There's a 1,000 gp gem magically attached to the princess that will be yours when you rescue her and return her to the church where they undo the curse, whereupon her father grants you a 2,000 gp reward.  No princess, no 3,000 gp. 

In a working version of "Gold for XP", some of the gold is mostly that with a bit more nuance.  There's some loose change that you pick up in the course of getting through the thing.  Probably difficult to get it all or miss it all.  The exact reward depends partially on luck and partially on paying attention.  However, the GM has a good ballpark estimate.  Then of the remaining potential gold, some of it is a near certainty and some of it is tricky.  You might do all the quests and challenges and miss that particular reward.  If the GM isn't prepared to employ those kind of nuances occasionally, they are either running a rogue-like dungeon crawl or they probably shouldn't be doing "Gold for XP" at all.

Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 07:11:37 PM
I guess it's a sliding scale.  Because once you allow magic and clever tactics (or even mundane, boring-but-logical tactics like besieging a dungeon, building a large bonfire at the tunnel mouth, and suffocating every organic monster within like recalcitrant groundhogs), you can make the getting of treasure trivial.

No - *trivial* acquisition of treasure does not yield XP. ACKS is super-explicit about this, but it's been at least implied in every ruleset I've seen discussing gold-for-XP rationales or rules.

For a commoner, labouring in the forge for many years doesn't increase your level; it might give you "training time" in some relevant skills, but if you never take risks, you'll never become a more powerful adventurer.

Wizard clears out dangerous beasts from mine? Lots of XP.
Wizard invests lots of money in constructs, with chance of failure, possibly disastrous? Some XP.
Wizard sets constructs mining for passive income? No XP.

Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 04:24:49 PM
I'm not a fan of gold-for-XP systems, myself.  If you want to incentivize adventuring, give XP for adventuring.  Tying XP to gold opens up a lot of degenerate behaviors.  Even assuming that you patch the obvious holes of the gold needing to come from a non-PC source to stop PCs from 'losing' their treasure to each other repeatedly, you still run into problems.  As noted, you lose the ability to motivate PCs with actual heroic deeds.  You, in fact, strongly motivate the PCs to come up with all sorts of hilarious hijinks involving fraud, illusions, forged magic, or even just having everyone roll an elf, start an accounting company, and level very slowly but very reliably with a few centuries of salary.

Yeah, I've run Lamentations of the Flame Princess.... which is basically B/X with a horror edge, and it uses a Silver for XP mechanic (Silver as the coin of the realm).  1 sp recovered from an adventure = 1 xp.   The game makes it explicit that xp is rewarded only for "treasure recovered through the course of adventure" (so no accounting tricks!) 

There was still a pretty high body count, but the silver for XP mechanic made the characters all scum in the end.  Obviously, the PCs were fighting horrific creatures, though the civilians were mostly normal and descent folk.  But the PCs were all mercenary scum that I'd just as soon see dead.  Eventually, when I couldn't root for the players any longer... I had to switch to something else.   It just got too dark! 

Quote from: Naburimannu on August 07, 2021, 09:59:54 AM

Quote from: robertliguori on August 06, 2021, 07:11:37 PM
I guess it's a sliding scale.  Because once you allow magic and clever tactics (or even mundane, boring-but-logical tactics like besieging a dungeon, building a large bonfire at the tunnel mouth, and suffocating every organic monster within like recalcitrant groundhogs), you can make the getting of treasure trivial.

No - *trivial* acquisition of treasure does not yield XP. ACKS is super-explicit about this, but it's been at least implied in every ruleset I've seen discussing gold-for-XP rationales or rules.

For a commoner, labouring in the forge for many years doesn't increase your level; it might give you "training time" in some relevant skills, but if you never take risks, you'll never become a more powerful adventurer.

Wizard clears out dangerous beasts from mine? Lots of XP.
Wizard invests lots of money in constructs, with chance of failure, possibly disastrous? Some XP.
Wizard sets constructs mining for passive income? No XP.

Which gets to the point clearly; money isn't the root of the XP.  If what you want to reward is taking risky behavior in pursuit of a heroic goal, then reward that.  Declaring that when the adventurers raid the tomb of the dread demon Newcomb, and that they can only grab one box of two before the tomb collapses, and that two adventurers that perform exactly the same death-defying feats until one randomly picks one box, and the other the other, meaning that one should get tens of millions of XP, and the other should get nothing, breaks the conceit entirely.

Treasure, ultimately, is not a metagame element.  Treasure exists tangibly in the game world.  It can be manipulated, stored, horded, and invested, by both players and NPCs.  Making a world where treasure has some numinous significance in powering up adventurers is like making a world where certain phases of the moon power up lycanthropes; it should be noted, observed, and reacted to.  And, famously, the OCR and other games are meant to be highly focused on player skill and tactical decision making.  Just as it is tactical to utilize flanking, ambushes, and striking the right balance of prepared equipment and mobility for your adventuring crew, it is tactical to, in an ACKS world, spend every copper you find build giant X-Crawl courses, shoving monsters that just barely meet the threshold of dangerous-enough-to-trigger-XP-gain, have them 'steal' your treasure, then clear the dungeon you designed and claim it back, getting XP accordingly.  Just as it is correct play to engage with the world and system to take the minimum amount of risk or expenditure to gain the maximal amount of reward, in terms of using area-of-effect spells on clustered enemies and saving your big single-target attacks for the strong-but-lacking-active-defense enemies, it is correct play to, when the world rewards you with 10,000 XP for gaining 10,000 GP after undergoing a certain level of risk, to repeatedly gain that 10,000 GP while undergoing as little risk as possible.

What you should do, if this is the style of play you want, is to make looting treasure just one of activities which grant XP.  Explicitly grant XP for accomplishing dangerous and heroic deeds in service to a greater goal, and then you've got possible XP awards of looting bandit fort's treasury (if the adventurers are there for money), or rescuing a kidnapped princess from said bandits (if the adventurers are seeking to perform deeds of renown and gain alliances with the princess's kingdom), or killing every bandit in the fort and putting it to the torch (if their goal is to bring law and order to the region themselves), or even to enter into alliance with the bandits and gain a trickle of tribute treasure in return for handling the incoming adventuring parties that the kingdom will be surely sending after their princess (if the party are all lawless rogues themselves).

Focusing primarily on money limits your options so many ways.  It makes hexcrawls into actual trackless wilderness boring and tedious; you don't care about natural resources you can't easily loot and carry away, since a massive lode of gold ore is worthless shiny rocks to you; you'd need to build a mine, extract and smelt the gold, leave it fallow to be claimed by monsters of sufficient risk level, and then take it back from them.  Any druids or rangers in the party who feel a greater connection to nature, and a lesser connection to keeping close to civilization with its steady supply of currency, will be forever frozen out of advancement.

And, as Zagreus says, a world where you get XP from riskful extraction of resources is a world where a kingdom, in advertising the wealth of its treasury, attracts adventurers coming to slaughter guards, fight their way through castles and fortresses, and claim that wealth.  And you can't even pay adventurers of your own to ward them off; if those adventurers accept mere quest-reward gold instead of massacre-and-loot gold, they will be drastically underleveled.  And, those adventurers will be able to get that power-boost themselves if they turn on you, fight their way through your other guards, and loot your treasury themselves.

And this calculus applies all the way down the scale.  Every merchant who could potentially present a risk to a bandit or brigand would be a massive target; if a merchant with massive net worth but limited actual levels themselves suffers a home invasion and presets enough of a danger to their robber to count as an encounter, then violent home invaders will grow in power over more skilled burglars who focus on houses with no one home.  You incentivize bandits who, upon coming across merchants and travellers who would be willing to pay tribute, to start massacring and committing atrocities, to inspire the travelers to fight back and present a minimal threat.

Or, again, you can instead say "You are heroes.  You gain XP for deeds of heroism, which can include but is not limited to recovering lost or stolen treasures.", and bam, you're done.  Party wages a successful guerilla war against an invading hobgoblin army, drives them back out, and manages to completely loot their baggage train and get the treasure from nearby sacked villages? Gain XP.  And if they turn around and give that treasure to the survivors and help them use it to rebuild and re-arm themselves against the next threat instead of keeping it for themselves? More XP.

When gold for XP is really popping, here are some of the characteristics that you get.  If you ain't getting this, you ain't doing it right:

Player pursuit of XP is somewhat aligned with character pursuit of gold.  Well, duh!  However, think about it in terms of sacrifice and greed.  What we are really saying is that the player and character have different pursuits that are aligned in their motivations.  Which is a good thing.  You can't really make players care about the gold that much, which is in genre for the characters.  You can make them care that much about the XP--which when they pursue is having the characters be in genre. *

Sometimes they lose out because they have to drop the gold, or leave the gold, or never even get the gold--as a prudential way of, "but we survived to try again."  It's a partial fail/partial success.  Those are a little difficult to set up for an inexperienced GM, but you with Gold for XP you start getting some of that in the most basic dungeon crawl even without knowing what you are doing. 

Even better, sometimes greed causes things to spiral out of control.  I mean, that's half the named characters in Vance, Leiber, etc. and sometimes even the antiheroes.  You had to get that last score or not drop the treasure or not use some of it to bargain passage--which is why you are now a splattered smear on the bottom of the pit under the rock trap.  Not incidentally, this is also the background of the player who will drop the treasure with a later character.

Sooner or later you will get moral decisions setup by the greed, and they will really hurt.  As in, I can get out with the gold and make 5th level!  Or I can ransom my buddy so that the two of us can stay about the same level and try to come up with a plan for how we are going to replace all the stuff we lost in this delve.  It doesn't even matter which way you decide.  Because your buddy saw that it was not an open and shut case.

* If it's not at least partially in genre that some of the characters will exhibit this behavior, then you shouldn't be using gold for XP.  That doesn't make gold for XP bad or illogical--just a bad fit for that particular game.

Quote from: robertliguori on August 08, 2021, 10:01:01 AM
Which gets to the point clearly; money isn't the root of the XP.  If what you want to reward is taking risky behavior in pursuit of a heroic goal, then reward that. 

No. Just no.

The reason to use gold is because gold is objective. It's not giving out XP based on some intangible subjective determination by the DM. It's giving it out because there were 21,238 gold pieces in the hoard of the dragon you successfully swindled. It's easy to measure, based on something that has an existence in the setting, and while there are a few rare cases where it doesn't apply (passing gold back and forth between party members), they're obviously complete metagamey bullshit that shouldn't be allowed, so it's trivial to make a judgment call. Sure, it's not an perfect 100% match of the behavior it's designed to incentivize[1], but it's very, very close.

[1] Which is absolutely not "risky behavior in pursuit of a heroic goal". Gold for XP is inherently anti-heroic, and it's designed to reward players who come up with creative solutions, not those who take stupid risks. None of your objections to gold for XP are even close to valid, if you accept what it's designed to do. Your problems with it seem more fundamental -- you want to a play a very different game from the ones that gold for XP is designed to facilitate.

Which is fine, but you should really stop making all these ridiculous arguments in an attempt to poke holes in the concept of gold for XP, because none of them are legitimate. Gold for XP is extraordinarily effective at what it does. It's just you want something else.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 03, 2021, 11:50:24 PMWhen playing a gold for XP game, do you ONLY give gold for xp acquired (aside from minimal monster killing xp)?

Yes, because it's a freebooter campaign.

If you don't want a freebooter campaign, that's cool, but be aware that whatever you give XP for will incentivize that behavior as the core of the campaign.

AKA, a superhero game that gave more XP for "doing good deeds" than for fighting would result in significantly different play than a superhero game where the main XP came from beating down villains.

In a D&D-ish game, you set the tone via how XP is gained. If monsters are worth little or no XP, then PCs will avoid combat. If gold is not worth XP, then treasure will be secondary for their PCs. If "completing quests" gives the most XP, then the PCs will seek out and complete quests.

Quote from: Spinachcat on August 08, 2021, 06:59:16 PM

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on August 03, 2021, 11:50:24 PMWhen playing a gold for XP game, do you ONLY give gold for xp acquired (aside from minimal monster killing xp)?

Yes, because it's a freebooter campaign.

If you don't want a freebooter campaign, that's cool, but be aware that whatever you give XP for will incentivize that behavior as the core of the campaign.

AKA, a superhero game that gave more XP for "doing good deeds" than for fighting would result in significantly different play than a superhero game where the main XP came from beating down villains.

In a D&D-ish game, you set the tone via how XP is gained. If monsters are worth little or no XP, then PCs will avoid combat. If gold is not worth XP, then treasure will be secondary for their PCs. If "completing quests" gives the most XP, then the PCs will seek out and complete quests.

I am all for the freebooting; my concern was if it means there's no place for a LG Paladin type character in such a game.

Think of "paladin in a freebooter" game as a bit of a challenge to the player.  Same as playing as land-lubber wizard in a pirate game.  Not everyone wants such a challenge.  Some that do think they want the challenge might instead be planning to go against the spirit of the campaign, perhaps without even realizing that is their plan.  Depends on why the player wants a paladin, right?