Creating Tension through Character Advancement Rules

A few days ago, user Ryan on the Necrotic Gnome Discord server asked if anyone used a simpler version of 3d6 Down the Line's "Feats of Exploration" XP rules, something without its extra calculation steps. I shared my campaign's rules for gaining experience through exploration, and the subsequent conversation led me to ponder the role of character advancement rules in adventure and campaign design.

There's always treasure inside the giant skull (art by Carlos Castilho)

Your rules for character advancement should reflect what's important in your campaign, and should reinforce the campaign's tone and hammer home its general vibe. Experience points for treasure sets this precedent. It incentivizes players to do anything for gold, and thus they become the very scoundrels and antiheroes of Sword & Sorcery that early TTRPG innovators sought to emulate.

XP for GP turns PCs into Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. XP for slaying monsters turns them into Geralt of Rivia. XP for stepping out their front door and going on an adventure turns them into Bilbo Baggins. You get the idea.

Let's be real, though: XP for GP is the best of these. But why? When PCs delve into the dungeon, they push deeper and deeper to accumulate more and more loot. Most importantly, the players strive to accumulate as much loot as they can in a single trip. Because, every time they leave and return, they must ...

1. Ascend back to the entrance of the dungeon safely
2. Travel from the dungeon back to town safely
3. Resupply for another trip
4. Travel back to the dungeon from town safely
5. Deal with new threats that have moved into the dungeon

All just to get back to where you made it last time. Who wants to do that? These serve as cons against leaving the dungeon for both the player and the character. The character has to spend more money to resupply and risks more random encounters. The player has to spend more play time retracing their steps and dealing with logistics.

Don't get me wrong: spending play time on logistics can be fun. My current campaign revolves around exploring an uncharted continent; trust me, we love logistics. But, it's not something you want to keep doing over and over in a short period of time. You want each expedition into the dungeon to be worth it.

All of this comes together to give the adventure a sense of velocity; momentum pushing the players in one direction. Keep delving, get as much treasure as we can possibly carry. Hire retainers and buy mules just to carry more treasure per trip. Open another door and risk another encounter.

Along with this momentum comes increasing risk, which in turn gives the game an intoxicating sense of tension. As you delve deeper, characters use up more resources. They carry more treasure: heavy bags of coins and bulky golden statues that slow them down. And, they attract more attention with their light and noise.

Rules that primarily grant experience for slaying monsters don't typically provide the same combination of velocity and risk that creates this delicious tension. If your goal is to slay monsters, then running into monsters isn't exactly a con. This leaves resupplying as the only valid con from the list above, and when a system trivializes resource management with powerful spells or simply hand-waves it altogether ... well, then the tension evaporates completely.

So, when you grant character advancement via means other than treasure, your game benefits if you can recreate that same velocity-risk cocktail. In my campaign, with its emphasis on wilderness exploration and discovery, I did this by granting an exponentially increasing amount of XP for every fully explored area (or, a 6-mile hex). Exploring that first area grants only 200 XP. By the fourth area, the character can earn 1,000 XP just for pushing on into the fifth.

Earn XP for Exploring the Wilderness!

This drives the players toward longer expeditions that go further from home. It encourages them to spend just one more night in the wilderness only to stumble into a new faction's territory the next day. During my campaign, this has yielded multiple exciting races to get home, where players have gone without food and rest in a mad dash to get to safety before they starve to death or get caught by monsters.

By customizing the game's source of character advancement while maintaining the same tension inherent in using XP for GP, the players themselves have chosen to go on exactly the sort of adventures that I have yearned to portray. And, they've done it for diegetic reasons that maintain a sense of coherency within the fiction.

Scaling Up Player Tools

I often see a variation of this piece of advice in OSR circles:

Give players fun tools without specific applications and encourage them to use those tools in creative ways.

For example, many old-school spells exemplify this adage. They don't simply deal xd6 damage. Instead, they provide you with a tool in your toolbox - the power to warp wood or heat metal - and the spell descriptions lack the hyper-specific limitations included in the name of balance that you see in modern editions.

The principle behind the advice is that giving your players powerful tools without obvious uses enhances your game because it fosters creativity and lets players feel like they outsmarted the game. Use this advice, it's good. Don't try to balance your tools. Let your players "break" the game.

And, importantly, don't forget to employ this adage when your campaign transitions into the wilderness and domain tiers. Your tools don't have to necessarily be more powerful. You can scale them up in other ways: size, distance, duration, etc.

Some examples from my ongoing Age of Discovery campaign include:

• A talking mountain who will let you hide inside its cavernous mouth to avoid magical or mundane detection
• A lighthouse that, when lit, either enhances or repels magic
• A well the purifies anything that passes through its opening
• An entrance to a parallel realm with shortcuts to various places across the continent

A fantastic discovery waiting to break the world

All of these are tools in a party's toolbox. Need to lay low after making off with some hot treasure? Go hide in the talking mountain's mouth for a while. Need to sneak out a besieged army? Brave the freaky parallel realm's shortcut.

Open your mind to radical possibilities that the players suggest. Sure, the magic well purifies water. Is that water considered holy water if the blessing is maintained or enhanced? What happens if an undead creature crosses the threshold?

Too often I see referees saddle tools of all shapes and sizes with strange caveats to avoid making them "game-breaking" (whatever than means); lame restrictions like "you can only send fewer than 10 people into the parallel realm" or "you can only pass inanimate objects through the threshold of the magic well."

Restrain yourself from doing this with magic items and show the same restraint when your party starts discovering magic locations as well. Just like you let them unbalance an encounter with their magic dungeon loot, also let them change the world with their fantastic discoveries in the wilderness.

Running Wild

I spent much of last year running Old-School Essentials by the book: meaning, I only added a house rule into the game once the need arose (e.g. rules for magic staves or additional combat declarations). I gave the rules a chance before deciding to change something (Chesterton's fence and all that), or deciding that something was even meaningful or relevant to change at all.

That campaign focused mostly on traditional low-level play: a base of operations (Fourtower Bridge) with nearby dungeons (we visited Winter's Daughter, Hole in the Oak, Incandescent Grottoes, Prison of the Hated Pretender, Star Spire, and The Waking of Willowby Hall). It was great fun.

This year I wanted to focus on adventuring in the wilderness. I talked with my group, got an idea of what might interest them, and then set out to build a setting for their adventures. We began our campaign at the start of the year and it has been a resounding success.

Rocks fall, everyone dies: wilderness adventuring is a dangerous business!

Though I highly customized the setting, I took the same approach with the actual rules for wilderness adventuring that I did for dungeon crawling and combat last year: stick to playing it as close to "by the book" as I can before making changes.

You can find numerous blog posts and videos about hex crawling across the Internet, ranging from elegant and practical to needlessly complex. In fact, almost every hex crawl procedure that I found overcomplicated the process. You don't need to do this to run a wilderness adventure! A referee has everything they need to run an excellent wilderness adventure right there in the Old-School Essentials rules.

As you play, you will add to or clarify those rules. That is expected. But, if you start with the bare necessities, your brain will thank you later for the reduced mental overhead.

AN EXAMPLE OF PLAY

Here is a real example of a full day of wilderness adventuring from a recent session.

1. The party woke up at camp and I described what they saw in every direction. In this case large hills to their north, southwest, and southeast with an obvious stretch of open plain due east. I asked them what they wanted to do for the day.

2. The party decided that they wanted to try to find a nearby river, which they knew was somewhere to their west. Hills rose in that direction, but there were a few passes that they could try to pick their way through.

3. Now I rolled some checks: a check for wandering monsters (the result was high, a 5 or 6. No wandering monsters today). Then a check for losing direction (a 2, uh oh).

4. Since they started in a clear plain, they did not immediately lose their way. But, as they moved into the hills, I described them getting turned around as they tried to make their way across them to the west. They couldn't tell one slope from the next. I described the peril and presented their options: they felt confident that they could backtrack and get back to where they started the day, or they could try to push through in a random direction. They chose to backtrack.

5. Now, having lost half of the travel day in the hills, they were back where they started. I described their surroundings once again and this time they chose to head northeast, keeping to the open plain while skirting the range of hills to the north.

6. Since they were on horseback, they could still move pretty fast. By the book, a riding horse travels 48 miles per day in grasslands. Having wasted half of the day in the hills, I ruled that they could still make 24 miles of progress. I eyeball this on the map, drawing a line as I go. Hexes are six miles across, but sometimes they only clip a hex. So, I use the hexes more as measuring guides than actual units of measure.

7. Whenever they reach a point where their surroundings change, I describe that so they can reevaluate their options. In this case, a clear pass opened up to the northwest between two ranges of hills. They shifted direction, so I continued their line of progress to the northwest.

8. As the travel day winds down, I describe them coming across a smaller stream that flows into the river they're looking for. They decide to make camp there, where they each consume a ration.

9. I roll again for wandering monsters overnight: this time, I roll a 1. I roll again on my regional encounter table: a small pack of blink dogs. I roll a d12 to determine an approximate time of night when this encounter happens and get a 3 or 4, so the encounter takes place a few hours before midnight (3 hours after making camp).

10. I follow encounter procedures. The blink dogs end up playfully trying the lead the lawful party member to a nearby river crossing. He does not follow them the entire way, but the party decides to head in that direction the next day ...

WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE AT THE TABLE?

We play on a virtual tabletop, but it would look very similar if we played in person.

The referee has their own map. This map is likely keyed and labeled. They do not share it with the players.

Here is a portion of my referee map relevant to the example above. They started the day at the X in Hex 0912. They traveled west into the hills and got lost. They backtracked and instead headed northeast, then turned northwest and camped by the stream at the X in Hex 1010.

The referee's wilderness map

As players complete their expeditions into the wilderness, I reveal those areas on their map. Note that I do not reveal as they go, only once they return to town. If the players want, they can make their own map based on my descriptions during an expedition. I highly recommended that my players do this.

Here is their map. You can see a previously explored area in the lower left. A previous expedition had already traveled up the river to this point and returned to town. Notice that their scale is off, but it doesn't matter. I don't try to correct them. In fact, I don't even look at their map at all during play. If they have a question about their surroundings, they describe what they do in the fiction and ask me!

The players' wilderness map

That's it. Rinse and repeat. Make rulings as they come up. Add rules for things that become relevant to your table. Have fun!

Roll Your Own

I like when the players make the rolls. Knave, the rules-light system by Ben Milton, gives PCs an "armor bonus" so that they can roll armor against a monster's static value. It's quick to grok but doesn't sacrifice anything from a "normal" attack roll.

What if players rolled their own checks for random encounters, particularly during wilderness travel? It would help them to conceptualize the passage of time during wilderness turns and it would also directly reveal the consequences of spending more time: risking more checks.

The referee does give up the power to discretely adjust the encounter chance on the fly, but in my games it would not be a problem to tell the players that their normal 1-in-6 chance is a 2-in-6 because of the amount of noise they've been making. In fact, it's not even a negative. Again, it provides the players with more information on which to base their decisions.

Adventurers encounter a wandering furry (art by David Trampier)

My current travel rules include an encounter check on every wilderness turn made by the players, who take turns around the table. They roll a d20, and lower results equate to worse outcomes.

1-3 wandering monster

4-12 travel challenge

13-16 descriptive encounter

17-18 evidence of monster

19-20 discovery

I'm toying with the idea of having them add their WIS bonus as long as they're not traveling in darkness or at a fast pace. It might mean that certain characters would very rarely roll wandering monsters, but since they must alternate, in the long run it should balance out with characters who have lower WIS scores.

Unless they're all clerics, I guess. Guided by the holy light?

Travel Challenges

For some reason, I like skill challenges.

I think it's the idea of a player stepping into their character and thinking about how the character would solve a problem given their unique talents.

But, every time I've tried to use player-driven skill challenges to depict wilderness travel, it's fallen flat.

Boring travel (painting by Stefano di Giovanni)

The fault lies with me, as the referee. Even if I set basic parameters, my players lack enough detail about the environment and the consequences to devise their own interesting obstacles. Sure, they can come up with something ("I jump over the chasm with Athletics"), but do those really add to the experience?

But, as soon as I start giving them more detail to set the scene, I ask myself "if I'm doing all of this work anyway, why not just run a hex crawl?"

In the future, I plan to take my favorite part of my travel challenges - the failure conditions and ramifications - and meld them into more traditional wilderness travel.

Getting Lost

• Whenever players take a wilderness turn to travel, roll an encounter die. The most common result is a travel challenge or obstacle rolled on a region-specific table (1-in-2 chance).
• Players propose a solution to the obstacle. If there is risk involved, call for a saving throw.
• A failure results in immediate repercussions and a failure added to the journey's tally. Then, they roll up another challenge: players cannot advance to the next hex until they overcome one.
• If the players accumulate 3 failures, they've wandered off course. Roll to find out what they've wandered into (typically a wandering monster).

I like the idea that getting lost isn't a binary failure but a series of blunders that leads to travel's fail state.

A more improvisational referee could do without the region-specific obstacle table and come up with challenges on the fly, but if I tried that they'd probably end up pretty boring.