XP For Treasure?
Trying to find a compromise between milestone and treasure-based experience
XP for Treasure has always bugged me as unrealistic. XP for killing monsters feels off for the same reason, but at least there’s a barely-plausible rationale behind “killing stuff makes you better at killing stuff”. I understand that at the bottom, D&D wants to be a roleplaying game, and that concessions need to be made for the game to not be bogged down in minutia. But XP-for-Treasure always felt like a bridge too far.
Still, one of the core exercises I engaged in when designing Materia Mundi was trying to justify all the old-school D&D tropes, so skipping XP-for-Treasure feels like a bit of a cop-out. By default, Materia Mundi does something like simplified milestone leveling — you gain one XP per dungeon that you clear, and you level up (and reset your XP to zero) whenever your XP reaches your next level. So it’s two dungeons to go from level 1 to level 2, three dungeons to go from level 2 to 3, four dungeons to go from level 3 to 4, and so on. The game notes that characters who perform exceptionally well in a dungeon should gain at most one additional XP for that dungeon, but doesn’t really spell anything out past that. So let’s look at using xp-for-treasure to clarify what “especially well” means.
Recall that the original D&D rules had xp-for-treasure at a geometric rate - the experience/treasure required to go from one level to the next approximately doubled each level. Materia Mundi’s system is a quadratic polynomial curve instead — the difference in experience between one level and the next is equal to the next level. So one way we can defer to the wisdom of our elders is by making the xp-for-treasure chart geometric.
It looks like 2000 XP is about the threshold for going from level 1 to 2 for most classes. Halving this to a 1000gp threshold feels intuitively right, assuming that PCs would generally gain about half their experience from treasure and half from killing monsters (which we aren’t directly tracking). This leads to the following progression, if we do just a little judicious rounding:
Level 1: 1,000gp
Level 2: 2,000gp
Level 3: 4,000gp
Level 4: 8,000gp
Level 5: 15,000gp
Level 6: 30,000gp
Level 7: 60,000gp
Level 8: 125,000gp
Level 9+: 250,000gp
To determine the party’s threshold, add up the individual thresholds of each member of the party (including retainers). So if the party looks like L7, L5, L3, L3, L2, L1, L1, L1, then the total threshold is 60,000+15,000+4,000+4,000+2,000+1,000+1,000 = 87,000 gold to earn the second XP.
You could also try setting a threshold for defeating monsters the same way, but the exponential curve is going to make things ridiculous rather rapidly. Besides, high-hd monsters should also count exponentially, rather than additively. Here’s an interesting compromise:
Level 1: 5hd of monsters defeated
Level 2: 10hd of monsters defeated
Level 3: 15hd of monsters defeated, each of which are 2hd or more
Level 4: 20hd of monsters defeated, each of which are 2hd or more
Level 5: 25hd of monsters defeated, each of which are 3hd or more
Level 6: 30hd of monsters defeated, each of which are 3hd or more
Level 7: 35hd of monsters defeated, each of which are 4hd or more
Level 8: 40hd of monsters defeated, each of which are 4hd or more
Level 9+: 45hd of monsters defeated, each of which are 5hd or more
You might also want to add a third category, for magic discoveries:
A new first-circle spell, common magic item, or 1-2 hd magic beast studied:
1 discovery point (Rank 1 discovery)A new second-circle spell, uncommon magic item, or 3-4 hd magic beast studied:
2 discovery points (Rank 2 discovery)A new third-circle spell, rare magic item, or 5-7 hd magic beast studied:
3 discovery points (Rank 3 discovery)A new legendary magic item or 8+ hd magic beast studied:
5 discovery points (Rank 4 discovery)
Level 1: one “discovery point”
Level 2: two “discovery points”
Level 3: three “discovery points”
Level 4: four “discovery points”
Level 5: five “discovery points”; only rank 2+ discoveries count.
Level 6: six “discovery points”; only rank 2+ discoveries count.
Level 7: seven “discovery points”; only rank 2+ discoveries count.
Level 8: eight “discovery points”; only rank 2+ discoveries count.
Level 9: nine “discovery points”; only rank 3+ discoveries count.
Now that we have all these options, one intruiguing possibility is to separate the “extra XP rewards” by class type:
Fighters, Stalwarts, and Champions gain extra XP based on monsters defeated
Scouts, Delvers, and Hunters gain extra XP based on treasure claimed
Wizards, Dweomersmiths, and Druids gain extra XP based on discoveries studied
Priests gain extra XP based on unholy/infernal monsters defeated and destroyed, and other creatures defeated and redeemed but not killed. The referee might want to double the bonus for redeemed creatures, to reflect the fact that they won’t be gaining extra experience from mere killing.