“People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole in the wall.”

Theodore Levitt

XP is far less of an incentive than many game masters and designers think it is.

Experience points are a proxy for what players want not the thing that players actually want.

The myth of Experience Points as primary incentive

There is a line of reasoning that if you want to encourage players to do something in the game, then you need to provide them an Experience Point incentive to do that. That’s true, up to a point.

If a player is 50 XP away from leveling, they might seek out an easy challenge to get the last little bump. Hence, the jokes about the XP value of a peasant farmer. However, we don’t see players looking for lots of easy foes to fight when they need hundreds of thousands of experience points at higher levels. They go looking for harder fights.

You get more XP for defeating more powerful monsters and those monsters guard more valuable treasures which yield higher XP in a game that give XP for GP. Players who need more XP to level up seek out adversaries and adventure locations with higher XP rewards. Observing that, It wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that the way to get players to do something you want them to do is offer XP and loot.

Many game masters and designers assume that XP is the main motivator for player choices and offer XP for other activities. A good example from the OSR is Jeff Rients Carousing Table and XP for exploration. I’ve used both of these in my games for quite a while. My observation of how they impacted play is one reason why I think XP is not that potent of an incentive.

When I have given XP for exploration it didn’t encourage players one way or the other.

In order for XP for Exploration to work as an incentive, players have to be aware of it. I have to tell them, “If you travel to the Cliffs of Insanity the party gets 10,000 XP to split among the survivors.” What I saw was that players didn’t care. It was a nice bonus but nobody in my groups ever said, “Let’s go to the Cliffs of Insanity because we will get 10K XP.” If they explored some place it was because they wanted to explore it for some other reason. There was something they learned about the location that made it seem worth checking out.

In the case of the carousing table, the players were far more interested in outcomes of the table when they failed the saving throw than they were in the XP the system provided. Failing the saving throw meant they didn’t get any XP, but they did get an amusing complication. Players would want to fail the save because the experience of play was more interesting to them than the experience points they’d get if they had a successful night of carousing.

It’s the Experience not the XP

One of the most interesting results of Paul Zak’s immersion studies is that what people say they like and how they behave often diverge. People will say, “I like this,” if you ask them what they think but do something different. What’s really weird is that they will confabulate and rationalize their reasons after the fact. They’ll do something and not be able to articulate why.

Players may say that XP is an important incentive but their behavior tell me otherwise. The XP is a proxy for what they want but the number on the characters sheet is meaningless.

What they really want is an engaging and immersive play experience. They want to fight the monster because fighting monsters is engaging and immersive. They want to find treasure in a hidden secret room because it is engaging and immersive to figure out where the villain hid his loot, figure out how to avoid the trap, and open the vault. It is the pursuit and not the reward.

It is the experience not the XP that motivates them.

How I think about XP

Once I realized what was going on with XP and player behavior around XP I stopped using it as an incentive.

I think of it as convenient metric for character skill development and as a design tool.

The character has gone on adventures and learned things. That learning has led to an improvement in their skills as adventurers. That greater mastery of their craft means they can take on more challenging adventures.

As a design tool, I use XP to figure out how much treasure to put in an adventure location. The harder the challenges the bigger the treasures.

My style as a referee is to keep players focused on “playing the world” as much as possible. I don’t want players going to the next hex just because they’ll get 100XP. I want them to say, “The hermit said there was ancient ruin with an intact mausoleum northwest of here. Maybe we should check that out. Anyone have any holy water?”

Old schoolers often say, “The answer is not on your character sheet!” Why then, as referees, are we trying to find ways to encourage players to look at their character sheet when making choices about what to interact with in the game world?

If I want players to explore a valley, I have to make them aware of something that the players are going to find engaging to interact with in the valley. The reason to go adventuring is because the challenge and thrill of it, not the XP total on the character sheet.

The Big Idea

The big idea is to set aside the notion that XP is the primary incentive of player choices. It’s an incentive, but not the main incentive. You can use it as an enticement but it works better if you combine it with something in the game world players want to mess with.

Players interact with specific elements of the campaign world because that is where they will get the most “fun.” There is nothing wrong with using XP bonuses or giving XP for something other than gold or killing monsters.

Just understand that a better incentive is a fun object, NPC, or experience of play.