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Nov 13, 2012 -- 9:27AM, MrCustomer wrote:

I think Rewards are what drive most players to continue or advance in D&D, and they want to be rewarded for their actions in the game, and they want rewards for what they have earned.

I can't stress "Earned" enough here. The Players Earn Expereince, and denying them takes away the reward for thier actions.

Not "the" reward, but rather a reward. As it has already been pointed out, there are plenty of other ways to reward players and PCs: wealth, fame, favour, land, allies and so on. IMO, giving out a number of points that have no effect until they reach a certain amount is an inferior reward. On top of that, if the number of points only really matter at specific moments, I'd rather have control over when that is exactly.

Nov 13, 2012 -- 9:27AM, MrCustomer wrote:

And when they accomplish something of meaning, something challenging or heroic then they should expect to be rewarded more then for some mundane, trivial task.

Yes, you can simply level them every 10 to 15 levels or ever 3rd game session, but by doing this you effectively trivialize the rewards for their heroism by making them equal to the trivial encounters. 

Is killing a group of goblins on par with slaying a dragon? is a game session spent shopping/traveling with a couple of random encounters worth a game session spent being heroic, risking life in limb in an epic fighter that goes down in legend? You risk making the resource management encounters worth the same as the final Big Bad encounter.

After a serries of minor encounters and squirmishes, with XP rewards proportionate to the encounters, that big battle that really chalenges them, where they take heroic measures to win, getting that large XP reward that pushes them into the next level really sends a message, "hey you Earned your XP today! You really accomplished something"

One thing that I found out while DMing is that I'd rather not bother with anything trivial. It is common advice here that in order to prevent combat from becoming boring, it is sometimes best to have combat scenarios that are meaningful to the characters in some fashion. While I do understand that some groups enjoy the uncertainty of random encounters, it is not for mine. Therefore, every encounter that is played out has some significance and difficulty to it, with consequences for failure.

The same goes for non-combat encounters. If there is no interesting consequence for failure, it's hand-waved. Shopping for items is done off-screen, between sessions. Negotiating the price of a permanent Teleportation Circle with a Wizard, however, obviously has various degrees of success. It is not trivial to the players. (They ended up owing two favours (quests) to said Wizard. The Paladin is no longer allowed to negotiate.)

Nov 13, 2012 -- 9:27AM, MrCustomer wrote:

Players anticipate these rewards, entering a fight like above they think, "alright I hope this is chalenging enough to give us the next level" rather then "Yay, it's day 3, we level after this, I hope the encounter isn't too hard" You can really create a different mindset with how you reward XP.

Most of the time, players don't know when they'll level up (exception being the current season of Encounters), even though they are fixed at certain points. Heck, for my Saturday home game, even I don't know when they'll level up. I'll just make it happen when it seems most appropriate. Sometimes levels last 2 or so sessions, sometimes it's upwards of 4.

By not telling players when they'll get to advance in level (sometimes not even knowing myself) and making every encounter roughly equal in importance, I found that I have better control over the pacing of the game and my groups have a better time for it.

That being said, it's matter of preference and play style, really. I'm not saying that giving out amounts of experience points for everything is wrong; just that it's not for me and my group.

I've run games with no experience points and with experience points. The one thing I notice is that it's easier to a run game without EXP for a DM. The problem rests with player reactions, which I don't think should be ignored. The experience point and treasure system was set up to provide a reward system to encourage players to use the same character or keep their characters alive; it also allowed a player to track their progress toward the next level. If a player doesn't need this reward system to feel like they have achieved something then a DM doesn't need to award experience. I don't often see that being voiced by players I've gamed with, it's usually a DM's call. New players don't know any different so you can get away with going either way without player frustration sometimes.

When I've been in a game that didn't award experience points, most of the players didn't like it (not all). The players wanted to track their progress to the next level, not wait till the DM was ready to unfold the right number of encounters and reach a plot point. I didn't really understand this till I was not DMing and switched to being a player. What I realized personally is the following,

(1) I often felt like I would never level up or it was taking a rather long time based on what I had encountered.
(2) I couldn't figure out if I was doing well, even with my character still being alive.
(3) The DM couldn't really indicate how long it would take to level up without giving adventure details away, so I had no way to track my progress with the DM's assistance.
(4) I would get frustrated and annoyed with the DM.
(5) The group of players including myself would joke about the confusing nature of mechanical character development, at the expense of the DM.

After that personal experience, I award EXP as a DM. I don't want my players feeling this way in my game. I'm not saying that this is the best way, but it's the best way for me and my group.

Note that not only does xp as a reward not have an immediate effect, it also rarely handed out immediately but at the end of a session. So if you want to use xp to garner favorable behavior or associate it with specific encounters you should hand it out immediately. I agree that for most players something like 3rd edition Eberron action points (spend it to gain a bonus on a d20 roll after the roll) works better as a reward mechanic for doing cool stuff.

Anyway, one downside of a xp-less game is indeed that players have less clear signals that they are advancing. I solve that by actually sticking to that 9 encounters model as closely as possible (at most differntiating one encounter up or down to prevent mid-session leveling - but my sessions only last 3 to 4 hours). Since my campaign tends to handwave events that have no serious impact the players simply have to count encounters and I remind them how many they had when they ask. For my campaign my players agree that there is no real difference between bothering with xp or not and hence it is easier for me not to bother with it