In Bloodborne, the Souls-like Gothic/Cosmic Horror game from FromSoft, there are two main currencies you can accrue. Blood Echoes are similar to the Souls and Runes found in other games of theirs - each enemy that dies adds to your total, and you spend these on nearly anything, but must make sure to spend them before you die so that you don't run the risk of losing them.
However, there's another currency you get called Insight. Given the Cosmic Horror (which often comes with Body Horror) genre they're working in, Insight marks your greater awareness and understanding of the Eldritch Truth - with enough of it, you start to see things you wouldn't normally. The most obvious one is that when you start the game with zero Insight, the "Plain Doll" who acts as your leveling-up NPC is inanimate, but getting your first Insight causes her to become a character with whom you can interact. (The body horror element here is that there's a possibility that the currency literally represents eyes growing on the inside of your brain).
Now, Insight is used in Bloodborne for a couple things: mostly, you can use it to summon other players or NPCs to help on boss fights. There's also a "shop" where you can exchange it for items, including the super-valuable Bloodstones that you use to upgrade weapons.
Now, this prelude aside, I'm not really intending to use this in quite the same way. Instead, I was thinking about my previous post, and how the allotment of XP as a reward for besting monsters of a certain CR creates a kind of strange pressure - you get more for fighting large hordes of less powerful monsters than you do for fighting one or two tougher monsters.
But when building a day's worth of encounters, at least using the system in Flee, Mortals!, you aren't necessarily going to be giving players the same amount of XP per day.
Now, it is worth noting here that the DMG encounters-per-day guidance is built more along the lines of the total XP one should earn per day, which means that under its system, you'd probably be throwing more encounters with tough enemies at them than the FM system, and it should create a more consistent leveling expectation.
But my experience using the DMG's encounter-building system made me flock very quickly to the Xanathar's one as soon as it came out (which is, itself, flawed, but far better).
So, it occurred to me: if we've created an Encounter-Per-Day system with points awarded for easy, standard, hard, and extreme encounters... why don't we just use those daily points in place of XP?
Notably, this also means that we can have a linear progression. Because what counts as a "Standard" encounter is going to change as we level up, but it's still meant to be "a challenge that drains some resources but shouldn't be dangerous enough that we're expecting any player characters to die" regardless of their level, we can consider that an even share of a total level's worth of experience.
Now, an adventuring day is not necessarily "a session," as in my experience, you can rarely get through more than two combat encounters in a 4-hour play session, unless you have very quick and easy encounters. (Obviously, different player groups will have different rhythms.)
Also, as I noted in the previous post, I don't think that anyone, even brand-new players, should have to spend more than one session at level 1. That can sometimes vary - if you're running a horror-themed game like a Ravenloft one, it might help the atmosphere of the game to leave players at low power levels for longer. But in a typical campaign, I think getting players at least to level 2, and preferably level 3, should be a quick process.
So, Experience is a pretty good term for "getting better by doing stuff," but we're trying to distinguish it. For now, I'll use "Insight Points" (which admittedly has an issue given that Insight is a skill) for this alternative.
Here's how it works: When you survive in an Easy encounter, you gain 1 Insight Point. When you overcome a Standard encounter, you get 2. And you get 4 when you defeat a Hard encounter, and 8 with an extreme encounter.
You can then spend Insight Points to level up.
Now, while it's tempting to make this a flat rate - simply getting, say, 24 Insight Points is always enough to level you up, I think I'd want to change it up a little to adjust the flow of levels. For example, it should be faster for you to go from level 1 to level 2 than it is for you to go from level 3 to level 4.
Here's what I'd propose: Levling from 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3, is cheaper than most levels. If we say you only need one adventuring day, that means that each would cost 8 Insight Points (we could even make level 1 to 2 cost only 4 to let people get past that level 1 awkwardness that much faster).
Furthermore, I think hitting a new tier of play should feel like a big deal - thus, it might take more Insight Points to go from level 4 to level 5 than it took to go from 3 to 4.
How much more? That might need testing. But let's say twice as many.
Ok, so here's what it looks like now:
Level 2: 4 IP
Level 3: 8 IP
Level 4: 16 IP
Level 5: 32 IP
Level 6: 16 IP
Level 7: 16 IP
Level 8: 16 IP
Level 9: 16 IP
Level 10: 16 IP
Level 11: 32 IP
etc., you get the idea: level 17, and possibly level 20, would each take 32.
Now, furthermore, we can pretty easily add Quest XP this way. A Side Quest might be worth 2 IP. A Major Quest could be worth 4 IP, and a Significant Milestone could be worth 8 IP. So, you know, you divert to go help save the blacksmith's son from a pack of gnolls, and you get maybe 3 IP from the two combat encounters that were involved, but then you also get an additional 2 for completing the quest. You discover the prophecy in the underwater temple to Dagon that will help you find the Artificer's missing niece, and you get 4 IP in addition to the 8 total that you earned from fighting all the Merrow and demons in the temple.
But here's where I get a little nuts:
What if we can spend IP on things that aren't levels?
Obviously, magic items are fun to find in a hoard from some monster you defeated. But what if some powerful items can be attained by delaying your next level-up? Maybe you can spend 2 IP to get your Halberd upgraded into a +1 Halberd? Sure, that might mean you need to wait a little to level up, but having that magic weapon is pretty useful.
And perhaps we could put powerful spell reagents - like diamonds required to Revivify your party members - behind IP. That actually makes it a real penalty if you die - you slow (but don't prevent) your level progression.
There are probably a lot of kinks to work out of this system, and ultimately I think the level of control you get as a DM with Milestone leveling is hard to give up. But I do feel like it's nice to give players a clearer sense of what they need to do to grow more powerful.
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