Have you tried not playing DnD?

Consider Experiences

2026-03-20

“The Black Hack”, by David Black, remains to date one of my favorite distillations of the objectives of the original dungeon-crawling games. A more exhaustive review of its features by leyline press, here.

Today I evangelize to you about “Experiences” as a way to handle leveling.

Initial draft of this blog is ripped out of my head half-drunk after watching this video from Mystic Arts. He discusses “keystones” as an explicit communication to the players of the path forward to leveling, without having that sense of progress be gated by big moments. He discusses the weakness of “milestone” leveling, that it is both not particularly clear and somewhat arbitrary. He also references a phenomenal Matt Colville video about “Toward Better Rewards”. I remember watching that Matt Colville video when it first came out. It is also very relevant to my read of RPGs. My article about Intention and Implementation dances briefly around the topic of experience as a lens of understanding what the game is about.

So

What was

Among OSR games as a genre, and the first handful of variants on D&D in particular, Experience Points (XP) are the means of leveling up. Each character class may have a different number of experience points between each level, and different levels of mastery. Some characters (races (dwarves, elves, halflings) were also classes in B/X ) had a lower max level, each class/race in Basic/Expert D&D reached those levels at different rates.

From Old School Essentials basic rules, which is a strict retroclone, the following level 14 experience requirements for different classes are illustrative:

Class Level XP
Cleric 14 700,000
Fighter 14 840,000
Magic-User 14 1,050,000
Thief 14 760,000

XP is granted 1-to-1 for gold-piece value retrieved from the dungeon, and approximately 5 XP per hit-die of monster defeated (to include scared away, slain, and outsmarted). Combat being the deadly affair that it is, the early D&D prime motivator was filching the treasure and getting out alive much more than outright combat. This is one of many aspects which contributes to its sense of adventure game, much more than heroic fantasy of later editions.

Experience for combat?

I’ll readily point out that 3e, 4e, and 5e D&D more or less drop XP for gold in favor of XP for monster-murder. That’s the main codified means of gaining XP to level up, and the main means of interacting with the world. Dungeoncore murderhobos are a function of the system! Mystic Arts points this out as well.

Milestones

5e codifies alternate XP systems in its DMG (p 261) in a shockingly brief passage about “milestone” leveling, in which it raises that you may want to award XP based on milestones rather than strictly on combat.

You can also award XP when characters complete significant milestones … designate certain events or challenges as milestones

The examples which follow include:

  • Accomplishing one of many goals for the adventure
  • Discovering hidden location or information
  • Reaching important destinations

Note! This usage refers to the practice of awarding XP for milestones! In 5e, everyone gains levels at the same rate of experience, with respect to their class level. (Multi-classing complicates this.) This is not the same as awarding whole levels for story progression. Milestone leveling, as written, was always intended to hook into the XP mechanics. However, the confusion with the latter may be forgiven for its proximity to…

Level advancement without XP

In which 5e suggests you grant levels in their entirety for every handful of sessions played, and its guidance on story-based leveling is a single sentence.

When you let the story of the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

This method is often confused for “milestone” leveling! A paraphrasing of this is precisely how most people discuss the subject.

Experiences

The Black Hack is trying to do something resembling the Original game, but it accomplishes many if not most of the balance desires through alternate means.

In the case of leveling, it smooths out the bumps by doing away with the fiddliness of experience points collected in the many hundreds of thousands for “Experiences”. It goes thusly:

…all that matters is that a Character is able to Experience enough things that will change them as a person.

Followed by several examples, my favorite of which is:

Failing so spectacularly and in such dramatic fashion that everyone around the table agrees it’s worth it.

Once a Character has acquired a number of Experiences equal to their current Level they may ‘share’ them to gain a Level.

I love that, it very succinctly accomplishes several things:

  • Experiences are able to be defined in a diverse manner according to the needs of play
  • By default they reward adventure (defeating named enemies, exploring a new level, completing a quest) rather than only combat (XP for nameless kobold murder).
  • They must be ‘shared’ to actually earn the level, which demands either carousing or narrative development of a character at the table.

This incurs a gameplay loop very well-suited for an adventure game.

It’s also just, a lot easier to track, especially for a casual beer & pretzels tone of game.

We’re not turning the game into an exercise of accounting for shares of experience points based on relative contribution to the fight, you just get an experience. You can track how many you need by comparison with how many you have with tally-marks, or a x/lvl notation on your sheet, not “Okay, what’s my total this session? 1650, okay added to 77,240 is… and when is the next leveling threshold?” Slowing down at the end to do taxes just sucks all the excitement out of it, IMO.

Effects on balance

In its coarseness, it loses the fine-grained difference in leveling between wizards and clerics, for example, but I think the original design intent had much to do with gating power level. I don’t much enjoy the “perfectly balanced” sensibilities of how magic-users are handled in early D&D games, for what that’s worth. Of course, as an offshoot of wargames, in which the conception of wizards is that they might affect the whole battlefield, that balance has a reason to exist.

Comparatively, Black Hack characters are much more playable than B/X, and have a level cap of 10 across the board. They don’t have much in the way of special powers, about one to each class that scales with level, but they advance in relative power level quickly, such that a group might actually be able to play the whole span of levels. (TODO An article about the inverse relationship between class complexity and game hackability).

Hacking it for your game!

Experiences as written ports seamlessly to any other game with levels.

Some games explicitly encode “GM-Fiat-Leveling”, such as Mörk Borg, whose rules text on the matter is:

The game master decides when a character should be improved. It can be after completing a scenario, killing mighty foes or bringing home treasure.

This is flexible, but still entirely up to the GM, and most Borgalikes seem to take that same approach. However, it also does not have levels! Mörk Borg characters are also able to get worse as they “get better”:

Roll a d6 against every ability. Results equal to or greater than the ability increase it by 1, to a maximum of +6. Results below the ability decrease it by 1. Abilities from −3 to +1 are always increased by 1 unless the d6 result is 1. The ability is then reduced by 1, but never below -3.

The balance of advancement is not a linear track towards increasing power, as it is in TBH or any other class/level game. But we also know the boundaries of ability scores within the range of -3 to 6. To balance the story and needs of the weak characters improving with keeping strong characters strong, I would probably allow players to choose if they want to Get Better when they have Experiences equal to their weakest ability, or their strongest ability.

Why hack and why not hack?

We are determining the challenge to advance to the next power-increase as a numeric function of how powerful the character is right now. That power has to be measured numerically, well defined and bounded, probably working best with a dozen or fewer ranks, and a statistic that advancement changes.

Note the contrast between TBH and MB, that MB has a very loosey-goosey advancement system that doesn’t have a linear track, but does have relative levels of power, where TBH and class/level games like it advance in a linear manner.

Some games do not benefit from that, and benefit instead from increasing the narrative stakes. FATE and Blades in the Dark both have pretty robust and concrete guidance for story-based advancement. FATE outright discusses minor, significant, and major milestones, and pacing those with respect to a session, scenario, and story-arc.

Blades in the Dark has multiple XP tracks on the playbook sheet, each of which do not change in size, so the number of XP needed is static. It awards XP for a number of clear and specific per-character mechanical and narrative triggers. But the crew advancement and narrative structure naturally push parties towards more intense narrative challenges over the course of play.

Note that story structure is important to that discussion! “Supernatural” started as a delightful monster of the week show, and then developed a problem that they couldn’t not escalate every season. They’re fighting the devil, then the devil’s cousin! Using Experiences allows you to keep the game in fun, casual, monster-of-the-week zone, without requiring narrative scaling.

Other self-balancing advancement mechanisms

Within TBH (which is normally a roll-under system), during advancement, you roll a d20 against your ability scores. If you roll over your score, you add 1 to it. As far as I can tell, this is a technique closely inspired by the implementation of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaing (emphasis mine):

At the end of the adventure … roll for each skill successfully used and checked. An experience roll is a roll higher than the skill chance (a reverse of the normal procedure). The idea that as a character gets more highly skilled, it gets harder to improve. If the experience roll is higher than the skill … roll 1D6 and add this total to the skill.

Note that BRP requires that the skill be used successfully in adventuring contexts, so it is nontrivial to advance, especially if the skill is low for that character! I personally think it is ludonarratively more interesting for failure to trigger this condition, because humans tend to learn more when they fail than when they succeed. However, without good guidance, this may result in skill dogpiling of nonsense rolls that have no utility in effort to game this.

Mouse Guard 2e is also levelless:

An ability or skill advances when you pass a number of tests equal to its current rating and fail a number of tests equal to one less than its rating.

(While I own Burning Wheel and Torchbearer, I found Mouse Guard to be a much better read. It is excellent. DriveTruRPG link in the references.)

Mouse Guard’s resolution system is dice-pool against a target, rather than roll-under like TBH or any BRP titles like Call of Cthulhu.

Regrettable defense of rules text

In the popular culture around D&D specifically, it is very common for fans to have a misrepresentation of the actual rules lodged in their brains. I’d be willing to bet money that most D&D enjoyers have not read the rules of the Player’s Handbook, let alone the Dungeon Master’s Guide, cover to cover.

Most people commit the error of representing “Milestone leveling” as “get a level when the GM says so”. Which, that experience sucks. I hate playing in a game wondering if we accomplished anything significant towards leveling that session. Number go up feel good. Number is question-mark feels bad.

Mystic Arts, for his part in the video, reads the 2024 rules text for Milestones, which is functionally identical to the 2014 rules text. However, he goes on to say:

that detaches the murderhobo incentive from the game, but we aren’t rewarding any behavior now. All we’re rewarding is playing the story, which what is that anyway? Like, what is it? When have we played the story enough to level up? Is the DM communicating those goals to the player? The rules certainly don’t specify that DMs using Milestone should communicate them to the players, i.e, when you reach [story location], you all level up.

The specific words “communicate the milestones to your players” does not appear in the text, but I would have read:

When preparing your adventure, designate certain events or challenges as milestones

…as not only DM-facing prep. That said, I will acknowledge that my preferred style leans heavily on transparency, as informed by other games’ advice, so I am inclined to read it as reasonably straightforward anyway.

And, while the 5e DMG leaves the exact numerics up to the GM, it does say this:

When awarding XP, treat a major milestone as a hard encounter and a minor milestone as an easy encounter.

As much as I think that D&D is not especially good at all the things people use it for, there is reasonably good guidance about how much XP a level-appropriate hard and easy encounter should budget for. This is still largely up to the GM, but the rules for milestones at no point leave room for it to be murky when you have accomplished enough story to level up. It’s just hooking into the existing numeric reward system! Rules as Written, if using Milestone leveling, at no point should it be unclear to the players how far away they are from leveling up with respect to the story!

Conclusion

In any level-oriented game, I strongly encourage GMs to consider lifting Experiences from The Black Hack for their game. It is clear, does not require intense bookkeeping nor fiddlefarting around with calculating XP for a hard or easy encounter, and is flexible enough to apply to any goal that the game is about.

As a function of level, Experiences naturally encourages more intense or longer adventures befitting a higher level character, or a greater quantity of smaller adventures. For adventure games and the OSR genre, by being coarse, it further discourages getting tangled up in random encounters or hordes of kobolds, pushing adventurers toward the exploration pillar, and towards the main cast of the scenario.

The determinant of experience point awards is also the determinant of adventure structure.

Consider Experiences for your level-oriented game, and consider self-balancing mechanisms in general. They’re easier to track, and feel good to interact with instead of GM-arbitrary or arbitrarily gamey.

RPG References

GMing technique 0

TL;DR:

When you reach for the Resolution Mechanic is far more important than what the mechanic is on its own.

Only call for resolution if results are uncertain, with interesting consequence for both success and failure.

That’s it, that’s the article!

Alternatively:

roll dice less often; say “yes” and “no” more often

//fixme: thesis is that the single best improvement is to discuss the player intention and what is at stake

Intention and resolving uncertainty

Nail down the intention of your game. If the Core Mechanics of the game are not implementing or supporting this intention well, you may be tempted to mess with them. This is a Smell. Consider adapting your techniques, which this article is about. Try not playing DnD, but something else entirely, especially if you’re at the point of “I’ll just reskin it”. Gygax and Arneson didn’t play or design only one RPG system and neither should you limit yourself.

The Core Mechanic of most games is its resolution system, which is used when the results are uncertain. In the lingua franca of D&D5: (d20 + mods >= target number). It has the largest affect on gameplay, and bad resolution systems are often a source of ludonarrative dissonance. Usually this comes up in the context of what the story of the game is about, vs how the mechanics allow you engage with the system and setting. Here, it may be more appropriate to understand this as incongruity.

Incongruity is when the Core Mechanic is disrupting the story, flow, or fantasy that you’re playing to express.

The worst thing an RPG can do with its Core Mechanic -the resolution system- however, is leave it poorly explained. This is one of my main gripes with “&” games, is they are both too verbose for what those systems actually do, without giving enough advice on how to use the resolution system.

Rule 0 of RPGs is that, as GM, you can do what you want with the rules. The important caveat is that you should do what makes the game better. If the intention is heroism, maybe keep the shopping episodes to your group-chat between sessions.

The verbal adjudication

In practice, RPGs operate as a conversation. Any in-game action involves a discussion of players’ intention, the fictional parameters, and the effects. Some players will say “I would like to roll for X”, when what they mean is “I want to X”. Once you suss out the intention, you can make a judgement, and the overwhelming advice is, let them do that thing. However…

There is more to verbal adjudication than just letting players get their muddy boots all over the fiction with constant “yes”. “No”, saith I, “even with a natural 20 it doesn’t make sense to seduce the dragon”. Drawing those lines is important. Limitations breed creativity, and boundaries helps play -the shared fiction- feel real.

The boundaries go both ways, helping you be a better GM for your players. The better you are about being consistent in this respect, the more the players will trust your refereeing, and IME, the more they’ll respect your game together.

I do not believe in:

  • The adversarial DMing style typified by fuck-fuck games of
    • tricky magic items
    • genies
    • underhanded GM rugpulling which illegitimatizes nat20s
  • Arbitrary fudging which
    • was avoidable
    • undermines tone

If a certain die result contraindicates what I as referee feel is most dramatically appropriate, I perhaps should not have accepted the roll at all. Forcing oneself to discuss what actually is at stake in a given roll helps avoid this.

Gambling

…Sometimes, players will say “I want to roll for Y”, and they mean, “I want to roll for Y”, because they’re gambling with you that it’ll work, and because the math-rocks make fun clacky noises.

This kind of desire to win against the house is a marker of, perhaps munchkiny play, but more importantly, it’s a marker of engagement. This is rich territory for sharing narrative control. I encourage you to let go of the reins a little. In keeping with the tone, gamble with your players when this comes up.

Here, also, considering what is actually at stake is important.

Friends of “yes” and “no”

“Yes” & “No”, in combinations with “…And” & “…But” are potent!

“Buts” represent between-spaces, other states than pure success and failure. Failing forward, success with consequence, and other bargaining to compel against or introduce aspects of the scene or PC. Discussing the intention, and introducing complications, are super fun. Many players are willing to get their character into trouble to advance the game. Peak roleplaying.

However, complications should add new things to deal with, rather than deleting the success a PC achieved. Imagine marginally small failures and successes, that grey area where fudging is tempting, or where their skill might have succeeded, if not for the difficulty of the scene:

  • “yes, you damage the engine, but now you are very obviously covered in oil”.
  • “Your blaster misses the bounty hunter, but it hits the door control, and the blast doors shut! There’s no running away from this fight, now.”

Not all uncertainty needs to involve those riders, but they add a lot of flavor. “And"s are particularly useful for critical successes and failures, ripe for opportunities to compel aspects of a PC or a scene:

  • “The brutality of your killing blow on the bugbear causes all remaining goblins to test their morale!”
  • “No, your knight’s love of wine has caught up with him, and uncouthly offends the baron’s honor in his attempt to sway him”.

Sharing narrative control

//TODO: Expand into an article

I encourage also, in the discussion about “and” & “but”, to be enthusiastic about the ideas your players bring. Having a light hand on the reins of the narrative is hard to teach.

The lingua franca of 5e, and the culture of play around it, suggests that GMs are something aside from a player. Quoting 5e DnD directly, the “[GM] narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions.” Absent any text about player narration, this implies that the GM is solely responsible for imagination. This is wrong. The GM is a player, whose role is to referee.

I frequently discuss the mechanical impact of what occurs, and then ask my players “what does that look like?” and let it ride. Mechanical success or failure, I’ve never been disappointed by letting a player narrate.

Tuning your barometer

Considering what is at stake, mechanically and narratively, is the best way to dial in consistent, fair, and fun refereeing. To that end, I present advice lifted from other games about this subject.

Blades in the Dark

John Harper’s Blades in the Dark introduces Position & Effect for its dice-pool Action Roll. These two dials can be addressed independently to give 9 mechanically distinct outcomes. Position guides the consequences of failure or partial-success, and Effect guides potency of successes. This works in tandem with Clocks, which are a reframed health-track for obstacles; Effect -> “damage” to obstacles, and Position -> stress/harm/complications.

Building the Position and Effect for a roll invokes the Conversation about intentions and parameters. But the Action Roll is not the first stop on the road to success. BitD does a good job of explaining “fiction-first” gaming, but the gist is that the conditions of the fiction, and mechanics other than the Action Roll appropriate to the conditions, should guide how you move forward.

Exercising this procedure will make you a better GM.

“Be a fan of the PCs” and “don’t make the PCs look incompetent”

To summarize, this is largely a framing issue. Whenever consequences occur, even critical failure, an opinion I share with Harper is that being told your PC is a big baby who poo-pood their pants is a mood-killer. It is more satisfactory to talk about the difficulty of the challenge, or the competence of the opponent, etc. Push but do not punish the PCs

Complications are not failures, and should not be used to undermine the PCs, but to launch new threads of fiction. This is also an excellent place to turn it around “why didn’t your character succeed?”, and players are often happy to share the fiction and supply a reasonably interesting jusification.

Please read BitD, it has top-tier GM text.

//TODO: write about clocks and UI

MYZ

Free League’s various MYZ engine games use a similar dice-pool-count-successes mechanic across them, paraphrased here:

Roll (ability + skill + equipment + situational)d6, 6s are successes. If you fail at first, you might roll again by “pushing” at the risk of resources.

A common complaint of MYZ games is that they are very punishing. Starting characters tend to suck at everything, with maybe a 50% chance of succeeding at best.

Their Alien RPG takes this a step further, because as you accumulate failures you also accumulate stress dice, which can send your character into a panic. The advice in the Alien RPG is to really seriously only roll in genuinely tough, dramatic situations. The game text explicitly says that nearly anything which doesn’t fit that criteria should not be rolled and characters should just succeed. It can be difficult, from a background where you roll for everything, to grok that approach.

What qualifies something as genuinely tough? What qualifies as dramatic? You must develop your own answer, but it’s somewhere north of “routine”, in spitting distance of “adventuring conditions”.

GURPS

Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS is tuned to a kind of “heroic realism”. Its 3d6-roll-under system is one of my favorites, admittedly. The brief is that you roll 3d6 under your effective skill to succeed. Because of its results curve inherent to multiple dice, increasing deviation, as well as increasing margin of success (or failure) are mathematically meaningful.

So, even given that rolls are more centrally trending and more predictable than a flat die (1d20 is a flat results “curve”), GURPS still has the advice paraphrased here:

The GM should only require a success roll if there is a chance of meaningful failure or gainful success, in particular:

The GM should require rolls when resources (health/wealth/etc) are at risk, or a PC stands to gain (allies/info/wealth/etc) from the outcome.

The GM should not require rolls for trivial/everyday tasks, daily work at a mundane, nonadventuring job.

Here, the difficulty modifiers imply that skills are pegged to a PC’s capability in stressful situations, where +0 is “Most adventuring tasks, e.g, Driving in a car chase”.

That’s a pretty good barometer, in my opinion.

The remainder of the chapter is a reminder that GURPS 4e Basic Set is a reference tome, with a litany of special cases befitting a Universal game.

Gumshoe/Trail of Cthulhu

Call of Cthulhu is often spooky noir detective work, but has the problem, often, that a player rolling badly can miss a clue.

That sucks and “Bear Lore” is stupid.

Robin Laws’ “Gumshoe” is specifically built to address investigations and mysteries, and Ken Hite’s “Trail of Cthulhu” modifies it to the tentacled milieu. Missing critical clues causing a Halt and Catch Fire, among other problems, are sidestepped by just… giving you the clues with investigative abilities. No random chance involved. Spending points with those abilities gives additional clues, in addition to incurring opportunity costs.

This is my prefered method of providing clues and setting information, at this point. It’s only when my players want to gamble with me, or when information is not critical to adventure, that I gate information behind rolls.

See also “Night’s Black Agents”, also Ken Hite, for vampiric investigations.

Burning Wheel & Others

A rule which I know from Luke Crane’s RPG, Burning Wheel, is called “Let It Ride”. The players get 1 attempt, singular, at a given obstacle or roll. Unless the situation changes dramatically (either in the sense of story-drama or in the sense of a large change), that roll stays in effect. It can be reasonably framed that the attempt given is the best that can be mustered at the time.

OSR, Dungeon Crawls, and Time

Lockpicking without a time pressure is pointless to roll for. What’re you gonna do if they fail? Break a pick? Roll again? meh

Dungeon Turns not only give a game structure, everything that plugs into them makes actions in the dungeon risky, and therefore, something which might warrant rolling.

Turns bring about:

  • impending threat of your torch guttering out
  • hunger setting in
  • gelatinous cubes or other wandering monsters stalking the halls
  • time pressures of the adventure of ritual sacrifice or whatever

Turns are an important resource. Time is always marching forward, and the Turn abstraction puts it constantly at risk. Now, failed lockpicking is not just a repeat-until-successful endeavor, it is one that drains resources.

I run most actions with a bent toward competence in this way:

  1. Engagement with the fiction is best, and if it can, it “happens” in real time. So do conversations.
  2. Abstracted but reasonably quick abilities roll not to succeed, but to avoid taking a whole Turn to do it. Describing it still happens in real time.
  3. Abstracted and reasonably involved abilities roll to happen quickly, rather than at all. Searching an office might take only a Turn… or it might take 2d3 Turns.

This is what “taking 10” and “taking 20” rules are for, skipping past the possible failures at the expense of time.

Effects on gameplay

By using good judgement about character strengths, one can help protect and enhance the fantasy in play.

Matt Colville points out in a video, Skill Dogpiling, that failure to protect specialization creates a muppety tone. “[skill dogpiling]’s dumb… it creates dumb outcomes.”

As Matt mentions in his video, integrating that with sensible mechanics and turning it back to the players is probably good practice. Where “no” may meet resistance, “…unless you can justify it or are proficient” may not.

Horror games

Call of Cthulhu or Mothership rolled differently creates different tones. Rolling often, especially with respect to sanity/stress events, can create a spiral of hilarious doom. Rolling too infrequently may pop the suspension of disbelief as uncharacteristically steely characters face inhumane horrors. It can also betray characterization if the hardened FBI agent or the doctor retch at gore, or the android freaks out about interfacing with alien technology.

/**

Aside: that’s a reference to the Mothership 0e rules, in which each character class could gain experience in a unique way, encouraging them to play to the peril of the crew.

Mothership 1e Warden Manual (Tuesday Knight Games) will absolutely make you a better GM for games besides it, btw. To the point about fear/panic rolls, I love the advice that it can be rolled, in addition to the defined list of events, whenever the player wants to. Giving mechanical hooks like that to players to characterize is good design.

*/

Fantasy Heroism/Pulp

Bending towards competence feels better. PCs are adventuring, and are assumed by the game system to be unique to that end. I encourage you to say a simple “yes, you do that” when it is in a PCs wheelhouse and not much is at risk.

PC character sheets are not just a blob of stats, they are a wishlist. BitD encourages thinking of the shared Crew sheet as a wishlist from the players about what types of scores or stories they want to explore. Fulfilling that wishlist by giving them challenges that their PCs are uniquely qualified to succeed in is a cheap hack to player engagement.

Yes, even the minmaxer and the munchkin obsessed with busting the game over their knee. Give them challenges which satisfy their system mastery, those which challenge it, and those which thwart it. If your player wants to build their wizard as a glass cannon who loves fireball, give them things to blow up.

Conclusion

The number 1 technique to better GMing is to call for dice rolls less often. How much less often entirely depends on what is important to your game at your table, and critically, how you communicate that.

Ultimately, this is the space in which RPGs stand out the most from other games. Not only is this core a big differentiator between RPGs, how and when you mechanically adjudicate uncertainty, but this is a unique infinite gap between rules which requires a human to interpret. Board games lack this infinite gap.

For some, perhaps it is best described as an intuition. But a sense for it can be learned, if you’re open to it, even if that learning is rote.