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

By Charles_Bailey, 2026-03-20