GM Campaign Prep: Figuring out XP

I've spent the past few weeks putting together a campaign world from scratch to run Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number for my main local group. Whenever I do this I build a World Anvil page for it so that the players have a place to find all the information about the place easily.  I am endlessly tweaking rules and adding new elements to things, but with this game I am trying really hard not to install too many kitchen sinks in my world. Believe me there was an overstocked Home Depot worth of kitchen sinks on the first draft of the world. 

One of my critiques of Kevin Crawford's -Without Numbers systems (and it's really just the one) that I can't help changing is that XP in the rules as written isn't granular enough. The full XP track is basically 0 to 100 for the full 10 levels. This runs contrary to my philosophy about earning XP in games. From a design standpoint XP is a reward for player involvement. They do some things to engage with the setting and they are rewarded for it.

That short XP track limits what actions I can reward XP for and what kind of XP values a player could earn from a given task. I want to reward my players for doing things in the game, but I don't want to limit the # of times they can do a thing. I know how they will engage with the setting for the most part, so I don't want to discourage those modes of play. I just want to encourage other modes of play. 

I replaced all the XP tracks for the characters with more tradition ones that go up to the many thousands range at the high end of things. This gives me a chance to offer more opportunities for XP as a reward for player engagement; which is the entire goal of my GM-ing. 

On my campaign's World Anvil, I have a page for XP and How to Get It. I came up with 4 main ways I want to reward the players that I pieced together from various sources.

1. Killing or Overcoming an Enemy
2. Doing Quests
3. Exploring
4. Tavern Nights

The first one is pretty straight forward. I really like the simplicity of the rule in Ryuutama where you get an amount of XP based on the HD of the strongest foe you defeated. I didn't want this to be a reward only for fighting classes, so I worded it to include players that overcome an opponent with Charisma rather than violence. This will reward a player who wants to engage with combat, but not reward them for doing it with everything they see since they only get XP for the strongest thing they overcome.

Doing quests also seemed pretty straight forward. There'd be people that needed stuff done and need help doing it, so the players could always offer their aid and be rewarded for it. I also like personal quests or goals, so I included that with this category. This gives players an additional reason to set goals for their character in the game.

Exploring is something I always feel needs to be rewarded. I took part of the idea from a Monsters and Manuals blog post about the Sage class earning gold from taking various detailed fieldnotes while out exploring the world and killing monsters. The other half of the idea came from Thousand Year Old Vampire in which you have a physical journal you keep memories in that are no longer in your head. If you lose the journal you lose the memories. What I ended up with is players have a journal/document keeper that they can keep up to 5 documents in. They then have the option of taking time to create the various documents which earn them XP and potentially money when they return to a city where they can sell it. I am hoping this encourages the players to see exploration as part of the game instead of seeing it as stumbling around looking for the thing to do.

Tavern Night came from my need for the players to have a chance to blow off steam and have some nights where they didn't spend the whole time worried their character might die and to give us a chance to get intoxicated together. There was a comment someone made on reddit (I couldn't find it again, to link it) where a person said their group had tavern nights where the whole session took place in a tavern in real time while the players hung out and got drunk together and had their character get into hijinks. This obviously ticked all the boxes I needed and I tossed that in as a regular session we will have during the campaign, as the fiction of the game allows. There will be XP awards during that, two from the GM, but then players can nominate others for XP awards based on the player or character actions during a session. This gives them a chance to pat each other on the back and to give me an idea of the situations they enjoyed the most so I can encourage those sorts of situations in future session. I also hope this will help keep them on task during the more serious sessions, knowing there will be one where they can do all their shenanigans at once.

Those are the ways I want to reward XP in this campaign. I can't be sure this will work out as I envision them, but as we get into the campaign I can make small tweaks to things. Even if it doesn't work exactly that way, I can be assured it will be closer to what I need it to be than the rules as written.