You've Been Giving Out Levels Wrong In D&D

There are many ways to distribute levels in Dungeons and Dragons. Nowadays, the primary way to level up players is Milestone Leveling, where players gain levels when they complete major goals or objectives. This is one of the worst possible avenues to reward your players.

Leveling up is the greatest way to reward players in the entire game. Money, gear, a sense of discovery, and magic items are cool, but they pale in comparison to the pure, raw excitement of leveling up. Not many DMs think about it, but the way that you distribute levels is crucial to how the players interact with your game. But, in order to discuss the reasons for this, we have to talk about psychology.

Depending on how many self-help books you've read, you might know about dopamine. If you don't know, dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brains of most animals (and even some plants, like bananas and potatoes, which is weird to think about), and is primarily involved in motivation to perform activities. As an example, in a famous study, rats that were dopamine-deficient would no longer eat, even when food was placed in front of them. They would find food pleasurable when placed in their mouths, but the lack of motivation would make them refrain from the action of putting the food in their mouths, which would lead to them starving to death (Source).

These days, dopamine is commonly discussed regarding addiction, and specifically social media addiction - as the big social media companies weaponize your brain chemistry to encourage you to continue consuming so they can sell your data to advertisers. Fun Stuff. But, this isn't particularly relevant. Today, we're talking about the simple, intended use of this brain chemical: motivation to do pretty much anything. It's what keeps you reading this article, and what lets you have a fun time playin' D&D with your friends.

Gaining levels in RPGs is a shock of dopamine. Having real achievement paired with tangible numbers visibly going up is so much more rewarding than mere gold, magic items or new spells. Gaining experience and seeing your character's improvement, especially when it's truly earned, is what makes this game such delectable power fantasy. It's fun because it's so different from reality - where tangible growth often comes from a long period of intangible growth. In D&D, we have concrete numbers which tell us exactly what we need to do to improve. This is the most important facet of D&D as a game.

This boils down to a simple fact about the human brain: how you distribute levels in D&D affects the player's motivations immensely. Depending on the way that you as a DM choose to allow the players to level up, you're directly influencing the behavior of the players. Above all, the way you distribute Xp to the players is a message about what you approve of them doing.

As discussed before, the unofficial de facto system for modern D&D is called Milestone Leveling - where the players gain levels at the DM's behest, usually when they complete some story objective or when it "feels right." It's the most popular system for a reason: it's just simple. You don't have to fiddle with annoying Xp numbers from monsters, or devise some weird alternate system. When it seems to "make sense," you reward the players, no extra thinking required.

However, think about what this tells the player. When using milestone leveling, You reward them exclusively for engaging with the "main thing," (Whatever that is for your campaign) and nothing else. When you do this, you're ensuring that the players only care about the story, or whatever else you deem valuable. Unsurprisingly, a system like this discourages free thinking and operating outside what the DM has explicitly plotted. This is bad.

It doesn't matter how "fair" you are in distributing levels, because this system takes away most of the power from the players. They can't choose how they level up. With the milestone system, there's never going to be a moment where the players are forced to make a risky choice in search of levels. "Gary's really close to leveling up, so do we risk the extra push, or do we cut our losses and go home?" This thinking will never happen with a system like Milestone Leveling. It's more like, "We're okay to just abandon everything and regroup at full power and come back later." This cheapens the experience, and makes the world feel less real.

Using milestone leveling removes the branching decision tree of gaining levels. It's reduced to a binary question: was the thing accomplished? If so, get a level. This system offers nothing in the way of allowing the players to choose their path. Agency is the most important part of D&D - it's what makes the game a game. By opting to remove the players' choices about gaining levels, you're taking agency away from the players. Milestone Leveling is just another form of railroading, as you're removing the player's choices in a crucial part of the game. This is why I never use it.

Okay, so what works then? What about Xp for exploration? You have an open world, and a bunch of locations. Every time they find a cool thing, you give them each 100+ Xp depending on some external factor. That way they're incentivized to discover things in the wilderness. This is a better start, but in this method, they're only really being rewarded for finding something, not engaging with it. When dealing with the primary motivation, you have to think about the play patterns it encourages. Even if you did something like "Xp for clearing a location," then play would still engage exclusively clearing locations, just killing all the monsters, saving the princess or whatever the "clear condition" is.

This is the same problem for doling out Xp for killing monsters, the actual default method in D&D 5e. With this system, the players are exclusively rewarded for fighting monsters. I bet you can imagine what kind of motivation this leads to. It's no wonder why there are so many stories of D&D players wandering around killing everything and everyone. If you're only incentivizing combat, then it's no surprise that the players will engage with combat exclusively.

The solution exists, though, and has since the first version of D&D. The original version of D&D from the 1970s uses an Xp system which prioritizes player agency, as well as making the game more fun. It breaks down into two parts: 1 Xp for each gold piece of value the party recovers, and 100 Xp per Hit Dice of a monster slain (Hit Dice are an older way of measuring relative levels of monsters. I talk about how to implement this here). The thing about this system is the two-pronged approach. Gaining Xp for gold is the primary way to level up. It may not seem like it, and it is relative to the game the DM runs, but gold is common. This encourages play patterns of extricating gold from your enemies as Plan A, and fighting them as a Plan B. If any location could have stacks of phat loot, then thoroughly exploring it becomes even more interesting, especially if the DM places hidden coins for the observant.

The second facet is the 100 Xp per Hit Dice(HD). This means that killing most creatures is a pretty decent amount of Xp, and killing monsters isn't a completely worthless endeavor (As a note, I personally run it so that wandering monsters don't give Xp or money, so the player's can't just abuse the system). There is another, smaller part of this system, and that's simply dividing the reward by the party's average level (never over 1:1). This is to make sure the 6th level party can't kill 200 orcs to level up, again discouraging killing everything they come across. I talk about this, and the style it encourages in significantly more depth in the other article, so do check it out.

While I like the original Xp system, that doesn't mean that it's objectively better than all the others. My point is you need to pay attention to the kind of game you want to run. If you want a heavily narrative-driven game, then don't give Xp for gold or monsters or exploration. If you want a significantly combat-heavy game, don't make XP-for-gold the only way to gain Xp. Milestone leveling, however, does remove the player's agency in a slight way, which is significantly more than I can tolerate being a part of the game.

If you want to run a campaign where exploration, agency and engagement is the primary focus, then there's no better, and simpler, way than Dungeons and Dragon's original Xp system. You can read more about how to encourage your players to engage more with your world here.

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