omens & odyssseys

The focus of any roleplaying game is going to be about what it rewards experience for.

Loot as XP is an incredible reward system for games that want the party to delve into dungeons.

Milestone advancement is perfect for tables that want to engage with the fiction of the world and change it for better or worse.

XP for killing monsters suits heroic modes of RPGs (though it does mean that the solution to almost any encounter is violence).

And, of course, there are methods for mixing and matching all of the above to allow for maximum flexibility.

But what about RPGs that are focused on survival?

In survival-focused games, my preferred method is using sessions as XP. It’s simple, fast, and most importantly, thematic.

Here’s how it works:

• At the end of the session, if your character is still alive, they get 1 XP
• If the amount of XP they have is equal to their current level, they level up
• Once they level up, reduce your current XP to 0

Survival-focused games tend to have extremely high lethality, which makes living to the end of a session a real accomplishment.

Because the amount of XP needed to level escalates, this allows the GM to recalibrate difficulty as the party becomes more powerful.

Lastly, it completely removes the fiddly book-keeping that some other methods use.