The good old hack-and-slash campaign
-- anyone who plays the AD&D® game
knows all about it. The main activity is
killing monsters, preferably by the dozens,
and looting their worldly goods. Whether
action is set in a dungeon or above ground,
what counts to the players and the DM
alike is the body count at the end of
the session -- the more dead orcs, dragons,
and demons, the better. Because killing the
same old thing stops being fun after a while,
this kind of game produces some of the most
unbelievable and biologically impossible
monsters that never walked the earth.

An endless string of search-and-destroy
missions produces a particular kind of
player -- one whose main motivation is
sheer greed. Although in theory his paladin
is devoted to the true, the good, and the
beautiful, and her magic-user wants arcane
knowledge for its own sake, show them
enough treasure and they loot and kill like
half-starved mercenaries. Eventually, this
kind of player presents the DM with a
genuine problem -- the extremely powerful
character who can blast or bash everything
in sight and sees no reason to refrain from
doing so. After all, heaps of dead monsters
and treasure translate directly into a vast
amount of experience points. In the ?right?
circumstances, it doesn?t take long for players
to build up characters who take artifacts
away from the gods as easily as they would
lift a drunken sailor's purse.

In DRAGON® Magazine and other <link>
publications that serve the gaming hobby,
many writers have addressed the problems
of hack-and-slash gaming. DMs have written
many letters complaining of overly
powerful characters and single-minded
players. Yet, as good as these articles and
letters have been, most have concentrated
on the campaign world rather than on the
rules of the game itself. We need to ask
ourselves if there's something in the very
structure of the AD&D game rules that
encourages hack-and-slash scenarios and
"sheer greed" players. The answer, unfortunately,
is yes. Any DM who tries to expand
the game action beyond
simple-minded banditry is immediately
faced with a major problem: reconciling this
effort with the rules for awarding XP.

After all, XP are the real
goal of players and characters, even more
than treasure or mayhem. All players want
their characters to amass as many points as
possible. Not only are high-level PCs fun to
play, but low-level PCs are incredibly
vulnerable in the dangerous Game world.
For players, that extra HD granted upon
the attainment of each new level means
survival as much as power.

In the AD&D game rules, <there are 2 main ways of>
gaining these coveted XP:
slaying and looting. (My references
here and subsequently are the PH, pages 106-107, 
and the DMG, pages 84-85.) The
rules explicitly state that all XP are 
to be awarded on the basis of
monsters killed and treasure gained. Although
the DM has some leeway about
awarding bonus points, even these points
may be given only for actions directly related
to the gaining of treasure.
    <XP for assassination>
    <XP for being raised/resurrected>
    <DSG: story awards>

With these limits, it's no wonder that
players want as many chances for their
characters to kill and loot as possible. In all
fairness, likewise, DMs feel obliged to provide
PCs with the opportunity to gain XP. 
The end result is that any
campaign based strictly on the rules will
have to center around treasure hoards
guarded by monsters, or similar situations.
A well-run campaign provides unusual
variations on this basic scenario and other
kinds of action between the looting sessions,
but ultimately the players must have plenty
of opportunities for gaining treasure and
killing opponents if their PCs are ever to
advance.

Let's LOOK at an example of a scenario
that provides plenty of game action but
gives the DM no opportunity to assign
XP under the rules. An NPC
who is well-known and well-liked by the PC
party is kidnapped and sold into slavery in a
distant city. The party members decide to
rescue him, but, upon arriving at the city,
they discover that their friend?s owner
refuses to sell him back. Attempting violence
in the well-guarded city would mean
their arrest. The PCs, however, are given
the chance to make the owner sell their
friend back to them by using guile if they
either gather information to blackmail the
owner, seduce his daughter, or both. In
this scenario, not only does using violence
mean failure, but the PCs are going to have
to pay out gold, not gain any, to rescue their
friend. How, then, is the DM going to
reward the party members if they successfully
think their way through the problem?

By Now, the nature of the difficulty
should be clear. As they stand, the rules for
assigning XP reward hackand-
slash gaming and penalize (or, at best,
ignore) intricate and nonviolent types of
play. DMs who want to expand their campaigns
beyond simple search-and-destroy
scenarios have to modify or even downright
change these rules in order to reward PCs
fairly. The most obvious way of
making these changes is to draw up a list of
new reasons for awarding XP
such as clever thinking, out-talking an NPC
guard, and so on.

I'm sure that many DMs have already
made up such lists for their own campaigns,
but this method has real problems. After
all, even if we choose to revise the
experience-point system drastically, our
revisions have to be consistent with the
structure of the AD&D game, not merely a
graft from some other game system or a
jury-rigged addition that runs counter to the
intent and structure of the game. Any new
rules for assigning experience points have to
take into account the rationale for and the
parameters set by the old rules. This article
1st analyzes the rules for assigning XP, 
then offers some suggestions
about expanding them to cover new kinds of
scenarios without doing violence to the
principles underlying them. (The suggestions
here are, of course, strictly variants,
not additions to official rules.)

What are XP?
On page 106, the Players Handbook
gives a long defense of the experience-point
rules, a defense which is restated on page 85
of the DMG in a slightly different way. The
argument is divided into two parts. First,
the system of using monsters and gold
pieces is simple, playable, and should be
accepted on faith as a rule and nothing
more. As long as play is confined to the
dungeons for which these rules were primarily
developed, there is no way or reason
to quibble with such an argument. However,
once a campaign expands in ways not
envisioned or accounted for in the original
rules, situations come up which those rules
cannot cover. Thus, the rules are no longer
playable, and we are justified in examining
them more closely.
<EXPERIENCE VALUE OF TREASURE TAKEN>
<XP VALUE OF MONSTERS, DMG>
    <XP VALUE OF MONSTERS, Dragon #89>

The 2nd part of the defense is more
interesting and offers us a way out of our
dilemma. The DMG points out that the
actual ways in which PCs would refine their
skills are simply quite boring -- long hours
spent in practicing fighting, rehearsing
prayers and rites, or studying in arcane
books. No one would want to play out every
detail of this practice in order to gain an
experience level. This argument shows that
"experience" is defined at root as a matter
of skill and proficiency in a number of
abilities.

XP are awarded when a
PC has shown that he can successfully use
the skills of his class by completing an adventure.
The assumption is that if the PC
can successfully accomplish the goals of a
number of scenarios, he has improved his
skills enough to advance to the next level.
Adventuring thus becomes a test situation
that allows PCs to display their skills, and
experience points are rather like marks or
grades in school. They are given when PCs
use their skills to achieve a goal. In the early
days of game scenarios, these goals were
always slaying monsters and gaining treasure.
Thus, the number of corpses and
coins was indeed a fair measure of the
player characters' success in completing the
scenario.

The XP system of the
AD&D game is an abstract way of judging
skills, because many different skills are
subsumed into the PC's profession(s).
When a PC goes up a level, he increases his
abilities with all his skills at once. The
abstract nature of the system requires that
experience points be awarded on the basis
of reaching one large goal, rather than on
the successful use of individual skills. If the
goal of a scenario is killing monsters and
gaining treasure, then all of the PC?s many
skills are considered to be bent toward that
two-faceted goal. If a PC is killed by a trap,
for instance, he won?t be around to gain the
treasure; therefore, escaping or avoiding the
trap is considered part of the work of
achieving the goal and is not independently
rewarded.

Since this point is important, let's make it
clear by contrasting our abstract experience
system with its opposite. The RuneQuest®
game developed by the folks at Chaosium
includes rules that offer a specific method of
gaining experience. Every time a PC uses
one of his many skills, he gets a chance to
increase his level with that specific skill and
that one only. The PC progresses by getting
better at the specific skills which the character
?s player chooses to emphasize. There are
no experience levels at all, no across-theboard
increase in a whole group of skills
subsumed under a character class.

If, therefore, we are going to revise the
rules for assigning experience points in the
AD&D game, our revisions are going to
have to be abstract, not specific, or else they
will be inconsistent with the system of experience
levels and character classes. This
need for abstraction is the reason that we
can?t simply make up a list of new awards
and assign an unvarying point value to
them. If, for instance, we say that slipping
past a guard is worth 500 points or using
magic to acquire information is worth 250,
then we are awarding points for specific
skills rather than judging a PC's abstract
success in using all of his skills to achieve an
overall goal. Trying to incorporate a specific
skill system into the AD&D rules could
seriously unbalance the character classes,
which were carefully designed to have
approximately equal strengths and weaknesses.
For instance, in our example of the
NPC sold into slavery, the terms of the
scenario combined with a specific
experience-point system would mean that
the thieves and magic-users in the party
would have more chances to use their skills
-- and thus to gain XP --
than the fighters.

What really counts in awarding experience
points, then, is the struggle of the PCs
to succeed in whatever task the scenario sets
for them. The only reason that the
experience-point system as it stands is so
limited is that it was designed to judge a
very limited type of scenario -- the
dungeon adventure or its above-ground
equivalent. Our problem arises when the
goals of the scenario have nothing to do
with armed enemies and loot, but we can
expand the basic principle of using the goals
of the scenario as the basis of awarding
points to cover a vast number of different
kinds of game actions.

Before we do, however, there is one more
aspect of the rules as they stand that we
must consider, namely, that the PCs must
use the skills of their particular character
classes in completing the adventure. The
Players Handbook puts it concisely: "If the
characters gain treasure by the pursuit of
their major aims, then they are generally
entitled to a full share of earned experience
points . . ." By implication, a PC who acts
outside of his class or who doesn?t use the
skills specific to his class is not entitled to a
full share of the points awarded by the DM.
<EXPERIENCE, PH>

At first thought, this rule seems difficult
to apply to scenarios that don't follow the
dungeon pattern. Let's again consider the
example of the PC party attempting to
rescue a friend from slavery. Since one of
the stipulations of the scenario is that violence
is forbidden, how can the fighter in
the party pursue his major aim, which is to
fight? In this and similar situations, we
need to extend the concept of the major aim
of each class to include staying in character
and drawing upon the skills and background
of the class. After all, a PC is much
more than a mere chess piece limited to a
single type of move.

In this example, a fighter could draw
upon the skills of his class in many ways. If
the party were gathering information from
underworld types, the scowling presence of
a well-armed fighting man would not only
keep the party safe but help intimidate their
sources and induce them to cooperate.
Likewise, he could guard their goods
from thieves, take care of any local bullies
in the tavern, and generally threaten force
in subtle ways to advance the party?s cause.
As long as the player of the fighter PC
worked to stay in character this way, the
DM would certainly be justified in awarding
the fighter a full share of experience
points, even if he never drew his sword.

New goals need new awards
As we've seen, the current experience
point rules in the AD&D game are limited
because they were designed to judge a scenario
with goals that almost invariably
involve killing monsters and gaining treasure.
To expand beyond a hack-and-slash
campaign, however, the DM needs to emphasize
new kinds of action, such as wilderness
exploration, political intrigue, and play
in cities. In such a campaign, the goals will
often be something intangible, such as
gaining honor in the eyes-of a king or finding
a crucial piece of information. Since we
can no longer use dead monsters and gold
pieces as convenient measures of success,
we need a new way of translating such goals
into experience points. As long as we put
the emphasis on the overall goal of the
scenario -- not on specific actions within
the scenario -- we will be staying within the
abstract experience system of the AD&D
rules.

Since the goals of scenarios that fall outside
the dungeon pattern are so varied, it?s
impossible to give a set of tidy tables and
lists covering all of them. What we can do
in this article is discuss some general principles
that will allow the DM to tailor experience
point awards to many different
scenarios. Let's start by examining a long
example of a scenario that cannot be fitted
into the dungeon mode. Once we have a
concrete example to refer to, it will be much
easier to set forth a procedure and some
rules of thumb for awarding experience
points.

In our example, a small kingdom is ruled
by a weak young king who has fallen under
the influence of a group of corrupt, selfserving
advisors. A local priest, fearing that
the populace will rebel, asks a good-aligned
PC party to free the king from this influence.
Simply marching into the palace and
killing or denouncing the evil crew will get
the PCs no farther than the royal gallows;
what they must do is worm their way into
the court and try to gain enough favor with
the king to open his eyes to the misdeeds of
his counselors. Fortunately, the local priest
can give them letters of introduction that
will get them a place in the court.

Once the PCs are there, the DM (in the
personae of various NPCs) scatters useful
information about the ways the party can
gain favor. The king is fond of tournaments,
and he lionizes successful fighters. The
queen is very ill, and perhaps the cleric in
the party can heal her where the court
physician has failed. Documents exist that
will blackmail the most corrupt advisors if
only the thief can steal them -- and so on.
Meanwhile, the evil counselors aren?t going
to take this situation lying down once they
realize the party's intentions. They?ll do
their best to trip the party up and eventually
resort to hiring an assassin if it looks
like the king is getting too fond of these
interlopers.

When setting up an experience-point
award for the successful completion of this
scenario, it's tempting to break it down into
a series of small victories. For instance,
each opponent that the fighter faces in a
tournament could be assigned experience
points like a standard monster. Unfortunately,
this way of working soon fails us. If
the cleric heals the queen, for instance, how
can we assign points to her recovery? It?s
much better, therefore, to find the broadest
goal possible and subsume all other successes
and failures under that heading. In
our example, the central goal is to expel the
counselors from court. Thus, we can treat
the counselors as "monsters" and award
points to be shared by the party as a whole
for each counselor successfully sent into
exile or imprisonment.

Let's start by considering the experiencepoint
table for monsters on page 85 of the
DMG, to see if we can find its underlying
principles. This table awards monsters a
point value based on four categories: the
level of a human or humanoid monster or
the hit dice of a non-humanoid; the hit
points of the monster; its special abilities;
and its exceptional abilities. In the footnotes,
the table gives examples of special
and exceptional abilities ? missile attacks,
low armor class, paralysis attacks, and so
on. In short, this table assigns monsters an
experience-point value on the basis of their
combat ability and little else. If the party?s
only goal is killing the monster, this basis is
perfectly logical, because the monster?s
combat ability is its main means of preventing
the party from reaching that goal.

If we expand its categories by analogy, we
can use this table for our purposes. What
counts is the monster's ability to prevent the
success of the PCs. Since the PCs in our
example want to expel the counselors, not
kill them, we simply need a different set of
measures for the counselors? abilities to
thwart the party's plans.

Since experience level is a general measure
of a character's skill at facing life?s
problems, we can start with the level of each
counselor and use the point award right off
the table. The next category on the table,
hit points, refers to a personal characteristic
of the monster. We can thus use the other
personal characteristics that directly influence
the counselor's ability to defend himself
in this situation. INT may allow
the counselor to outwit the PCs, and CHA
is a good measure of how much influence
a counselor has over the king.

When it comes to the categories of special
and exceptional abilities, we will have to
make a more subjective judgment as to
what qualifies as such an ability. We need to
choose those things that will actively hinder
the PCs from reaching their goal -- that is,
those things that will make the counselor in
question harder to oust. One might have
been highly praised by the king?s father,
making it harder for the PCs to convince
the king that something is amiss; another
might have a network of palace spies; a
third might find a piece of unwelcome information
about one of the PCs, and so on.
On the other hand, if a counselor owns a
vast country estate, it will have little bearing
on his ability to stay at court, and thus that
fact should not be considered.

Let?s look at a detailed example of this
system of awarding points. Sannar, one of
the evil counselors, is a 10th-level an astrologer
(a variant NPC sage class) with 15 intelligence
and 13 charisma. His mistress, one of the
serving women, will spy on the PCs for
him. Since the queen is superstitious, Sannar
is constantly called upon to give her
good advice -- a situation he can use to his
advantage by uttering dark warnings about
the PC party. Consulting the experiencepoint
table, we find that the basic value for
a "monster" of Sannar's level is 900 xp.
Then we substitute the total of his intelligence
and charisma scores in place of hit
points, and multiply by 14 (the xp/hp value
for a 10th-level monster). This total is 392
(28 times 14), bringing Sannar?s xp value
up to 1,292 so far. Next, we decide that his
spy counts as a special ability for 450 xp
more. And his access to the queen is certainly
an exceptional ability -- so exceptional,
in fact, that it should be worth
double the usual award (as allowed for in
the rules accompanying the table). After
adding these two bonuses (a total of 1,650
xp more) to the base total, we determine
that Sannar has an XP value
of 2,992 -- the amount that the PCs will
receive if the astrologer is exiled or imprisoned
through their efforts.

In scenarios of this sort, it's also possible
to be flexible when awarding bonus points.
In our example, we might decide to give a
bonus if the party not only removes the
counselors but also helps the king become a
better ruler by making sure he realizes the
lesson in what's just happened, or -- in the
context of a long-running campaign ? if
gaining this king?s favor will help the party
later on. To make this award part of the
game rather than a lump sum of abstract
points, we could put it in the form of a
reward from the grateful citizens (or the
king himself) in easily countable gold
pieces. Or, the priest who originally put the
party up to the job might offer to resurrect
one of them free of charge if such a service
ever became necessary ? a reward that
could be kept ?as is? or cashed into experience
points on the basis of the normal cost
for the casting of such a spell. Whatever the
bonus, the important thing is to make it a
part of the world rather than a mere DM?s
award.

Another kind of monster
In our example of the corrupt advisors,
XP were fairly easy to assign
because overcoming the counselors, each of
whom could be treated as a monster, was
the stated goal of the scenario. The big
difference between this scenario and a
standard dungeon was that the "combat"
was subtle, tricky, and nonviolent. In many
scenarios, however, the goals will be much
less clear-cut and the opposition much less
easily defined. One example of such a scenario
is a wilderness journey, where the real
enemy of the PCs is the environment itself.

Let's work out a scenario where the environment
is paramount. The PCs here are
two high-level thieves who are imprisoned
in the top cell of a tall tower, the donjon of
the local duke, who intends to make a spectacular
example out of them at the next
market day court. Since the duke knows
that he has a tricky pair on his hands, he?s
set guards and traps throughout the tower
to prevent their escape. Fortunately for the
PCs, their brethren in the thieves? guild
have managed to smuggle them their lock
picks, one dagger, and some information
about the tower. The thieves' goal is simple:
to get out.

The opposition seems at first glance to be
made up of three parts: the tower, the
guards, and the traps. On further reflection,
though, we can see that dividing up the
opposition in this way makes it difficult to
assign points in a way consistent with our
abstract experience system. If each guard is
assigned a point value based on his combat
ability, for instance, then what happens if
the PCs successfully use their thieving skills
to evade all the guards? That course of
action would be greatly superior to combat,
especially considering that the thieves have
only one dagger between them. So, it?s
preferable to treat the tower itself as the
opposition, and the guards and traps as
"special abilities" of the tower designed to
help prevent the escape of the imprisoned
thieves.

What we can do with this scenario, in
short, is to personify the tower and treat it
as a "monster" to be overcome by the PCs.
By treating the tower as a monster, we can
allow the PCs great freedom of action and
reward them for thinking, not slashing,
while still playing by the AD&D rules, not
the rules of some other system. The first
thing we have to do is to assign the tower a
?level,? corresponding to a monster?s hit
dice or experience level. Since the use of the
word ?level? is already confusing enough in
the AD&D rules, let us make the level of an
inanimate object more specific by calling it
the ?level of difficulty.?

Assigning a level of difficulty to a piece of
terrain or other inanimate object (such as a
bank vault, for example) is bound to be a
subjective business, but we can get some
guidelines from the real world. First, we
need to ask exactly how the object is opposing
the PCs. In this case, since the PCs
want to get down from its top, the tower?s
height and the smoothness of its walls can
be measures of the difficulty involved in
overcoming it. To further illustrate this
concept with another example, let?s say that
the PCs are trying to cross a desert. In this
case, the heat of the desert, the distance that
must be traversed, and the amount of available
water would all be factors in determining
how difficult it is to cross.

Now, returning to the duke?s donjon, we
next consider towers in the abstract. If we
define a one-story tower with rough walls as
a ?first level of difficulty? tower to climb,
we can set a 500-foot-high tower made of
slick obsidian at the other end of scale ?
say, at the fifteenth level of difficulty. The
duke?s tower is ?only? 100 feet high but has
very smooth walls; somewhat subjectively,
we decide that it?s an object at the tenth
level of difficulty.

Since inanimate objects and terrain have
no personal characteristics as such (no ?hit
points? or standard abilities), we will eliminate
the step of finding a correlation to the
xp/hp category on the DMG's XP value table <XP VALUE OF MONSTERS, Dragon #89>
and concentrate on the
categories of special and exceptional abilities.
The table tells us that a tenth-level
monster has its point value increased by 450
for each special ability and 600 for each
exceptional ability. We decide that the
guards count as special abilities and the
traps as exceptional abilities, because the
guards are easier to see, hear, and thus
evade than the traps. The duke has placed
ten men on guard and set up six traps.
Therefore, if the thieves make a successful
escape, they will have a total of 9,000 xp?s
to divide between them: 900 (base award)
+ 4,500 (10 x 450) + 3,600 (6 x 600).

We can treat a dangerous piece of natural
terrain in the same way. Suppose we have a
group that knows of a magic item buried
on a small island in the middle of a swamp.
To recover the item, they have to cross the
swamp, which then becomes their main
opponent to achieving their goal. Scattered
through this lovely bit of real estate are
natural traps like quicksand and a variety 
of monsters. Rather than treating the monsters
as separate enemies with a separate
award of experience points for each one, we
should consider them as special and exceptional
abilities of the swamp as a whole.
The PCs are trying to reach the island, not
clear the swamp of monsters; if they can
evade the monsters or trick them by using
their brains instead of their swords, so
much the better.

Conversely, what if the goal of the PC
party was indeed to kill a particularly dangerous
monster that lived in the swamp? We
could then treat the swamp itself as one of
the monster?s exceptional abilities, because
living in a difficult-to-penetrate swamp
makes the monster harder to kill. If the
swamp is particularly dangerous, we could
give it a point value as if it had more than
one exceptional ability. And if we did so, we
could not award points independently for
the defeating of any minor monsters living
in the same swamp, giving the characters
the option of tricking or evading them
rather than wasting their strength before the
main combat. This kind of bonus rewards
characters (and players) who think first and
slash second, while remaining true to the
abstract nature of experience points in the
AD&D rules.

Some rules of thumb
Now that we've analyzed some example
scenarios, we can outline a procedure for
determining the XP awards of
scenarios in general. By following the steps
below and referring to the examples in this
article, a DM should be able to develop a
feel for awarding experience points that will
be more valuable in the long run than any
set of lists and tables.

1. Make sure that the material for the
adventure is indeed one single scenario.
Since we've decided to make our point
awards on the basis of a goal accomplished
in a given scenario, it's important to make
sure that we're not short-changing the PCs
by cramming too much action and danger
under one heading. Generally speaking, a
single scenario should be no longer than the
amount of material that can be played
through in one 6-hour gaming session, but
there will, of course, be some exceptions to
this. Consider the 1st example in this
article, where the PC party was attempting
to rescue a friend sold into slavery. Since the
party already knew the whereabouts of the
friend, this scenario had a suitable goal. If
the problem was "your friend has disappeared;
you must find out where he is and
then rescue him," we would be dealing with
enough material for at least 2 scenarios,
not just one.

2. Define the major goal of the scenario.

The DM should first examine the scenario
to decide what its central point is,
then define this point in terms of a goal that
requires the use of PC skills. In our example
of the donjon tower, defining the goal as
"reaching freedom," while true enough,
would not exactly suit our needs. Defining
it as "using thieving skills to escape from
the tower" gave us a solid basis on which to
award the points.

The goal should also be defined in such a
way as to cover the entire scenario. As
another example, consider a scenario where
the PC party is sent to rescue someone held
prisoner in a dangerous jungle by a pack of
bandits. Bringing this person back out of
the jungle alive is the real goal of the scenario,
not merely getting him out of the
hands of the bandits.

3. Determine the opposition to the goal.

Generally speaking, it's the difficulty of
the opposition to achieving the goal that
determines the actual XP
award. The term "opposition" here covers
both persons and monsters actively trying to
thwart the PCs and terrain that passively
makes a goal hard to reach. In many, if not
most, scenarios, both kinds of opposition
will be present. The DM needs to decide
which one is primary, as we did in the case
of the 2 imprisoned thieves when we
decided that the tower was the primary
opposition rather than the traps or the
guards.

4. Personify the opposition if necessary as
a single "monster".

If the primary opposition is passive, it's
much easier to award XP if
the DM 1st personifies the situation by
assigning it a level of difficulty. The two
main criteria for assigning this level are the
deadliness of an environment or object and
what may be called its frustration, factor.
Obviously, any kind of terrain where the
PCs can be killed by one wrong move
should be of a higher level than one where
dangers are more easily avoided. At times,
physical danger may not be the real issue,
as, for example, when the PCs are trying to
find information in a city where the inhabitants
are indifferent to them. In that case,
the DM should consider the "frustration
factor" of the situation. If the inhabitants of
the town in our example are inclined to
keep their mouths shut, the information will
be harder to ferret out than if the inhabitants
are the open, easy-going sort.

5. Use the table in the DMG to determine
the actual point award for the personified
opposition.

Although the 4 categories of this table
can only be a rough guide, they at least give
the DM a place to start.
<XP VALUE OF MONSTERS, DMG>
    <XP VALUE OF MONSTERS, Dragon #89>

6. Determine bonuses, if any.

The DM might well decide that the special
conditions of the scenario merit a bonus
if the PC party achieves certain secondary
objectives or does a splendid job of fulfilling
the main objective. These bonus awards
should never be more than 25% of the main
award, and there should rarely be more
than two of them.

7. Keep in mind the "measure of challenge
" rule in the DMG.

The "measure of challenge" is a firm
part of the AD&D game's experience-point
system. Briefly, the DMG states that if the
party is ten or more levels above the level of
the opposition, then the experience-point
award should be halved -- unless the opposition
outnumbers the party by at least
twenty to one. In scenarios that don?t follow
the dungeon pattern, "being outnumbered"
has to be a flexible concept.

In our example of the island in the
swamp <WSG>, for instance, if the swamp were at
the fourth level and the party at the fifteenth,
the party?s award would be cut
unless the place was swarming with monsters
and traps. On the other hand, if the
monster population was thin, but the
swamp so large and grueling that the party
risked losing levels to exhaustion, then the
DM might decide to award the full amount
of experience points anyway.


When all else is said and done, remember
that creativity is the key to enjoyable gaming.
Since the system for awarding experience
points outlined here is designed for
creative and unusual scenarios, the DMs
who use it will have to be creative themselves
and adapt it to their own needs.

In closing, I strongly urge DMs to remember
the abstract nature of the AD&D
game?s experience-point system. They
should stay firmly within it by awarding
points only for major goals that require the
use of many PC skills to achieve. Although
it?s tempting to give point awards for specific
actions, such awards really do run
counter to the spirit of the game. While
creativity is the most important thing a DM
needs for good gaming, a sound and consistent
system of rules runs a close second.

MARCH 1985