Millstone Levelling
I often rant about people reinventing square wheels and how it frustrates me to no end. The topic of experience and levelling is no different. Outside of OSR circles it seems like everyone has lost the plot, and instead of doing it right, they decided not to do it at all. Advice you commonly see boils down to something like "stop doing Exp; just tell them they level up when they finish a story beat, or when you think they deserve a level-up".
All of this misses the point of what experience is and it's a millstone around the neck of both the players and the referee (yeah I didn't make a typo in the title).
Let's look at the most obvious one that does it right: ODnD. Simply: you get experience for bringing treasure from dangerous places back to civilisation. And yeah sure, you also get a small amount of experience from slaying monsters, but that's overall peanuts compared to what you'll obtain from treasure. This simple system immediately tells players what'll be incentivized in this game and with that: what the game is about. Going into dangerous places, overcoming obstacles in whatever way you can come up with, and getting out with the valuables. You don't need a session zero with a checklist to ask "what do you want out of this game, are you more G, S or N". The system tells you what kind of games it was made for.
Similarly with systems like Pendragon (though slightly different because well, the system is about generational legacy at its core). How do you get Glory? By doing things that would make you famous; completing quests, winning battles. How do you gain Honor? By doing honorable deeds, by being the ideal of a knight. The systems tell you what they value and what you'll be rewarded for.
In essence, these are 'objectivised' systems. Not objective in the sense of "not based in opinion". These systems are intensely opinionated, but they are objectivised in the sense that they are knowable to the players, and not beholden to referee fiat.
Now let's look at Milestone Levelling to see what a bad example looks like. I'll use the common parlance definition of it here, because there's roughly five hundred variants of experience systems out there, but I think this one'll be accepted by most.
Milestone Levelling - a system made to replace dysfunctional experience systems, where based on subjective referee criteria such as "when they complete a story beat" or "when you feel like they've earned it", the referee tells the player that they are now allowed to level up their characters.
This is the opposite of an objectivised reward structure. What does ācomplete a story beatā mean from the playersā side of the screen? How do they know whether they are pursuing one? What does āearned itā look like before the referee announces that it has happened?
A reward system like this gives little guidance to either side of the table. Does it reward good roleplaying? Not necessarily; good roleplaying might lead a character away from the intended plot. Does it reward clever play? Only if that cleverness happens to move the story in the approved direction. Does it reward pursuing personal goals? Only if those goals have already been woven into the refereeās planned arc. It rewards correctly guessing what the referee thinks the story is about.
And it's not like the system's better for the referee either. It keeps them trapped in the self-abusive cycle of forcing the referee to be the one preparing the game, having all the level-appropriate encounters ready, knowing exactly what will happen and living out that pre-scripted scenario, instead of allowing himself to be surprised by what happens at the table along with his players.
The sad thing: I get why people see the need for any other system than what's in the book, because these often suck. What do most systems say you get experience for by default? In 5e it's 'winning encounters'. Fine in theory, but this is not how most people see and play the game. Hell, in many other systems (Fabula Ultima and VtM 5e for example) you often get the majority of your experience for showing up. Of course it'll feel like useless bean counting.
But like with other square-wheel reinventions it misses what the system was introduced to do and instead of understanding that, they just create some alternative system that misses the point entirely. And so the cart of TTRPGs attempts to hobble along with another square wheel and a niggling doubt in the back of your mind that something isn't right, but you don't know what.
So instead of doing the easy thing, why not think it out properly? What is your game about, what is the intended core loop, and what if you were to give out experience for that? Why not take an opportunity to align the game mechanics and player incentives? Something to think about.
But until next time, count your torches and keep mapping.