As a GM, I like to the flexibility XP gives me to encourage all kinds of arbitrary behavior that the game designers could never explicate in print. I'm trying a variant of "Three Pillar XP" wherein I divide XP needed to level into ~20 sachets of points, eg 90 @ 3rd.
Sizing XP sachets is an art, but to simplify I scale it to the lowest-level PC in the party, so everyone else gets diminishing returns.
My biggest fear is that monster-slaying rewards will so significantly outweigh exploration and social encounters' rewards that by engaging in all three equally my players will blow through the levels and bowl straight into epic characters before I've designed any epic adventures.
But, in my experience, players never "blow through" anything, choosing instead to hem, haw, kibbitz, strategize, loiter, or poke about with their 10' poles.
Besides, let 'em blow through. We can always retire 'em and start fresh. I think I make things too difficult, anyway.
Insofar as GMing is improv, I seem to suffer like many from the "blocking" malady the famed Kieth Johnstone identifies. I am too often trapping them, punishing them, removing limbs and closing avenues. What happens when, instead, the players succeed? What's on the other side?
Honestly, sometimes I wonder if the players would notice if I ran a session without a single die-roll, but just an automatic success at everything they attempted.
Would they still have fun? Would they feel cheated? Would I run out of content?
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Prepping a sandbox #ttrpg campaign is wrecking my health.
In the past, I'd outline ~5 adventures, drop ~2 hooks on the party, then sprinkle the rest liberally throughout my notes with a "hooks to other adventures" section in my encounter template.
But this time around...
First of all, my map's too big. I used a planet-generating algorithm to produce geologically realistic continents, and I'm so in love with it, I just can't "kill my darling" like I'm supposed to.
But let's come back to that. Primarily, I just don't know what to put in the world.
Ben Robbins' seminal "West Marches" blog post suggests overlapping "layers of history", and he even invented a tool for it: Microscope, which I've been playing for years, and is *not* my problem.
I just don't have enough friends to play separate games of Microscope and D&D!
"I really like to play," he told me, "but I don't know how to run the game."
I almost joked back, "me neither" (which is how I've been feeling, lately) but my new thing is projecting confidence for the players' sake, so I didn't.
But later it got me thinking, "what do I know that he doesn't? He knows the PHB and splat-books back-to-front, while I've never cracked most of 'em, so what's he missing?
I think the answer is "notes" or, more philosophically, "ontology" or else "higher order abstractions."
A player has a character sheet (and the back of it). That is the beginning and the end of their notes. They've a single, over-arching abstraction that fits on one page. Sure, it comprises a dozen sub-abstractions, but none of them exist outside the bounds of The Sheet.