Abstracting Rewards for Fun and Profit

Rewarding players with XP, gold, and loot whenever they defeat an enemy in an RPG is the norm these days. And it makes sense; it's easy for a GM to know when to hand out rewards and it's exciting for players because they can see their characters grow stronger and richer right away.

It does, however, foster the mindset that the only way to progress in the game is to kill things. And if that's the only way players ever get rewarded, why would they do anything else?

But What Is the Alternative?

Treasure Points is a rewards system that abstracts XP, Gold and Loot into points that can be awarded for any achievement in a D&D 5e game.

While this alternative is by no means the be-all and end-all of rewarding player gameplay and character progression, it has reshaped my games in all the ways I had hoped it would.

Table of Contents

• System Background
• So How Does It Work?
• Claiming Treasure Points
• Implementing the System
• Why the End of the Session?
• Why 200 XP and 50 GP per TP?
• If You Don't Use a Crafting System

System Background

I initially created the Treasure Points (TP) system for an invite-only West-Marches-style game. The game focussed on exploring a new world and featured a lot of combat. It also leaned heavily into survival mechanics, had very few NPCs, and—because we played with Gritty Realism—featured a lot of player character downtime.

In some respects, the game was very similar to Ben Robbins' original West Marches campaign (as opposed to the mission-based, multi-GM servers that are prevalent these days).

I knew my game had the potential to become the kind of game where players would simply kill anything they found on sight and so, if I wanted a different outcome, I had to change the way I was going to reward gameplay.

The design of the system was heavily informed by Justin Alexander's writings on game structure, open tables, and reward systems (articles one and two). The design also assumed a game that uses a crafting system. My game used Kibble's Crafting which allows PCs to craft almost anything, from magic items to structures.

My goal was to create a reward system that:

• plugged into the macro game structure of exploration via hex crawl,
• disincentivised killing creatures just for the sake of gaining XP,
• incentivised exploration, risk-taking, and alternative solutions to problems,
• incentivised players to engage with the crafting system,
• minimised pre-game prep, and
• minimised in-game note-taking.

So How Does It Work?

The GM hands out Treasure Points to the PCs whenever they do something that is worthy of reward.

Whether the PCs complete a quest, harvest some materials, trick a dragon, save a princess, loot the bodies of their enemies, solve a riddle, find a lost artefact, barter with an ancient tribe, whatever, if it is the kind of gameplay the GM wants to reward, they can give the PCs some Treasure Points.

In this way, TPs remove the expectation that PCs will receive XP just for killing stuff.

For example:

• PCs find a missing child and return them to the village? The village elder awards the PCs with TPs appropriate for the risk and effort.
• PCs find a cache of treasure in a dungeon? They find a number of TPs appropriate for the risks involved in finding the cache.
• PCs get ambushed by some bandits, survive and loot the bodies? Award TPs appropriate for the challenge rating of the encounter.
• What if they don't kill the bandits but rather escape and then later steal all their equipment in the middle of the night? They get the same number of TPs—or maybe even more.

PCs can then redeem their TPs at the end of the session (more on that later).

These are simple examples. One could easily award XP, gold, or loot for these activities, but TPs are quick and wholistic solutions to a number of issues:

• How much gold do you award?
• What if it doesn't make sense for the enemy to have any gold?
• Do the PCs carry off the bandits' weapons as loot?
• What if they don't want anything the bandits have?
• What if the enemy isn't lootable or harvestable?
• What if players do something awesome you hadn't prepped a reward for?
• What happens when the loot is not easily divisible by the number of party members? This in particular is an important question for open tables and West-Marches-style games.

Each TP is worth exactly 200 XP and 50 GP worth of coins, gems, items, and/or crafting materials.

Let's say 5 players are awarded 4.5 TPs (yes, you can award fractional TPs). How many does each get? 0.9 TPs, No problem. It's not so easy to do this with a gem or a sword.

Another advantage is that the GM doesn't need to stock the world with loot in the hopes that the PCs will find it. They can simply reward the PCs' actions.

Claiming TPs

At the end of a session, the players tell the GM how many TPs they want to exchange.

Converting TP to XP is simple; the PC gets 200 XP per TP redeemed.

The 50 GP worth of coins, gems, items, and/or crafting material per TP is more complicated. If you want to only hand out gold, that's easy, the PC gets 50 GP per TP redeemed. If you want to give items or crafting materials, you add up the value of items handed out, subtract that from the amount of gold you would have given, and then give the remainder as gold.

For example, let's say the PC wants to redeem 3.2 TP and you know they really want a diamond worth 100 GP for a spell component.

• First, they get 640 XP (3.2 × 200 XP).
• Then you give them the diamond and 60 GP (3.2 × 50 GP = 160 GP = A diamond worth 100 GP + 60 GP).

Implementing the System

With the heavy crafting focus of my game, I always handed out random crafting materials and an amount of gold that made up the rest of the TP value. 

That, of course, would be a pain in the backside to calculate every time, so I created this handy spreadsheet, in which I could plug in the number of TP being redeemed. The sheet would do the randomisation and output which crafting items the PC would get and how much XP and GP they would get.

The crafting resources and the gold are worth exactly 50 GP per TP. The randomisation determines how much of that 50 GP is received as coins and how much is crafting resources, as well as which crafting resources are given.

There are also three different tables to "roll on", depending on how many TPs the players want to redeem. The more TPs a player redeems, the more likely they will receive rare crafting resources. This means that players can always claim rewards, but if they want to save them up, they can do that too. The tables and tiers are as follows:

• Up to 5 TPs (Trivial and common crafting resources)
• 6-25 TPs (Uncommon and common crafting resources)
• 26+ TPs (Rare and uncommon crafting resources)

I originally designed the system so that players couldn't exchange less than 1 TP, but as a happy accident, the system still works fairly reliably down to as little as 0.1 of a TP, which makes this system accessible to low-level play.

As Summer pointed out in the comments, another example here would help: In my West Marches games, the in-world explanation for where the reward was coming from was that the characters would report back to their patron at the end of every expedition on what they had accomplished, and the patron would pay them in coin and supplies for their service.

Why the End of the Session?

This may not be necessary for all tables, but it does reduce in-game admin:

• The GM doesn't have to look up and read out rewards,
• The players don't have to write them down, and
• The players don't have to spend time arguing over who gets what.

Yes, doing it this way does sacrifice something that players have come to expect (I loot the bodies, I get cool stuff), but pretty soon my players were getting the same satisfaction for getting TPs, knowing that the rewards were still to come.

There is nothing stopping you from letting players claim the TPs in-game. For example, perhaps you've given out TPs for the players overcoming a bunch of obstacles on the way to find a lost treasure horde. When they find it, the contents of the treasure horde can be equivalent to all the TPs the players have accumulated, and they trade in their TPs to claim it.

In my game, there was very little reason for PCs to stuff during a session because most items were crafting items and there was nothing they could do with them until they got back to the camp, which only ever happened between sessions.

Why 200 XP and 50 GP per TP?

The TP to XP ratio is irrelevant; whether you make 1 TP = 200 XP or 1 TP = 100 XP makes no difference, as long as 200 XP always equals 50 GP.

Only the XP to Gold ratio is actually important if you want to ensure characters scale according to D&D 5e's expected progression. 

I derived the XP to Gold ratio from a post on D&D Beyond that details the expected wealth that each PC should have at certain levels. I'm not 100% sure of the math used to figure out these values, but they have proved useful estimates time and again.

The bigger problem is that the XP to Gold ratio is not consistent per level, so I had to make some assumptions about expected levels of play and acceptable deviation.

I found that equating 200 XP to 50 gold worth of loot and coin gains creates a decent XP-Wealth curve from Level 3 to Level 11, except at Level 5 where the players will have more wealth than expected for their level.

After Level 11, players will be gaining less wealth than expected, but the game breaks at those levels in a hundred other ways anyway you can always award more gold in addition to the TPs if you need to.

If You Don't Use a Crafting System

This system was designed with specific goals in mind but can steal this idea and make it your own.

You might start looking at awarding rolls on the magic item tables instead of crafting materials, or adding functional, complete items (weapons, armour) from the PHB to the randomisation tables.

If you want to add specific items, I recommend adding them to the tables and listing their value based on the Discerning Merchants Price Guide.

Happy TP'ing!