Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D grants us XP for doing the show.

When should your players level up their characters? Beyond gold and magic items, advancing a character can be the greatest reward in fantasy gaming. Traditionally that meant tracking and awarding XP, but increasingly, RPGs, including D&D, are embracing the concept of tracking advancement in other ways. Is there still a place for XP, and why might it still be a good system for your table? We’ll explore that in today’s episode.

You may have heard of the “XP for gold” rule, but D&D co-creator Dave Arneson had a more radical idea: adventurers should only gain XP for gold they spent. After his early exit from TSR, he formalized this concept in his Judge’s Guild supplement, The First Fantasy Campaign.

The catch? You didn’t just get XP for spending gold—you had to categorize it. His system divided expenditures into seven specific groups: Wine, Women, Song, Wealth, Fame, Religion, and Hobby. (Way to gatekeep woman and LGBTQIA+ gamers there, Dave) Your final XP total depended on two incredibly dense charts that interact in a way that’s about as easy to figure out as the three seashells in Demolition Man.