Just what is exp?

Explosive X-ray Projectors.

It call honing your craft.

It's a difficult question, because exp is impossible to describe.
One might ask the same about birds. What are birds?
We just don't know.

because you remove the competition

experience/practice abstraction

either (a) it's in the hands of the player to distribute it and they can pretend learned a few new tricks or were crafting things in their downtime, or (b) the system does it automatically, so it's because of a flaw in the system

Something that shouldn't exist, because as you level up and advance numerically, the GM adjusts encounters and target numbers accordingly.
Therefore, leveling up doesn't actually provide anything besides new abilities that allow to interact with things in new ways.

Why not do away entirely with the leveling/XP system and simply give new abilities to the players as a reward for completing an objective?

Because your GM is shit if they only hand it out for murdering things.

No, but one orc wizard doesn't differ from other orc wizard nor orc barbarian from another orc barbarian. 'Experience' carries with it a sense of 'new, exciting', your day-to-day grind at your job cannot be an 'experience' thus you shouldn't get any EXP from doing the same thing again and again.

You see, when a fandom likes E and P really really much...

It's not literally just experience so that's like saying "you ran at a certain degree of incline so you can't become better at running by running that degree of incline more" and that's silly.

Hush you, neckbeards don't like nice things.

An abstraction

>fighting three orcs on a tight bridge in a collapsing cave is exactly the same as fighting two enlarge-person'd orcs and the orc wizard that did it on a boat heading into a maelstrom.

That being said, I think that you can cap on knowledge specific to orc fighting pretty quickly. So while you may get better at fighting orcs after fighting them a few times, you'd not receive any bonuses specific to fighting orcs after a few times, instead progressing only through getting better at other relevant skills, such as swordsmanship, or sorcery.

I'd be interested in a system that gave players a penalty against monster they'd not fought before, assuming that after that fight they're capable of fighting at full capacity against similar threats. If not by species, then by "role" or some combination of race and class supergroups.

Because it's nice when a system provides guidelines for how things should progress, so you aren't continually guessing "is now a good time to give my barbarian player more rage per day? What should our rogue's will save be by this point? When was the last time I let the wizard learn a new spell?"

Obviously less simulationist games don't struggle with this as much, but still.

>because as you level up and advance numerically,
>the GM adjusts encounters and target numbers accordingly.
c

>a carpenter can't get better and better when he makes the same cupboard every day
>a Smith can't become a master swordsmith by makes swords every day
>an adventurer can't become a master goblin slayer by killing goblins every day

If you do the same thing, and practice it every day, you learn how to do that thing amazingly. You don't become a master violinist by playing a single song once. You practice it, again and again and again, even when you think you've perfected a song, you still practice it. Experience isn't just learning how do to one thing once, it's also culmination of learning how to do things well. There's never a day where you don't learn something new or get better at something you know how to do.

XP works best in the classic D&D feedback loop

1) Recover treasure from adventurous locales to get XP
2) Training, taxes, etc drain money
3) Find an adventurous locale with treasure to recover

It provides a nice structure to the game.

That's not "a good xp system," it's "an xp system tailored to the system's expectations."
Experience for treasure falls apart the moment "get rich" stops being the objective.
Which isn't an issue in OSR, but is an issue in most other systems.

1 gold coin.

>the moment "get rich" stops being the objective.
When has that not ever been your objective.

This.
Even boring stuff like book keeping, you slowly learn new better faster ways to accomplish the same task with the least amount of errors and time involved.

I play non-OSR games every now and then.

Perhaps you'll be a better bookkeeper after all the xp calculations you've suggested.

I think the guy that killed 1,000 orcs would be a little more impressive than the guy that only killed one.

A mechanic used in many games and tabletop systems to track how close the player character are to the next level up point.

Practice makes perfect. The more you do something the better at it you become (to a point at least), and when you have reached your upper limit, the more times you do that thing the longer you are able to maintain your ability at that limit.
That would make for an interesting mechanic actually, if your skills decayed if you did not use them for prolonged stretches of time. Not a huge loss, because it would be doubtful you'd regress too far. But something like you loose your goblin fighting mastery bonus, if you haven't fought goblins in a in-game week or so.

Along with levels exp is used to simplify character growth. Instead of adding a new ability here and a feat there and new skill points there it all happens at one time. Much simpler and intuitive.

Your such a fucking racist.

This is MMO their thought.

> I outleveled orcs and can ignore them when they attack me because I don't take same or get XP

Because games have mechanics and aren't a 1:1 recreation of the real world.

That's why your character can walk a mile without sitting down and you can't.

>I've fought one back alley beggar so fighting in a human vs human war would give me exactly 0 experience.
Faggot.

Because D&D only has to be somewhat realistic for it to work.

>not being able to walk a mile

>Not being able to run a mile
What are you, 280 lbs?

i think you are wrong. i am an electrician. i have installed hundreds of transformers and pieces of gear. every time i do this, it is somewhat different, but mostly, i refine my installation method, becoming more proficient, skillful, expert, and efficient. i get better at installing them, doing the job faster and looking better, and making fewer mistakes. its called getting more experienced. it is the difference between a helper, an apprentice, a journeyman, and a master.

>280 can't run a mile
Shit, I'm 330 and can run a 5k

Holy shit user, take a trip to Veeky Forums sometime

I'm not as fit as I used to be (I can't quite run a mile in 6 minutes), but I've run sub-5 minute miles before.

>walking garbage
He /just/ told you he wasn't walking.

Because 3e was originally going to be tied to the Fallout intellectual property, before WotC bought out TSR.

When you kill somebody, you end their fate line, releasing and absorbing the power of their destiny. Your fate thus becomes stronger, allowing you to create a bigger impression on reality. In essence, your exceptionalism is magnified.