I just had a thought, and I felt I needed to get it down before it escaped from my head. I’m short on time, so this’ll be a quick post. In 4th Edition D&D, players are rewarded for completing encounters not only with XP and treasure, but also with action points. Action points allow them to do cool things in combat, they earn them by completing encounters, and they don’t stick around forever so there’s no incentive to hoard them.

A while ago, I was allowing my players to come up with personal quests, little things that they thought were cool and wanted to be part of the story. I awarded them XP for these quests, but quickly learned that that was not an ideal solution, because it created a disparity between the party members’ XP totals, and made leveling more complicated than I wanted it to be. So, why not award them with something else? Story points!

The idea is that story points are like action points in that they are a reward mechanism that is designed to be spent. Instead of providing combat benefits, however, story points would allow players to influence the course of the adventure in small ways. They’d last perhaps until the end of the adventure, or perhaps there would be a limit to how many you can have at one time, in order to prevent hoarding of story points. I’ll need to figure out exactly how they work, but I like the idea. More on it later.