D&D: Five Rewards That Aren’t Treasure Or XP
D&D is full of a variety of ways to rewards player characters for adventuring. Here are five that aren’t XP or GP!
You might be wondering, well, why wouldn’t I want to hand out a big parcel of treasure or a bunch of XP/a milestone level up? And the answer lies in pacing. Sometimes you accomplish something big but it happens right after you’ve just leveled up from an epic boss fight, or the conclusion of another adventure. Not everything is in neat little increments.
Sometimes you want to feel your characters growing in power without feeling like you’re speeding through the levels. And for that? There are plenty of ways to reward an adventurer without having to level up or have yet another pile of treasure. Variety is the spice of life, right along with the spice, melange.
So with all that in mind, here are some non-treasure, non-XP/level ways of rewarding characters. Try mixing these in with the other rewards. See how they affect pacing and the feeling of characters advancing in the world.
Renown
Renown is one of the many tools you’ll find in the ‘DM’s Toolbox’ section of the new Dungeon Master’s Guide. And it can be a helpful way to reward characters who have an impact on the world, for better or worse. This is a great tool for measuring how whole groups of people might think of the PCs.
Here’s how it works: Players have a “renown score” that starts at 0 and can go up or down as they do different things. This can be applied on a faction level or by like town or city or region or whatever. Players track renown separately for various groups. So you might have a renown score of 5 with the City of Waterdeep but a score of 20 with like the Xanathar Guild.
As characters earn renown, which they do via completing quests or helping people or just having good interactions (you know stuff that feels like it would give you a better rep), they might find soft benefits like cheaper prices on goods, free lodging, maybe even helpful information or assistants that can provide various services temporarily.
Blessings
Of course, there’s also supernatural boons. There are a few different kinds in the DM’s toolbox, starting with supernatural blessings. These are often rewards from powerful beings, like celestials, fiends, spirits, gods – if you help a mystic creature and feel like it should give them a boon somehow, you might consider a Blessing. These are permanent upgrades that characters get.
There are a few examples in the DM’s guide, including gaining +2 to a stat (to a maximum of 22), or the ability to summon spectral warriors a la a Horn of Valhalla once every seven days. But you can’t really go wrong with freestyling your own versions. Decide what feels appropriate to your campaign and go for it – don’t be afraid to experiment with cool powers. Players love getting new abilities.
Feats
Similarly, there are the various Feats. These can be potent, since many of them come with a stat increase – but the good thing here is, you can decide which feats a player gains. And this means that you can pick feats that aren’t necessarily another step in an optimized chain. I guarantee you, the kind of player that looks for those has their character planned out.
But you can award them something like the Skill Expert or Skulker feats and let them grow in unexpected ways. Or, pick a new origin feat – there aren’t many ways of gaining another one after you create your character, so these can also be fun rewards you don’t often see.
Bastions
Bastions are another great source of a campaign reward. If you’re using the Bastion system rules out of the DM’s Guide, you already know that they provide players with their own little corner of the world that they get to design.
You might even consider awarding a special facility – or even the choice of a new special facility whenever the players do something cool. It might just help give them that much more to care about in the world. Or to get excited about while they’re off adventuring. Nothing like creating a sense of a home base to give adventurers a stake in the campaign.
Followers
And then there’s the classic non-monetary, non-level based reward: loyal followers. There was a time when this was asort of expected thing. You’d hit a certain level in D&D and then you’d get a fancy title appropriate to your class, and then you could build a stronghold and attract some low level minions to follow you around.
I think you can still absolutely do that. Just have some low-level followers show up to help the PCs with their endeavours. You could pull an NPC stat block or give them a more fleshed out NPC that has a personality and their own goals, but is dedicated to helping the players.
Happy adventuring!
