Axioms of an Addled Antillectual

Splitting the Baby

“Wait, two decoder rings at once? Let your posts breathe, man!”

Well, dear hypothetical imaginary commentator who just exclaimed that, I originally had every intention of making each topic its own post!

As it turns out though, and as you’ll eventually see, the two concepts are so closely related that we cannot solve for one without simultaneously solving for the other… after we work through the foundational assumptions and make the choices required to build our approach, that is.

It might not sound very sexy, but I promise you it’s every bit as important.

First and foremost, though, I’m afraid I have to inflict our dear hypothetical imaginary commentator with some important context.

ACKS-ing the Right Questions

“What does ‘adventurer progression’ even mean? Why do we have to talk about that?”

Well, as we’ll explore later on, class levels and level advancement are heavily integrated into all aspects of ACKS. While ACKS is specifically designed around helping you build and run a sandbox setting, level classifications help determine how various types of characters are accounted for within its structures and where they’re integrated in its procedures.

Thus, if we want to take the best possible advantage of all the various useful economic and demographic tools and tables within ACKS, then we’re also going to need to understand what “level” a DFRPG adventurer of a given point value loosely correlates to—and vice-versa, what an ACKS adventurer of a given level should approximate to in the context of DFRPG, depending on the benchmarks we choose.

Translation of what a “level” represents can only be done with any accuracy (or more importantly, consistency) if we look at and compare character progression systems between games—XP and CP awards—and calibrate our resulting decoder rings to account for the differing core assumptions and design choices of each rules framework.

“Why did you start typing ‘adventurer’ instead of just ‘character’?”

I can’t put a fine enough point on this—we cannot just say “level x represents character point value y in GURPS.”

ACKS characters with adventuring class levels are just that—adventurers—while 0th-level non-adventurers and leveled non-adventuring classes account for and largely represent “everybody else.” The ACKS II JJ has an entire chapter dedicated to the subject of non-player characters, beginning on page 245.

0th level accounts for both combatants and non-combatants (emphasizing the latter, though) such as soldiers, master artisans, hapless dirt-eating peasants, shop owners, crusty barkeeps, mercenaries, alchemists, animal trainers, other various types of specialists, and so on.

0th-level characters of average intellect might have anywhere from 4 to 15 general proficiencies upon reaching adulthood, and potentially numerous combat proficiencies or even a class proficiency!

The potential range of ACKS proficiencies at 0th level isn’t that far off, conceptually, from the wide range of plausible GURPS character point values for “average joes” and other everyday non-adventuring folks.

In GURPS you can build negative character point value characters, and quite plausible ones at that! By the same token, a GURPS “non-adventurer” might be a well-educated, socially and financially successful entrepreneur measured in hundreds of points… that can’t throw a punch to save his own life and has zero practical knowledge on how to survive in the wilderness or navigate, maybe even being physically frail and susceptible to sickness, disease, and kinetic energy.

“Regular people” in GURPS comprise a huge swathe of point values, professions, capabilities, interpersonal relationships and stations.

Thus, it doesn’t help us to declare “4th level is 150 character points,” which might be equivalent to a studious librarian. Comparatively, establishing that “a 3rd-level ACKS Fighter with sword-and-board tendencies is about the same range of competency as a 125-point Delvers to Grow Journeyman Knight” is much more useful. We’ve scoped properly and created a benchmark, beginning to make it useful in the context of various economic and demographic tables and procedures from ACKS.

We want to compare apples to apples… or rather, adventurers to adventurers.

The driving point here is that ACKS has a defined separation between “adventurers” and “non-adventurers,” which is not the same thing as a “combatants vs. non-combatants” dichotomy. That’s actually a good thing because it helps us hone our approach and tighten our scope—but it also means that we need to establish (or steal) similar definitive boundaries of our own to get the most utility out of the tools in ACKS.

“Okay but wait, you were saying ‘GURPS this, GURPS that’ all through the last post… Why start bringing up ‘Dungeon Fantasy’ again now?”

To build on the prior reasoning, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game contain obvious published solutions for predefined D&D-style adventuring “classes” in a GURPS environment, as well as worked demonstrations of multiple competency thresholds which we can associate with specific levels of ACKS adventurers by either rough approximation of capability or by the relative benchmarks they have achieved in their respective progressions (more on that later).

Taking advantage of those existing published materials helps us recreate the line drawn between adventurers and non-adventurers in ACKS without having to do extensive conversions or being forced to outline what defines an “adventurer” in the context of GURPS ourselves from the ground up.

Remember: we’re working to emulate multiple elements of “old-school” play and style, including its participating genre-defining adventurers of yore—not just stealing some tables. GURPS DF and the DFRPG already have perfectly usable interpretations of D&D adventurers… Why let finished work go to waste?

“GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying game? Do you have a stutter?”

Alas, I do not. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is a series of themed rules, setting, and adventure supplements for GURPS Fourth Edition while the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game is a standalone “Powered By GURPS” roleplaying game which is revised and streamlined to deliver a specific pre-tailored, out-of-box experience without the unnecessary cruft of extra options, knobs and dials that GURPS is commonly known for.

I sometimes refer to them together because, largely, their rules are quite interchangeable. People frequently import material from DF into the DFRPG, and vice-versa. The latter does have some rules refinements and clarifications that have been well-received, though.

“Okay, thanks for explaining all that I guess, but so what?”

For the purposes of creating these “decoder rings,” we’re going to limit our scope by using DFRPG specifically to make our benchmarks easier to establish. However, the intent in the longer term is to enable ourselves to pull in additional resources from the Dungeon Fantasy line and even the larger GURPS corpus as needed or simply as desired, once we have further developed our decoder rings and the framework tying them together.

*Gunshot*

Alas, our dear hypothetical imaginary commentator has taken the easy way out.

Zero to Hero

In honor of our fallen, let’s begin looking at adventurer progression in earnest.

ACKS stratifies varying levels of adventuring competency into a range of, well, levels—from 1st–14th. GURPS has no such finite range, no inherent character point floor or ceiling. We need to figure out how to establish rough equivalences—to be able to understand what a level 8 ACKS character “should” sort-of look like in DFRPG, or where a 250-point DFRPG delver belongs on a demographical list in ACKS.

We could compare things like task resolution systems and success rates based on level and skill level, or draw equivalences between proficiency counts and skill levels, or do in-depth statistical analysis on how many attacks an adventurer of a given level or point value is likely to survive from a fodder enemy, or conduct any number of other involved mechanical investigations, but…

Down that path lies madness, and especially nonsense. The mechanical scaffolding and underlying core assumptions of each game are so different as to make direct comparisons between them at most levels of granularity next to worthless—even between elements which seem superficially similar, i.e. “these two attributes share the same name and kinda represent sorta the same stuff, therefo-” *BZZT!* No!

Similarly, there is little utility in aimlessly dissecting high-level mechanical contrasts except as some borderline-spiritual meta-analysis of tabletop RPG design itself.

This form of thinking is a rabbit hole down which many disappear and never return from. We’re borrowing some tools and the spirit of play present in ACKS, not reverse engineering the 50+ years of iterative design and redesign composing its foundations—if you feel like you need to do that, you’re probably better off just playing ACKS instead!

The problem: ACKS has bounded character progression. DFRPG doesn’t, so we can’t properly compare the two.

The solution: invent one for DFRPG.

To begin, we’ll create our bookends in the form of character point values which best represent the form and spirit of 1st- and 14th-level adventurers.

First Level Lamentations

We want to facilitate the naked, vulnerable, inexperienced atmosphere suffusing the player experience at the lowest levels of classic D&D and OSR games, preserving the spirit of true “zero” to hero as we progress.

In similar vein, we want to support the option of running a type of introductory adventure known colloquially as a “funnel” or sometimes “meat grinder.” The following quote defines a funnel, as lifted from the below link.

terminology – What is a “funnel”? – Role-playing Games Stack Exchange

“A ‘funnel’ is an adventure designed to take in a large number of 1st- or 0th-level characters and spit out just the survivors, if any. The metaphor is the shape of the PC pool: large at the entrance, small at the exit.“

“[…]The result is that your ‘starting’ 1st-level character has a bit of a history, some stories to tell, and a connection to the other PCs that’s forged in fire.”

In order to fulfill these demands, we want:

• Low-powered DFRPG templates representing characters that have only just begun their adventuring careers—no 250-point “Larger-than-Life” (B487’s words, not mine!) heroes… at “level 1,” anyway.
• Simple, quick character creation methods so that it’s easy to start playing even in the case of multiple characters per player, and to help salve the fear of potential PC death and the posthumous sting of loss for such relatively vulnerable PCs early on. “Easy come, easy go.”

Growth Must Start Somewhere

Continuing with our approach of using work that’s already been done for us in the form of published solutions, we’re going to leverage some of the most relevant material the DFRPG has on offer:

Delvers to Grow. I mean, the tagline is literally “From Zero to Hero.”

Delvers to Grow has a few standout features which help facilitate our “old-school” approach to character creation right out of the gate:

1. Fast character creation (like, between 5 and 15 minutes fast).
2. Limited decision making.
3. Flexible primary templates at the top (Strong, Fast, and Smart), which can be attuned to ACKS core classes for certain uses later.
4. Novice, Journeyman and Master versions of each template above, for starting PCs at different “levels.”
5. Basic Modules corresponding to the 11 professions presented in DFRPG Adventurers, which can also be attuned to ACKS classes.
6. A variety of Advanced and Upgrade Modules which allow further refinement of professional niches.
7. Predefined spell packages.

Points #1–2 and #4 above nicely address both of our “wants” from the previous section, as well.

The Haves and the Have-Nots

In ACKS‘ Auran Empire setting, the frequency of 1st-level characters in human populations is 1-in-40, or 1-in-16 adults—1st-level adventurers account for 1,761,624 people, or 2.666382% of the overall population of 66,067,940 within Aurëpos, home of the Auran Empire. People with adventuring class levels are therefore not uncommon per se, but they are certainly not the norm—the vast majority of the Auran Empire’s population is 0th level.

0th-level characters which do reach level 1 gain an important proficiency—the Adventuring proficiency (JJ, p. 259). This tells us that, at this point, they are at least acquainted with the lifestyle and habits of adventuring. It’s noted that all PCs are assumed to have Adventuring proficiency, while most 0th-level NPCs do not.

Specifically, Adventuring proficiency states that:

• They know how to clean and sharpen weapons, set up camp, cook meals over open flame, saddle and ride a horse outside of combat, and perform rough-and-ready first aid.
• They have a rough idea of the value of common coins, trade goods, gems and jewelry, and of the nature of different types of magic and monsters.
• They can attempt to bash doors, climb easy-to-scale obstacles, conduct methodical searches for traps, secret doors, buried treasure and other hidden features.
• They can attempt to disarm traps and listen for suspicious activity.

This isn’t to say everyone with the Adventuring proficiency is good or even reasonably consistent with any form of success at those tasks outside of the first bullet—Proficiency Throws are a topic to themselves—but they are at least acquainted with such procedures.

GURPS and DFRPG by extension handle such matters of conceptual acquaintance rather than trained skill with Default Skill use (DF Adventurers, p. 69 and 71), in addition to Task Difficulty Modifiers and Time Spent modifiers (DF Exploits, p. 6). Positive TDMs of +4 or +5 are typical for non-adventuring tasks, rising as high as +10, which helps unskilled adventurers consistently scrape by for most of the activities listed in the first bullet. By the same token, extra time taken to perform leisurely tasks can net a modifier of up to +5 cumulative with TDM.

One could speculate that rather than a lack of Adventuring proficiency indicating a literal inability to perform the listed actions in the third and fourth bullets, that instead its absence indicates that 0th-level NPCs would just generally not risk doing so—and if they tried, their attempts would be met with essentially automatic failure.

This rings fairly true for DFRPG non-adventurers, as well. A barkeep shoved into a dungeon is not going to have any desire to disarm a trap or do anything else risky (TDM 0 or less) and if forced to, they’re almost certainly going to fail—perhaps catastrophically. Most non-adventurers probably aren’t going to be comfortable attempting a task unless they have a positive TDM of at least +4 or +5 (non-stressful, non-adventuring tasks).

All this to say, our choice of level 1 equivalent should have some adventuring experience, just very little. Adventuring proficiency is essentially a clause that tells us “this guy or gal is willing to attempt risky tasks, and is very slightly more likely to actually succeed at them than average townsfolk.” Almost like some sort of “adventurer.” Hrm!

That helps us calibrate our expectations while consulting templates from Delvers to Grow.

Putting Too Fine a Point (Value) on It

Delvers to Grow offers descriptions for the Novice, Journeyman and Master versions of its templates on page 3. Of particular relevance here is its description of Novice templates for Strong/Fast/Smart delvers, each at 62 points.

“These adventurers are just starting out their career, with barely enough points to cover their profession’s basic module and one upgrade module. Playing at this power level can be a challenge—with primary skills in the 11–13 range, there’s little room to get fancy—but with a little caution and good teamwork they can thrive.”

The GURPS Basic Set, page 487, has the following to say about 62-point characters.

“Competent (50–75 points): Athletes, cops, wealthy gentry . . . anyone who would have a clear edge over ‘average’ people on an adventure.”

Why, these descriptions are perfect!

In keeping with our tactic of doing as little as possible ourselves, then, we’re going to use Delvers to Grow Novice templates at 62 points as our “level 1 adventurer” equivalents, and thus 62 points will serve as our progression’s first bookend.

Fourteenth-Level Leviathans

ACKS indicates that level 14 accounts for 0.000008% of the people in its default setting—that’s a grand total of 5 people within Aurëpos’ overall population of 66,067,940.

So… what exactly does a 14th-level character look like? Surprisingly, you won’t find much about that explicitly laid out in the ACKS II RR or JJ.

You can read between the lines based on their capabilities given throughout, though—they command capable and numerous subjects and possess great personal power, authority and wealth, often ruling over their own domains which can take a variety of forms. After all, the Emperor of Aurëpos himself is 14th level.

Delving deeper, into dusty old posts in the Autarch forums and its Discord server, we can find musings from the author which describe the essence we’re trying to capture—the character inspirations that higher levels (11th–14th) are intended to emulate.

Those inspirations are rooted various historical and not-so-historical Greats, including but hardly limited to:

• Conan (the barbarian, not the librarian)
• Aragorn
• Perseus
• Julius Caesar
• Gandalf the Grey
• Genghis Khan
• Alexander the Great

Alexander Macris, in reference to an earlier 101-session campaign:

“[If you’ve ever wondered what] a 14th level ACKS character [does after he has] conquered a realm… he builds a starjammer and invades the moon.”

At this point we have some historical and fictional benchmarks we can keep in mind or invent ourselves, but more importantly it’s clear that 14th level is intended to represent legendary, borderline-mythical (and sometimes literally mythical) figures—practically forces of nature.

Now we have the spirit of what to aim for as we progress towards establishing our second bookend point value.

To Whom It May Concern

GURPS Basic Set, page 487 provides an example point value range of 300–500 points for “Legendary” characters—its description stating that this range accounts for “protagonists of epic poems and folklore” and “mortals who rub shoulders with gods.”

That sounds pretty close to what we want, but let’s glance at a few examples to reality check ourselves. GURPS Classic: Who’s Who 1 and GURPS Classic: Who’s Who 2 offer point values for all sorts of well-renowned historical figures… in Third Edition, which had radically different character point prices in many areas.

For their Fourth Edition conversions we can take a look over here and here, and although cross-edition conversions are prone to character point inefficiencies which would probably be ironed out had they been built ground-up in Fourth Edition, we can still use their values as points of reference.

A few values of note, in no particular order:

• Alexander the Great—391
• Julius Caesar—426
• Nikola Tesla—417
• Hannibal—379
• Chinggis (Genghis) Khan—374
• Sir Richard Burton—535 (!)

As an aside, over on his (wonderful) blog Dungeon Fantastic, Peter V. Dell’Orto wrote a little bit on Alexander the Great in GURPS and History in June of 2024.

In short, he writes positively of the writeup that Kenneth Hite gave Alexander III of Macedon in GURPS Classic: Who’s Who 1—specifically agreeing with the assessment of Alexander’s Strategy skill level… of 22! I happen to agree with his reasoning, too.

He also wrote a pretty killer GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Manifesto.

I personally think some of the characters above could plausibly be given even more generous treatments, likely resulting in even higher point values, but I’ll save that soapbox for another time.

Shooting for the Stars

Given the above guidelines and examples, then, where do we want to set our bookend point value for 14th level? Well, the historical figures above are just that—historical.

In our progression, we want to budget some extra points for stuff those figures (probably) didn’t have access to such as cinematic and supernatural traits, spellcasting, and attribute levels that approach or even violate the laws of plausible verisimilitude.

With that in mind, we’re going to set our 14th-level bookend value at 500 points—somewhat arbitrarily, but not entirely so.

Technically per B487, this strays into its example of “Superhuman” (500–1,000 points) territory, but a lot of that is down to context and character options in a given campaign—after all, Sir Richard Burton wasn’t one of the X-Men as far as we know. We’re going to instead rebrand this category to “Mythic,” which is more flavor-appropriate for our purposes anyway.

We’ll look at this 500-point bookend again when we begin tweaking our progression later on.

To Infinity, and Beyond!

“Why are you capping GURPS character point values?! That’s dumb!“

Oh, thank goodness! Our imaginary commentator made a full recovery!

In any case, I agree—that would be unnecessary, and frankly undesirable. We’re not establishing a cap here, exactly. All we’re doing is establishing a milestone which indicates characters have effectively achieved 14th level, enabling us to begin calibrating our GACKS progression for the range of point values between our chosen bookends.

Even in ACKS it’s not expected that the game will stop dead as soon as the player characters reach the peak of their progressions—by default, it assumes at least another thirty-some hours of play upon attaining level 14.

We’re not halting progression there at all—our DFRPG characters will theoretically be able to advance indefinitely. Whether or not our campaigns will last long enough for that to matter is the larger concern!

Where’s the Cream Filling?

Alright, so we’ve chosen our two bookends:

• 1st level = 62-point Delvers to Grow Novices
• 14th level = ~500-point Mythic adventurers

That’s a lot of words for those two little bookends… and we’re still missing all the levels and point values in between! Oh no!

What is a Man? A Miserable Pile of XP

It’s time to take a look at the character advancement system in each game with greater scrutiny, followed by figuring out how to splice them together in a way that makes sense with the assumptions of each game—allowing us to finalize point value relationships for those levels squished between 1st and 14th.

No problem! It won’t be as painful as it sounds. Let’s get to work.

The ACKS Rollercoaster

An adventurer in ACKS gains experience mostly through the direct acquisition of wealth, most commonly by raiding dungeons, strongholds and other lucrative locations—acquired wealth primarily taking the form of valuable commodities, coinage, and magic items that the PCs are able to bring back to civilization.

An adventurer bringing home 1 GP worth of valuables directly rewards them with 1 XP—note that adventurers still get to spend any recovered GP, sell items and similar, though! Gaining XP from bringing valuables home does not require any expenditure of the corresponding GP.

Slaying monsters does award some XP, but these awards are fractional relative to plundering valuables—slaying monsters along the way is, mostly, a means to an end. Similarly, at higher levels, adventurers can gain passive XP through ruling domains and other assorted avenues. Again, these are fractional rewards relative to pure loot recovery.

On the other hand, a point of XP in ACKS and by extension a single GP of value brought back to civilization does not always hold the same value for the purposes of character advancement—it depends on how much XP is required to qualify for advancing to the next level, which inflates dramatically as character level increases.

ACKS features a sort of hybrid progression, beginning with geometric progression of requisite XP, then transitioning to a type of arithmetic progression beginning around 8th level, with some rounding and adjustments made within each leg of the progression.

When ACKS characters rise in level, they’re incentivised to delve deeper into more dangerous dungeons, travel further into the uncivilized wilderness, face ever more dangerous threats and foes, and amass ever-increasing values and volumes of treasure in order to maintain the pace of advancement.

This translates directly into higher volumes of XP awards by associated level of challenge.

The DFRPG Ferris Wheel

In contrast, adventurers in DFRPG tend to receive relatively flat, consistent session-based point awards (DF Exploits, p. 92)—amounts anywhere between 0–5 points per session are described as “reasonable,” with an extra potential cumulative bonus of the same amount on conclusion of an adventure.

A character point in GURPS (and DFRPG by extension) holds the same value regardless of the overall character point total—a single CP is always enough to open a new skill, buy a perk and so on, which is incremental character advancement.

Thus, character advancement is relatively consistent and occurs mostly or completely independently of treasure rewards, the volume of which will vary depending on adventure but isn’t inflationary in nature.

Escaping the Carnival

In summary:

• ACKS advancement is directly tied to loot collection while DFRPG advancement is mostly disconnected from treasure rewards.
• XP devalues as characters advance, while the value of CP remains constant.

These points also reveal another mismatch of assumptions: the treasure rewards progressions contrast greatly between the two games, in that one expects treasure rewards to scale alongside character advancement and the other doesn’t.

We’re probably going to want to use ACKS treasure tables anyway since we’re planning on utilizing its economy, but this emphasizes the need to map its expected treasure rewards to our experience progression in order to calculate Gold-as-CP later on.

In order to map DFRPG point values to ACKS level ranges, we first need to find common ground.

Progress is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

What does an apple have in common with an orange? They both grow on trees.

Similarly, speed of advancement and therefore progression can be measured in each game by the amount of time spent at the table before meaningful progression occurs.

The ACKS II JJ, page 188 goes into specifics on this as one component of structuring a campaign sandbox. These details, assuming an average session length of 4 hours, produce the following:

Range of Play	Sessions of Play at Each Level	Levels Per Range
1st–3rd (low-level)	4	3
4th–9th (mid-level)	6	6
10th–14th (high-level)	8	5

Thus, ~80 sessions of play will take a PC from 1st to 14th level and an additional 8 sessions of play are assumed at 14th level itself.

The math on total sessions is simply “Sessions of Play at Each Level” for each “Range of Play” multiplied by the corresponding “Levels Per Range,” all added together.

(4 * 3) + (6 * 6) + (8 * 5) = 88 total sessions of expected play.

Since DFRPG already measures advancement in sessions, with the sorcery of Microsoft Excel (or a calculator, or our fingers) we can now establish how many CPs it takes to “gain a level” based on our 62-point and 500-point bookends along with the table above.

CP Per Session

This one’s straightforward. Our high bookend minus our low bookend, divided by total sessions of expected play.

(500–62) / 88 = 4.98 CP per session.

Hey! That’s awfully DFRPG-friendly after all!

Time Is Relative

“Hey wait, the amount of time it takes to do stuff like combat is different in each game, though! Playing the same number of hours in ACKS and DFRPG doesn’t necessarily let players accomplish the same number of tasks!”

Very astute! While this doesn’t actually matter much for our purposes here, it’s something we’ll look at in more detail as we attempt to import certain gameplay procedures from ACKS later on which will help us structure various forms of task resolution and corresponding passage of time into our gameplay loop, better synchronizing the “play time involved to get stuff done” factor between games.

That’s a topic for another post though, and I promise it doesn’t matter for the purposes of these calculations anyway.

CP by Level

These are easy, too. Beginning at 2nd level, we simply multiply our “CP Per Session” by the “Sessions of Play at Each Level” in the table up above, then adding the result to the CP total of the previous level (1st level, for the purposes of calculating the 2nd level CP total) and rounding up.

(4 * 4.98) + 62 = 82 CP at 2nd level, after rounding up.

Simply proceed in this fashion until levels 2–14 have been completed.

“Hey! Level 14 doesn’t come out to 500 points!”

True! 500 points is simply a target—the time-based progression puts us slightly off at 482 CP.

If you prefer, take the difference and use that as extra points to award throughout the campaign, perhaps dividing it into two chunks of 9 points and awarding them to PCs as they ascend to Conqueror and King tiers, or maybe award all 18 points when they reach 14th level thereby catapulting them into “Mythic” territory at 500 CP—or simply ignore the difference entirely, since it’s not like we’re capping progression at 482 CP either way!

Default DF and DFRPG templates of 250 points end up 2 CP shy of “8th level” under this progression, which feels right on the mark.

Alternative Techniques

F**k Fractions!

Since the above method technically uses fractional points per session in its calculations, instead of rounding at each level’s corresponding CP value we could instead drop fractions from CP value per session—turning it into a flat value which can be awarded consistently across multiple session instances. This ensures that the number of sessions to level up within each “Range of Play” remains consistent.

In the case of the progression above we would drop 4.98 CP Per Session to 4 and continue with other calculations as normal, resulting in a 14th-level total of only 410 CP.

I see little value in this, but it’s certainly an option. You could also choose to round up instead of dropping fractions—in the case of our progression above though, this would make no difference.

Eating Dessert First

If we wanted to instead establish our average session reward in CP first, then figure out our 14th-level bookend based on that, then it’s simply a matter of deciding on your “CP Per Session” and multiplying by “Sessions of Play at Each Level” according to which “Range of Play” the level you’re calculating for falls into—then adding the CP value of the prior level.

So, if we decided we wanted to maintain the DFRPG “standard” of 5 CP per session, that’s (5 * 4) + 62 = 82 CP for 2nd level.

Continuing with 5 CP Per Session through each Range of Play results in a 14th-level total of 482 CP, which is the same benchmark we ended up at earlier anyway.

Had we decided on a 3 CP Per Session average however, our 14th-level equivalent would be at only 314 CP after 88 sessions!

My Kingdom for a Point

Alright, we’ve established some point value benchmarks. That’s sort-of okay for reading certain ACKS tables, but what else does it get us?

Well, everything else… after we pick a progression from ACKS to use, anyway. No need to try and work things out for every last class advancement variation—their delineations are based on mechanical assumptions that don’t matter to us.

We’ll use the Fighter progression, since it’s both a common “core” class as well as the same progression used for lots of monsters and other combat-oriented people and creatures.

Our progression, combined with that of the ACKS Fighter, gets us the following:

Fighter XP	Level	CP by Level	ACKS Tier	GURPS Descriptor
500	1	62	Adventurer	Competent
2,000	2	82	Adventurer	Exceptional
4,000	3	102	Adventurer	Heroic
8,000	4	132	Adventurer	Heroic
16,000	5	162	Adventurer	Heroic
32,000	6	192	Adventurer	Heroic
65,000	7	222	Conqueror	Larger-than-Life
130,000	8	252	Conqueror	Larger-than-Life
250,000	9	282	Conqueror	Larger-than-Life
370,000	10	322	Conqueror	Legendary
490,000	11	362	King	Legendary
610,000	12	402	King	Legendary
730,000	13	442	King	Legendary
850,000	14	482	King	Legendary

Gold-as-XYZ

Incidentally, this is what we needed the Fighter XP for, and also why we want to include that “500 XP” at level 1—it helps smooth out the conversion rate at 1st level and brings us into parity with some less noticeable ACKS assumptions.

To get our XP-to-CP conversion rate at each level (simultaneously giving us “GP-as-CP”—remember, 1 GP is the same thing as 1 XP), we need to subtract the Fighter XP value at the current level we’re calculating for from the next level’s value. We divide the resulting total by (CP value at the next level minus CP value at the current level we’re calculating for).

So, at level 1:

(2,000 – 500) / (82 – 62) = 75 XP to a single CP.

Let’s take a look at what this gets us!

Level	GP/1 CP	$/1 CP	Avg. Session GP/PC	Avg. Session $/PC
1	75	$3,000	375	$15,000
2	100	$4,000	500	$20,000
3	133	$5,333	667	$26,680
4	267	$10,667	1,333	$53,320
5	533	$21,333	2,667	$106,680
6	1,100	$44,000	5,500	$220,000
7	2,167	$86,667	10,833	$433,320
8	4,000	$160,000	20,000	$800,000
9	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
10	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
11	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
12	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
13	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
14	3,000	$120,000	N/A	N/A

As you can see above, we’ve now plugged in our $40 = 1 GP conversion rate from GACKS, Part I: Currency to get us our extrapolated “how many $ to a CP” rate.

Yes, there’s a hiccup across values at 8th level! This is an artifact of the ACKS XP progression swapping from essentially a geometric one to an arithmetic one.

Thus, the question of “how much GP nets me a CP?” is functionally the same as asking “how much GP gets me to the next level?”—neither can be answered without first answering the question, “what ‘level’ is your character?”

Handing Over the Money

For ease of reference, we’ve also included the expected GP and $ figures which a GM should expect to award for each session of play at each character “level” (on average, in order to maintain speed of PC advancement), which are calibrated based on our earlier metric of 5 CP being awarded per session of play.

For a party of delvers, multiply those values by the number of PCs to maintain speed of advancement for the entire party—XP and CP rewards from treasure returned home gets divided amongst each contributing party member, after all!

Points in Practice

While until now we have been discussing per-session CP awards, it’s important to note that if we’re to use Gold-as-CP as intended then PCs won’t actually be receiving the corresponding CP awards each session at all! After all, it’s hard to imagine PCs returning to civilization with all the loot they’ve recovered at the end of every single session (even using 1:1 timekeeping).

Instead, what this gives us is an average amount of treasure by session we can use as a “budget” while populating dungeons with loot (for instance) based on how many sessions we expect it to take our players to overcome it and return home safely, whereupon they will be awarded the corresponding CP value in one big lump sum.

This can be haphazard, resulting in spikes and doldrums, but that’s partly the point! In fact, due to CP awards coming in much larger lump sums at the end of each delve, even if our adventurers come out a little anemic on treasure/CP it’s still likely to feel rewarding—players are unlikely to suss out averages by sessions played and make comparisons to the table we created.

Let your players get clever about how to get their rewards and get out. By all means, this should encourage all sorts of “old-school” play tactics.

Let them figure out how to extract the 800 lb. golden idol from the dungeon and haul it back using two sick donkeys and a bag of rope—they might cut their losses and simply break off a few pieces they can carry back to sell by weight, instead.

If they figure out a way to plunder more than you anticipated faster than you thought they would, or with less trouble than you had planned on, or even find ways to loot things you hadn’t considered treasure at all, well… that’s great! Can I borrow your players?

For those GMs which don’t like the idea of pre-populating dungeons with specific and “appropriate” amounts of treasure, that’s perfectly fine—neither do I, and evidently neither does ACKS given that there is no such “expected GP per session” table to be found in its pages.

Part of the reason we built this table using the reasoning we did was so that we could use ACKS treasure tables, monster rewards, and similar as-is. No pre-planning required if it ruffles your feathers—we can simply use ACKS treasure rewards systems already calibrated to reward roughly appropriate levels of value based on corresponding challenge, which we’ll address in more detail in another post.

In keeping with our mission statement of doing as little work as possible, our progression will help us simply crack open the ACKS II JJ, Monstrous Manual, and Treasure Tome and use the dynamic treasure from random encounters, dungeon construction, abstract looting, or whatever as appropriate right out of the books!

That being said, the table values can still help us eyeball published dungeons and adventures to determine whether we need to “round out” their rewards with some extra treasure or not to keep our delvers happily gaining CP at around the rate we want them to.

Investing in the Future

With all that out of the way, we can take a look at a few other considerations. Not all of them mind you, but some of the most directly pertinent for the purposes of this post anyway.

Slaying for Fun and Profit

ACKS does include smaller relative XP rewards from slaying monsters and myriad avenues of passive XP collection—why not do the same in DFRPG?

For example, one could use the $-as-CP rates according to the approximate “level” of the PCs in addition to standard DFRPG “Session Awards” (Exploits, p. 92) for Battles and Feats. This could potentially drastically increase the rate of character advancement, which isn’t in and of itself an issue…

Do note, though, that if treasure rewards aren’t commensurate to approximate character “level” then PCs may end up effectively “higher level” than the wealth they’ve accumulated from treasure alone would suggest—meaning they may not integrate at the same fiscal points in certain economics-related ACKS systems they expect to, based on their “level.”

Not the end of the world, but worth keeping in mind—if using $-as-CP for advancement, then erring on the lower end of cumulative session-based awards (if using them at all) is probably wise.

Scrooge McDuck

“That’s an insane amount of money being thrown around at the table.”

Well, yes, but it’s also a matter of perspective really.

Another example of a setting where great volumes of currency circulate at higher standards of living is, perhaps surprisingly, Douglas Cole’s relatively grounded Norðlond fantasy setting for DFRPG, as detailed in The Citadel at Norðvörn.

As noted previously, Norðlond‘s simulation comes to a lot of similar economic and demographic conclusions as ACKS—its economic assumptions anchoring the relationships between hajarls, jarls, herras and ridders, for instance. Its village builder is designed to peacefully coexist with and support that simulation as well.

The Citadel at Norðvörn, p. 20, indicates that a hajarl’s duty payment to the king is something like $70 million each year—Doug himself having noted that many of them make 2–4 times that amount!

On the plausibility of coinage itself, while keeping in mind the caveats of fantastical currencies both linked and described in GACKS, Part I: Currency, I’m sharing an excerpt from a discord exchange I saw a while ago on the Autarch server.

I have no driving point behind sharing it here, but I consider it a thought-provoking point of reference.

[Alexander Macris]

“Random side note, the game puts coins at 100 coins to the pound. The British silver penny was 240 coins to the pound. So if you wanted the prices to be correct in terms of weight of silver/gold/etc just change that.

“Amusingly, if you do that, it means Alexander the Great’s winnings in Persia were worth even more. 40,000 talents of silver and 10,000 talents of gold – a talent being 60 lbs – so that’s 2 400 000 lbs of silver and 600,000 lbs of gold, which is 200,400,000sp and 60,000,000gp. or 2.4x that if you use more realistic weights.

“This is why when people tell me that ‘adventurers would destroy the economy’ I just laugh. People have no idea of the extent of the size of ancient and medieval economies, and how much looting already went on. Adventurers are paupers in comparison. Can you imagine a dungeon with 200 Million sp and 60 Million gp? The closest I can imagine to every seeing that portrayed is Smaug’s hoard.“

[User 1]

“I listen to a Byzantine history podcast, the treaties between nations often involves thousands of pounds of gold paid yearly.”

[Alexander Macris]

“Let’s see 525 lbs per cubic foot, 3000 000 lbs, call it 5714 cubic feet, if we imagine the coins are ankle deep (3″), then that’s 22,856 square feet of coin, or a room 150′ by 150′. So Smaug’s hoard is plausible from that point of view. Right, exactly – which is hundreds of thousands of gold pieces.“

[User 1]

“Alexander’s take was from looting an empire though.“

[Alexander Macris]

“Yah, I know, it was the biggest haul ever, but it’s a fun benchmark. There have been other big hauls in history. Caesar’s haul in Gaul, etc. I mostly just wanted to prove that a 50,000gp haul from Treasure Type R in a dungeon doesn’t destroy the economy.”

[User 2]

“It might destroy a village
By turning it into a town.”

Of course, pretty much any time a massive amount of money literally appears from nowhere (i.e. traditional fantasy dungeons) it’s liable to cause an upset of one variety or another. Depending on the setting though, it such an influx might not be entirely unexpected.

After all, the gold piled up in each dungeon must have originally come from somewhere and assuming it was put there in even semi-recent history then someone is probably expecting it to turn up or even attempting to recover it themselves! If “adventurer” is a common enough “profession” to be acknowledged, they’re probably the first people to hire for such a job.

If treasure hasn’t even been touched in semi-recent history, then our adventurers are truly striking out into the uncivilized, unexplored wilds—anything is possible out there!

There could be entire town economies revolving around periodic influxes from a single mega-dungeon. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s basically the premise of the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting: Caverntown… Of course, we’re at risk of getting lost in deeper reflections on the implications of various D&D-isms themselves.

One published exploration of certain D&D tropes, which takes them with open arms and molds them into actual believable setting elements, is Doomed Slayers by the Steve Jackson Games forum’s own denizen Jürgen Hubert. For anyone curious, it’s a fun and thought-provoking read—inexpensive too, since at time of writing it’s Pay-What-You-Want.

Short version—if you worry about high volumes or values in circulation, then my advice is… don’t. Try to keep in mind all the cool stuff PCs have to spend money on—a magic sword, a nice set of armor, and a horse to ride in on are just the beginning, and barely at that.

They’ve got hirelings to pay, officials to bribe, animals to train and feed, cities to buy out of stock, castles and temples to build, mercantile wars to conduct, armies to raise, magical constructs to invent, and so on. I won’t go on about all the ways to spend money at length… Eggplant has done a great job of detailing a variety of easy cash sinks already!

After all, while we wanted to import inflationary “Gold-as-CP” in part to incentivize more dangerous adventuring and more ambitious treasure hunting as our campaigns progress, we also very much want to incentivize increasingly ambitious expenditures!

ACKS Treasure? Y-ACKS!

If you don’t want to use ACKS treasure, that’s perfectly fine!

In that case, though, the Gold-as-CP conversion rates we’ve established in this article aren’t going to apply. In fact, most of this post won’t help you at all!

There’s already some good guidance in Dungeon Fantasy 21: Megadungeons, which covers how to make delving more treacherous the deeper you go, as well as how to populate dungeons with monsters, traps and loot.

Most relevant though is its illustrative interpretation of “treasure-as-progression” on page 10, in the form of bonus character point awards which take into account both value of “Required Loot” and “Delver Point Value”—its award system is calibrated to reward around 5 character points per typical session.

Go nuts! Just, not too nuts—there should be at least one sane person at every gaming table…

Advancement in a Nutshell

Combining the most essential values of our two tables together gets us the following “master” table for both progression and Gold-as-CP (or $-as-CP).

Level	CP by Level	GP/1 CP	$/1 CP	Avg. Session GP/PC	Avg. Session $/PC
1	62	75	$3,000	375	$15,000
2	82	100	$4,000	500	$20,000
3	102	133	$5,333	667	$26,680
4	132	267	$10,667	1,333	$53,320
5	162	533	$21,333	2,667	$106,680
6	192	1,100	$44,000	5,500	$220,000
7	222	2,167	$86,667	10,833	$433,320
8	252	4,000	$160,000	20,000	$800,000
9	282	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
10	322	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
11	362	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
12	402	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
13	442	3,000	$120,000	15,000	$600,000
14	482	3,000	$120,000	N/A	N/A

We have now successfully:

• Created a DFRPG delver progression and mapped ACKS adventuring class levels to approximate DFRPG delver CP values.
• Mapped ACKS‘ expectation of increased loot collection onto our new progression as characters rise in CP value, mimicking ACKS‘ devaluation of currency for the purposes of character advancement at higher levels.
• Established ACKS Gold-as-CP and $-as-CP rates within DFRPG.
• Enabled the use of ACKS treasure tables and rewards as published.
• Established CP awards and treasure rewards by session count to synchronize pace advancement between games based on our new progression.

Whew! It took some reasoning, but we got there in the end.

Leveling Up

Now that we have our Currency, Adventurer Progression and Gold-as-CP decoder rings each sorted out, we can begin importing some stuff from ACKS in earnest!

As far as the next article, I’m considering continuing this series with exploration of some potential Adventurer Demographics using some of the work we did in this post as the starting point.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that while GACKS Part I and II are hopefully enlightening reads, they’re also just singular approaches to each which is frankly no fun.

So, at some point I’ll be creating a GACKS Appendix containing some of the tables you’ve already seen published, all in one place for convenience and without the verbose reasoning, as well as links for some Microsoft Excel tools with places to plug in values so you can experiment with creating and tuning your own alternative conversions and progressions.

Also on the to-do list is a little cleanup and organization of posts so far, adding cross-links and similar.

Whichever direction my whimsy steers me though, the following entries in this series will increasingly be focused on using the tools we’ve since developed. There’s no point in making them if we aren’t going to use them—rubber, meet road!

I won’t give all my cards away just yet, though. Stay tuned!

Up Next: GACKS, Part II Addendum: Wealth & Influence

—

14.04 edit: Added “Advancement in a Nutshell,” some light reorg.