Skill based games: XP award based advancement or chance of increase per use advancement?

Since this forum seems appropriate, I'd like to know. Show of hands and all. XP award advancement bases itself on the GM awarding the player XP or some other moniker for specific actions such as killing or discovery. Chance per use advancement has a chance to increase a skill/attribute when used.  And there's also a mix of the two. An interesting example is Risus, which mixes the two by awarding die rolls for a chance at advancement for any cliches moderately used during play. Another example of mixing is when skills are given XP individually each time they are used, but that constant record-keeping personally annoys me. One "on use" advancement that I haven't seen is re-rolling a natural 20 against the skill/attribute used, increasing it upon surpassing it.

Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome (My Little Pony spinoff of Unknown Armies ) would be "mixed": When you fail a skill roll, you immediately gain 1 point in that skill, capped at the skill's governing attribute When you perform an action in-character or out-of-character in line with one of the five primary Elements of Harmony (Generosity, Honesty, Laughter, Kindness, Loyalty), you earn 1 point on the relevant Friendship Track You can spend 5 points in any combination from the other Friendship Tracks to earn 1 point on the Magic Track (points from the first five Friendship Tracks have other uses, as well) You can spend 1 point from the Magic Track to increase an attribute by 1, capped at 99 (there are other uses for Magic points, as well) The game is designed toward playing foals who have not yet discovered their Special Talent and earned their Cutie Mark. The first time a skill reaches 40, that skill becomes the character's Obsession Skill, and he or she discovers a Special Talent related to that skill and earns a Cutie Mark related to the Special Talent. To quote the book: A recurring motif within My Little Pony is that learning only occurs through failure and overcoming adversity. Put another way, "Good judgment is a result of experience; however, experience usually gained as a result of bad judgment." Failure is not inherently bad, because it teaches us what to do the next time we try. The only way to advance in skills (and therefore find one's Cutie Mark) is to fail. Therefore, failure is awesome .

As a GM and a player I prefer systems which award skills improvement to skills used. Normally this is on success but I would be open to systems which learn from 'failure' if it doesn't mean lots of rolls just to get the '+1'.  If you have awarded points for e.g. defeating enemies these would need to to be restricted to advancing only the appropriate skills. Also, the system would need to 'pay out' for a variety of things covering all skill types. Unless it does both of these gameplay would become focused on the things that get you points and about advancing those skills. 

Years ago I played in a game that each skill level had it's own xp cost and everytime you used the skill in a dramatic event like picking a lock under fire or diarming a trap with lethal consquences you would earn xp for that skill. The more you used that skill, success or not, you would gain xp in that skill.

Brian said: Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome (My Little Pony spinoff of Unknown Armies ) would be "mixed": When you fail a skill roll, you immediately gain 1 point in that skill, capped at the skill's governing attribute When you perform an action in-character or out-of-character in line with one of the five primary Elements of Harmony (Generosity, Honesty, Laughter, Kindness, Loyalty), you earn 1 point on the relevant Friendship Track You can spend 5 points in any combination from the other Friendship Tracks to earn 1 point on the Magic Track (points from the first five Friendship Tracks have other uses, as well) You can spend 1 point from the Magic Track to increase an attribute by 1, capped at 99 (there are other uses for Magic points, as well) This system sounds interesting, though you'd probably want to avoid increasing the skill for needlessly difficult tasks, only the ones in which a roll is likely. A system in which the skill rises if your first roll is a fail but the second succeeds perhaps. It would make increases fastest at the 50/50 mark. Epiphany. Hmm. Metroknight said: Years ago I played in a game that each skill level had it's own xp cost and everytime you used the skill in a dramatic event like picking a lock under fire or diarming a trap with lethal consquences you would earn xp for that skill. The more you used that skill, success or not, you would gain xp in that skill. This sounds like a paperwork heavy version of Skyrim. Was it tedious?

A well designed character sheet can make tracking that easy.

I'm using a hoembrew system for that... When you perform an action, you can ask the GM for an "learning counter", which the GM may or may not give to you (if you just killed a peasant in a fight, and you have a really high skill in Sword-fighting, you probably didn't learn anything at this time... So, nope, no counters for you). The GM may award this counters both in sucesses and failures (you learn things not only when you get it right, but also in failures - like the MLP system over there). At each night, players can spend their counters to make tests for the skill, where they need to get a roll higher than the skill itself (being a d100 system)... There's also influence, in this test, from the amount of counters the character has, his "Learning" attribute (there's an attribute just for that) and how good or bad were his rolls when he got those counters (criticals, for example, counts less, as they usually don't come from the character's actions, but from luck)

It was at first but when then gm dscovered how many times was making us roll for stuff he edited his stuff some. He put a limit in per session and made a sheet that had checkmark boxes so that we could track our usage. It was a simplfied system that was classless. If i had the notebook of my notes, I would type it up and run it here but all I have are some memories from 20 years ago.

Metroknight said: It was at first but when then gm dscovered how many times was making us roll for stuff he edited his stuff some. He put a limit in per session and made a sheet that had checkmark boxes so that we could track our usage. It was a simplfied system that was classless. If i had the notebook of my notes, I would type it up and run it here but all I have are some memories from 20 years ago. Greater things have been made from less.

If I remember it correctly, it was a blend of AD&D 1e and something else. I remember it having the D&D races but you got to chose all the skills your class is suppose to have (I think it was the at the beginning of templates) and you got to select some of the skills while others were prechosen because of your career/field of training. I can't remember if it was d20 or % roll or it could have been a d30 roll, just can't remember.

I like skill based games. I've seen it as gain skill pointd by xp and also for rolling a nat 12 or 2 on 2d6. Collect a pile and skill up. I like rolemaster / spacemaster a lot. But I run Traveller (online) and Alternity (Offline). Depends on the system..