A long time ago, when I was more invested into TTRPGs, I grew increasingly frustrated with the system of only distributing advancement/experience points at the end of a session.
This always made me think that certain challenges could be better dealt with if the players could access/develop abilities as the game progressed in real time.
At some point, I started to divise a play system that relied on a split experience atribution system, with players being able to automatically rack experience points from directly using their skills/habilties, while the DM would keep a tally of points from goals/missions achieved, distributable at session end.
A practical example: a burglar would have the lockpick skill. The skill would be tiered, with each tier having 100 points to max it out, and the higher the tier, the less experience would be given by making use of the skill, as the skill would be further and further refined and new breakthroughs in its understanding become harder to achieve. But DM attributed XP could either be spent towards maxing out the skill faster or gain a new or linked one, like disarming booby traps.
I drifted away from TTRPG and simply let my idea sit in a drawer in a notebook. Today I found my notes again as I was rummaging through the junk and the it brought some nostalgia.
To those with more experience in TTRPGs: would this be feaseable? Or enticing? Interesting?
Burning Wheel’s Artha system has players create goals that are tied to their beliefs and related to their character’s relationships and back stories. When one of these goals are achieved in game the player gains a large chunck of progression.
Small chunks of progression in that game work similarly to Skyrim: when attempting an action a character moves closer to improving their ability with that skill.
It is an excellent system that my playgroup returns to every few years.