Goodbye to EXP
XP is a lie we've all agreed to tell.
You kill enough things, you check enough boxes, the number goes up. Your character grows.
Except that's not how anyone actually remembers their best sessions. Nobody walks away from a table saying "we got 400 XP tonight." They say "we burned the whole city down and it was our fault" or "I didn't think we were going to make it out of that one."
The XP system asks the GM to be an accountant. We don't think that's the job.
Milestones, not math
In Einsol's Razor, characters level through milestones — narrative moments where something real happened. The GM decides when the party has earned it, not because a counter hit a threshold, but because the story shifted and the characters shifted with it.
What counts as a milestone?
Not every session. Not every fight. A milestone feels like the end of a chapter — something concluded, shifted, or became impossible to take back. When your players look at each other after a session and say "that mattered", that's a milestone.
Some examples from the book:
- Completing a major story arc or campaign objective
- Surviving a pivotal encounter that changes the direction of the story
- Uncovering a truth that reframes everything the party believed
- Making a decision with lasting consequences for the world
- Forging or breaking a significant alliance
- A moment of deep personal growth or reckoning for a character
- Reaching a point of no return
If your Level 6 party hasn't aligned with a faction yet, that's fine. The table isn't judging them. If your Level 3 party already changed a power structure, the milestone reflects what actually happened. The story leads. The number follows.
One rule with no exceptions
Absent players level with the group. If someone misses the session where the milestone happens, their character still advances. They were part of the campaign that led to that moment. Penalizing absence with level gaps creates problems that aren't worth the fairness argument.
How it plays at the table
The GM calls the milestone. Players handle their level-up between sessions and arrive at the next game ready to play. Nobody spends table time on character sheet math.
We trust the GM to know when it matters. The dice don't.
- ER Team