SWN’s greatest flaw, like several other OSR games, is its lack of a properly defined XP-generation formula to drive play. Anyone who knows the OSR well knows the classic D&D formula: recover treasure to win XP to make your character better at recovering more treasure. And that is a brilliantly elegant mechanic that provides clear narrative motivation, encourages players to push against obstacles and seek out exciting situations and clearly defines what play is about. And yet repeatedly OSR designs flake out in their own implementations of this established process, leaving XP awards entirely up to GM fiat with at best some benchmarks to aim for.

I really like SWN, I’ve run it often, yet even I can’t really tell how to make all the products of those great sandbox-generation tools into attractive draws for the characters outside of a metatextual consensus that “adventurers go on adventures.” Or what the objective difference is between 100 and 101 XP. I strongly hope that when Kevin Crawford revises SWN next year, he addresses this problem.