Using Experience tags in D&D

While I haven’t actually played a game using the Daggerheart rules yet, it seems really cool. It plays a lot more with meta-currencies and mechanical tidbits than Dungeons & Dragons, and I think that is a good thing. One of my favorite aspects of the game is the idea of Experience tags. Recently, I tried implementing them as a homebrew rule in my ongoing D&D campaign.

Basically, the idea is this: you pick a word or phrase that represents something at which your character is especially skilled. This is your Experience tag. Whenever you attempt a roll for something that you think the tag applies to, you can add a bonus to your roll for that tag. In Daggerheart, the bonus is +2, but for Dungeons & Dragons I decided to make it +1 because I think it’s more balanced as an add-on rule. It just tips the scales without stepping on the toes of other bonuses in the game.

So, for example, you might have the Experience tag “military tactician”, or “musical prodigy”, or “life of the party”. These tags are more specialized than skills, but also more flexible.

For example: the Performance skill could be used for trying to portray a noble at a party or for mesmerizing a troop of monsters in a dungeon. “Musical prodigy” would only apply to one of those situations, but it would stack on top of the Performance roll. You might also be able to invoke the tag if you were trying to gain the confidence of an opera singer (Persuasion), resisting a musical enchantment (Wisdom save), or looking for clues about the murder of an orchestra conductor (Investigation).

It’s a little bit like how Backgrounds work, giving you a mechanical benefit for a story concept, but more directly applicable to regular skill checks which are the bread-and-butter of most D&D rolls.

That said, we don’t want too many of these floating around. D&D 5e got rid of a lot of math for a reason. I think Experience tags should be treated like special awards to be handed out when the story calls for a character to develop a specialization. They should remain rare and unique.

The player characters in my current campaign are students who just graduated an academy. I decided that the benefits of completing their education would be that each of them gets to choose an Experience tag to represent the most important thing they learned. It could also be a chapter bonus for the end of a plot arc, a way to represent a training montage, or the blessing of a powerful being.

(Aside: If you really like this idea, you could also try Legend in the Mist which is a tabletop role-playing game entirely based on tags. Something else I’m very excited to try.)

I’ve only just started using this house rule and so I can’t guarantee it’ll work for your table. But I think it presents a lot of opportunity for enhancing role-playing aspects of the game, and I’m always looking for more ways to do that without sacrificing the crunch that I really like about TTRPGs. Have fun!

Illustration by Alex Pavor on Unsplash