WHAT THE HECK EVEN IS LOOT ADVANCEMENT?
Instead of levels and experience being tied to ephemeral game constructions like XP, or handwavey or subjective things like story milestones, loot advancement bridges the divide between diegetic apparency and objectivity. Loot advancement is where your Class levels are tied to the loot you require on an adventure. There are many more specific ways to do this, some of which I'll cover below, but the main concept is that you can find objects in the world of the game that give you your character progression.
WHY MIGHT I WANT TO USE THIS SYSTEM?
There are many strengths to this system, but also a number of weaknesses. To address the biggest weakness first, loot progression takes away a lot of player choice in their character advancement. Instead of being able to wring their hands away from the table and looking forward to the cool things to come, the players have to wait and sit at the table to see what abilities they're going to get. This feeling of players having less say in their character builds definitely would irk a good many players whose fun comes from developing a character mechanically, and that's perfectly valid.
In addition, since the advancement is tied to real artifacts in the world, there's a slim chance the players, through a string of bad decisions or bad rolls, will be forced to skip some of the treasure, or won't find hidden loot. Instead of getting rewards for simply playing, there's the extra challenge of playing well to get level rewards. Again, a matter of taste- you might feel bad if the party has a bad day or can't do what they need to do, wanting to give them a boost but with no easy way to get loot into their hands.
However, there are a number of strengths. First of all, for those DMs (like me) who want to keep it all grounded in the narrative instead of having fiddly mechanics to worry about like XP, loot makes it super easy to ground levels in the world. Loot helps you more easily control what resources the party has and what tools you want to give them at a given time. Loot allows you to restrict player class choice diegetically without just saying "that's how it is in my world". Loot allows you to reward good play in new ways. Loot makes treasure more interesting, and makes it feel better to receive. Loot invests the players in the world: if they want a level in their cool homebrew class, they have to go in a library and look up where to find the appropriate loot. In that capacity, it also encourages players to make and pursue their own goals.
OKAY, HOW DO I USE LOOT?
There's a few options. You can:
-Have a piece of loot tied to a class. When you get your hands on the loot, not only do you get to keep the loot, you get the class level to have and to hold. This is the most generous option, and makes equipment very special indeed.
-Have a piece of loot tied to a class. When you get the loot, you can either choose to keep it as a physical artifact or convert it to a class level. This makes more choice: would I rather have a immovable rod or a level in Paladin? This is what I'm currently using in MARROW, for the most part, and I'm liking it quite a bit.
-Nix class levels altogether, what you are carrying makes you cooler. This is what ICRPG (the system I got the inspiration for loot progression from) does, and it has a lot of strengths and a lot of limitations. This method makes it really easy to cripple the characters with lootbreaking enemies like Rust Monsters. Players are a lot warier about inventory, and a lack of permanent abilities makes finding new tools/crafting foolproof plans a more appealing option. This is a bit too extreme for my tastes, especially because MARROW needs a lot of inventories to fill, but ICRPG uses it to great effect, another reason to buy the book immediately.
-Some fourth option. If you know of anything I missed, leave it in the comments!
Dedicated to BaaL on the OSR Discord, who asked how I do loot. I hope this helps illuminate some options, ideas, and pros and cons.
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