Oooh Earthdawn! Its a cool concept, but terrible in practice. You only get XP if people hear about your adventuring exploits. So to get XP, you have to hire bards to sing about your adventures. Well, the bards won't do it for free, so you have to adventure, find enough gold to pay said bard, roll well enough on your own storytelling skill, and then wait a month or two while your story spreads.
Also magic items required XP to attune yourself to them. Not just swords and things. Things like potions. A simple healing potion took about 1/3 of a level of XP, and it only worked once. I found roughly the equivalent of a +1 sword. I had been playing for about 2 months (8 sessions), and I hadn't spent any xp yet, and I didn't have enough to use the +1 sword. A few sessions after that, all the players just gave up in frustration.
