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XP (Experience Point) is a term particularly used in gaming. Should I use much or many in this context?
Adam: 'I killed the boss! I got 100 XP!'
Alex: 'Great, how ___(many/much) XP have you got?'
Google says to use "how much". According to the app version of the OALD, it has another form: XPs (or Experience Points). Because of the s, I'm assuming that XP is countable and people should say, "How many XPs (Experience Points) did you get?".
In that case, why do people say "How much XP"?
We use “many” for countable things (e.g. glasses of water), and “much” for un-countable things (e.g. sand; sand is not feasibly countable). But also note that “grains of sand” uses “many”, as the grains are countable.
I would describe “XP” or “EXP” as a collective of “experience points”, similar to how “sand” is a collective of “grains of sand”. One could say both:
How much XP / Experience did you get?
How many XP points / experience points did you get?
So, you're partially correct that XP is countable. The points themselves are considered countable, but "XP" as a whole is not — again, just like how grains of sand are countable, but "sand" is not.
For more on the distinction between many and much, try this website: https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/much-vs-many/
Technically 'XP' may mean 'Experience Point' but most people, when they are framing the question in their head, will think of it as just 'Experience'. So when they ask the question "How much XP is this encounter worth?" they are really asking "How much experience is this encounter worth?".
While technically expressed as a discrete countable number of points in role playing games, the general concept of 'experience" is not generally expressed as or thought of as a discrete number and 'much' becomes the word used in questions out of habit. To a native English speaker, it will just feel like the correct word to use.
This is a good question that, as a native speaker, I never really thought about until now. The point is a good one: "much" is used for uncountable objects (sand, water), whereas "many" is used for countable objects. So why do people think of Experience Points as uncountable? To me, it comes down to the following question:
What does it mean to be countable?
In practice, people think of something as countable when differences of 1 are notable. For example, you would use "many" to ask
How many houses does he own?
when the answer is 2 or 3. In this case, a difference of 1 house is significant. But if the expected answer is tens of thousands (say, a real estate developer) where the difference of 1 is insignificant, you would switch to "much":
How much housing does he own?
Experience points are the same. If a typical XP award for an encounter were less than a dozen, I'd ask "how many XPs was that worth?", expecting the answer to be, for example, 3 or 4. But in these types of games, it's far more typical to be awarded 23,000 XP (or some other very large number), at which point people start to think of individual XP like grains of sand or molecules of water.
tl;dr– Experience (EXP) isn't countable, so it's a "How much?" thing. By contrast, experience-points (XP) are countable, so they're a "How many?" thing.
Characters acquire experience (EXP), which can sometimes be quantified in terms of experience points (XP).
Analogies:
| Concept | Example quantifiers |
|---|---|
| Experience | Experience-points, levels, bars(Note) |
| Money | Dollars, Euros, Pounds, months of one's salary |
| Distance | Kilometers, miles, meters, feet, football fields |
| Time | Seconds, minutes, days, years |
Note: Some games show experience in a figure composed of multiple bars, so players might refer to "bars" of experience, where each bar might be like 5% of a level.
We ask "How much?" of a concept, or "How many?" in a quantification.
Alice: How much longer?
Bob: 5 seconds.
Alice didn't ask for a quantification, but Bob provided one. It works, even if Alice didn't necessarily need to an exact number of seconds.
Alternatively, Bob could've responded like this:
Alice: How much longer?
Bob: Pretty soon.
Regarding the example in the question:
Alex: 'Great, how ___(many/much) XP have you got?'
Either way could work.
Using "much" would ask a more general question. For example, the answer could be "Almost enough to level!".
Using "many" would imply a more specific request for a number of experience-points.
"XP" and "EXP" mean different things to different folks.
Personally, I tend to think of "EXP" as being the first few letters from "EXPerience", while "XP" comes from "eXperience Points".
However, some folks use them as synonyms, sometimes preferring "XP" because it's shorter. They may not even recognize a distinction between the concept of "experience" and a quantization of it with "experience points".
For folks who don't consider the difference, they may not be using the normal grammar rules discussed above, but rather just always default to asking "How much?" on a more idiomatic basis.
My take is that it's treated the same as money. It's reasonable to ask 'How much money do you have?' rather than 'How many units of local money do you have', even though it's a quantifiable amount.
It's a silly point to make, but not outrageous to say that if a noun is countable or not is often more about 'how realistic is it to count this?' rather than 'can this be counted?'
