Werewolf the Apocolypse is a game where the characters have a specific goal, which is to adapt to their new life as a creature bound to the spirit world, and Renown is offered up as an incentive to get a player to have their character act on becoming a part of that world.

A few other games in the World of Darkness line have similar systems.

Mage: the Awakening offers characters Arcane Experience for exploring the unknown and trying to uncover the mysteries of the world.

Promethean: the Created offers Vitriol if your character accomplishes tasks relevant to their Refinement. (Their philosophy on what it means to be human.)

Basically, it's pretty common in World of Darkness games, but those point could only be spent to improve certain points of your character, since there are no levels in WoD. (In most cases, it was improvements to your supernatural abilities.)

I've also seen this sort of system used in Anima: Beyond Fantasy; they called it "Elan," and it was a measure of how much your character embodied the ideals of a particular god, and it was largely an optional rule, since evens gods can only pay attention to so many people.

The basics of that, though, was that if you have a connection with a god, actions you take would strengthen or weaken that connection, and you could earn special abilities at certain levels.

The system works for World of Darkness games because they play right into what the game is already about. Werewolf is about maintaining order in the spirit world, so slaying malicious spirits or doing tasks for elder spirits is a well defined task for the reward. And to top it off, the reward can only be used on a few things, and only on things you could already easily get.

However, Anima's Elan system works off a similar premise to the D&D alignment system; there's a lot of conflicting elements, and there's some ambiguity as to how much of an impact your action has to have on the world for it to have an impact on your character's abilities. Plus, a lot of the abilities you gain through Elan can ONLY be gained that way.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is this: I'd probably play a game that uses that sort of system, but not in a game like D&D. That, and people argue too much about what alignment means anyways.