Awarding Experience - question

Just a quick question....I can't seem to find the reference in my DMG.

If a character is incapacitated during a fight....either helpless or at death's door, but doesn't die, does he gain XP? Half XP? No XP?

I know that if he dies and is later resurrected, he doesn't gain any...similarly if he's already incapacitated at the start of the fight. I'm wondering about when he goes down during the fight, and is bleeding out, but gets bandaged before hitting -10.

Banshee

Of course. If he never got to act because the mage fireballed all the enemies to death before his turn came up, he'd get xp, too. Just participating (or trying to) and putting yourself at potential (keyword here) risk, you earn xp.

As far as dying during a fight, I personally give them the xp from the fight to help offset the level loss, especially if they died heroically and/or selflessly protecting the rest of the party. That's just how I do it, though, not RAW.

Here's the relevant section from the DMG (p 37):

Only characters who take part in an encounter should gain the commensurate awards. Characters who died before the encounter took place, or did not participate for some other reason, earn nothing, even if they are raised or healed later on.

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and...

4. Divide the base XP award by the number of characters in the party. This is the amount of XP that one character receives for helping defeat that monster.

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This is, of course, a bit vague. Obviously, we can say that the moody swashbuckler who was upset at being insulted by the gruff dwarf and decided to sit out the combat in a sulk does not get any xp. But what about the wizard who steps up into the fray (say as a double move) and then gets hit on the head by an orc and dropped to -1, stabilizes the next round and then sits out the rest of the combat as his colleagues are too busy to get him healed? Does this equate to helping defeat the monster?

I guess it depends on how you interprate even if they are raised or healed later on. On one level this does seem to imply that the wizard would receive nothing, but perhaps it may also have been referring to someone who was previously injured or killed (perhaps some reinforcements arrived several rounds after the first combat, for example, and a new combat ensued).

My interpretation is that I always award full XP to everyone invloved in the combat, irrespective of how long they were involved in the actual combat itself. In the above example, for instance, did the wizard help defeat the monster? Well, the orc had to move to the wizard and hit him, which (perhaps) brought him into charging distance for the gruff dwarf, who perhaps critted and took out the orc... and so on. And even if the dwarf in fact missed, the orc had still used up all or part of his action on the wizard. It just keeps things simple, fair and consistant.

YMMV of course.

Yup - everyone "active" durng any part of the encounter (and not dead at the end of it) earns xp.


3.5 has pretty much everything based on "team work" - so always keep that in mind.

Did the character serve as a distraction for one of the bad guys? {then he is part of the team}

Did he run away at first sight and leave everyone to fend for themselves? {then he is not part of the team}

Just use some sort of consistent logic - and don't forget individual awards come from the role-playing aspect adn not from the "action" or "what did the PC do in the encounter" aspect.

irdeggman said:

Did the character serve as a distraction for one of the bad guys? {then he is part of the team}

Did he run away at first sight and leave everyone to fend for themselves? {then he is not part of the team}

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Of course, if he ran away the first round because the enemy cast a fear spell on him or something, he acted as a distraction for one of the bad guys and still gets XP.

As per rules, (as quoted above) I'd say only characters active during any part of the encounter (and not dead at the end) should receive XP.
Note that characters active during the encounter but dead at the end should count against the number of characters the XP should be devided by!

Having said that, I'd just like to share the two method's used in two of the campaigns I run/play in:

first campaign uses rotating DM's. This means that the character of the DM is put on hold during his DM period. Following the rules, he shouldn't get xp, but that would mean penalizing someone for DMing.
Also, it's a large group (6 players) and we play when at least 4 players can make it to the game.
We decided that we would like to have everyone at the same level, so we give out XP regardless of presence of the player.
On the other hand, I do give out XP according to challange, so I devide the XP by the number of active characters. (sometimes characters of absent players are played by one of the other players.)

second campaign uses a different method:
participating characters who's players are present get full XP.
participating characters who's players are absent get half XP.
non-participating characters get no XP.
(not sure about the XP devision, since I'm a player in that group)
The main reason for characters not being played by other players has to do with bookkeeping: the two characters that mostly get left out are the psion and the bard, because they have a habit of not recording exact stats, abilities used, etc.
Nobody likes to do bookkeeping for another player...

Herzog

hmmm.....I wasn't sure about giving full XP, but it makes sense.

In this case, it was in Midnight, and the PCs were hiding from a patrol of goblin worg-riders and bugbear slavers.

One of the PCs unwisely chose to burst from hiding and attack, and it didn't go so well. Came within an inch of a TPK, and at the end, 3 out of 6 characters were down...one was at -8 and one was at -9.

All of them participated......two of them made it through about 70% of the fight before they went down. One of the ones who went down was the Channeler, so the party's only healer was out of it, and couldn't bring the others back into the fight.

I was thinking half XP, but based on the discussion in this thread, I think I'll award full.

Banshee

If unwise actions made it impossible to get XP, there would be a wisdom-based modifier to XP gains.

PC idiocy is a long and rich tradition in DnD. In the end, only success and failure determine reward.