Cry Foul or Fair?

[Kastil]

Currently I am down to one game a week. I love the game and I play my favorite character (3E/3.5E wise). However, I was a little shocked to find out another player's XPs are very near perhaps more than mine. Why am I upset? Let me count the ways.........

I am an active roleplayer at all times during the game. I try my damnest to pay attention ((I've gotten very good at sprinting to the bathroom)) and interact with other players because the new D&D isn't all about killing things to gain experience not to mention talking is a free action.

I post weekly on our gaming board so does my husband. He's ahead of the game on xps by a mere 400 but that is justified. I missed a session where those xps were earned by him and another party member (not the one in question). Posting gives you experience, this person has not posted once.

I do not feel those who post should be 'held back' because others do not take the opportunity to post about anything. That would be like saying 'Well Bob missed the combat and really will fall behind so I'm giving him XPs even though he didn't participate one bit in it.'

The player in question has come, in IMO, better at interacting than when I originally joined this merry bunch of players but on the other hand, has more footfalls to take. We still wait too long for dice rolls etc from this person. It slows the game down and combat can be slow to begin with. It seems unless my character is throwing sexual innuendos or knowing grins their way, they are a mere walking puppet on a stick.

The DM is a great person but sometimes a softie in the 'what is fair' department. Perhaps I just view DMing different. After all, in the game I DM (currently on hiatus) the players are 6-8 in level because some post and some don't. I don't look for brilliant New York Best Selling Author work, just a good sense of what their character is feeling etc and of course the hook every DM wants to make the game players feel like part of the show.

Needless to say because of bad judgement and bad rolls the party stands thusly after tonight's game. Two of them had fear put into them and ran like heck. The wizard went down in one shot from this fire hurling BBG, the paladin (the player in question) stood there getting pounded by the fireballs and instead of running up to swing some major butt kicking on this gnome-looking thing, they decide to use their bow (after about 20+ dmg was inflicted). The paladin is now down and bleeding to death leaving yours truly left to finish this thing who has now turned into an ogre. Can you say this rogue is screwed? I thought you could.

Now I wait on a fragile fence as the creature wants to play 'your money or your life'. Isn't that my line? Doesn't look like Diplomacy is getting me squat either but we'll see next session.

How do you play it out there? Is fair to toss crumbs to a player who's back is turned the wrong way most of the time over those who are fully aware of their surroundings?

 

[Brekke]

No it is not. We have something going on in our game like this. We get XPs for journals 50 for each level you are. I have not missed a game and have always written journals. Our DM does not want people to fall behind so they XP when they don't show they change characters or die they don't lose XP. And one player is never far behind I think we all know he cheats on his XP a little.

I have a little problem with this too. We practice don't kill the character if the player is absent. So they get the same XP as those of us who took the risks.

I don't know what can be done about this without setting wolf into the hens.

 

[Crothian]

Personally I'd confront the DM. If these extras are designed to give more XP, but then he doesn't for whatever reason do it; he's in the wrong.

 

[BSF]

I would feel a bit chapped too. But, you might want to step back and reassess the situation. Are you sure you have all the facts? Make sure the player in question isn't emailing some one-on-one stuff with the DM that might explain the EXP increases. Maybe there is more going on than you know about.

 

[Dreeble]

Heya:

I agree with Crothian. If there are supposed to be minor rewards for going above and beyond (posting backstory and such to a messageboard in between game sessions I assume), but the rewards are nullified due to softheartedness on the part of the DM, then it's time to communicate this to the DM. Let him or her know, "If the rewards, albeit small, get distributed regardless of contribution, then I ain't gonna do 'em no more either, and save myself the effort."

Take care,
Dreeble

 

[Zentermi]

Let me preface my comments with the phrase "I have walked in your shoes"

Possibly you are right. But take a few things into consideration.

You, seem to be, judging by language skills, and your comfort with message boards, a gregarious, involved play type. You strike me as an aggressive problem solver(I may be reading too much into this).

The player in question: is he generally withdrawn? Is he quiet because he feels inadequate due to inferior language skills? Poor math ability? Waiting for his chance to shine? Impossible to say from what you wrote(not a snipe).

You say his playing ability has improved since you and hubby arrived in group. He is growing as a character and as a player(you said so), is that not worth a not so wide an XP gap between him and the other players?

XP is not the only measure of play compensation. Do you generally recieve prime items(first pick or preference, when it comes to divying time, due to your reasoning ability)? Are you having a good time? One of the great things about D&D is the fact that much of the time, the payoff is what you give yourself.

Are you playing to "win" D&D? Otherwise, doesn't seem to me that it should matter so much.

Perhaps, your problem(if it can be called that) is not so much with the other player... as it is with the DM. Perhaps your real gripe, is that you feel you are recieving a disproportionate XP reward(consistent with your involvement) when compared to the apparent involvement of the other player.

Could be yer entirely justified. I totally know what it feels like when I've taken the initiative all module long.... and I clock in at a measly 50XP's more than the slug. Just supplying some food fer thought.

Hell, maybe I read the whole thing wrong, and maybe it was the DM you were after all along.

risk/effort = rewards... least that's how it should be.

But D&D, like life.... isn't always fair. Look at the Bard.

Let me finish by saying: I'm not a touchy-feely kind of guy. If yer char was always the one who failed to pull his weight due to lack of effort or pure stupidty, I'm not going to double back to scoop you up if yer the one who breaks an ankle fleeing from the dragon.
Lastly. Anything that sounded like criticism actually wasn't. Was a wholly good natured post. Folks can get REAL sensitive on this board.

 

[Kastil]

The player in question: is he generally withdrawn? Is he quiet because he feels inadequate due to inferior language skills? Poor math ability? Waiting for his chance to shine? Impossible to say from what you wrote(not a snipe).

Very withdrawn IMO. Of course most of us think they used to game at work becaue they left the room and sign off frequently in the past. This person is not a moron but I do think they aren't a flambouyant player as I am. I sink a lot into backgrounds etc in all my characters. It's part of the flavor.

You say his playing ability has improved since you and hubby arrived in group. He is growing as a character and as a player(you said so), is that not worth a not so wide an XP gap between him and the other players?[/B]

No. This player has been in the group longer than I. In fact, when my husband saw how fast my other gamme I used to be in went, he said I should think about joining his to see if I could 'speed it up'. This meant going to my parents and using their computer until we got set up at home with extra phone lines etc.

Perhaps, your problem(if it can be called that) is not so much with the other player... as it is with the DM. Perhaps your real gripe, is that you feel you are recieving a disproportionate XP reward(consistent with your involvement) when compared to the apparent involvement of the other player.
[/B]

I've known this DM for a long time. They have their faults and I really hate to complain because getting XPS is like pulling teeth. I think the DM dosesn't like conflict between players which is understandable but I take pride in my work and would like to be compensated so.

 

[Zentermi]

I'm sorry, I went by this,"quote: The player in question has come, in IMO, better at interacting than when I originally joined this merry bunch of players but on the other hand, has more footfalls to take."end quote

I may have over-emphasized it. "He hasn't grown much, but has improved..." would be more correct?

I had some other points, but they must be non-applicable, since they weren't mentioned.

Still tho, ultimately, the problem is with the DM. Player X has no business seeing your char sheet and the DM is the one handing out XPs. Explain your dissatisfaction with the XP rewards, and why. More than likely, the other guy will never notice if the more active players recieve their XP bonus 'in the email' so to speak. If he does, it's none of his business anyway.

That's just my opinion. Your mileage may vary.

 

[apocalypstick]

Foul. Oh, yeah... definitely foul.

The DM that I play under on Sundays (today!) does this. We have a fairly large group (6 players), and in three months I believe there's been 1 session in which everyone showed up. I'm always there, as are two others... but the fair-weather characters are as "leveled" as the rest of us are.

You see, if you don't show the DM ghosts your character - but you never die, you don't use up any of your goodies, and your character still gets full XP for the session.

I think this stinks. Last week my character died in a big fight - yea, I probably could have escapred, but I didn't - that's not the point. The character of the fellow who wasn't there last week didn't go into the dungeon with us, didn't die, didn't even risk death, and yet he still gets a share of the XP.

"Because I don't want anyone falling behind," says the DM, to which I say... meh! M - E - H: "meh."

Well, I'm starting a new character today, and hopefully it plays well, but it burns me that, apparently, your reward is greater for not showing than showing - you get most of the bennies (full XP, no treasure) with none of the risk.

Or something like that. Grumble grumble.

 

[Demmero]

I am the evil/softie/reviled (?) DM of Kastil's game. I'm going to post some of my side of the story, and then let the membership weigh in with their opinions. For being a softie, I have unusually thick skin (+7 natural bonus to AC), so feel free to rip into me if you must.

First, Kastil's gripes and points are all valid, and second, the player in question did not do anything special behind the scenes to earn extra XPs (but see below).

My side of the story:

Yes, I'm a softie. Guilty as charged.
Yes, I try to avoid player vs. player arguments/disputes/duels.
Yes, I suck at giving out XPs regularly (but I'm slightly better than in past campaigns).
Yes, Kastil and her husband deserve to be out in front in the "XP Race," and I sort of went out of my way to give the other players a chance to catch up.
Here are my reasons why:

#1. The previous campaign. Kastil and her husband were the only ones who posted to that game's message board, and mainly as a result of those bonus XPs (and some good RPing), they led the XP parade. Not a bad thing, in and of itself, but the two other players with solid attendance records feel uncomfortable posting--whether that's due to lack of time, lack of creativity, lack of confidence, I'm not entirely sure--and they fell behind in XPs. At times, it feels like I'm running my D&D campaigns for Kastil and her husband, with the others merely along for the ride.

More about the previous campaign: I put in a decent amount of work into that baby, and it was very serious in nature (for the most part, but I'm a goofball at heart and occasional can't resist the impulse to get a bit goofy). Many of the players, however, were not taking it as seriously as myself (weird characters, goofy names, lots of mid-game joking/chattering/shaky attentiveness), and for a short while I was so frustrated that I considered ending the game. The players weren't playing my game the way I'd intended it to be played! But I genuinely like my players as human beings, and enjoyed the sense of camaraderie that had developed in the group...so I swallowed my pride and own wishes and came to an understanding with myself that the players were more important to me than the game itself. From that point on, the game's been more of a social get-together to me than a hard-core D&D game. I am now among the worst of the in-game jokers.

#2. The new campaign. We started anew at 1st-level. Before we started, I warned the players that this campaign would be more serious and deadly than past campaigns. I have a preference for low-level games, and had noticed that I'd been using the same monsters over and over again (goblins, slavers, and bugbears come to mind), so I wanted to branch out a bit this time.

Well, when it came to leveling up to 2nd-level time, some of the party members had enough XPs to level, others were a bit short. At this point, I believe the 6-person party had 3 2nd-levelers, 3 1sts. Awkward arrangement for picking their next set of foes...but I stuck with the general storyline I'd prepared and had them walk into a veritable grove of twig blights (18 of 'em; I still get EL rants from the players to this day! . I figured this was one of those "easy if handled properly" encounters hinted at in the DMG; the things only did 1-2 hp dmg with a hit and were slow-moving with no intention of pursuing the party out of their grove.

Well, the party missed their Spot checks, the twiggies won the Init, the party was quickly surrounded. I still figured the party wasn't in too much danger; once they killed a couple of the twiggies (or decided to risk an AoO or two to break the twiggies' "ring of death," they'd be OK. Unfortunately, bad party dice rolling ensued, and no one though about breaking loose from the twiggies until two characters were down (both 1st-levelers, IIRC) and several others were very low on hps. Mr. Softie here didn't go for the TPK, blamed himself for the high EL of the encounter, and moved on.

Now we come to the point where characters are ready to level to 3rd...but only two of them have made it: Kastil and her husband. The others were apx. 500 XPs behind Kastil, even two of the regulars who'd shown up just as faithfully, week after week. My mind screamed "That's like 20% less than Kastil and Thazar (her hubby's character)! How can that be??!!" Kas and Thaz's players were scheduled to go on vacation the following week, so I decided (rightly or wrongly--you be the judge!) to run a combat-intensive session for the other players that week so they'd catch up, and hopefully we'd avoid any potential mixed-level near TPKs like the twig blight incident.

Three of the 4 other players showed, and they wandered to a ruined town that I'd sketched out vaguely for a future adventure. The two monsters I'd decided long in advance that were present in the ruins were a yellow musk creeper and its zombie minions and a pair of spriggans.

They got the yellow musk zombies...a few at a time. The zombies came at the party at the rate of about 1 per round, and the group was fighting from between 1-4 of the things at any given time. The plant had originally been scheduled to have 9 zombie servants, but Mr. Softie here was gonna cut them off whenever the 3 heroes seemed to be in danger of annihilation. Well, it was a tough fight, and one hero went into negative hps for a while, but they handled all 9 of the plant zombies (1,350 total XPs; over 400 each!). Two more of the players leveled, and those two who didn't had missed several sessions, so even Mr. Softie here had no regrets about where the game and the PC party stood. All was right in the world with me; I knew that Kastil and her husband would soon pull back into the XP lead and the party seemed well-prepared to face the mother plant (a CR 4 baddie for a party with 4 3rd-levelers and 2 2nd-levelers). All the zombies had come from the ruins' lone stone building, one covered with vines, leaves and pretty flowers (the YM creeper itself), so they probably should have known the plant was there and should've taken it out easily, probably from a safe distance.

Well...one dead PC, one zombified PC, and one brain-damaged one (Kastil, the character, not the player later.... I was left wonder what went wrong. More EL grumbling from the players. The dead PC was one of the 2nd-level PCs, and his player has since decided to take a break from the game. I shudder to think what might have happened had I not run the combat- and XP-intensive game against the YM zombies and two more of the PCs were merely 2nd-level for that encounter...a TPK would've been a real possibility. One of the first things I did after that session was to cut back on the number of spriggans lurking elsewhere in the ruins from two to one. One CR 3 beastie, a fair foe for a party now consisting of 4 3rd-level PCs and one 2nd-leveler.

Well...Thazar's still alive because he self-stabilized at -6 hps. The paladin (who ate 5-6 firebombs courtesy of the spriggan's produce flame ability is at -8 and counting. The 2nd-leveler and the other player both succumbed to the spriggan's scare power and took off running in opposite direction (almost without doing anything to awaken the others!!!). So now a bloody Kastil faces a bloody and now enlarged spriggan bandit, who is demanding the party's treasure in return for sparing their lives. And of all the dirty tricks to pull, Kastil goes for a Diplomacy check to try to wheedle the spriggan into not demanding their hard-earned (and, admittedly, stingily distributed) treasure. (That's another thread in itself; besides being late and stingy with the XPs, I was really stingy with treasure and magic items in the last campaign. I decided in advance--and told the players--that I'd be using the treasure tables in the DMG for the new campaign and randomly-determining treasure hordes; and the dice have not been kind to the party thusfar).

Anyhow, Kastil knows darn well I don't know the rules for making a Diplomacy check...who ever heard of such a thing??!!
But I know Kastil's player loves her character and made him a non-traditional rogue in some skill choices especially (there's another thread on these boards from a month or so back where Kas complains about being yelled at by other players for not finding a couple of pit traps that swallowed up the group, and the DM (me!) gets blasted by some other posters for not "thinking outside the box" and tailoring his adventures to his adventurers' skills and other abilities), so I'm going to review them this week before next Saturday's game.

Maybe a successful Diplomacy check can make a nasty, evil spriggan brigand (whose only reason for lairing in the ruins is to rob passerbys in the region) walk away from his prize even though he's pretty much routed his opposition. My inclination is that it probably would not, but I'm gonna do the right thing and check the official rules for that blasted skill of Kastil's!

Oh, and Mr. Softie will probably also try to find a way to get the two scared-off characters back into the encounter as soon as possible. The excuse I'm considering is that those two characters wouldn't be able to flee to the best of their ability in the darkness outside the camp, so they either slowed their pace or decided to go to ground nearby and hide from the scary spriggan instead.

So that's my long, drawn-out side of the story and why I did what I did. Feel free to praise me or rip me to pieces (I'm expecting a little bit of both). A big part of the problem stems from the fact that not only are the characters of Kastil and Thazar likely to leave the others in the dust in the XP race, but their players are the ones who are the most serious, most dedicated, most prepared, most thinking of the group. And yeah, they are being penalized a bit for that, which isn't fair. But the other choices I see are even less appealing: 1) drop the other less intense/active players and find some new, more hard-core replacements (which to me is not even a choice at this point; all the players I now consider to be friends, even though my campaign is of the online variety and I've only met 3 of them IRL); 2) Let Kastil and Thazar race way ahead of the others and risk more of the twig blight/yellow musk creeper "split level party" incidents; 3) Drop D&D altogether and find a new hobby like digital photography (not very likely!).