Roleplaying XP

[Pbartender]

I want to encourage my players to roleplay a little more by giving out roleplaying XP. What is your experience (no pun intended) with RXP?

My experience with RPXP is this:

The players who already role play get a lot of extra XP. Those who are unable or unwilling to role play fall far behind. I have never personally seen RPXP encourage a non-role player to role play more.

That said, in my current game whenever I see a player doing something Amazing™ (and that could be just about anything: good role playing, and ingeneous plan, taking an incredible risk and being lucky enough to succeed, a really good description of an effect or action, etc...), I give them a "personal milestone". That is to say, a bonus milestone for that character alone.

 

[LostSoul]

I have played TSoY, I think it's awesome.

The Keys do more than just reward you for "roleplaying". They allow the DM to say, "Oh, this is what this player wants to do; I'll make sure I put some stuff about that in the game." They also allow for interesting moments when someone buys off a key.

They aren't about "behaving", since what you need to do to get XP is defined right there in the key.

Example: I bought the Key of Glittering Gold in the game. You get XP each time you double your wealth, or something along those lines. (At this point all I had was a loincloth, so each gold coin or piece of pirate clothing would get me some XP.) As the game goes on, I end up with the chance to sail away with a pirate ship and a loyal(-ish) crew.

But there's a basilisk about to turn a bunch of kids into stone, so I decide to give up my quest for worldly goods, buy off the key (remember, I can never have it again), and use the XP for buying off the key to buy another key (something to do with protecting the weak) and to help me save those kids.

You can easily game keys (since buying a key costs 5 XP and buying off a key is 10 XP), but whatever.


I would recommend using minion XP (1/4 minor quest XP) for each Key XP; that way you won't gain two levels in a single session. You should also be able to spend an XP to get a bonus; maybe use XP as action points instead of having APs gained at milestones.

 

[Ughman]

As a proponent of props, my group likes to use poker chips to represent healing surges and action points (white chips for surges, and red for APs). I like the idea of giving out bonus action points as blue chips that don't go away at extended rest (but still follow the 1 AP/fight limit...we don't want to horribly imbalance things.) So when PCs do fantastic RPing (such as interesting steps of character development, great PC/PC interaction, or just something hilarious), you can toss them a blue chip.

Obviously everything depends on your GMing style, and the preferences of your players. I still remain a big proponent of trying new things though. You can ALWAYS improve a game, but only if you're willing to try!

 

[eriktheguy]

The problem with RPXP in 4e is that there are only 2 possibilities:

1, players still progress in level at the same time:
In this case, players see no benefit for role playing because the bonus XP is not sufficient to increase their leveling rate.

2, players progress in level more quickly:
In this case the better role players in the group level up faster than the others. This is not great because the 4e system is not intended for mixed level parties. The balance just isn't there for such a scenario.

My suggestion is to award role-playing with either story type bonuses (players get friends, contacts, reputation etc) or with action point type rewards (I like these things I call 'awesome points', which let the players do something awesome without needing dice).