When to award XP?

[Queen_Dopplepopolis]

Immediately after each encounter. That way we know if we end up levelling before the next fight... Sometimes they occur one right after another... And we spend a few minutes levelling up, for those players who haven't already done so...

Only "a few minutes"? I've never experienced people that could level up their character in a matter of minutes - it's always a very long process filled with questioning and second guessing feats, skills, etc... It takes - in a word - FOREVER.

 

[sniffles]

I had a homebrew game system once upon a time where character advancement was done on-the-spot; it was essentially a percentile system and every time they succeeded or failed a skill roll within a 10 point margin, they got an experience check. To do this, they rolled on the skill in question, and if that roll was a failure, they got +1% to their skill. They also got experience at the end of the session to apply to skills they specifically wanted to improve.

The players all liked this, because they got to watch the characters grow before their eyes, instead of just session-by-session, and because an experience check was like a chance at "free" experience points. It also really enhanced the "you improve at the skills you're actually USING" concept that I was trying to establish. The problem was that it had a tendency to bog down play (the Blade Combat skill got a lot of experience checks, in the middle of combat, for instance), and it also tended to make people mediocre in lots of different things rather than good at any one of them -- skills that had high rolls were statistically much harder to improve with an experience check.

I don't know of any good way to implement that in D&D other than awarding lots of story experience during the game session. "You solved the sphinx's riddle! 100 XP all around." But unless you're going to also let people level-up on the spot, you're just as well served to do it all at the end of each session. Less frequently than that, is not much fun from a player perspective IMO.

-The Gneech

That sounds very much like the way we did XP in RuneQuest, except we didn't do it until the end of each session, or sometimes the beginning of the next session.

As far as XP in D&D, most of the GMs I've played with do it as JimAde described. The players have no idea what our XP is until the GM tells us that we've leveled. We don't level in mid-session or mid-adventure, though. Leveling up always occurs when we're out of the action.

 

[zeo_evil]

I award experience whenever the party rests for at least eight hours. In other words when they camp. I allow them to level up whenever that happens to be with the reasoning being that they have those hours to contemplate their actions and discuss them with one another. Most players and thus characters have an idea of what skills and feats they want so I have them comtemplate, discuss, and practice in the background during camp then level in the morning. I write for an eight hour session each week so I have time to adjust for the increase in levels every other week or so.

EDIT: Sports montage? Hahaha!