Are Red Shirts given experience?

[RedShirtNo5]

Experience?

You have any idea how many times I've saved Kirk's life by taking a phaser hit? I think I deserve some experience for that.

 

[reapersaurus]

I use this all the time.
The PCs are helping some village with some problem, then somenoe asks if any of the villagers can help out. At that point someone else in the party says something along the lines of, "And let them take our experience? Screw that we can handle it."

I've never understood this kind of meta-gaming.

Thanks for the replies - especially Caliban.

Addendum: My PC actually did enter the fight 1 round before the evil guy went down.
He chose not to shoot a crossbow into melee his first round, and moved around to get a better shot.
Before his initiative came up the last round, the evil guy went down.

You're saying he should get some experience? hmmmm.....

 

[Dr. Zoom]

You're saying he should get some experience? hmmmm.....

Sure.

In the same way that you and your group share the XP award when the rogue single handedly finds and disables a trap.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Meta-gaming with respect to xp is ridiculous. Foolishness should not be rewarded.

The best answer is to set experience based on accomplishing significant story goals and ignore minor NPC tagalongs altogether. If you can convince an NPC to help you out, that is good play and should not affect your end xp at all. Don't punish players for good play.

 

[reapersaurus]

Good point, RC.

Ironically, in the very next scene of that adventure, we went off to defend the town against an advancing arm of an invading force.

The meta-gaming approach would be for us travelling adventurers to defend the town, without any town backup.
In fact, we'd try to prevent the 6 guards that I got to join us to even show up!
God forbid that the townspeople defend their own town, you know.... might cut into the almighty XP we adventurers are looking for above all else.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

God forbid that the townspeople defend their own town, you know.... might cut into the almighty XP we adventurers are looking for above all else.

The Seven Samurai? Wimps! Real Heroes would defend the entire town unassisted while the peasants cheered them on.



Another reason to base xp on story accomplishments is it slices a lot of other stupidity out of the equation.

Need to find the Ogress' Hut in the Dark Forest? You can hope you have above average luck with your wilderness and direction finding skills, you can convince the old fur trapper to guide you there quickly, or you can stumble around for two days and get jumped by spiders and giant carnivorous flying squirrels along the way.

Which method should give you more xp? IMHO the Dark Forest is a story obstacle which should have a set xp reward. Not having the skills or foresight to navigate around the dangers should not give you bonus xp, just like falling into a pit trap does not give you more experience than successfully detecting and avoiding it.

Same story with defending the town. The goal is to defend the innocent townsfolk, not rack up kills. How many townsfolk and enemy are killed might be factors in the DM's estimation of your success, but 6 able-bodied farmers with spears shouldn't matter much either way.

 

[ATO_DM]

I've never used experience by giving it to people only because they participate in the combat. I assign an amount of experience to each character, each session that is dependant on the overall difficulty of the adventure. I've always found that this makes the game more versatile, by giving people the option of finding ways to get around situations without necessarily fighting.

 

[Gromm]

I've never understood this kind of meta-gaming.

Personally I could care less. Theres really nothing all that heroic about asking help from every village you come to, that theres a game reason not to only helps reinforce being heroic.

I've played other games where the PCs spent half the game trying to get 2 or 3 red shirts out of the town so they could get killed by whatever thing was waiting for them and save the party resources. Its not like the PCs always turn away help, but when it comes to low level NPC nobodies they almost always do. They aren't willing to share XP with guys who wont be doing anything anyway. If the badass leader of the watch wants to help, thats cool since he'll pull his weight. If 4 of his lvl 1 warrior buddies want to help fight the dragon, odds are the PCs aren't going for it.

 

[Malin Genie]

As far as I can tell, the rules would give XP for adventurers defeating enemies they blundered into by getting lost, but no XP for not getting lost in the first place.

I prefer the Living Force system - set XP for acheiving goal (with partial XP for partial success,) no matter how many or few enemies/traps/etc were run into or avoided by PC cleverness. The amount can be determined using CRs of 'likely' encounters as a guide.

 

[Moon_Goddess]

I've had too many experiences of PCs trying to round up the help of every peasent in town to face some minor threat. Not Heroic in the least. Making them split the Xps is a good way to enforce heroics. Not realistic, no, but DND isn't about Realism, it's about heroic adventure, and if they don't wanna play heros you need some metagame tool to play to their greed to beat hero into there head.

I also give away bonus XPs for heroic acts and acts fitting a "good" alignment.