Developing a new Campaign Style---Help!
- Thread starter d20Dwarf
- Start date
In D&D, experience is tied to a character. You take a character through a challenge, if "he" succeeds, that character gets experience. This does not need to be true, and it's actually kind of counterintuitive. Experience and advancement are metagame things, they reward the player, not the character. Characters get in-game rewards like status and wealth and nifty loot. 
In TSR's old game system, Amazing Engine, experience points were awarded to the player, who could distribute them for advancement among his pool of characters, whether those characters were in the same universe or not (completing a scenario in Bug Hunt could give you experience you might use on a character for a Once and Future King game). This was a blatent attempt by TSR to cross-promote these games, so people would "Gotta collect them all!", but it was also a neat idea, especially for multi-character play.
The easiest way to do this would be to say that for your game, players have two characters, each of which has the same experience as the other. That way they're interchangable, the players can swap them in and out as necessary without worrying that one is falling behind. Keep track of the xp points by player, not character. They reward the player for showing up and playing well.
In TSR's old game system, Amazing Engine, experience points were awarded to the player, who could distribute them for advancement among his pool of characters, whether those characters were in the same universe or not (completing a scenario in Bug Hunt could give you experience you might use on a character for a Once and Future King game). This was a blatent attempt by TSR to cross-promote these games, so people would "Gotta collect them all!", but it was also a neat idea, especially for multi-character play.
The easiest way to do this would be to say that for your game, players have two characters, each of which has the same experience as the other. That way they're interchangable, the players can swap them in and out as necessary without worrying that one is falling behind. Keep track of the xp points by player, not character. They reward the player for showing up and playing well.
Storminator
First Post
d20Dwarf said:
I think that's exactly what you'll get if you do it the way you first said. What if half the party picks their primary PC as the dungeon crawler, and the other half picks the city game? Then half your PCs won't be able to carry their weight in the dungeon, and the other half won't have any appreciable effect in the city. And then, since the secondary characters advance slower, they'll never catch up.
Letting the players assign XP as they wish, and starting the PCs at the same level, will keep things a lot more even. You could even assign XP penalties if the 2 PCs get too disparate in level, just like it was a multiclass penalty!
PS
