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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 5358463" data-attributes="member: 1210">I am currently running 4e, so here we go...<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> Give less treasure than normal for a while. It should even out before too long. And I'm not sure how they did this, but take measures to ensure that it isn't easy to replicate- whoever they got that money from certainly doesn't want to lose any more! In the meantime, let them enjoy being rich. Residuum or ritual components. (These have the added benefit of encouraging more ritual use.) Deeds to property. Inclusion in a will (imagine an 80-year-old man asking the pcs to kill some monster, and as a reward, he'll put them in his will so that they'll be rewarded at some nebulous time in the future). Fancy clothes. Valuable books. Teleport circle coordinates. Exotic pets. A statue or monument in the pcs' honor. That's how I run them too, but I don't really have a problem with taking 10 in stress-free situations. Oh HELL no. When we stop for the night, we keep track of expended powers, hit points and healing surges, etc. It's up to the pcs to manage their resources. If you do this, you'll never have the glory of a 13-encounter day. For that matter, it's quite possible that the pcs might not be able to retreat and rest in peace (har har) if they don't finish the dungeon off. Oh yes! This is a matter of taste, but to me, tracking things like rations and arrows is very important- those are limited resources and replenishing them takes time and money, possibly giving my bad guys time to construct traps or recruit new monsters to replace some of their dead. I am not presently using roleplaying xp in any systemized way. The DMG2 suggests a reward equal to a single monster of the party's level for about 15 minutes of good roleplaying, but I think that's excessive. In 4e, I award roleplaying xp pretty much like quest xp. Also, I'll do a lot of impromptu skill challenges and the like. To top it off, when the pcs are just roleplaying with no challenge to overcome, I'll award a few extras once in a while. Really, though, imho 4e advancement is fast enough already. 3e was too, but I cut monster xp in half to accommodate my roleplaying xp system, which went like this: There were four categories that I awarded xp in: class, race, alignment and personal. If you could make a reasonable case that you roleplayed a given category, it was worth (25 x the level of the highest level pc in the party) xp, so if you got all four, you would earn 100 xp/level. The only way that this worked is because I was extremely liberal in awarding these xp. There were times when a pc wouldn't receive all four awards, but they were usually in extremely combat-heavy sessions of if the player was only there for an hour or something. But for instance, say you were playing a LG human paladin and the party was in your home town. You could call going and praying at the church for class, visiting your home town for personal, spending some time helping clean up the streets for alignment and spreading the tale of your adventures around town as race. That said, there were a couple of restrictions. You couldn't call the same thing for more than one category (our paladin above couldn't call cleaning the streets as both alignment and personal, for instance), and you couldn't call something that amounted to simply using your abilities (for instance, a cleric couldn't call "I cast all my spells as healing" for class). A variation that I really liked replaced these four categories with player-determined traits. Each pc had a list of personality traits. Instead of the four categories above, a pc could earn xp for up to 10 traits at a rate of 10 xp/level per trait. These traits included things like "speaks with a lisp", "hates spiders", "likes to wear blue", "tries to appear mysterious", etc. A further variation we introduced to that almost immediately was the idea that a starting pc would have fewer traits, but each session the player could add one until the pc had 10 or even more- but you could only earn the xp for 10 categories. So eventually you might have 12 or 13 to choose from. I found that even low-roleplay players enjoyed this system and it really encouraged them to roleplay more. Again, interpreting the system very liberally, most pcs hit 7-10 of their categories most sessions. </li> </ol>I try to run monsters like I think they would behave. Goblins and kobolds are certainly prone to retreat, while orcs and gnolls are wilder and more prone to fight to the death. When in doubt, I'll roll 1d20 to get a rough idea of how strong the creature's morale is holding- if I roll a 1, it probably breaks or surrenders, while if I roll a 20, it probably keeps up the fight to the bitter end.If the pcs retreat and the monsters are in good shape, they probably pursue. If the pcs surrender, the monsters might ransom, sacrifice, enslave, sell, force a favor from or even marry them into the clan, depending on the circumstances.</blockquote>

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