Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Demonspell" data-source="post: 6756004" data-attributes="member: 6792769">Again, to each his own, and every party is different. At one time, I was exactly like you, I gave party experience and divided it evenly amongst everyone. Then one player ruined it, he would show up, and he would do a little roleplaying, but he was never very active. He usually sat back and allowed everyone else in the party to handle combat. It something came up that needed his special skills he would step in, but otherwise he stayed in the shadows.As the other players put it, he simply followed them around and “stole” their experience. At that point I decided that I would REWARD my players not on their existence in the game, but on their contribution to the story. Once he realized he no longer received experience for showing up, he became more active, and everyone was happy. In my opinion, experience should ALWAYS be used as a carrot not a stick. If you are announcing their experience rewards publicly you are hitting them over the head with it and telling everyone who is contributing less. That is a stick. I do not do that. I communicate constantly with all of my players and all advancement communication is kept confidential. I won’t even talk to them about how they want to advance their character in front of the other players. They can approach me afterward if they have questions, but again I insist that no one else is involved. Each player advances their character the way they want to, preferably without the input from other players. My ONLY exception to that is new players; in that case asking advice is encouraged, and I usually solicit advice from the party when the player asks me questions. I am sure you have never had a player that simply mooched off the party for advancement. Once you do the rest of the players will do one of three things:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Quit due to the unfairness of your system</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Force the other player to quit</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Insist on a change to the system</li> </ul>When this happened to me, I had several players threaten to quit unless I changed the system and I did. It had a positive effect on the group and now everyone contributes. The contribution varies on a weekly basis, but overall it ends up being fairly even. I notice that you ignored my statement regarding my experience in a contribution based experience system. My players, except for those that have lost level due to loss of experience due to any number of reasons, are all fairly close in experience. This happens because even though John doesn’t contribute much this week, next week he contributes in a big way. Same thing happens with Sally, and Jack as well. Even Michael, who tended to mooch off the party under the even experience system still has his good days and his bad days and still manages to keep up with everyone else. This happens because I REWARD them according to how they help the party (and the story) advance.I think you are confused about how Contribution based experience really works. Except for those players that have been hit with negative level effects, died (and created new characters or were brought back in some way) the PCs in my group manage to level up fairly close together. I think currently the biggest gap in experience among characters that have been with the party since the beginning is about 300 xp, which means they usually level within a session or two of each other.</blockquote>

Verification