Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6760547" data-attributes="member: 29398">My primary goal with the xp system I use is to keep advancement at a slow to very slow rate (so the campaign will last longer) while still rewarding characters for what they do.  So far so good, I suppose, in the keep-it-going department: 3 major campaigns thus far of 10, 12 and 7+ years respectively.  As for the rewarding, I could certainly fine-tune it far more than I do but life's too short; in a perfect world I'd go beyond simple participation in a combat or other encounter and fine-tune it to what that participation achieved based on the goals of the character and of the party, while also looking at what the character did both in relation to its established personality and in relation to what it in theory could have reasonably done (or attempted; e.g. a fighter who misses on all 6 swings she takes in a battle won't lose out vs. the fighter who hit on all 6 tries, it's the attempt that counts).  But I ain't got the time during the game to make notes that detailed; so I just keep a list of characters in the party and tick off each time who got in on an encounter, and work it out later.But even without the fine-tuning players still know that if they want to advance they'd better get involved somehow, and to some extent it discourages passengers.That said, I also give out what we call "dungeon bonus", a varying amount of xp per adventure mostly for completion of the mission; the in-game rationale being that these are the xp that would otherwise be earned in little tiny dribs and drabs for doing minor things to keep the party going (finding campsites, keeping watch, tending the wounded, testing items, etc.) that I just can't be bothered to track.  The meta-game rationale is these in a tiny way replace the old xp-for-g.p. in 1e as written.  This dungeon bonus is usually less (sometimes quite a bit less) than a character's already earned just by going through the adventure, but it's something.  Most of the time I just calculate each character's bonus by setting a fixed arbitrary number (let's say 4000 for this purpose) and giving a ratio of that based on the number of days a character was active during the adventure (so if the adventure took 10 days the bonus would be 400 xp per day).If a particular adventure gave out unusually heavy or light amounts of xp I'll use the bonus to compensate a bit.  For example the current group I'm running are in an adventure vs. Giants and are raking in the xp; so I'll tone the bonus down a bit for this one.  Conversely, I've run adventures in the past that gave out very few xp yet the characters were successful in their mission, so the dungeon bonus here was relatively large.  Bonus is smaller if for some reason the mission was a failure; and in one memorable case from years ago there was no bonus given at all: the party never found the dungeon after several weeks tromping around the wilderness looking for it and despite several hammer-sized hints.Lan-"characters tend to do better working as a team than as a bunch of individuals but they need to learn this for themselves; I'm not going to enforce it"-efan</blockquote>

Verification