Do you or have you ever penalized characters in terms of XP?

[S'mon]

So if you want to put a little morality back into the game, award bonus XP for not killing people, award bonus XP for taking the bad guys to jail, award bonus XP for working in a heroic, moral fashion.

Yup. Of course in a Machiavellian campaign you could give XP for being clever and ruthless, in an Evil campaign you could give XP for being Evil in accordance to your campaign's genre norms - you don't sacrifice the princess to the Dark Gods in a Disney-themed campaign, but you might give her a poisoned apple that sends her to sleep for a hundred years.

 

[vagabundo]

If you are training animals, you get a much better response by giving positive reinforcement to the behaviour you want, rather than negative reinforcement to the behaviour you don't want.

I agree. Give people the freedom to act in a consequence free environment and their baser survival instincts will come to the fore; tribalism (you are not in the group and so must die), kill or be killed, genocide (every orc MUST die!) and of course cannibalism (come on folks we've all seen it).

Players are animals of the lowest order...

 

[S'mon]

I give XP for in-session PC & party achievement - obviously an absent PC earns no XP. If the player is absent but the PC is present, and the player left their PC sheet to be played by another player, the PC earns XP normally.

With 3e & 4e I cap mininum PC level at 2 below the highest PC level, so that players who only play occasionally still have a viable PC.

 

[IronWolf]

I have not doled out negative XP for anything. Reduced XP for a particular objective, sure, but not negative. And these days XP has become such an abstract thing that we barely track it and go more by feel or pacing of what we are playing than anything else.

As for the OP, I would be much more tempted to have in game consequences for random NPC killing if you felt you needed to get things back on track. A good chance someone would take notice and perhaps turn out to be the BBEG to make things hard for the PCs if people are getting killed with no good reason or full understanding of just who they are taking out.

 

[Umbran]

Depends on what you call a "penalty". Is failure to get the maximum possible XP necessarily a penalty? I give XP (or whatever the game's equivalent is) for overcoming challenges, advancing plot, and for rich role playing. If you sit boringly in a tavern, you're not overcoming or advancing, so you're missing out on XP, but I don't call that "penalizing", I just consider it, "You haven't earned it yet."

I generally give XP not for killing a foe, but for defeating them. If they are beaten and captured, you won the fight as surely as if they were dead, so you are getting the XP anyway.

Killing them, "so they don't come after you," is downright silly from a metagame standpoint. The game's not the real world - there's going to be conflict as long as we play. Killing a guy now does not mean you'll have fewer foes later!

 

[IronWolf]

Killing a guy now does not mean you'll have fewer foes later!

Exactly! In fact in some campaigns it may mean you have more foes and possibly even more powerful foes!

 

[Kraydak]

...
Killing them, "so they don't come after you," is downright silly from a metagame standpoint. The game's not the real world - there's going to be conflict as long as we play. Killing a guy now does not mean you'll have fewer foes later!

GMs looooove their "so cool" reoccurring bad guys. Their "so cool" reoccurring bad guys go waaaay out of their way to screw with PCs in annoying fashion. Their "so cool" NPCs tend to cheat because, well, they are "so cool". GMs jump on any NPC that lives as a "so cool reoccurring bad guy". From the point of view of the players, these NPCs rarely actually rise above the interest level of "pond scum" expect in that the annoyance from the GM cheating to keep them around.

The best defense is to kill every even vaguely hostile NPC dead.

(Above post only marginally tongue in cheek)

 

[clip]

Never given out penalties, but if DL comes out for 4e, I'll make anyone who wants to play a Kender start on -500.

 

[billd91]

I don't dock XPs that have already been given, I don't recall any specific instance in which I have (though I may have in my earlier DMing days). I will not award full marks, though, for some things that blatantly transgress the type of campaign we're running. But for the PF game I'm running, I'm not even giving out XPs, I'm just having them level up from time to time, so even that's a moot point.

That said, the original situation does make me think the issue of keeping an enemy down is a bit more complex. If the DM has a history, in the campaign, of using BBEGs to plague the PCs again (even raising them), then the DM has to expect that the PCs will learn from their "mistakes" of leaving enemies behind who can return. In one campaign where I was a player, the DM did this more than once so we started making sure that enemies couldn't be easily raised if we managed to kill them. Disintegration or feeding the bodies to the sharks were a couple of the things we did to raise the bar on what it would take for those villains to come back.

 

[IronWolf]

GMs looooove their "so cool" reoccurring bad guys. Their "so cool" reoccurring bad guys go waaaay out of their way to screw with PCs in annoying fashion. Their "so cool" NPCs tend to cheat because, well, they are "so cool". GMs jump on any NPC that lives as a "so cool reoccurring bad guy". From the point of view of the players, these NPCs rarely actually rise above the interest level of "pond scum" expect in that the annoyance from the GM cheating to keep them around.

The best defense is to kill every even vaguely hostile NPC dead.

That said, the original situation does make me think the issue of keeping an enemy down is a bit more complex. If the DM has a history, in the campaign, of using BBEGs to plague the PCs again (even raising them), then the DM has to expect that the PCs will learn from their "mistakes" of leaving enemies behind who can return. In one campaign where I was a player, the DM did this more than once so we started making sure that enemies couldn't be easily raised if we managed to kill them. Disintegration or feeding the bodies to the sharks were a couple of the things we did to raise the bar on what it would take for those villains to come back.

Both good points. If the GM is haunting players with BBEG's that tend to bend the realms of possible even within a fantasy world then the GM has likely brought this swathe of destruction the PCs leave behind upon themselves.

So if the PCs are killing dead everything in their path it very well might be a good time for a brief talk about the game and seeing why they feel the need to do that. If the response is that the GM is going to make them pay for leaving anyone alive by some means then the solution may be the compromise between the GM not making every little NPC left alive come back to pester the PCs and the players giving a shot at trusting the GM to do so.

This of course may not work for every group, but I suspect it might for the groups where the GM is questioning why the players kill everyone in sight.