Downtime Based XP?

[Nightfall]

Nah, I think governmental offices are more fun as a comparison joke.

Getting back on track, I do want to add I think using story/ad-hoc XP is probably the best way to determine it. That and maybe consider any plans/goals that these characters might have reached that didn't involve heavy combat or roleplaying.

 

[evileeyore]

What one of my GM's liked to use was this formula: level in experience per day.

Thus a 5th level whathaveyou spending 30 days gains 150 xp as long as he was doing something. Not just sitting in a tavern drinking his life away, but doing a job, whatever that might be.

This has happened in our games where the Enchanters, Clerics, and Alchemists decide to sit down and create magical items/potions/brews/scrolls/etc, and the rest of us twiddle our thumbs. Since us thumb twiddlers ussually had jobs to fall back on as time wasting devices we all (including the ench/cleric/alch) could gain some money and exp. It also proppelled some characters into getting jobs and thus weaving themselves into the local populace (more roleplay, less dungeon crawl yeah!).

As for job hazards well I don't remember how he handled that.... (I play a Courtier style Sorc/Clr/Cour/MysTh, so my job is riff with only social dangers generally)

 

[Bloodsparrow]

Any ideas or resources?

In my group we have revolving DMs. When a person is DM'ing they're character is removed from action and considered to be off elsewhere doing other things. When the person's time DM'ing is up, the PC is reintroduced with the average experience gained during their players reign as Screen Monkey.

If a player brings in a brand new character (for whatever reason), the new character comes in with 66% of the XP of the Highest Level Party Member.

So far, this has worked well for us.

I should think that the 66% rule would work well for characters of players that have been away for an extended period of time. This way, the characters are not so far behind that they can't catch up, but the people who have been playing the whole time don't feel like all their work was for nothing.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

Remember that on page 58 of the 3.5 PHB and on page 145 of the 3.0 PHB it says that characters are assumed to spend a fair amount of time training and studying. It even goes on to say that if they don't train and study they will lose XP. It implies that adventuring alone is not enough to go up a level. Characters apparently must spend time "practicing" so they may "consolidate what they learn on adventures."

I don't have a system for assigning XP for practice and study, but I also think there is nothing wrong with being generous in that regard. The only time I wouldn't award XP for downtime is if the PC spent that time doing something other than training and studying. If they spend their time drunk and laying around, or captured and forced to work in a mine 20 hours a day, they will gradually lose XP for not training.

 

[Buttercup]

I like to award player initiative and creativity, so I would ask them to tell me what the character had been up to. The more interesting the story, the more XP I would award.

However, I really like the idea of awarding some base level per day that Dogbrain mentioned. I played with it a bit, and I think it isn't reasonable to award experience to a character before they reach adulthood. So taking a human expert as an example, you would award a daily base XP amount for 45 years to get that expert to age 60. For my campaign, I think I would want Joe Nobody the cobbler to be a level 4 expert by the time he reached the venerable age of 60. That works out to not quite .4 xp per day.

So using that method, even if the player didn't have a very interesting account of what his character had been up to, he would earn .4 xp per day, unless he spent the whole time with his head in an ale barrel.

 

[nopantsyet]

I haven't dealt with any long-term absence, but for short absences, I allow my players to conduct actions by email. The restrictions are that they cannot utilize more in-game time than the session spans, and all actions must be resolved before the next session. I even have an online dice-roller that uses a true random number generator and emails me the results, so I'll sometimes require them to make rolls to adjudicate actions. Then I award experience based on what they do.

In my game, I give encounter experience rather than just combat experience since there tends to be more roleplaying than combat. So this allows absent players to gain XP and feel like they haven't been completely out of the game. The next session, the catch-up takes place in-character since the party was actually split up and have different experiences to share.

 

[CombatWombat51]

One thing that works very well is "breathing experience". Every being capable of gaining experience gets it.

I like that! I, too, have wondered about how to assign XP for downtime.

Assuming a human can't gain XP till they're 16 and gets 1 XP/day, that gives them...

19 y/o...level 2
24 y/o...level 3
32 y/o...level 4
43 y/o...level 5
57 y/o...level 6
73 y/o...level 7

And if they're on "hazard duty" (Toughest Place on the Frontier (TM)), double that would be...

17 y/o...level 2
20 y/o...level 3
24 y/o...level 4
29 y/o...level 5
36 y/o...level 6
44 y/o...level 7
54 y/o...level 8
65 y/o...level 9
77 y/o...level 10

Of course, it all goes to hell if you try and figure in longer-lived races... but my demihumans aren't longer-lived, so nyah!