Just need 20 more xp!

[Jan van Leyden]

I remember it only as a joke. Unless you count a player under 1e rules asking for a heavily injured kobold with a big sack full of gold.

 

[SLOTHmaster]

We boiled ant hills

 

[jedavis]

This happens all the time in my ACKS game. "Hey, I'm 20 XP short of a level." "Well, try to earn some domain XP I guess. And then don't die next adventure."

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Quite common. Did lots of rat hunting; if the difference was 100 XP or so some sort of PvP event usually resulted ...

 

[Jon_Dahl]

In such cases I usually give some XP in advance. It means that you get some XP now, but it will be deducted from your future XP. I'm always very precise with XP (mistakes occur, but rarely) so I don't like to do that quite often.

Once there was a PC with just one XP away from the 9th level. I swear it was a coincidence.

 

[saskganesh]

In the game I run, I track all XP. Players know generally but not specifically how many XP they have. For gameplay/time reasons, I prefer to do level ups between pr before sessions, and not during sessions. If a character winds up being very close to breaking a level at the end of the night, I'll just inform the player that they have broken, and we'll take it from there.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

I stopped using the experience rules, as written, in 1982.

But we have several jokes/stories of 'experience mills' involving all sorts of contraptions. One of my favorites was running a horde of sheep into a dungeon to spring traps, and flush out bad guys, and then demand the experience for the dead livestock. Ahhh...good times.

 

[Wycen]

Yeah, games that don't award xp or you are told "everyone gains a level" of course aren't going to have this happen. But you know what? I like getting xp. In a game like DnD, it is one of the things I look forward to. Sure, gold and magic items and boons and hanging out with friends is great too, but when talking about the DnD experience, getting xp is part of that.

 

[Squire James]

The expression used in my game was "chaotic squirrels". Later on the joke became "chaotic squirrels with rapiers" after I actually put some of them in a hallucination - ahem! - adventure.

Yet later, it became an orc (leveled up to the appropriate CR) with a pie.

 

[Bullgrit]

Thanks for all the xp on my OP, but I really wasn't trying to get it.

For some examples of this, I checked out the posts I did about xp awards in classic D&D adventures.

At the end of this
http://www.enworld.org/forum/tablet...d-d-d-d3-updated-11-17-08-q1.html#post2928898
the magic-user was just 1% from leveling up.

And here
http://www.enworld.org/forum/tablet...d-d-d3-updated-11-17-08-q1-4.html#post3620236
the fighter was just 2% short from leveling up.

And at the end of the long-spanning campaign
http://www.enworld.org/forum/tablet...d-d-d3-updated-11-17-08-q1-4.html#post4550732
the cleric, illusionist, and thief are very close to leveling up. Though at these levels, a single percent is still a four-digit figure.

Bullgrit