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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6821640" data-attributes="member: 29398">Sadly, sometimes this is true.Fair question.  If a character contributes to the other pillars of play that's great, and rewards (and xp) should follow.My beef is with those characters (and the players who run them) who avoid the front line or other risks and by doing so expose other characters to greater risk.  I've been on the wrong end of this (and died for it) just a few too many times.Front-line combat has the obvious risks.  Exploration has risks: traps, capture, natural hazards, etc.  Diplomacy has risks: poison, assassination, charm-domination, and so on.  All of these can, if not kill you outright, certainly make your day miserable.  And if a character doesn't want to take its chances in the front line then I'd sure like to see it getting out there in one or two of the other pillars.A character who stands out of the front line, does little to no exploring, and shuts up when the diplomacy starts should not get levels at the same rate as those characters who do take those risks.OK, here's an example from the last session I ran:It's a big party - 11 characters at the moment, with two more (along with a PC couple's baby) captured.  For some time now the party have been planning a scry-buff-teleport (except without the "scry" part as doing so would alert the enemy) rescue mission to either get the prisoners back or die trying.  How it shook down:4 of the characters did a bit of the planning then stayed home, contributing nothing else.1 of the characters went part-way with the away team and did some diplomacy on their behalf,2 of the characters went part-way with the away team, did some diplomacy on their behalf, and pre-cast a bunch of buff spells.4 of the characters were the actual mission team, who went in to a mostly-unknown situation and at considerable risk successfully rescued all three captives without taking any casualties.So how do the xp break down here?  To me, the vast majority would go to the mission team who actually took the risks; some would go to the three who helped out but stayed behind, and very little would go to the four who only helped with the pre-planning.  Why?  Because the 7 who were not in the mission team had, in the end, nothing to lose*.  Four of them took no risk at all, and the only risk faced by the other three was what sort of mood a particular known-to-them mage might be in when they all showed up at his guild (this was the mission's jumping-off point).Giving the stay-at-homes equal xp as the mission team would only tell me, were I in that party as a player, to keep my character's hand down when it came to volunteering for the next one! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />* - you could say they stood to lose some friends if the mission failed, and if they tried something risky to get them back the xp rewards would again favour those who went after it over those who stayed home.Lan-"in another thread on this subject the line 'coat-tail riders and passenger joes' came up; that song has now been written and recorded, I'll post a link to it if it ever gets online"-efan</blockquote>

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