D&D 4E No Roleplaying XP in 4e

[The Mirrorball Man]

Well I'm fairly sure the point of a roleplaying game is not to pass judgement on the method acting skills of your friends.

Who's talking about method acting? If giving out a couple of XP for good roleplaying is enough to make sure that every player makes a minimal effort to act in character, I think it's worth it, and it makes the game more fun for everyone.

 

[Njall]

Frankly put, who cares? WotC doesn't run my games, I do.
When WotC screws a rule that interacts with other rules (ie. trip being to weak/too powerful), so that I have to adjust a ton of feats/rules just to make the game work as I wish, that's a problem.
If WotC thinks I should/should not award xp rewards, it's not a problem in the least for me: I'll just do what I feel appropriate for the group I'm currently DM'ing.
YMMV.

 

[Ranes]

Actually, it is from the section on experience in the official rules for OD&D as cited.

Rules Cyclopedia != OD&D

It seems they've gradually lost touch with (or were never aware of) some of the foundational elements of the game that have since been overshadowed or left by the wayside.

The idea of an XP award for roleplaying was not a fundamental element of the original game. This was because roleplaying was not a fundamental aspect of the original game.

 

[NMcCoy]

A notion I've been toying with is karma points, a purely metagame construct. Players get them for roleplaying well (entertaining the group), being the victim of horrible luck, providing snacks, and so on. Karma points will influence arbitrary DM decisions like who a relatively unintelligent monster decides to attack, which magic items show up, and so on, and it's a way to reward players for Bringing The Awesome (and console them for having misbehaving dice) without throwing off the XP scaling.

 

[Ranes]

One of the players in my last campaign was a successful actor. He played a sun-crazed cleric of a sun god (Shamash). He hammed it up superbly. He entertained everyone. My sides hurt from laughing so much.

Everyone got the same XP.

Like hong said, "Showboating is its own reward."

 

[Micco]

I, for one, am glad that WotC doesn't provide rules for awarding appropriate roleplaying. It's so clear from their comments that they just don't get it that there is no way they could effectively create the right kind of rules.

In our games, roleplaying rewards are there to partially compensate players for making decisions that are not optimal for overcoming the key challenge, but are appropriate for the character and their background.

It is not about speaking with a high squeaky voice to sound like a gnome. It is about deciding that your character simply cannot kill the demon because it is currently possessing the body of a young and innocent child....even though not killing it will likely lead to the death of many other people in the future. And even if it makes completing the "quest" (in 4e terms) more difficult. If that decision is appropriate for the character's history, personality, morality and code of ethics, then I am very comfortable with rewarding the player for maintaining character consistency by making such a decision. In fact, I think that decision is more interesting (and hence inherently more rewardable) than the thousand times the character will decide to kill the monster during his career.

And such decisions do represent experience that advance the character's ability to deal with such situations more effectively in the future...which is the whole conceptual underpinning of the XP mechanic.

People who comment that roleplaying is "amateur acting" so don't get the concept that they have no business trying to codify a ruleset to reward the appropriate behavior. Fine. In fact, good.

Let's recognize that not everyone thinks that "roleplaying" (and by this I think most people think "acting") is fun. I agree that that definition of roleplaying should be it's own reward. But the definition of roleplaying which involves making decisions in a character's context (rather than the players) is more fundamental, in my opinion, to the genre. But I don't think the WotC designers agree with me on this. That's okay by me...I'll run the game my way.

So let those that wish to play war games do so without the complexity of roleplaying. Let the actors go for it and we'll all reap the benefits (at least from the good ones.) As for me and my gang, we will reward good play in all it's forms. And that includes "roleplaying XP" for maintaining character consistency even when it sucks to do so.

 

[Larrin]

I can say from personal experience that RP XP in a group of experienced gamers is very different from when a player is not familiar with the rules.

The first White Wolf game i played, the DM gave out the WW equivalent of XP at the end of each session by asking you "What did you learn". I was pretty unfamiliar with the system and had created a rather weak and ineffective character, and had a hard time contributing alot to the general flow of things, but i tried, i was just unfamiliar with what was effective. So when it came to me, i really never had much to say because A) i really didn't know what the DM was looking for. B) My character hadn't learned all that much on his own, because he was gimped by my inexperience. As a result i got about 1-2 points per session, while others with their tweaked out characters were getting 4-5 points. as a result, their characters could grow, mine did not. It was very discouraging. I eventually got better at it, but i definitely felt put down by being punished for being new.

Roleplaying xp in D&D can do the same thing. A new player will seldom roleplay as well as the 5 year veteran, and thus the rookie will effectively be punished for being new, and his character, and effectively his roleplaying skills, will be stunted. This is discouraging. Also, this encourages spotlight hogging, since the person that does the most talking will argue he did the most roleplaying.

On the other hand, if you have a group thats experienced OR willing to encourage the new players, adding in xp for cleverness and getting into character is fun, as long as everyone has equal access to it. I once played in a game where we got 25xp for every fly bugging the DM we killed. It was silly and fun (and not techincally role playing but oh well).

Its the DM that makes or breaks RP XP, WoTC is wise not to try and encourage it in general, IMO.

 

[preacher]

People who comment that roleplaying is "amateur acting" so don't get the concept that they have no business trying to codify a ruleset to reward the appropriate behavior. Fine. In fact, good.

So let those that wish to play war games do so without the complexity. As for me and my gang, we will reward good play in all it's forms.

I'd argue that no-one has any business codifying a ruleset to reward roleplaying. There are many ways of defining roleplaying, good or bad. It's so entirely subjective that I believe it'd be impossible to create rules for.

Also, most groups will contain a mix of players - good roleplayers, good tacticians, people who just enhance the game through the way they interact with other players, and so on. Many will bring more than one of these qualities to the game. Some are in-game qualities and some are meta, but all can enhance the game. If you give out XP rewards for good roleplaying, do you also give out awards to the person who thought up the winning tactic, or to the person who made sure the quiet, shy player got more involved? If you do, then fine. In fact, fine if you don't. But while I think there's room in the game for bonus XP awards, I would hate to see them codified. And I'd particularly hate it if the rules attempted to define good roleplaying and instructed me on how to reward it.

Others have made excellent points as to why roleplaying means different things to different people. I don't think the lack of rules to reward RP makes this less of a roleplaying game. It just accepts that it means something different to everyone, and allows us to handle this subject as we wish, rather than forcing a particular vision on us.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

My 2 favorite approaches to rewarding XP for good role-playing:

- Don't do it all.
- Reward everyone the same. If someone in the group did some good role-playing, but the others didn't all get rewarded. This means people will appreciate the one doing the role-playing more, even he "hogged" the spot-light - they all got rewarded for it. In the end, everyone might try to add some extra XP to the group for good role-playing. But even if not, the one interested in doing it and creating a more entertaining game doesn't feel like it was worthless - his group is getting better thanks to him. This makes the whole spot-light hogging aspect a lot less worse, since everyone is reminded that it is for the sake of the whole group.
The downside might be you put pressure on the ones that didn't grant the group role-playing XP, and this can lead to hard feelings. If you avoid that, things are fine.

The moment you begin to give out XP differently between players, you end up with some PCs better then others. That will only help to increase the differences between the PCs, and worsen the situation in the long run.

 

[Family]

Hand out special snacks instead. (Just an option).