Player XP vs Character XP

[takasi]

I'm running a campaign with characters at 3rd level. A noble house leader captured a player's character, and for the purpose of the story we decided to let the player build a new character at the same xp to rescue his old character.

Some background: There are only three players (four if you count me) in this campaign. We play online once a week. It's a freeform game that takes place in the Moonsea and I'm trying to mimic a World of Warcraft feel. No major ongoing metastory, not a lot of intricately crafted combat scenes, and no huge involvement in any individual character's background. Exploration of the world is the primary theme of the campaign.

And please remember that all of the players, including myself, are in other campaigns.

I'm thinking of trying something new (for us anyway), and I wanted to run it by the EN World folks to see what you think. The basic idea is to award experience per player, not per character. A player earns XP during the campaign and uses it to determine the highest level PC he can bring into the campaign. He can bring in a new character every level, provided he has a place (like a town) to drop off the previous character he used. New characters created get starting wealth per the DMG. He can only play one character in any given session or 'quest' (which may span multiple sessions, DM's call). So at 6th level a player could have 6 PCs running around the campaign world, with only one controlled by a player for any given time. If a character dies then a player will lose 'player XP' rather than character xp. He can still control his highest level characters, but it will just take him longer to get enough xp to create or control the next level of PCs. And when he gets enough XP to level then he levels up all of his previously created PCs.

Are there any obvious flaws I'm overlooking? Anything I should give some more thought about before allowing this? Have you ever done anything like this? What was the game like?

 

[DreadArchon]

Are there any obvious flaws I'm overlooking? Anything I should give some more thought about before allowing this? Have you ever done anything like this? What was the game like?

My current players are allowed to make new characters with impunity (or re-stat their current characters, though either can happen only during down time).

As there's no real benefit for doing so, and as most of my players are sticking to something they like, it never really comes up.

 

[davidschwartznz]

I'm running a campaign with characters at 3rd level. A noble house leader captured a player's character, and for the purpose of the story we decided to let the player build a new character at the same xp to rescue his old character.

My personal experience is that XP should be player based, not character based. It may be based on the characters actions, buts it's a reward to the player. If you don't give the player (and thus his main character) XP for playing an NPC while his main character is out of the action (for whatever reason), he'll see it as a punishment rather than an opportunity for roleplaying.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

The only real problem that I can see cropping up is one of making sure that character entrances / exits makes at least some sense... And the possibility that character incompatibilities may be created... Both of those should be relatively easy to solve by just making the players come up with a reason for their new characters to join forces with the group.

Later
silver

 

[Erywin]

We basically do this altho with a few changes, if you want to change characters you need to let me (the DM) know ahead of time, I write it into the storyline and you take a hit to XP as if your character was killed. Now this seems to be rough but in my campaign you gain 20% more exp for each level you are behind the highest. Works out great Players change characters only when they really want to and we go from there. The campaign has only seen one character switch so far, mainly cause Blarg was tired of playing his utterly broken Shifter Monk/Druid, YAY I gained a really awesome bad guy His character got dominated and planeshifted by a mindflayer where 2 other mindflayers turned him into a voidmind (MM3). His new character came in and he has been happy since.

Cheers,
E