NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6038614" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe. Part of the problem is that D&D play, in its most mainstream form, doesn't always make it easy to engage in creative or engaged roleplaying, because the stakes for making the wrong call are too high (typically PC death). Before the designers think about incentivising that sort of play, they need to look at ways in which the game can make more room for it.This is my own view, too. When one of our players misses a session its not uncommon for them to phone in when they get a chance to see how things are going, and we circulate updates via email to keep non-attenders informed about what happened to their PC in particular and to the party in general.We want to play, and missing out is its own penalty.You start out talking bout players (they are the ones who show up or not, disrupt or not, etc) but then finish by taking about PCs.I think it's interesting to consider whether XP are awarded primarily to the character (as  [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] has described above) or to the player (which is where most of those who advocate "no attendance, no XP" seem to be coming from). Presumably this should make a difference to the way in which they are awarded.These two posts capture the way that I use XP: its a pacing mechanism that both (i) let's players have a bit of fun with their PCs' current builds before they change again, and (ii) advance the backdrop of the game from fighting kobolds to fighting Orcus.In 4e, I think it should be roughly one level per 10 hours of committed play. Despite the relative transparency of this, I still use XP in my 4e campaign. Mostly for aesthetic/nostalgic reasons, I think, but also perhaps on the assumption that the designers though that their own XP suggestions would achieve goal (i) above, of giving players a good amount of experience with their current PC build.Or, in other words, what Mallus said here:</blockquote>

Verification