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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 6039602" data-attributes="member: 3887">There is - but it's not a distinction that I personally care to make. YMMV. The way I look at it, if I like someone well enough to keep inviting them into my home, into my campaigns, them I'm willing to cut them some slack. Besides, sometimes a soul needs a good pub crawl <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=":)" />. As a matter of fact, I'm somewhat overdue... I don't think this is true (at all).The reward for creative thinking and good role-playing is success; the PCs achieving their desired outcomes with the minimum undesired consequences. I get the need for a positive feedback loop during play, but rewarding players with metagame currency after the fact isn't the only way to get it. The best reward for a cunning plan is having it work. True -- but RPGs aren't competitive games the way baseball games and chess matches are. Victory is terribly subjective; the PCs 'win' against 'teams' assembled, coached, and deployed by a referee who's job is to challenge them, or simulate events in a fictional world, not take home the trophy. The rules are flexible guidelines, prone to being modified on the fly or even switched on and off on a case by case basis (they're more erratic, even, than penalty calls in American football!). Achievements are pretty subjective, too. Sure, there's PC survival and weath/power gains, but there are also intangibles; story rewards, character growth (in terms of characterization, not level), rewarding relationships in the game's fiction. Not to mention 'achieving' really entertaining failures.For example, some of the crowning achievements of out old 4e campaign where character tag lines, like Lizzy the Communist Dwarfs battle-cry "Universal Health Care!".Where was I? Oh... the joy of RPGs is that people get so many different things out of them, there are many different kinds of success. I suppose I could hand out bonus XP to players for 'hitting their marks' (however they define them), but I choose not to. Mainly because I refuse to reward players for playing the way I do -- and I'm fully aware that's exactly what I'd end up doing if used individual XP awards.(I'm well acquainted with my own inescapable subjectivity) So I let the reward for good play be in-game success and fond memories, and leave XP as a pacing mechanism.  Absolutely -- but I one thing I refuse to be as DM is an art critic. Again, artistic achievements in my campaigns -- such as they are -- are rewarded through the player's talking about other peoples' PCs/exploits years later. I think campaigns that push the game aspect of the game really benefit from XP as an explicit score-keeping mechanism -- they're just not the ones I run (but I'd be game to play in one).</blockquote>

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