Roleplaying Experience

[SableWyvern]

Vaguely relevant preamble: Personally, I'm not a fan of "just award whatever" experience systems. For whatever reason, I like a nice, codified system to work from, even if I end up arbitrarily altering the results.

As such, I've been developing a system to utilise in my upcoming Conan game (Conan doesn't use CRs or any system of CR-generated experience).

I used the Silhouette system as a starting point when decided what to award XP for, an in analysing the RPing awards Silhouette used, came to a sudden epiphany.

Getting to the point: I have frequently in the past awarded an amount of experience for "Roleplaying", mainly to encourage such. With my current group, though, no reward system or encouragement has really got the group firing as far as getting into and staying in character goes.

Silhouette's awards, though, have one particular XP category that got me thinking: Selflessly provides scenes for other players.

I like this, and have expanded on the thought to also include the lesser category of "Enhanced another character's scenes".

So, rather than focusing mainly on giving XP for playing one's own character well, the players are encouraged to facilitate each other's roleplaying.

Thus, staying in character has a wide variety of rewards, including story control, XP for achieving important character goals, and the simple fun of playing in character. Additionally, now, other players who help make getting into character more rewarding in game, will themselves be rewarded for it with XP.

If this kind of system can encourage the more experienced players in my group, who I know can roleplay well, to help bring out the best in the others, it could mean the return to some better gaming all round.

I like it. Proactive in so many ways.

 

[DragonLancer]

Your players vote another player for getting the reward, or does any player who gets nominated get the reward?

Personally I've never felt comfortable with that system, because what if you have a player who never gets nominated for whatever reason? It could either lead to them trying to improve their RP skills, or just get them wound up that they never get picked.

 

[SableWyvern]

It would be handed out by me, in conjunction with the rest of the experience. Players won't know exactly where all their XP came from, nor would the rewards being discussed make up a large part of the total, so there would be no sense of "why didn't I get XP for that?" or "why aren't I being nominated?"

Naturally, I would be willing to discuss my distribution of XP with players privately and on an individual basis, if there did happen to be any sense of unfairness.

Fortunately, disputes over XP have not been a problem I have had to deal with since my very early days of roleplaying.