roleplaying rewards?

[dudebird]

i'm new here, not too sure where this would've been handled...

just wondering some people's systems for rewarding players XP for role-playing. i'm leaning towards a democratic system where each player votes based on a quiz at the end of each session. several categories i have thought of for the quiz would be:

-good use of skill/feat/spell(especially unconventional without reaching too far outside of the rules)
-playing alignment
-playing character personality
-adding character flair(using reference to character's background, using colloquialisms)
-team player(crucial in a generally good game)
-good tactics
-heroism(not to the point of foolhardiness)
-speaking in character exclusively


this quiz would also include bonus XP for remembering key plot details(names, locations) and a section for suggestions to the DM(me). i think just filling out the quiz will return some small XP awards as well.

things i've missed? your thoughts?

 

[azhrei_fje]

I've never used anything so detailed. But I got an idea similar to this from tournament play.

I would hand out a 3x5 card with each player's name and their character's name, listed from the top to bottom of the card. Each name would have a line next to it. The goal was for each player to "vote" for the other player that they thought did the best job of playing their character. They could use any criteria they wanted: the PC saved their PC's life, the PC solved some puzzle, the PC gained some important information, the PC was played entirely in-character, and so on. They were told to rank their top three choices (at the time, we had 6-9 players in the group, depending on who showed up for a particular session).

I used those votes to award "bonus" XP and my own system of "hero points". My hero points could be used to re-roll any roll they wanted after finding out whether they succeeded or not, or a hero point could simply add +4 to a given roll, or a hero point could substitute for a spell component of up to 250 gp per hero point (max of 4 hero points could be used at once for this), and so on.

I ended up terminating this experiment as the players themselves didn't seem to be particularly interested in it. That surprised me somewhat. But I had two players say out-loud that they would rather I choose which players had done the best job and just award the hero points appropriately.

I have to admit that I was a bit overwhelmed by that; they trusted me (the DM) to be fair and impartial, while they didn't put much stock in the votes of the other players! Hmm, interesting...

 

[Jack Simth]

I ended up terminating this experiment as the players themselves didn't seem to be particularly interested in it. That surprised me somewhat. But I had two players say out-loud that they would rather I choose which players had done the best job and just award the hero points appropriately.

I have to admit that I was a bit overwhelmed by that; they trusted me (the DM) to be fair and impartial, while they didn't put much stock in the votes of the other players! Hmm, interesting...

Well, if you're still playing with a given DM, you've pretty much already decided that DM is fair and impartial within your tolerences (or has a slant you don't mind...); fellow players, on the other hand, don't have nearly as bad effects if they aren't fair and impartial (they are even expected to be heavily slanted in favor of THEIR character(s)... rather than yours, where their slant belongs).

 

[dudebird]

i fear i'm a bit partial to those who roleplay a lot... hahaha. i'd still rather put the questions in their hands so they know what sort of roleplaying i'm trying to encourage. plus rewarding them just for casting their votes should be enough to get those lazy louts going. XP in my game is definately slowed down(about 1/2 of DMG unless they totally pull off really good tactics) so they'll hopefully scramble for whatever they can get.

anybody elses thoughts/suggestions?

 

[Crothian]

I just give out what I feel they should get based on how they do. I don't have a system of do this and get this much XP.

 

[the Jester]

In most of my campaigns, I cut monster xp substantially (to between 1/3 and 2/3 of standard) and split rp xp into four main categories: class, race, alignment and personal. If you can tell me how you roleplayed each category, I award roughly (25 x character level) xp in each category. Simply using your abilities doesn't count, but getting creative with them might ("I cast most of my spells" wouldn't work for rp awards for a wizard, but "I used my feather fall to impress the primitives prolly would).

In my low-magic experimental campaign, on the other hand, I'm not using alignment at all; instead, each pc makes a list of ten characteristics, and if they can tell me how they rp'ed each of those, they get an award roughly equal to (10 x character level) for each one.

 

[RandomUsernamehmimo71]

Dudebird, you might also want to check out the sweet20 Key-based XP system.

 

[dudebird]

thanks dudes!

yeah, the sweet20 is pretty neat. i might incorporate something similar... being that i'm a bit of a slow poke on really learning and threshing out variant rules i'll probably not implement that exact system...

any other thoughts?
thanks again.