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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 4718772" data-attributes="member: 7635">I'm not picking on you EW, but I have to question this. Once upon a time, I gave XP for good role-playing. (This was in the dark days of 2e, when you needed huge amounts of XP to gain levels, kill XP was small, and gp=xp was an obscure, optional rule. It threw nothing off to grant bonus XP for roleplaying, snacks, DM bribes, etc). However, I began to notice a certain disconnect between what I viewed as "good" and what my players did. In particular, I found that how my friends viewed their PCs and how I did differed on more than one occasion. Classically, there were debates on alignment (what I viewed as an evil act my player viewed as coldly neutral) but there were other discrepancies as well (as another example, a cleric of my game had a very different interpretation of "honor" than I did. Where I saw Sir Galahad, he saw Bushido samurai). Mostly though, I found giving "good role-playing" XP began to equate to "playing in the manner I preferred" on a lot of issues. Thus, players whose styles more closely emulated my own tended to get more XP and thus started to be higher level. After this became apparent, I began giving a flat "good RP" award to everyone, which morphed from "reward for playing in character" to "showing up this week and not derailing gameplay". Eventually, I dropped the reward entirely. It was so subjective, I began to question my own criteria for judging. Is a player who is an introvert (doesn't talk a lot, but shows up because he likes to be with his friends) being punished? What about someone playing a strong, silent type? Why should I be the one grading my PCs performances?Since then, I dropped XP for RP and never looked back since. I occasionally grant a small "clever" bonus for very creative play, clever thinking, or outright sheer awesomeness, but the reward is modest and rare. Similarly, there is no penalty for "bad" role-playing, but PCs that are disruptive often get spoken to to promote PC and player unity (and fun).</blockquote>

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