Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 2552022" data-attributes="member: 5143">The party is assumed to work together in my games.  Each person there contributes in their own way(casting spells that help others, making decisions for the group, adding to the role playing experience).  This is one of those situations where I'd love for the people who do more to get more, but there is no fair way of deciding what "more" is, so they get equal.Well, no, it's like everything else in life.  If your team doesn't show up for a baseball game, you should expect to lose by default.  You could also say this was just the person in charge of the baseball league's decision and he could change it at any time.  He could, but he's just being fair, the other team was considerate enough to show up.A sense of fair play and equality.  People showing up for the game because they have incentive do to so more than just desire to show up.  I know a couple of my players have missed games for a barbeque with friends, going away for the long weekend, a card game tournament, etc.  I'd like to leave them with a choice: Play in the tournament that ONLY happens once every 6 months (so is really important, according to the player in question) and you will miss out on XP.  Your choice.With this statement, I realize our gaming styles are COMPLETELY different.  I might end a game session with "Ok, you are all walking down the hallway of the 4th level of Castle Maure, you were about to open the 3rd door on the left when we ended for the night because Mike had to go to work and Dallas needed sleep.The story revolves around the WHOLE party, they are all in the corridor, they are all about to walk into a room that likely contains a monster capable of killing them if they don't work together to beat it.I consider it too much of a hassle to run someone's character while they are gone (I have to DM, too much to think about), and I hate giving control of a character to another player (I've died while my character was being played by someone else, I really hated it and I wouldn't do it to someone else without their express permission.  Even then, most people who agree do so because they assume they won't die and their tune changes when it actually happens.).  So, due to this, I use the "party member is not really there for this session"...he decides suddenly to scout out another part of the dungeon, he breaks a nail and decides to stand there filing it off no matter HOW long it takes, etc.  Generally we handwave WHY the character isn't there, it just isn't.I also planned out the enemy in the room weeks before assuming the whole party was there.  If the pary has 4 people and only 1 of them is a good fighter, and he suddenly vanishes as they are opening the door to a powerful enemy, the rest of the party is in big trouble.  The enemy is now twice as hard to defeat as it would have been otherwise.  That's why, when enough people don't show up, we cancel the session to avoid just killing off the people who ARE there.In a heavily role playing game, I could see being a little more lenient, you'll miss that character's personality at your table for a session, but you can invent a story reason for it and everyone is happy.  Since I'm big on fair play, I'm not going to come up with story reasons why the enemies weapons are deflected away from the party's head.My players are motivated by XP.  They have their characters planned out for the next couple of levels, they really want to get that next cool spell or that next cool feat.  They understand they need to work towards it.If you want to understand my attitude about this, you have to understand where XP comes from.  In 1st Ed, you got XP for DOING things.  You got XP for casting spells, you got XP for stealing things, you got XP for killing enemies, and optionally some DMs gave out XP for good role playing.  I come from a background of this method.  It wasn't up to the DM, I didn't blame them for making up stupid rules, it was in the DMG and the way the game worked.  I felt complaining about the way XP worked was an awful lot like complaining that in tennis you have to hit the ball.  It's the way the game worked and if I didn't like it, I'd play a different game.I'm very big on using game systems for what they are designed for.  If I want a very role playing heavy system where I rarely, if ever, had a combat, I'd likely get a rules light system that resolved combat quickly and without much detail as that wasn't the focus of the game, likely the story teller system or BESM, or some diceless system.  I don't play in this style, we are pretty much classic D&Ders.  We focus on going through dungeons and killing enemies, which is what D&D is good at and what the XP system in the DMG is designed to reward.So, all in all, people in my game get XP based on the monsters defeated during the session and that's it.  It is split only amongst those people who helped defeat those monsters.  If something strange happens and a character ends up in a battle even if the player isn't, the character still gets full XP as it helped defeat the enemies.  It isn't about punishing anyone at all.</blockquote>

Verification