For us, I like the freedom of NOT having governing rules for XP awards. A general guideline of 100-150 maybe 200XP per session, given across the board to everyone that even came close to participating, works fine for us. If the players WANT to actually “roleplay” – YAY! If not, oh well, roll your dice – long as you mostly pay attention and cooperate.

We all DO want roleplaying quality, to see it in others and to deal it out ourselves, and while I think some aspects can be encouraged to a small extent by game mechanics, like some games that give extra dice for entertaining stunts, etc. our RP “requirement” is generally if someone is trying something halfway important like talking to an NPC or making a decision of how to do something, the player has to come up with SOME sort of verbal explanation and description in order to get to roll the skill check at ALL – no RP, no roll. Doesn’t have to be much of anything, just some effort, little in-character wit, basic understanding of how to climb up the house, something that shows you have something rattling around in your head past “I want to do X , here’s my roll.”  We do on occasion give the PC’s roll a temporary in-game bonus (+5-10% or so) on the spot if his set-up was good, as instant gratification and to encourage confidence in his abilities, making his task more likely to succeed and demonstrate to others what they need to do to be able to get similar boosts.

For me, if you really want to, breaking it down into combats, encounters, plot points, etc can be vaguely assigned XP by the GM beforehand, and as long as the PC’s participate in that, they get the XP, maybe a bit more if they did really well, or less if poorly – but though I toyed with the idea of also adjusting each person’s flat XP award slightly based on their own particularly entertaining contributions, we just decided to keep it a flat, across the board end-of-session handout – if someone RPs well enough that it makes me want to give them extra XP, then everybody gets it – first for that player really doing a good job and entertaining, and second for being a great example to the rest of the group and maybe inspire them sometime to do likewise – the other PC’s get the extra earned XP because they’re cooperating, in a party, with this guy, and so all share in his generous and infective optimism.

I would be hard pressed to come up with a reason to dock the group XP – everyone would have ot be acting like asshats.

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This entry was posted by J P on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 5:25 pm and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.