With this article the series “A stick and a carrot” is finished. I really hope you enjoyed reading this posts over the last months. Honestly I do not like the concept of experience points very much. When you kill ten people you may be more experienced, but you can hardly say that this can lead to better skills in reading and writing. I have always preferred to take down notes who did what. The experience points gained can then be distributed among the skills the PC have used during the game. In this way the advancement reflects the way the PC is played. Someone who fights and only fights is a fighter and unlikely to develop any notable skill in diplomacy.

Generally experience points are awarded for combat and roleplaying and solving certain situation. Killing a monster however can only bring experience points when the monster or foe uses a tactic unknown. The PC should get experience points the first time he fights the foe, probably also the second time. In the third fight the amount of experience points should be reduced and this should continue with any new fight until the PC gets no experience points for the fight, unless the foe used some new tactic or ability.

Roleplaying should be awarded with experience points. This helps to stimulate good roleplaying. Make clear that roleplaying is awarded. You may even want to as far as telling every player why he got the experience points (how much for fights, how much for roleplaying, etc.).

This article by L. Schrader was originaly published in 2001 at Strike-to-Stun.com

Tags: GMing, XP

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 11:13 pm by Server Goddess and is filed under GM-Aids, WFRP. 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.