Awarding Experience

[kg8jk]

Getting ready to run my first mini session and I have a question about rewarding experience. In the rules it suggests that you can reward experience just for the encounters or for gold as well (noting that your PCs will advance more quickly). I don't want the PCs to advance too soon but with only short sessions once a week just XP for ecounters alone may be too slow. Anyone shed some light on how quickly PCs advance under either system? I was thinking maybe full XP for encounters and half for gold.

Thanks

[Mint]

I'll start with a caveat. These instructions will work for your situation of a finite number of sessions with very limited time for each. I wouldn't recommend it for a campaign that is played with several hours of time per session with any number of sessions. That said:

It's really just arithmetic.

Add up how many sessions you can do.

Determine how many levels you want the characters to advance, if possible, in that time.

Add up how much XP your characters would have to gain to reach that level in that amount of time.

Now figure out how many monsters they will have to kill to achieve that in that amount of time. Is it doable? Can they survive that many?

If it's too many monsters then the amount of gold / treasure is what you need to make up the difference.

This steps listed are bare bones but offered as an outline of how to figure your XP out.

[Koren_nRhys]

My experience in Classic D&D, and by extension BFRPG, is that advancement is quite slow. If you are only playing once a week and for short sessions at that, you'll have no issues giving them the gold XP as well. The low level slog where PCs are fragile isn't necessarily a lot of fun, so you can afford to gift them a little and get the party to the sweet spot of 5-7 or so more quickly.

For what it's worth, I personally find even that to be really slow unless you are throwing hoards of monsters at the party. With an orc worth just 25XP, a goblin worth 10, divided across a group of 4-6 players it takes a loooong time to accrue a couple thousand XP to level from just 1 to 2! At my table, I give the full XP for a monster to EACH character and divide the treasure XP evenly between them and they still are advancing at a fairly slow rate.

Edit to Add: Seeing your other thread, you're talking about 45 minute weekly sessions with HS kids? Yeah, they'll be used to video game quick level up play. If they drag on with a level 1 or 2 character they'll quickly lose interest in my opinion.

[SmootRK]

I would consider that you simply decide a certain amount of XP for goals accomplished, rather than the tedious bean counting of encounters and individual monster xp.

Something like:
session one - investigate some leads. a couple combats where clues found. 500xp each character (Humans get bonus of course).

session two - town interactions (shopping, tavern, npcs, etc), additional clues, encounter where bad guys make appearance in town. 500xp each

Session three - lair located (500xp) - proper dungeon now, so perhaps room by room XP. I would award XP by room, based upon success/not or bypassing creatures, etc.

Point being, with such little time, take out the tedious parts of the game so you can focus their time upon interactions (and I don't just mean the combats)... you can always preface your meetings with "of course there is more you can do with the game on your own when you dig into the rules and the supporting material."

[Mint]

I totally agree with Smoot and he said it far better than I ever could.

[black1blade]

I enjoy counting the individual xp. I give about half xp if enemies are avoided but remain alive. The levelling was really slow in our games and becoming a bit of a slog but I decided to give gold for xp for the latest excursion and they got loads of xp so I will be doing that from now on.

[Dimirag]

There is another, free of XP manipulation, way of halting the PCs leveling: Please note that this will work better on games that allows for easy traveling between their adventuring site and some city or town.

Under this system you give the full XP gained only when the characters are under civilization where they can continue their training with their masters, think of the thing they did and learn from their success and mistakes.

If you allow that and manage to control how often the characters will "train" and for how long they must train then you can control the speed of leveling. And you don't even have to tell the players how many XP they've earn, just tell them when they feel that are ready to step up in their training.

[black1blade]

Yeah, in my campaign the characters must spend a day of intensive whatever to level up.

[Delver]

I use a method very similar to Smoot's. Sometimes even more general and do a fixed amount per session adjusted by a player's participation effort ...

[Dimirag]

I'm most accustomed to the system Smoot mentions because it was the one used in all the games I've played so far.

Lots of people changed to the X adventures per level in 3.X as the game easily allows for that.