Experience Points Should Reward All Gaming Styles

Most role-playing games have some form of experience points that allow characters to gain strength and abilities over time.  But sometimes experience point awards don’t factor in all the aspects of RPGs that most people want to encourage.

Several years back, I wanted to encourage better role-playing among my group.  I also wanted to reward players for good ideas that might avoid a conflict, help the party win a battle more quickly, overcome a trap, etc.  Furthermore I wanted the players to better follow the overall story.  But I didn’t want to put the burden all on myself to track good role-playing and ideas and I didn’t want to be the sole arbitrator of good role-playing.  I guess I was in the middle of what were called “360 reviews” at work, so I thought to apply that concept to experience point awards.

These “360 reviews” solicit feedback from a variety of people you work with instead of making your review solely the discretion of your manager.  Honestly, they’re terrible because they take so long to write, among other reasons.  But if you can use the idea to ask the players to take five minutes to jot down some notes about the game session, the idea is useful.

The practice has evolved over time, but the core is the same and we still use it today.  At the end of each session, I ask each player to fill out a sheet that ranks the players (excluding themselves) for how well they role-played their character.  (As an aside, one improvement I plan to make is to have each player describe his character and how he intends to role-play the character at the beginning of each session so at the end of the session the players have a criteria to measure against.)  I also ask them to list any ideas,  memorable quotes, or especially good role-playing moments of the other players.

Then I collect these (and add my own rankings and thoughts) and give roughly a 5% bonus (at low levels it may be 10%) to whoever had the best role-playing of the session.  I then give proportionally smaller bonuses to the other players based on how well we thought each player role-played.

Good ideas are a different beast.  Ideas can take many forms such as: combat tactics; solving a puzzle; asking an NPC the right question; connecting the dots in a plot-line; etc.  If an idea helps the party avoid a key encounter, I’ll give the group most of the XP for the encounter and give a bonus to the player(s) who had and developed the idea.  If a player has an idea, but then tells the player of the character who should have had the idea the basics and lets the other player flesh it out and do it, then both of them will get a bonus: the player who originated gets a bonus for the basic plan and for facilitating role-playing by letting the other player develop and letting that character say it/do it.  I give one of three small fixed (but proportional to the experience points needed at that level) award amounts based on the impact of the idea.

Next are story awards that are granted when the party clears certain obstacles or reaches certain conclusions or overcomes major challenges.  Major story awards can earn each character a 10% of the experience points needed to get to the next level.  If a particular player is following along closely and draws a conclusion about the storyline, he’ll earn an idea bonus.

Of course, I award experience points for a party’s battles.  For me, the charts of challenge ratings and party levels are a guide.  If a party had difficulty, I’ll consider the reason why.  If there were circumstances beyond their control (an ambush or particularly good planning by their foes of even bad dice rolling) I’ll still give them roughly the standard experience point award.  If a party breezed though an encounter that I expected to be hard, again I’ll consider the reasons why.  If they had a good plan I’ll grant them the standard award (and maybe they’ll get a bonus for the idea).  But if the group got lucky or there was some other way they benefited from an unearned perk, I might consider the encounter to be less challenging than the charts state.

To sum up, it is important to award experience for all styles of play: hack and slashers, role-players, story tellers and thinkers.  This can be more easily achieved (and you’ll be less likely to forget) by enlisting the help of your players.  Plus, you won’t be the only one deciding what was good role-playing or what was a good idea.  The players can order how well each other player role-played as well as note memorable quotes, good role-playing examples and good ideas other players had.  Use this information  as a guide to give bonuses to the players for ideas for role-playing.  Give small awards for good ideas based on the impact the idea had.  Give story awards when the characters reach milestones in the campaign. But usually the primary experience award should still be based on overcoming encounters.  However, make sure you consider how well the party overcame the battle and why before you grant them the standard experience points for an encounter.

It takes us less than 15 minutes to do all of this, and during most of that time, another GM would be calculating monster experience points while the players wait.

For example, if in a given 3.5 edition OGL fantasy game session a party won two minor and one major battle, achieved a major storyline point, and a 2nd level character had the best roleplaying and 1 small and 1 medium good idea, then his XP might look like this:

200pts (his share of the 2 minor battles)

500pts (his share of the major battle)

200pts (the major storyline point)

50pts (best role-playing, but the #2 person might still get 40pts and so on)

10pts (the small good idea)

20pts (the medium good idea)

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980 points