Rewarding Experience Points

Like many people who are table top gamers I started my experience with D&D. Having been the only thing I had played for a long time I essentially saw no faults with it. If you wanted to play an RPG you played D&D, whatever edition was the newest. My only other exposure to RPGs had been JRPGs such as Final Fantasy on the SNES, which of course were also largely influenced by D&D, and the SNES Shadowrun game (but I had no idea there was anything beyond that for years).

My only complaint in the early days was that D&D was a fantasy game. While I enjoy fantasy I'm a much bigger fan of soft sci-fi, super hero stories, and genre mash ups. So I started making my own rules based on D&D3e (not d20, D&D) to better fit whatever genre I was currently in love with. I didn't realize it then but this was part of a subconscious dislike of D&D's origin as a war game.

Since D&D started as a table top fantasy war game with narrative elements thrown in, to explain why the battles happened, it is unsurprising that there is such a large emphasis on combat. However, that emphasis ends up weakening the games narrative side. I'm sure some people will read this and start thinking that either I'm saying it's "rollplayer vs roleplayer" or that I don't have good players or some other thing because this is the internet and there's always someone unhappy. In short, I don't care how other groups have fun, so I'll talk about how my group has fun.

Anyway, the emphasis on combat affects the game's reward system. There are 3 types of reinforcement: positive (telling someone they are doing well), neutral (not saying anything), and negative (punishing them for their actions). In rules as written D&D3e when you role play you get neutral reinforcement; no gold, no xp, no magic items. When you fight you get positive reinforcement. If you suck at combat you get negative reinforcement; getting killed, getting less XP than others, feeling helpless.

With these negative reinforcement of sucking at combat it makes the changes in D&D4e understandable, though there is another way. The first game I played other than d20 was the Serenity RPG. One of my favourite things about that game was the plot point system which worked as such: at character creation you pick Assets and Complications for your character. The former gives you bonuses, the latter penalties. All have a mechanical effect but more important is how they define the character. During play you get plot point by playing to your characters flaws, completing party or personal goals, and doing neat stuff if your GM is generous. Plot points can be spent in game for bonuses on roles and to activate abilities. They are also used to buy new Skills and Assets, or get rid of Complications.

Since game sessions can be all kinds of mixed up, one of the best ways of figuring out how to award plot points is to talk to the players at the end of the session. I ask them why they think they deserve plot points, specifically WHY they had their characters act the way they did. Then I'd give them plot points based on how well they related their characters to their characters' Complications. I liked this so much I ported it over to d20.

This was very important because my group doesn't particularly like combat. To them it CAN be exciting, but it is a means to an end, not the end in itself. So there's only 1 or 2 short combats per session. I also want to help balance out the negative reinforcement of not being good in combat by changing role playing to having positive reinforcement. I take a lesson from my experiences with Serenity and reward XP for RPing. I do this by talking at the end of the session after awarding XP for combat and skill challenges. I ask each player in turn why they deserve RPing XP. For each reason they give me that shows they were acting in character as opposed to out of character I record them as having 1 "plot point". If a player kicked in the door because he heard his friends' screams on the other side they'd get a plot point, but if they did it because the player knew, but the character didn't, there would be no reward. After everyone has explained their reasoning for their actions I give every player an amount of XP depending on how many "plot points" they got. Typically I reward between 15 and 30 (depending on the character level) XP per plot point. Admittedly the reward is a bit arbitrary and takes some practice to find the right amount of XP to hand out, but it certainly works in encouraging players to RP more.