Post/Author/DateTime	Post
technochris81 07-11-07, 09:05 AM	my buddy and i were playing a solo game. he was DM. just so i wouldn't get totally creamed all the time, he was having me travel around with an NPC that was about my level. we came across some bugbears. we were outranked and outnumbered. they asked us for all our food and drink. i was at a loss for words as what to do. my DM, feeling sorry for me i suppose, had the NPC offer the bugbears this stuff called passion juice. passion juice is basically ecstasy in beer form. the bugbears accepted and quickly became sedated. they wanted to party with us. so we gave them some of our food until they fell asleep. at this point, i thought about killing them. although this was not something my character would ever ever do, i wanted the xp. then i thought to myself, why should my character's beliefs ever get in the way of my getting xp? my DMs response was: "yeah, but you still earn xp in plenty of other ways." to which i replied: "yeah, but i'll never get the same kind of xp as a character than just goes around killing everyone." he could see my point, but then said "rules is rules" or something like that. does anyone know a good way to make xp more about goals and less about killing? mature, adult responses only please -chris
Rhialto 07-11-07, 09:53 AM	In 3rd edition, you get xp for overcoming the encounter, not necessarily for killing the encounter. That GM should have given you the xp, since you defintiely overcame the encounter, the way you describe it. otoh, a case could be made that you only overcame it because of a deus ex machina (the GMPC). Experience should be because the PCs overcame the encounter, not because a GM character was busy inventing the means with which to overcome it.
058 07-11-07, 10:25 AM	This is somewhat campaign-specific, but in the current game in which I'm a player, our goal is to take over the world, and our DM grants us xp based on how many followers we induct into our dark, evil cult. Each follower is worth 5 xp or something like that. This means that our goal is anything but killing everything; subduing a party of bugbears and getting them to offer to join us is exactly the sort of thing that we want.
Xaer 07-11-07, 11:41 AM	I generally grant XP to bypassing an encounter, especially if it's creative. It seems bad to punish players for finding a way to accomplish their goals without fighting.
Holy_Beholder 07-11-07, 04:31 PM	I would have given extra xp for that, whether you kill them afterwards or not. Still, some DMs only give xp for kills(really annoying during a DM switch, we fought mostly humanoids, and my character would knock them out, tie them up, then hand them over to the authorities) How long had the DM been DMing, if he was new then it would be confusing. D&D is really rule heavy after all.
eamon 07-11-07, 05:14 PM	The XP should have been awarded the moment the passion juice came into play, and further upon feeding them until they fell asleep. Depending on your game, that may or may not be awarded partially to your character. It's an NPC, but still, I'd let you have some of it... ;-) The actual killing of the bugbears should be worth very little xp if any at all once they're sedated.
Werral 07-11-07, 06:26 PM	Anything that's helpless is basically CR 0 - so you'd get no XP for killing the sleeping bugbears. Defeating a foe gets you XP, not killing it (though you usually defeat stuff by kiliing it in D&D). In this case I would say that, as others have pointed out, the NPC would at least share, if not take most of the XP depending on how it actually played out. There's an option to use Story/Freeform XP in the DMG, where you just award XP for goals completed.
twiggyleaf 07-11-07, 07:36 PM	I generally halve the experience points for encounters and then add stuff on as the game progresses, awarding XP for character play, play according to motivation, solving puzzles, innovation and humour. I work out what the remaining half I have taken away is, and then divide it up to create units, and then while playing, just mark off a unit for each thing done. It's very quick and although some players score differently from others, it usually works out to roughly the same amount of XP as I would have awarded if playing the standard encounter manner - the only difference is that it's a lot easier to reward things like the use of passion juice that you mentioned. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to add in ALL those things when, for example, you are involved in a heavy combat - for this reason, I also offer the players the chance to appeal at the end of every game - "appeal" as in the game of cricket - I ask each of them if there is any one thing they think they should get XP for. If I have neglected to mark it down, I then award extra to those players, commensurate (in units) for what they did. Basically, I reward half for getting through the mission and half for the way they do it. It needs a bit more prep but less mathematics at the end of the game.
Slapstick 07-12-07, 04:37 PM	I've actually done away completely with xp in my campaign. The players level up whenever I feel they've earned it (which basicly, is how it works anyway). This has made the players focus a lot more on playing their characters, rather than playing the game. They also try to invent clever ways to solve situations in order to impress me :D When it comes to crafting, I've made it require special and hard-to-come-by materials. We haven't gotten around to high-level spells with xp components yet so I've decided not to worry about that yet. So far both me and the players have really enjoyed the shift of focus from 'What can I do to get some xp' to 'What crazy stuff can I come up with now?' - Slapstick