A gap in XP [Archive] - Wizards Community

A gap in XP [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
MortalPlague
04-20-05, 05:13 AM Is there any truly good way to reduce a gap in experience?

I have a group that's mostly 5th level (other than one 4th level halfling), but the one in question is at the tail end of third level. This is an unfortunate result of luck and circumstance.

He and the fourth level character are halfling brothers who entered the campaign at the same time, and progressed fairly evenly for a while. Then our player in question missed out on a daring encounter which gave a sizeable chunk of xp to a small group of party members. Now ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal, as I could catch the player in question up with similar encounters.

The problem is, he contracted a strange supernatural 'disease' of sorts, and I use the term loosely; it's more a template. It grants an array of bonuses, but one of the side-effects is that it drives him slowly but steadily into madness. Both myself and the player would love to keep the character around, but the group has him tied to the back of one of their horses to keep him from going mad and killing everyone, and as such he's not participating in any combat (and thus not gaining xp).

When he's eventually cured, is there a good way to catch him up without just dumping a massive lump of xp on him? Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Temrek
04-20-05, 05:28 AM Award xp for things other then combat would be a good start...
MortalPlague
04-20-05, 05:33 AM Award xp for things other then combat would be a good start...

True. I've migrated away from the arbitrary xp model I used to use towards the standard DMG experience, which in turn has minimized non-combat xp. That said, I'm planning to give the player a large experience award for fighting a long mental war. However, I really don't want to suddenly bump him up two levels for it.

As far as granting RP experience, if I started giving him rp bonuses left right and center, I'd have to give the better rp'ers much more to keep things consistent. Which really wouldn't help things. ;)
VerinBlod
04-20-05, 07:36 AM If he is tight up, does the party take him with them into dungeon and the like? I ask this because he could be in a dangerous situation and thus participate in the encounter. Learning how not to attract attention from the monsters while going insane. :D He could even get xp for it, probably less than the normal party members. If the party leaves him behind you could throw some random encounter his way and let him deal with it.

Hope this helps.
Dash Branaghan
04-20-05, 07:37 AM I snagged the Palladium system's XP Awards model in part this past week. It rewards ideas and actions, successful use of skills (which I limited to ones that succeed...in Palladium, there is always a 2% minimum chance of failure), self sacrifice, and stuff like that.

Email me and I'll send it to you.

Dash
CzarGarrett
04-20-05, 09:28 AM Side quest- give him something to do, by himself, thats mostly simple. The XP from that should get him to be at an appropriate level gap between him and the other players.

Although at the tail end of 3rd level, with the party mostly 5th level, isn't too bad.
TheBard
04-20-05, 09:53 AM Shouldn't it sort out itself over time? I mean, there are rules in the DMG which give different amounts of XP based on the pc's level.
Cantankerous
04-20-05, 10:15 AM The bard nailed it in one. The difference in how much experience you get isn't small either. Let's say the group is 3 5th level characters a 4th and the one third. When faced with a CR 5 encounter the standard experience point awards should be 300 xp each for the fifth level characters, 32o for the fourth level one and 360 for the third level character. Seeing that it only takes 3000 points for him to advance from 3rd to 4th level while it takes the 5th level PC's 5,000 pts to get to 6th, he'll catch up pretty quickly by getting an extra 20% experience with his lower cost requirements.

Isshia
babysamurai
04-20-05, 10:22 AM I feel sorry for the player who is forced to sit and watch the other characters have fun, while he is strapped to the back of a horse going insane (hopefully screaming, I want to go for a run...I feel happy...)
Alynn
04-20-05, 11:10 AM Even tied up, if he is playing his char (in other words, he keeps showing up to the sessions just to RP his char) he should get something, I'm not saying anything near what the ones in combat are getting (unless however he comes into direct combat with the enemy, even if he is tied up, if there is a chance he can die, he should get the exp, maybe not for the whole encounter, BUT at least for what could have killed him).

If he roll plays well, give him 5%-10% of the party's exp for the session (or just a flat rate of 50 or something, I don't know how much exp you normally give per session) for bad RP 1-2%, it gives him a reason to keep coming to the sessions, adds a bit of fun and flavor to the story (hell if I was him just to get them to let me go, I'd start yelling to attract monsters "Just let me go and I'll stop, I feel fine, I don't want to kill you, you are way too cute." *Diplomacy check*)

Also, you may want to brief him by either notes or whatever, how he will act for the day. I have a player who has a clepto dwarf rogue, who has a 20% chance any day to have the overwhelming feeling that something (randomly chosen by me) somebody in the party (random roll) has belongs to him, and he is going to try is damnedest to get it. Make a percent roll, so he has his good days, kinda good days, and straight out I wanna cut out your tounge and use it as a sword sharpener days.

Anyway the exp for RP helps by 1) giving him steady exp increase 2) A reason to keep coming to sessions 3) Heap big RP fun time.
MortalPlague
04-20-05, 12:47 PM I feel sorry for the player who is forced to sit and watch the other characters have fun, while he is strapped to the back of a horse going insane (hopefully screaming, I want to go for a run...I feel happy...)

He's actually playing a temporary character currently; they're on a quest to find a tree of wonder so they can harvest its sap to help break the disease. He's with them because nobody would let them leave him with them.

This is a party of 6 (and ofttimes 7) players, so the xp rewards in the big group are never as large as they could be on a solo quest. Thus, I think the solo quest option may be the best idea.
Dash Branaghan
04-20-05, 01:15 PM The bard nailed it in one. The difference in how much experience you get isn't small either. Let's say the group is 3 5th level characters a 4th and the one third. When faced with a CR 5 encounter the standard experience point awards should be 300 xp each for the fifth level characters, 32o for the fourth level one and 360 for the third level character.

My understanding of XP is that you take the party average (in your case, it is 22/5, which is an average of 4th level) and then determine the XP based on party average level...so a CR 5 encounter vs. a Level 4 party will yield X amount (sorry, no books on hand, and don't remember off the top of my head), and that is then divided by 5...everyone gets the same amount. Where it becomes balanced is that eventually he will catch up to them in level, despite the gap...at higher levels a 4000 point gap isn't much, but at low levels it's a killer.

The suggestion for a side quest is all well and good, but you run the risk of annoying the other players who have to sit around and wait for the resolution...and this can be quite time consuming. Unless you and the player are willing to get together outside of normal gaming, in which case this might work. However, if the player decides he needs the help of the group (or even 1 or two members), the time is wasted since you have to wait until such time as everyone is together again.

Dash
wordserpent
04-20-05, 03:26 PM You could run an alternate quest for that PC on a night other than the gaming night. Perhaps a quest that allows the character to gain his sanity back and thus be a normal member of the group.

I think the main problem is the "curse" that gis character is under. It really seems like you have hamstrung him.
wordserpent
04-20-05, 03:32 PM Double post.
MortalPlague
04-20-05, 04:20 PM You could run an alternate quest for that PC on a night other than the gaming night. Perhaps a quest that allows the character to gain his sanity back and thus be a normal member of the group.

I think the main problem is the "curse" that gis character is under. It really seems like you have hamstrung him.

An alternate quest outside of gaming night would be fairly easy to arrange- the player in question lives about five minutes from my house, so getting together is not a problem. For the sake of ensuring that he gets the xp himself without any others leaping ahead, I could fill out a small group of NPCs to help him out.

The curse is a bit of a problem, but that's the way the campaign unfolded. His character basically was nearly killed, but instead of killing him, the BBEG passed this supernatural ailment on to the player in the hopes that he would fall prey to it and slay his comerades. I gave the player the option to continue playing his character or to roll up a new one and turn the halfling into an NPC, and he chose to keep playing the character.

In my experience, the different xp awards for different levels rarely ever make a difference. At least, not in a swift enough fashion to level the character to an acceptable level. His character would likely be killed fighting CR 5 and 6 monsters while the others in the group would easily dispatch of CR 3 and 4 encounters. The solo questing seems like the best idea.
Cold Napalm
04-20-05, 04:21 PM Well you can always take the LARP way when a character has to be shelved for a time for some reason or other. The exp that the NPC character that he is running applies to his actual PC character. That exp will be the "award" for the halfling beating a very dangerous and possibly deadly mental disease.
olshanski_home
04-20-05, 04:21 PM Dash Branaghan excellently summarized how experience works in 3.0.

If you have a 3.5 PHB, you will notice that they've updated it to read the way TheBard describes above. It is a subtle difference from 3.0, but it means that anyone who spends experience on crafting items or who looses a level will soon catch up with the rest of the party.

Lets say you have a party of 5... with 4x5th level and 1x3rd level. And lets say that party defeats a pair advanced trolls with a CR of 6 each.

In 3.0 rules, you'd say average party level is probably 5, which means the reward for a single CR6 creature is 2250, x2 trolls = 4500 divided by 5 characters = 900 XP each.

Here is an example using 3.5 rules:

The 5th level character reward for a CR 6 encounter is 2250, divide by 5 characters = 450 XP for each of the 5th level characters, x2 for killing two of them = 900 XP for each of the 5th level characters.

The 3rd level reward for a CR6 encounter is 2700 XP, divided by 5 characters = 540 XP for the 3rd level character, x2 for killing two of them = 1080 XP for the 3rd level character.

Eventually, the 3rd level character catches up... between the extra XP and the steeper XP required for advancement, the 3rd and 5th level characters will probably both be level 8 at the same time.
Ranger_ORB
04-20-05, 09:09 PM you could give him a bracer, headband, other magic item that cures the disease until it is taken off or until it is actually cured
MortalPlague
04-20-05, 09:10 PM The difficulty with the xp rules as written is that the amount of experience granted will only add 100 or 200 every encounter, when there's a debt of several thousand experience to be filled. Additionally, this only happens for encounters which are difficult; any encounter with CR1 or lower creatures at this point grants the same xp to either of them. Furthermore, this would only serve to get the character to the low end of the level before they gain experience on relatively equal footing, which would leave them about a full level behind.

I'll be using the xp rules to increase the players xp, but I think I'll need to step in with some solo questing to supplement this.
Death_Mint
04-20-05, 09:52 PM yea if he lives five minutes from your house i see no reason not to have a solo campaign for him, also the idea of a ring or bracer that keeps him under control until he gets a permanant cure sounds good. i would love to be playing that character tho being strapped the the back of a horse all day sounds like my idea of a party! :cool:
mrgoat
04-21-05, 01:02 AM You could have him slip into madness on the outside (i.e. character gibbers, drools, and otherwise acts nonsensically (and is an NPC in the meantime), you could give him one of those somewhat cliche "all-in-your-head" type experiences through his own psyche, as a sidequest, and then justify giving him XP based on that, if he makes it through "alive". (Dying in his head could justify dying in the real world). He could also mysteriously wake from his delerium just as the party is administering the antidote, leaving him to wonder just a little if the antidote did it, or if he came out of it alone and the antidote did nothing.

Or, if you want it completely non-lethal, you could just work it so that if he's right about to die, or just died, that that happens to coincidentally be the time the party saves him with their mysterious concotion. Then award XP based on how far he got. Time in his head doesn't need to be exactly 1:1 with the real.

I guess that way he could technically adventure and gain xp while the party also gained xp, and he could come out of it having learned many things, thus justifying bumping him up in level to close to the rest of the party.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
MortalPlague 04-20-05, 05:13 AM	Is there any truly good way to reduce a gap in experience? I have a group that's mostly 5th level (other than one 4th level halfling), but the one in question is at the tail end of third level. This is an unfortunate result of luck and circumstance. He and the fourth level character are halfling brothers who entered the campaign at the same time, and progressed fairly evenly for a while. Then our player in question missed out on a daring encounter which gave a sizeable chunk of xp to a small group of party members. Now ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal, as I could catch the player in question up with similar encounters. The problem is, he contracted a strange supernatural 'disease' of sorts, and I use the term loosely; it's more a template. It grants an array of bonuses, but one of the side-effects is that it drives him slowly but steadily into madness. Both myself and the player would love to keep the character around, but the group has him tied to the back of one of their horses to keep him from going mad and killing everyone, and as such he's not participating in any combat (and thus not gaining xp). When he's eventually cured, is there a good way to catch him up without just dumping a massive lump of xp on him? Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Temrek 04-20-05, 05:28 AM	Award xp for things other then combat would be a good start...
MortalPlague 04-20-05, 05:33 AM	Award xp for things other then combat would be a good start... True. I've migrated away from the arbitrary xp model I used to use towards the standard DMG experience, which in turn has minimized non-combat xp. That said, I'm planning to give the player a large experience award for fighting a long mental war. However, I really don't want to suddenly bump him up two levels for it. As far as granting RP experience, if I started giving him rp bonuses left right and center, I'd have to give the better rp'ers much more to keep things consistent. Which really wouldn't help things. ;)
VerinBlod 04-20-05, 07:36 AM	If he is tight up, does the party take him with them into dungeon and the like? I ask this because he could be in a dangerous situation and thus participate in the encounter. Learning how not to attract attention from the monsters while going insane. :D He could even get xp for it, probably less than the normal party members. If the party leaves him behind you could throw some random encounter his way and let him deal with it. Hope this helps.
Dash Branaghan 04-20-05, 07:37 AM	I snagged the Palladium system's XP Awards model in part this past week. It rewards ideas and actions, successful use of skills (which I limited to ones that succeed...in Palladium, there is always a 2% minimum chance of failure), self sacrifice, and stuff like that. Email me and I'll send it to you. Dash
CzarGarrett 04-20-05, 09:28 AM	Side quest- give him something to do, by himself, thats mostly simple. The XP from that should get him to be at an appropriate level gap between him and the other players. Although at the tail end of 3rd level, with the party mostly 5th level, isn't too bad.
TheBard 04-20-05, 09:53 AM	Shouldn't it sort out itself over time? I mean, there are rules in the DMG which give different amounts of XP based on the pc's level.
Cantankerous 04-20-05, 10:15 AM	The bard nailed it in one. The difference in how much experience you get isn't small either. Let's say the group is 3 5th level characters a 4th and the one third. When faced with a CR 5 encounter the standard experience point awards should be 300 xp each for the fifth level characters, 32o for the fourth level one and 360 for the third level character. Seeing that it only takes 3000 points for him to advance from 3rd to 4th level while it takes the 5th level PC's 5,000 pts to get to 6th, he'll catch up pretty quickly by getting an extra 20% experience with his lower cost requirements. Isshia
babysamurai 04-20-05, 10:22 AM	I feel sorry for the player who is forced to sit and watch the other characters have fun, while he is strapped to the back of a horse going insane (hopefully screaming, I want to go for a run...I feel happy...)
Alynn 04-20-05, 11:10 AM	Even tied up, if he is playing his char (in other words, he keeps showing up to the sessions just to RP his char) he should get something, I'm not saying anything near what the ones in combat are getting (unless however he comes into direct combat with the enemy, even if he is tied up, if there is a chance he can die, he should get the exp, maybe not for the whole encounter, BUT at least for what could have killed him). If he roll plays well, give him 5%-10% of the party's exp for the session (or just a flat rate of 50 or something, I don't know how much exp you normally give per session) for bad RP 1-2%, it gives him a reason to keep coming to the sessions, adds a bit of fun and flavor to the story (hell if I was him just to get them to let me go, I'd start yelling to attract monsters "Just let me go and I'll stop, I feel fine, I don't want to kill you, you are way too cute." Diplomacy check) Also, you may want to brief him by either notes or whatever, how he will act for the day. I have a player who has a clepto dwarf rogue, who has a 20% chance any day to have the overwhelming feeling that something (randomly chosen by me) somebody in the party (random roll) has belongs to him, and he is going to try is damnedest to get it. Make a percent roll, so he has his good days, kinda good days, and straight out I wanna cut out your tounge and use it as a sword sharpener days. Anyway the exp for RP helps by 1) giving him steady exp increase 2) A reason to keep coming to sessions 3) Heap big RP fun time.
MortalPlague 04-20-05, 12:47 PM	I feel sorry for the player who is forced to sit and watch the other characters have fun, while he is strapped to the back of a horse going insane (hopefully screaming, I want to go for a run...I feel happy...) He's actually playing a temporary character currently; they're on a quest to find a tree of wonder so they can harvest its sap to help break the disease. He's with them because nobody would let them leave him with them. This is a party of 6 (and ofttimes 7) players, so the xp rewards in the big group are never as large as they could be on a solo quest. Thus, I think the solo quest option may be the best idea.
Dash Branaghan 04-20-05, 01:15 PM	The bard nailed it in one. The difference in how much experience you get isn't small either. Let's say the group is 3 5th level characters a 4th and the one third. When faced with a CR 5 encounter the standard experience point awards should be 300 xp each for the fifth level characters, 32o for the fourth level one and 360 for the third level character. My understanding of XP is that you take the party average (in your case, it is 22/5, which is an average of 4th level) and then determine the XP based on party average level...so a CR 5 encounter vs. a Level 4 party will yield X amount (sorry, no books on hand, and don't remember off the top of my head), and that is then divided by 5...everyone gets the same amount. Where it becomes balanced is that eventually he will catch up to them in level, despite the gap...at higher levels a 4000 point gap isn't much, but at low levels it's a killer. The suggestion for a side quest is all well and good, but you run the risk of annoying the other players who have to sit around and wait for the resolution...and this can be quite time consuming. Unless you and the player are willing to get together outside of normal gaming, in which case this might work. However, if the player decides he needs the help of the group (or even 1 or two members), the time is wasted since you have to wait until such time as everyone is together again. Dash
wordserpent 04-20-05, 03:26 PM	You could run an alternate quest for that PC on a night other than the gaming night. Perhaps a quest that allows the character to gain his sanity back and thus be a normal member of the group. I think the main problem is the "curse" that gis character is under. It really seems like you have hamstrung him.
wordserpent 04-20-05, 03:32 PM	Double post.
MortalPlague 04-20-05, 04:20 PM	You could run an alternate quest for that PC on a night other than the gaming night. Perhaps a quest that allows the character to gain his sanity back and thus be a normal member of the group. I think the main problem is the "curse" that gis character is under. It really seems like you have hamstrung him. An alternate quest outside of gaming night would be fairly easy to arrange- the player in question lives about five minutes from my house, so getting together is not a problem. For the sake of ensuring that he gets the xp himself without any others leaping ahead, I could fill out a small group of NPCs to help him out. The curse is a bit of a problem, but that's the way the campaign unfolded. His character basically was nearly killed, but instead of killing him, the BBEG passed this supernatural ailment on to the player in the hopes that he would fall prey to it and slay his comerades. I gave the player the option to continue playing his character or to roll up a new one and turn the halfling into an NPC, and he chose to keep playing the character. In my experience, the different xp awards for different levels rarely ever make a difference. At least, not in a swift enough fashion to level the character to an acceptable level. His character would likely be killed fighting CR 5 and 6 monsters while the others in the group would easily dispatch of CR 3 and 4 encounters. The solo questing seems like the best idea.
Cold Napalm 04-20-05, 04:21 PM	Well you can always take the LARP way when a character has to be shelved for a time for some reason or other. The exp that the NPC character that he is running applies to his actual PC character. That exp will be the "award" for the halfling beating a very dangerous and possibly deadly mental disease.
olshanski_home 04-20-05, 04:21 PM	Dash Branaghan excellently summarized how experience works in 3.0. If you have a 3.5 PHB, you will notice that they've updated it to read the way TheBard describes above. It is a subtle difference from 3.0, but it means that anyone who spends experience on crafting items or who looses a level will soon catch up with the rest of the party. Lets say you have a party of 5... with 4x5th level and 1x3rd level. And lets say that party defeats a pair advanced trolls with a CR of 6 each. In 3.0 rules, you'd say average party level is probably 5, which means the reward for a single CR6 creature is 2250, x2 trolls = 4500 divided by 5 characters = 900 XP each. Here is an example using 3.5 rules: The 5th level character reward for a CR 6 encounter is 2250, divide by 5 characters = 450 XP for each of the 5th level characters, x2 for killing two of them = 900 XP for each of the 5th level characters. The 3rd level reward for a CR6 encounter is 2700 XP, divided by 5 characters = 540 XP for the 3rd level character, x2 for killing two of them = 1080 XP for the 3rd level character. Eventually, the 3rd level character catches up... between the extra XP and the steeper XP required for advancement, the 3rd and 5th level characters will probably both be level 8 at the same time.
Ranger_ORB 04-20-05, 09:09 PM	you could give him a bracer, headband, other magic item that cures the disease until it is taken off or until it is actually cured
MortalPlague 04-20-05, 09:10 PM	The difficulty with the xp rules as written is that the amount of experience granted will only add 100 or 200 every encounter, when there's a debt of several thousand experience to be filled. Additionally, this only happens for encounters which are difficult; any encounter with CR1 or lower creatures at this point grants the same xp to either of them. Furthermore, this would only serve to get the character to the low end of the level before they gain experience on relatively equal footing, which would leave them about a full level behind. I'll be using the xp rules to increase the players xp, but I think I'll need to step in with some solo questing to supplement this.
Death_Mint 04-20-05, 09:52 PM	yea if he lives five minutes from your house i see no reason not to have a solo campaign for him, also the idea of a ring or bracer that keeps him under control until he gets a permanant cure sounds good. i would love to be playing that character tho being strapped the the back of a horse all day sounds like my idea of a party! :cool:
mrgoat 04-21-05, 01:02 AM	You could have him slip into madness on the outside (i.e. character gibbers, drools, and otherwise acts nonsensically (and is an NPC in the meantime), you could give him one of those somewhat cliche "all-in-your-head" type experiences through his own psyche, as a sidequest, and then justify giving him XP based on that, if he makes it through "alive". (Dying in his head could justify dying in the real world). He could also mysteriously wake from his delerium just as the party is administering the antidote, leaving him to wonder just a little if the antidote did it, or if he came out of it alone and the antidote did nothing. Or, if you want it completely non-lethal, you could just work it so that if he's right about to die, or just died, that that happens to coincidentally be the time the party saves him with their mysterious concotion. Then award XP based on how far he got. Time in his head doesn't need to be exactly 1:1 with the real. I guess that way he could technically adventure and gain xp while the party also gained xp, and he could come out of it having learned many things, thus justifying bumping him up in level to close to the rest of the party.