Awarding Experience or Karma

[Erudite]

[Dionysus]

I always liked the "key" system in the shadow of yesterday - been dying to try that one out.

[Erudite]

[Dionysus]

The "keys" are the ways your character gets XP.

You need to pay xp to gain a key - like focussing on what the character wants to do - their motivation.

eg from the book:

Key of Conscience
Your character has a soft spot for those weaker than their opponents. Gain 1 XP every time your character helps someone who cannot help themselves. Gain 2 XP every time your character defends someone with might who is in danger and cannot save themselves. Gain 5 XP every time your character takes someone in an unfortunate situation and changes their life to where they can help themselves. Buyoff: Ignore a request for help.
The buyoff shown above is a special bit about Keys. Whenever a player has a character perform the action shown in one of the buyoffs, the player can (this is not mandatory) erase the Key and gain 10 XP. Once bought off, a character can never have the same Key again.
Unlike abilities and Secrets, the number of Keys a character can have is limited. A character can have no more than five Keys at one time.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I also vastly prefer giving out xp in real time, to the extent that I don't nowadays play any games that do it differently, and will house-rule a system to do it this way if it has some lame end-of-session math for this purpose. I also usually expect xp to flow so quickly that it'll have a discernible effect in one session already.

In my current D&D homebrew sort of thing xp is tracked as checkboxes on the character sheet, so it'd take a rather dull individual to spend too much time jotting the xp down. I could use chips as well, but those are already in use as hit points and whatnot. The criteria for xp are public as well, so the players can remind me if I overlook something.

[Erudite]

Thanks for the explination Dionysus!

Eero Tuovinen , it sounds like a good method you use as well.

[Kevin Smit]

I've found that experience awards are one of the more contentious aspects of rpgs.  The thing you have to remember is that experience is a reward system, and reward systems modify behavior.  If xp/ karma is gained solely by killing things, the characters will find ways to kill things (and not look for alternate methods).  I've found that my groups are fairly intolerant of reward systems that lead to differences in reward (why did HE get more xp than ME?).  Players across the board want to feel like they're progressing.  The system that i ended up using was just to allow a progression every few sessions (depending on play time).  It satisfied the players that their characters were getting better while avoiding all of the minutia of what behaviors produce the reward.  Since the game "difficulty" rises in accordance with players progression, nothing really changes except the tools available to the characters.  I've found that progression is more about the players' subjective feeling about their place in the game world than about promoting or punishing particular actions.

[The Dragon Master]

Kevin Smit: I'd have to disagree with your assesment of  "gamers" and reward mechanisms. For my own part, I prefer a game without any type of "experience" mechanic, or one where that mechanic is... trivial (i.e, Sorcerer and Classic Traveller). I prefer to focus on the characters story*, rather than on raising the stats. If I can't build the character I want to play when I start, I really am not interested in playing in the game period, and having created a character I want to play, I'm not terribly interested in changing the character in the (seemingly) arbitrary way that Experience Points allow for. I'm sure I'm not alone in that, though I'm almost certainly in the minority.

Erudite: Out of curiosity, do your players prefer the game to go this way? That is to say, having their gameplay rewarded if it fits what you want from the player? Or is the standard you're measuring their gameplay from one that was agreed upon by group consensus? Have you had any "player mutiny" since you started doling out experience like this? I'd be interested to hear how the group dynamic (rather than game dynamic) has been altered by this... technique.

*By which I mean the general path that the characters life will take which I have in mind when I create it. An example is the Dragon Blooded magic user I made for Exalted. The whole point of that character was a downward spiral based on the story of Brigid. The character pursuing these mythical points of power in order to increase his own, only to find it was just a myth, and no such places existed, with him eventually running into the Wyld believing that they must have been swallowed up by the Wyld in the distant past.

[Erudite]

Note: for a somewhat deeper look at the experience mechanic itself, check out this thread: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=27357.0