There has been quite a bit of discussion lately with players in my game concerning the awarding of experience points for healing. Although this discussion concerns Legendary Quest (www.legendaryquest.com), it would obviously also pertain to other games. I have no doubt that some of the gurus on this forum have already given this topic considerable thought so I thought I'd pick your brains.

First, a brief introduction. Legendary Quest is a combat-oriented fantasy RPG that has a reward system based on experience points. Although I'm no expert on the terminology used on this forum, I believe it to be a Simulationist/Gamist system. (I would appreciate any correction you might have as to its GNS classification.) I award experience points immediately after a battle since it provides the players with immediate feedback and doesn't really slow the game down much. Experience is awarded according to how much positive impact a player had on the outcome of a battle.

The problem with this practice is that I have a player that wants to play a character that is primarily a Healer. As such, he doesn't want to participate in combat to any degree, although he is convinced he must to gain any reward to advance his character.

At first, I didn't have any easy answer to this delima, but I've finally come up with an idea and thought I'd bounce it off of y'all. My current idea is to keep the rules as they are but recognize that healing can only influence future battles. That is, experience points are still only awarded to those characters that have an actual positive influence on the course of a battle. However, that influence may have come hours or even days prior to the actual confrontation. This rule merely clarifies what "positively influencing a battle" means for non-combative characters.

Suppose a party defeats a troll during a particularly nasty battle. Harvey the Healer, the party’s Acolyte, expends all of his mana after the battle in healing the group, but did not participate in the battle in any way. Question: Should Harvey get experience for the troll? Answer: No. The outcome of the battle would not have been any different had Harvey been vacationing in Tiawana. So, he gets nothing for the battle with the troll. Now, suppose after the party is healed, the group heads down the road and shortly thereafter encounters an ogre, which they also defeat after a long and difficult struggle. Once again, Harvey does not participate in the battle and, unfortunately, cannot even heal the party after the ogre falls because he used all of his mana after the troll battle. Question: Does Harvey get experience for the ogre? Answer: Yes.

I think the problem I've been having with dealing out experience for healing is that I did not properly identify all of the causes that influence a battle. In the first battle, Harvey truly had no effect on the battle and therefore did not gain experience even though he healed the damage incurred during that battle. However, in healing the party’s damage, the party was able to continue on that much quicker and was able to more easily handle their next encounter. Consequently, Harvey the Healer had a significant positive impact on the battle with the ogre.

Notice that the same could be said for a mage that cast a Dragon Might spell on a fighter before combat with the ogre, but did not otherwise participate in the battles with the troll or ogre. Since he had a positive influence on the battle with the ogre, the mage would be awarded experience for that battle. Why does it matter that the mage cast the Dragon Might spell only moments before the ogre battle while the healing priest may have cast his healing spells a day or more before? Both had a positive influence on the course of the second battle and so both are awarded experience.

Does this logic make sense to everyone out there? Do you think that I should also require that the priest at least witness the battle that he aided with his healing, or does a priest who stays in town deserve a piece of the action of any group coming to him for healing? Does anyone have any better ideas?

Thanks,

John Kirk

John,

I really like this idea - it seems to fit your game well. I would award the experience whether or not the healer is at the successive battle.

To be honest, I'd use this rule for anyone that influences a battle. If one character travels to get help, and that help means that the other characters win a battle, I'd give that character experience too.

Clinton,

To be honest, I'd use this rule for anyone that influences a battle.

John Kirk wrote: How about the Smithy that forged the fighter's shield? (We have Smithy characters in LQ.) How about the Alchemist that made the Healing potion the fighter drank? What about the Enchanter that gave the fighter's sword a +2 bonus? Should they get E.P. even though they weren't even aware that a battle took place? If the healing priest that stayed in town gets E.P., shouldn't these craftsmen get E.P. too? If so, how much?

Jack,

Of course the craftsman receive xp for making the sword. He receive whatever xp he should get for using his craft skill, but it is not that much because he is not in the combat. He receive a nominal such for preparing for combat by making a tool useful for it, but there's no way to know if the sword in question will ever be used in combat or not. So he gets xp for using his craft to make the sword whether it is used in 1,000 battles or if it rusts on his wears wall.

I dunno if Clinton meant it, but I'd say: yes. if the rpg is combat oriented and experience is based on positive contributions to a battle, then the alchemist, enchanter, and smith should all earn experience points if they are player characters (advancement for NPCs should probably be ignored, or abstracted if you really feel the need to plot it out.)

after all, how do smiths advance their craft in a very Sim game? in theory, by using their skills to craft items. in your game, there is no advancement for non-combat use of skills, at least from your description, so smiths would need to make weapons of war. you could weight the experience so that a smith or other character who does not take a personal risk would earn experience at a 1:4 ratio (make four weapons, heal four wounded soldiers...)

an alternate way would be to award experience for weapons based on the average amount of damage the weapons would do in a battle. or, for healing potions, the average amount of damage the potion heals. as an example, consider the way The Fantasy Trip awarded experience: 1 EP per hit point of damage dealt or healed, plus 1 EP per point of DX to the character who dealt the killing blow. I believe also TFT awarded experience for damage taken; in any case, other games have used that as an award as well. by analogy, then, TFT could have chosen to award 8 EP to a smith who made a 2d6+1 weapon.

John Kirk wrote: Suppose a party defeats a troll during a particularly nasty battle. Harvey the Healer, the party’s Acolyte, expends all of his mana after the battle in healing the group, but did not participate in the battle in any way. Question: Should Harvey get experience for the troll? Answer: No. The outcome of the battle would not have been any different had Harvey been vacationing in Tiawana.

I like the idea of it mattering who made my weapons. I like the idea of a swordsmith's name, fame, and skill increasing as his swords see battle.

Very cool, very High Fantasy in a good way.

-Vincent

Thanks for all your replies. You have given me a lot of options to think about. I'm still leaning toward my original idea, but I do believe that I should come up with some new rules concerning the gathering of E.P. for craftsmen. Currently, I'm thinking that a craftsman should gain 1 E.P. per day for practicing his trade. (In LQ, it only takes 25 E.P. total to gain 2nd Character Level, so 1 E.P. per day is actually a lot more than it probably seems.) A priest doing priestly things (such as healing) in his temple would get this "trade E.P." also. At this rate, with LQ's exponential experience point system, it would take a craftsman approximately 5 years to gain 7th level from "trade E.P." alone, which is a fairly respectable level in LQ.

However cool it seems, I just am simply not able to bring myself to have a swordsmith gain E.P. for the monsters his swords slay. Now, a master swordsmith/enchanter that imbued a sword with a portion of his own soul might have some claim to E.P., but I don't think that a plain old vanilla weapon has the "Karma" for E.P. gathering.

Even so, I am willing to hear more opinions along these lines. The best argument someone could make to me is providing supporting evidence that this idea has a real basis in folklore or mythology. The reason for this is that I've made strict adherance to authentic folklore and mythology a guiding principle in the development of Legendary Quest.

Mike Holmes wrote:

That is, characters may have fought very differently because of the presence of a Healer who they knew could heal them.

John Kirk wrote: If I understand correctly, you think that I should just give Harvey the Healer, say, 10 E.P. for performing a "Lay on Hands" on the fighter and not give him E.P. for the subsequent fight with the ogre? Is that right?

Let's get clear here. What are you trying to reward? Simply success in combat?

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: wrote: Let's get clear here. What are you trying to reward? Simply success in combat?

In Tactics Ogre you gain XP for healing (and other enhancement/curative magic) based on the level of the character you heal (or enhance or whatever).

Personally, I would just award XP based on how effective the healing was, however you measure it (HP, presumably).

Xp should be awarded for "doing your thing", whatever that is, whether it be healing, killing, stealing, spelling, etc.

Just my 2c

The real problem here is that you are encountering a classic problem with trying to reward two separate things, and getting a result that doesn't make sense. Are you rewarding the players for their good play? Or are you rewarding the characters for the experiences that they've had? You can't do both. The first example we call metagame. That is, it's understood that, though it's represented by an in-game cognate, the reward is really going to the players for a job well done. You're saying, "you played your character well in a tactical sense, so here's a reward".

The latter is not a player reward. It's a detail of simulation that says that if a character does X, then he'll get better by Y amount. These don't mix. If you go for the Metagame reward, you can forget about "what makes sense" in-game. Just say the character is contributing X amount to party success, so he gets X experience points. I mean, if a character does 10 points of damage to an Ogre, and leaves, he deserves that much credit for success. If a healer adds 10 HP to a character he deserves that much credit. It's all very simple from a math POV.

If you want the Sim method, then you'd have to just determine what makes for an experience that's important to learning, and go with that. From that POV, characters wouldn't realistically get too much experience from killing things. They'd get it from practice.


Have you been reading any of the theory around here? If you can do so it would help make discussion of these things easier. There are a lot of ways to tackle reward systems. Just to get you into another frame of mind, have you considered not having an "advancement" mechanic at all?

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Are you rewarding the players for their good play? Or are you rewarding the characters for the experiences that they've had? You can't do both.

Mike Holmes wrote: Have you been reading any of the theory around here?

Mike Holmes wrote: Just to get you into another frame of mind, have you considered not having an "advancement" mechanic at all?

Hi John,

I think you're going off the rails a bit regarding the GNS stuff. I don't think it's relevant.

The real question was laid down by Mike - what, exactly, is being rewarded. You say "good role-playing," but that means absolutely nothing to anyone besides yourself. There's no way I or anyone can interpret that.

Can you break it down into one or the other of these?

1. Rewarding players for playing in a certain way?

vs.

2. Improving characters based on their in-game actions according to the logic of the in-game world?

These aren't as easy to tease apart as one might think. For example, in Tunnels & Trolls, it's #1 - but the way players are rewarded is to have their characters improve in effectiveness. It's only when you check to see what the Adventure Points are awarded for (usually guts and pluck, in that game) that the distinction becomes clearer.

Now, based on your last post, it sounds like #1. But what do you mean by "good role-playing," in terms of the players getting a reward? Can you give a couple of examples of role-playing that really, definitely would get rewarded by you? And a couple as well of role-playing that really, definitely would not?

Those examples would help me a lot. Right now, I'm looking at the thread and I can't imagine what to say, without them.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Can you break it down into one or the other of these?

1. Rewarding players for playing in a certain way?

vs.

2. Improving characters based on their in-game actions according to the logic of the in-game world?

Ron Edwards wrote: Can you give a couple of examples of role-playing that really, definitely would get rewarded by you? And a couple as well of role-playing that really, definitely would not?

Hi John,

Actually, I think you've interpreted my #1-2 in a different way from my intention, so I will keep going with my explanation.

In #1, I'm not talking about role-playing one's character. When I say "a certain way," I mean, any way that you as the GM are hoping to see. Doesn't matter whether it's role-playing in the acting-sense or not.

In #2, your second interpretation is more on target, but I hope you can see that it's exactly the same as #1. You want the players (note, not the characters) to be involved in play in a certain way. Presented with a problem or concern, they have to get into it, emotionally, and deal with it in a fun and imaginative way. Combat or no combat, role-playing (in terms of "acting") or not, you demand this involvement and imagination.

Do I have that right? That's a #1 thing. It's an expectation of your players' behavior.

So - in that case, the only reasonable concern you should have is to make a reward system that focuses on exactly that. Did the player invest in the situation and provide neat stuff to happen? Then wham - reward. Never mind the actions involved (combat, no combat, etc, etc, which skills, healing, not healing, etc, etc). In many ways, it doesn't matter what they do as long as (as you put it) they accomplish something with what they do.

Once you have that principle down, then the next question is whether you want to distinguish among players in terms of how much. A lot of rules-sets assume this is a good idea: "+1 for the player who ..." and that sort of thing. In terms of this type of reward system, though, I tend to think of this as unnecessary. Did we do our thing well? OK, five points for everyone, be done.

And finally, the next principle is what the points may be spent on. That's a whole 'nother issue, and I'll hold off on discussing it, based on your response to my points so far.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Presented with a problem or concern, they have to get into it, emotionally, and deal with it in a fun and imaginative way. Combat or no combat, role-playing (in terms of "acting") or not, you demand this involvement and imagination.

Do I have that right? That's a #1 thing. It's an expectation of your players' behavior.

Ron Edwards wrote: In many ways, it doesn't matter what they do as long as (as you put it) they accomplish something with what they do.

Ron Edwards wrote: And finally, the next principle is what the points may be spent on.

The problem simply was that the Healer of the group healed some party members in desperate need of help after E.P. had already been distributed for the battle that caused the damage. The obstacle doing the damage had already been overcome and the Healer was not even present for the battle, so had absolutely no impact on its victory. The party was expecting more trouble at some point in the future, so the Healer very rightly felt the need to help his cohorts out. But, at the time of the healing, nobody had any idea when or how the next obstacle might arise.

clehrich wrote: Let me point out that you've implicitly defined "obstacle" as "something that can do damage."
...
But why define "obstacle" so narrowly? Is that required in LQ?

clehrich wrote: Seems to me that there's a few ways to deal with this:

1. Assume that PCs don't get into damaging situations without a healer, and thus healing after the fact was implicit in the damaging situation; therefore the healer gets E.P.

clehrich wrote: 2. Assume that healers have different obstacles than do fighters; their big obstacle is readiness for unknown situations, and thus healing the gang in preparation gains E.P.

clehrich wrote: 3. Assume that obstacles are solely and in a limited sense situations that cause damage, in which case healing after the fact or before it does not gain E.P.; only healing during a fight gains E.P.

clehrich wrote: Are there others I've missed?