i run a combat heavy game and i thought it would be cool to give very small xp bonuses to my players for things like double kills and extra hits beyond the first. just 10xp per additional kill/hit. what do you think? do you have any other ideas for additional rewards? i'm not really worried about giving them a lot of experience because my group likes to ramp up quickly.

Well I can't say I know your style of playing, but a term I first heard well over a decade ago comes to mind: frag stealer. =)

Not just that but you would encouraging the use of full auto weapons more than any other types. And a melee focused player could quickly start falling behind because of it, if there is such a character among your players.

I'm not saying "don't do it", just think carefully about what your players current capabilities are, and how each one of them could possibly earn the same ammout in any given fight. I'm really not sure how to find a good balance between what would give you additional xp, and what wouldn't.

How about 1 xp per wound inflicted, might not sound like alot but in a heavy combat game...it adds up quickly.
That is what we used when we played WFRP 1st ed. back in the days....like 15 years ago...

GrtZ,

S.

xenobiotica said:

this is very true. thanks for pointing that out. as for 1xp per wound i tend to just kill off the minor mobs if they get hit to keep the game moving along so i don't know if that would work out for my particular group. i think instead i'll just start handing out small xp bonuses for things that just seem like they deserve it. for example in our last game one of the pcs dropped everything so she could drag another that had just been wounded to safety. it's pretty arbitrary but i don't think they'll mind. also having something more open to my own interpretation as gm allows me to control it a little better to make sure no one gets left behind.

thanks a lot for your feedback.

Why not assign XP based not on whether an opponents been killed but on how they've been killed. Cool, effective, fluffy or just plain funny methods of foe-removal earn you XP, just shooting/stabbing the enemies to death doesn't. (unless you've just stabbed a plasma-cannon armed servitor after charging it from 100m away course).

You'll find that the most XP-hungry PCs will immediately stop using the best weapons and begin looking around the environment more. This will help them kill the enemy, but also help the story and detail.

Mind you, I give XP based on how funny the PCs are so my ideas might be useless!

"Kool Kill" bonuses are likely to build up faster when dealing with minor/weaker enemies. They are often less skilled (easier to hit), less armoured (easier to damage), less durable (easier to crit) and available in great numbers.

-K

I like to have my players decide on at least some of the xp they gain. It of course depends on the scope of your campaign and how much of a storyteller vs fighter you and your group are. Here are a few versions I use:

Vote for best performance, can be in several different categories. The player with the most votes gets bonus xp. Some examples of categories to vote for: killyness, creativity, laughs, character acting, ifantrymans primer citations, piety, heresy etc etc etc. Voting can be done openly (beware of favouritism and hidden power-structures) or closed (takes a bit longer with writing notes).

Give bonus points to players that arrive in time, bring snacks enough to share, keep the snacks off the gaming table, manage to stay on topic/in character during the entire evening, or behave in any other way that you want to encourage. This can in very productive ways improve your gaming groups behaviour and attitudes.

The most radical method, and my favourite: Let the player group score themselves collectively, maybe 0-200 xp in a few easy categories such as: How fun we had. How much 40k-feeling we had. How clever we were. How beautiful our combat sequences were. How much we pwned the bad guys. How well we worked together. How much we succumbed to/resisted the lure of chaos/heresy/xenos. This can of course be combined with regular xp/hour or any of the abovbe sources of xp. In my extensive experience (no pun intended) player groups have been very reasonable with their xp sorting and actually quite often develop into creative discussions as to how they can improve their gaming nights, based on what they want their adventures to be about. If you are feeling really adventurous (pun intended) let your players decide on a few categories that they will score themselves in. This really takes away the competition between GM and players, and reinforces the feeling that "We are all in it for the fun".

Spend some time thinking about what the xp:s are supposed to represent. Are they a representation of what the characters have learned during the story, or are they a reward to the player, as compensation for time spent playing during the evening? In each case, decide what you want your players to do during an evening and reward that. If you give points for scoring kills, your players will go for killing stuff. If you give points for creative roleplaying, your players will roleplay.

Another xp-related hint: Let all the characters level at roughly the same pace, and let newly created characters be roughly in line (xp-wise) with the older ones, else there is a risk that some players will feel useless. The risk is less in a skillbased system like DH, than in a levelbased system like DnD, but still.

Some good ideas there Mellon. I like some of them very much, especially the "vote" XP and even letting players determine XP themselves to some extent.

At the moment, I award XP strictly equally across the group (roleplay is a team-based activity!) and expliticly state what it's for: "25 XP for achieving this minor task, 100 XP for completing that major task, 80 XP out of 100 because you guys really got into character tonight". That way the players know exactly what they got XP for, and what they have to do next session to do more; every character levels equally meaning no one is left with a character inferior to all the others, and the players are encouraged to work together.

This is popular with most of the group but there are one or two who preferred the way every other GM in our RP group so far has done it: "Jim gets 150 XP, Bob gets 200 XP, Fred gets 180 XP" with no explanation as to why, or what Jim needs to do next week to catch up with Bob. One of them even said it's "not fair" that if they roleplay well, others get the benefit. (Yes, this person is naturally competitive). I pointed out that roleplay is rarely solo, you can't have a brilliant roleplay conversation with yourself, and that anyway it's "not fair" that someone who's naturally quiet, or has a naturally quiet character, gets less XP (and therefore a less good character, and therefore less fun!) than someone who's naturally outgoing. I'm not sure how convinced the person in question was. If there is a mutiny at some point in the future, I'd rather change it to use some of your ideas (players judge each other) than how our other GMs have done it (GM judges players from an ivory tower).

Bonus XP = damage taken.

Hey, that reminds of the old MERP system where you got xp from critical taken...they actually were my greatest source of xp...

"All organic material on back destroyed"

Santiago said:

It should. It's an idea I got from Rolemaster.

MERP (and Rolemaster, and Spacemaster) you were supposed to get XP for every hit done or taken, and 50 per level for every crit delivered or taken... plus you got roll * difficulty factor for every roll made (from x.1 to x10, IIRC), and for every mile hiked, and ... and... and...

When I ran RM, I gave each player an XP form. While it took 10,000. XP to level, I've had players who kept careful track level in a single (6hour) session of RM.

Back on topic....

Pick what you want players to do. Give extra XP when they do so. For me, giving XP for taking hits is good, but I don't want to incentivize a "shoot first" mentality, so I'm not giving XP for hits done; the setting does that well enough already.

Likewise, if you want Players to talk to prisoners, give them 20-50 xp just for talking to the bad guys. And tell them why they got them.

If you want them to be careful to take prisoners back for judgement, rather than summary execution, give them 50-100 xp for doing so, plus an extra 25-50 per additional body arrested.