This may be a not all together unprecedented question on these forums, and I apologize for possible redundancy. I'm running a play-by-post DH campaign on StoryCrafter.com. (It is called 'Calixis Confidential,' if anyone's interested). I've been running character preludes as 'short stories' to get warmed up on the rules of DH and the pitfalls and advantages of PbP. I just finished my first one. "The Fall of the House of Drake," and I'm trying to figure out what kind of experience to reward the players with for a 'prelude adventure.'

I suppose the broader question is, if you have GM'd play by post, how do you manage XP in play-by-post games? These adventures often take a long time to finish because of the nature of the medium.

On a related question, how do you all treat the initial 400 XP that the PC's get? Do you count it towards their Rank. In other words, is a starting PC only 99 points away from rank 2?

A starting player is 100 (not 99) points from Rank 2 (said explicitly someplace -- in the errata, I think). Those first 100 must be spent on some Rank 1 advance.

All I play is PBP -- due to there not being a whole lot of DH players in Moscow, I do not have a choice, and actually it gives me a lot of time to prepare and think things through as a GM. Since there are no sessions per se, I use the advanced XP system and hand them out whenever there is a recognizable transition point in the adventure. I'm also thinking of starting to double the amounts, given the slow rate of PBP games.

Like bogi_khasa, my DH is all PBP on RPol because that's where my players are.

I start my players at 800 xp and starting cash & 3 months income anyway, because that means you tend to have characters that can actually do stuff without having to wait an age.

I divide my games up into rough 'chapters' and award xp per chapter. A chapter is approximately the amount I'd envisage getting through in a few hour session of tabletop play. This generally seems to work out as around the 6 month mark, and I'll give between 200-400xp. It's fairly arbitrary, but I've had no complaints so far. I play online as well, however, and my experience there is that xp seems a looong time coming. As part of the point of the DH system is that you gain xp quickly but by small increments I'm having to rethink the way I'm doing things. The problem is balancing the lived experience of having played for a long time with no xp with the in-game timeline. It might make sense to give 100xp around once a month, but the danger is that you end up with characters who have essentially walked down a street, chatted to some people, spotted some posters, chatted to some more people, suddenly becoming markedly more powerful, which seems weird. I've noticed that conversations and combat become markedly slower in PBP, and this skews things a lot. The players standing around saying 'ok, what do we know, what do we think is going on here and what should we do next' could easily take a month.

The other option would be to essentially change the way the xp system works, and give larger chunks of xp, though with the same frequency. This is probably what I'll try doing. It makes more sense in game-time terms, as it can in part represent stuff learnt in down-time too. The slow pace of advancement in PBP is a real drag with DH, because seeing your character develop over time is one of the most fulfilling aspects of the game. I think fudging things a little by giving heftier xp rewards is probably worth it in terms of allowing players a real sense of their character growing and changing. I've got an Rpol WFRP game that's been going for a few years now, and the characters still haven't advanced massively from their starting point. That's just depressing. Even my most loyal player (I've lost several along the way) frequently notes what year he's expecting to be able to change career in - 2011 I think...

Thanks...I do appreciate the input, and you've echoed a lot of things I've been thining about. I think, maybe large, discreet experience awards doled out at narratively appropriate times -the end of adventures- with lots of narrative down time in between -a la the Eisenhorn books. This makes logical sense and provides an impetus to keep playing.