I just started reading the core Rulebook for Edge of the Empire last night. But the XP awards are kind of confusing, though I think I have an idea of how to do it. I got lots of the glass stones in red, white, and blue colors. I was thinking after every battle or occasion to award small xp awards to just give each player a white or clear and make it worth 1xp each. While keeping red worth 5xp, and blue worth 10xp and just award a red 5xp stone after each campaign. Is this a good system for the Star Wars RPG that is just right and won't progress the characters too slowly or too quickly? :'(
XP award question.
You can track it however you like, how much you reward is really about how quickly you want characters to progress.
I like to give 25ish xp per session. It allows a new PC to make some dramatic progress early on, and it allows an advanced one to purchase a final talent in a spec or the 5th rank of a career skill, so even they feel progress every session.
Edited by 2P51Greetings mate!
Try to see the game as a "reward per scene" game intead a points per kill. After a good session/campaign (or even imagine it as a Clone Wars/Rebels episode) give a reward considering some facts like:
General game lenght:
- Weekend game with a pair of sessions
- A campaign based on a story with an end.
- A endless sandbox that your grandsons will continue... XD
Also consider your idea of universe "Scale of Power". Your players will become Vader-killers or just unnamed heroes that battle unnamed pirates? Something in the middle perhaps?
So consider this ranks and a few ones, I suggest to give:
- Between 5-25 XP per campaign or session up to the first sessions or until they get Rank 3 on some key skills.
- Between 5-15 XP until they get the fourth rank or complete a spec tree fully or get the third one.
- Between 5-10 XP If they achieved Rank 5 on key skills and some other resolutions.
Also, I gathered some interesting posts about this.
Enjoy the lecture and be welcome 
Edited by Josep Maria
I typically do 5-10 per session, plus an additional 5 for good roleplaying, accomplishing key mission objectives. If the players really get creative then I give them an immediate XP reward instead of waiting until the end of the session. The roleplaying and creativity bonus is a good training piece for the players, showing them its not just a shoot-em up or strategy game.
We don't track by encounter or kill, we just do per session depending on how much we accomplished (advancing the story and relative difficulty). We typically give out 25-30 per session in our group. I know that this is pretty high compared to other groups, but this allows a player grab something new every game and still have enough points to spread around for skills. It also keeps our players interested with many competing games/events at our local store. Nobody is showing the signs of blatant power gamer yet, and we tend to do more roleplay than rolling, so everything appears to be in balance. Individual results may vary.
I don't give extra exp for good role-playing or anything like that, our group don't really need or want that carrot so to speak. But we have a lot of encounters each session, most of them are non-combat and the length is usually really long, far longer then most groups, 8h+ is the standard here. And I give out 25ish exp per session, I have out more exp in the start and planning to give out a little less in the future. Right now the PCs are about 450exp + start exp, and they are broad. The feel of power from the PCs right now are about Ashoka Tano, which is quite nice becouse they play Jedi Padawans in the prequel era.
Depends on what happens and how big the session is, for me.
For short sessions, or games where not a lot happens, there's a base of 5xp to start. Which gets further modified by things like +5xp more per "encounter" they get through, +1xp per destiny point each player has at the end of the session. (Each player rolls his own dp in my games and we use it as a reflection of "their own destiny" rather than a group pool. But players can donate to a pool if they want to help another player) and anywhere from +2 to +4 extra xp for then doing something amazing, or particularly good role playing skills.
I use it to encourage role playing, risk taking, and clever dp usage. (My players usually spend dps quickly, and often. And I try not to spend them on every little check, so I usually end up with a horde. Each player having their own 1-2 personal dp helps me spend and manage things. And it feels a bit more personal when one gets flipped onto a player.)
With these in place, a small session usually nets about 10-15 xp for short games, and the largest game saw each player getting 30+. And they could've gotten more, but chose to (rather wisely) take flight rather than fight.
The advice I heard on the order 66 podcast, which I have been following is 5xp per real world hour spent at the gaming table. I also offer my players 5 to 10 Xp for writing up stuff for the obsidian portal site for the campaign. So far only 2 have taken me up on the extra Xp offer.
Edited by EliasWindriderThanks for all your advice. I got my xp award system straight. 
Also when my pc's don't have the skill set the need for the next session, I will bribe one to train up the skill. For example I needed someone to be trained in stealth, and the PC'S had gotten 20 XpressMusic the previous session, I offered an XpressMusic who had stealth as a class skill 10 xp for them to spend that 10 and the other 20 to get 3 ranks in stealth
Jay Little. The guy who designed the Core Mechanic suggests about 5xp per hour of actual game play. IE not including side conversations and distractions.
For "not-so-marathonian" campaigns, its a good options
...XpressMusic...
It takes a long time to train auto-correct. My phone is just now letting me drop the f-bomb without changing it to "duck."
...XpressMusic...
It takes a long time to train auto-correct. My phone is just now letting me drop the f-bomb without changing it to "duck."
I have a Samsung Galaxy note3. How do you actually train auto correct? Is there a button to push to say "this is correct"? T
I have done three sessions - 10xp, 10xp, 15xp.
In the latter session, the challenge and quality was dialed up. I dolled out a few reward XP bonuses - 2 xp to a new role player for repeated ingenuity, 1 xp to each of 2 players for doing some cool stuff.
I don't recommend you do XP rewards by encounter in any game, even the ones that typify that method. (Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, etc.)
Rather, for this system, I recommend you award XP at the end of the session based on how often you meet. If you have a weekly game (or more often) reward 5 XP per session. Every other week should be 10 XP. Once a month should be 20 XP. Also leave yourself room to reward an additional 5 XP to the group for excellent roleplaying or accomplishing major goals.
No matter what, try to reward in multiples of five, as that's the magic number for buying skills and talents. If the final tally for a session is 9 XP, the players will only be able to use five of that anyway.
I'll probably do 5-10xp. Plus 2 other reward systems. 5 more for good roleplay/action that people comment on another person--- example: 3 players and one person nominates one of the other players saying something they roleplayed well or an action they did that was awesome. This way it gets the social thing afterwards going on as well as give players a good clue on what made their character unique or special to the game and group.
Haven't seen it mentioned yet, but what we (and others) have done is typically 5 XP per hour of play. Bonus XP for a character thinking of something awesome that had a big impact on the story, or completing major plot points.
Like just about everyone else said, don't reward XP based on encounters, but rather key advancements to the narrative. You can use the published adventures as a guideline to handing out XP. For instance, page 55 of JoY has five different plot points that should gain XP based on the progress in Episode 1. In this instance, the XP gain might seem high, but Episode 1 will probably take more than a session or two to complete, so it accumulates.
If I hand out XP based on session, it's usually in the range of 10-15, plus a bonus if someone does something narratively spectacular Keep in mind that the more XP you hand out, the shorter your campaign will most likely be. This is because with high level campaigns, every PC will have high checks with a lot of different skills and talents, and it can become progressively more onerous for the GM to provide an adequate challenge. This isn't always the case, of course. I'm sure there's plenty of 1500 XP+ campaigns being run with happy players and GMs. But most of the challenge of the game is in advancing your character and giving it more depth and interest. Past a certain point, players can run out of ideas and can get bored. There's only so many speciailzations you can purchase before things start to get ridiculous
This is like kids comparing how much allowance they get. Our GM is very liberal with XP in comparison to most of the people posting here. We started lower at the 10 XP per session but have been getting 30 XP per weekly session for the past few months. I think it is a little high, but he does challenge us on a regular basis. Encounters vary among the social, personal combat, and starship combat. Would I do less? Probably, but we are all having fun. He has developed several interconnected storylines for each of our PCs based on the backgrounds we chose. If I think he's giving out too much XP, how could I possibly complain when we're getting great stories every week? I guess that's what really matters.
I've looked at this and other similar threads to come up with my xp plan. At first I had planned to simply fix the xp every session, based on how fast I wanted the players to advance. Moving away from the "kill for xp" we find in D&D and others was critical. However that minimizes the importance of player accomplishments and I realized I didn't want to do that as it might lead the players to feel like what they chose didn't have any real impact.
So with the base of 5xp per hour, I assigned 5xp chunks to various encounters or encounter groups (not all combat of course, and some not even involving skill checks). If the players do everything they can, or create an encounter of their own that is equivalent in scope to one I've set up, they get the full amount at the end of the session. If they dither a lot, argue a lot, get distracted a lot, or just plain have terrible luck all night and don't accomplish much, then they'll get less.
I'm hoping this is a good blend of rewarding player engagement and accomplishment, making the players feel like their choices matter, and balancing character progression pace so the players don't "outlevel" the story.
No it really doesn't. If you look at the rules and the adventures FFG has put out. When calulating XP they do take into account good role play, accomplishing goals etc. When we say the rule of thumb is 5 XP an hour of game that is yardstick. give mor if they accomplished goals. Give more for good roleplay. etc.
You could go for 5xp per hour and then just give a couple of points extra here or there as bonus. So for example a player may get 15xp for the session and the +2 for the bonuses you award. I don't see any rules that make you give xp in 5 point chunks, even though you spend xp in 5 point increments.
I guess I'll have to read through some of the adventures. So far I've been focusing on the Core Rulebook and a couple Sourcebooks.
We play sessions of 4 hours where I give 10 XPs at the end of the session. I sometimes award 5 extra XP if the PCs did something very creative, heroic, dramatic... or if they hit a major milestone in the campaign.
I also allow XP expenditure on the fly, in the middle of an encounter for example, the PCs like it a lot.