Hi i was thinking of using experience points as the old system ie 100xp per advance...

My reasoning is it better allows flexibility for awards in general..

Because everybody getting one advance per session is to arburtory this way i get to award odd amounts without upsetting the balance of the game...

I will probally award between 75 and 150 per session and maybe an extra fifty for a milestone achievement.

However what do people think would be the pros and cons of this...

Regards

The upside would be, as you say, greater control over the XP distribution. You might want to give less XP per session or more XP per session more frequently. It would also be easier to divide the XP for a mission between the missions individual, or lesser, goals.

The downside is more for the players I think. Because you can give them, if you go for a 1 XP equals 100 XP option, 50 XP at the end of a session you would infact be taking away an advance from them. Which under the 1 XP system they would be entitled to IF you gave them any XP at all since you wouldn't be able to give less then 1 XP. Unless ofcourse you start giving out decimal points of XP.

I am actually thinking about doing 10XP = 1AP.

I don't feel the need for the granularity that 100 point system would give. I would also make an adventure start with 10XP + rewards. This is in keeping with the 1AP per adventure of the CORE mechanics, while still allowing me to award bonus experience.

The downside with the current 1XP = 1AP is that it makes it difficult to award bonus XP...IMHO.

It's funny, I started running Star Wars Saga Edition recently and that game has a pretty complicated XP award system which I felt was too cumbersome so I decided that I would just do away with XP altogether and let the whole party move up a level whenever they've achieved significant story progress.

I haven't been able to open my WFRP box yet, but from this thread I am gathering that in this game the designers were thinking pretty much the same thing I was, is that correct?

I understand why you would want to go back to using XP but for me and my group, a system without XP apparently works better.

You should keep the XP award even across the party. The book recommends handing out Fortune Points and in-game rewards such as fame, titles, etc. to reward and encourage good roleplaying. Handing out variable XP can cause all sorts of problems and wall flower players aren't going to be encouraged to roleplay better by shorting them XPs, they're just going to have less fun. It also opens up the possibility of favoritism or the appearance of it, so consistent awards is the way to go in my opinion.

That being said, the only reason to change the XP system is to slow the rate of advancement. I can see that if you run shorter session, you may not want the PCs to advance every session, but every other session. An XP system similar to Savage Worlds where it takes 5 XP to advance and 2 or 3 XP are awarded every session to all players ensures that PCs advance every other session. Seeing as there are already advances in this system such as Characteristic advances and non-career advances that a PC must save up for, they won't necessarily be improving every session anyway, so I'd be cautious of slowing down the rate of advancement too much. An advance like a new action card represent a rather small incremental step in improvement and wouldn't seem as attractive if it took a PC 4 or 5 sessions to get it. If you are just changing the scale and still have the PCs advance once per session on average, I'm not sure what the attraction is to having more XPs and handing out variable amounts.

IMHO, the advantage of having more XP is rewarding a player when it wouldn't be possible otherwise.

So let's say Player A has a great idea that benefits Player B. In game, Character B gets the in-game rewards and Character A gets nothing, maybe a master-work weapon or something equally nice that it wound make sense to only reward 1 item. In these situations, which happen regularly, WH3ed has no built in way to reward Player A. In the past I would reward Player A with some additional XP for having a good idea, not a tremendous amount mind you but something. Rewarding fortune points is unappealing because they just refresh at the beginning of the next session anyway.

I do think that it is important for a GM to consider everyone's XP when doling out rewards. I also tend to add in equalizer XP. Take the difference between highest XP character and the lowest, and give the lowest half that XP. Or give the lower XP characters 150% if the XP earned for that adventure. Just because I think it is important for every character to be generally equally experienced.

The new system, as written, does not allow for that flexibility, which I think is a weakness of an otherwise incredibly flexible rule set.

To each his own but the idea of using XP to reward player ideas rather than in game rewards only to have to manage "equaiizer" XP to keep PCs advancing at the same rate and/or not too far spread out in their abilities is just more work than I want to do.

I'm simply doing a 3xp = 1 advance system. It's simple and allows some flexibility when rewarding particular players for good roleplaying.

And each session (assuming it was an average length session) everyone receives 3xp.