Elfcrusher wrote:
Interesting. Is the number still determined based on how (how often, how successfully, etc.) skills are used during that session? So that if the session is mostly social interaction and the two characters with high persuade/riddle/courtesy do all the rolling, everybody still gets AP? Or is it just "fixed AP per session"?
Flat rate per session, regardless of what the hell we were doing or how successful we were at it. We show up to play, we all get 1 XP (two if we're finishing off some extended goal or something else really big) and 3 AP.
For some context: this works for us because we're a weekly, scheduled game with fixed session length. There aren't some sessions which only last an hour and some sessions where we play all day, it's always roughly the same length of time. And because we play online, combat takes longer than it might otherwise, which means sessions where we're bouncing around stabbing things tend to occupy a lot more of our play-time than ones where we try and convince Beorn to part with some sweet, sweet honey.
Like I said, it's a way to go.
Stormcrow wrote:Some mature gamers prefer to actively earn their in-game rewards, rather than just be handed them regardless of one's actions.
See, that's the thing. Our GM doesn't pure mechanical character advancement to be an in-game reward. An in-game reward, to him, is managing to slay all the trolls and claim their loot. Or convincing Dain Ironfoot to back up Frar the Beardless on his quest to reclaim the Greydelve. Or becoming the War-leader of the Woodmen. Or, after a year-long quest, receiving an Arnorian weapon made by the Dunedain that you can wound Nazgul with without it breaking.
Those are in-game rewards, in his lexicon. Our GM has an enormous hate-on for systems which advance characters mechanically in an uneven way, based on his own experiences, which have been: people generally roll up characters to do awesome, cool stuff with them. Generally, your ability to do said awesome, cool stuff is tied strongly to your mechanical strengths; good planning, creative thought, and just plain luck play a large part, but the best planner in the world is probably still going to fail if the plan he comes up is one relying on skills they're mechanically deficient in. And people tend to grow resentful if they've been showing up every week and playing (at least in their minds) just as hard as everyone else, but are advancing more slowly and, thus, are less able to do cool stuff than the guys who managed to buy up skills faster. So whenever he runs a game he tends to flatten out mechanical advancement and award totally equally.
For stuff he considers to be an in-game reward he can be pretty brutal. I played in a game with him where my PC ended up as a complete pariah, hated by most, not allowed to hold personal property or any responsibility, and only hadn't been executed because of the patronage of one single person. This was a result of in-universe decisions on my part, and it put me, in-universe, at a grave disadvantage compared to the other players.
But mechanically speaking I was exactly as strong as all the other PCs. We'd all advanced at the same rate and started from the same floor.
This isn't any sort of "one true way" of doing things. But it works for him, and I also like it and will probably emulate it.