Rewards: Experience and Wealth
Characters may gain experience towards level advancement and treasure to equip their characters with in two major ways. Role-playing and Going on Adventures. The rules for both are mentioned below; and make use of the Open Game License XP system published as part of Paizo's Pathfinder Roleplaying game; and it (as well as guidelines for building encounters) may be found here: Encounters & Rewards
Role-Playing Rewards (Only Council may award this, so save your logs or post them)
XP: During a RP session that is spent role-playing outside of an adventure, a character gains experience as though they were a member of a party of 4 characters defeating an enemy of a Challenge Rating (CR) equal to their character level; as shown on the Encounters and Rewards page above. Thus a 2nd level character gains 150 XP for every hour spent role-playing, while a 10th level character gains 2,400 XP. Cap is currently CR 10, use that row even if above lvl 10
Treasure: During a RP session that is spent role-playing outside of an adventure, a character is rewarded 1/4th the treasure they would have received for overcoming an encounter for character level as shown on the Encounters and Rewards page above (rounded up to the nearest 5gp). Thus a 2nd level character would 200gp per RP session, while a 10th level character gains 2,050gp per RP session.
Adventure Rewards
Adventures award XP and Treasure according to the Challenge Ratings/Encounter Levels as normal. The GM determines how much XP each encounter is worth and then divides the rewards by the number of players. For your convenience, you may total all the XP together by CR and divide it by the number of players, or use the CR chart on the Encounters & Rewards page to pass XP out quickly and at a glance.
Should the party have 6+ party members in the group (something not uncommon on the Black Marches games), the XP reward division caps at 6. Thus if a CR 1 enemy is worth 65 XP per party member in a group of 6 players, then all players earn 65 XP if there are more than 6 players in the group. Likewise, when determining how much treasure is available in the adventure for larger than average parties, determine the split as though there were 6 players; then add an equal share for each additional player. Such shares can easily be added into the treasure horde as gems, art objects, and coins until the treasure horde of the adventure is appropriately filled out.
Is normal, even when overcoming extremely difficult or rewarding challenges, they may never earn more than 1 level worth of experience from a single adventure. If a character would earn enough experience to gain more than a single level, they gain their first level and set their XP total to 1 point under their XP To Next Level. Thus if a character needed 1000 XP to reach level 2, and 3000 XP to reach level 3, and they earned 5000 XP during an adventure, their new XP total becomes 2999 XP; 2nd level, almost 3rd level.
Update (April 22/2010): Normalized the treasure values. Realized there was an error that would eventually unbalance the treasure to XP ratio and corrected it. Edited XP and Treasure gain for RP sessions to be for the whole session, rather than per hour of the session (because recent experiences have shown it adds up quickly). Characters awarded using the previous method may keep their rewards; but with the new rules in effect from this point, until noted otherwise.
Update (April 24/2010): Just added a portion up top called "RP". If you have a RP summary you'd like to put in, that'd be the place. Including logs as well. In this way a "council" doesn't need to be present, but can award RP xp/gp.
Another update, capped the xp gained at CR 10 for rp xp, it was breaking down at higher lvls.
After around 3 good games, you will be brought into the DM/plot team and your adventures can be part of the bigger plot.
((First draft, rules subject to big changes)
Additionally, for balance, all GMs must try to follow these guidelines for xp/gold.
Wealth awards
- 500 gp/lvl awarded to each PC, with a cap of 1/4 of their maximum wealth for that level. Typically that means higher lvl characters won't hit their cap.
Just RPing awards
- 1000 xp/gp per hour of RP. PCs must post actual RP and be present. RP is defined as no encounters or fights.
Ad hoc awards, or RP awards for adventures are limited to 250 xp per hour of real play. An adventure lasting for 4 hrs, could give a max of 1000 xp for example to the PC that was 'great at RP'. GMs may not be awarded this xp.
Calculating XP
- You must calculate CR as provided by the calculator in the DM resources for each level of the person. Typically this means a high lvl in a low lvl adventure gets very little xp along with some book keeping of the CRs used.
- Additionally, for parties of less than 3, the calculator breaks down, so experience should be awarded at half for a party of 3, and 1/4 for a party of 2 (this is because a GM can pull punches so to speak, and make it more geared to said PC, and if they're not, well, I'd run off as a PC).
XP awards Caps NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH THE ABOVE ACTUAL XP in a typical 4 to 7 encounter adventure (which takes 3 to 6 hrs real life time for most GMs, even if they hurry).
- 1-5: Depending on the CR, can gain 1/2 to 1 lvl's worth of experience
- 6 to 10: 1/3 of their xp needed for the next level maximum of the highest level player in this bracket
- 11-15: 1/4 of their xp needed for the next level maximum of the highest level player in this bracket.
Typically, that means for a lvl 9 in whatever adventure, he/she will get awarded 3k (45k-36k = 9k, or 1/3 of that = 3k). But this also means a lvl 6 would get that 3k award in that adventure. This is a cap again for the XP awarded in a game, not the actual xp, if the challenges are lesser, that lvl 9 would probably not get awarded even 3k.
The above is a guideline for a cap when awarding xp unless the PCs face big challenges.
Big Challenge rules.
- PCs can die from 1 full attack or similar, save or die method, or similar. This must have a good chance to effect the highest level PC in the group, for example, its pointless to throw a save/die stone effect and count is as a big challenge versus a person with awesome saves.
- PCs must fear death in the game, either from the above, or permanent loss of character, or need to pay for true resurrection to be able to continue their character onward.
- If they fail the "big challenge" they get awarded no xp or gp, and get penalized as above.
- With all the above said, don't be a dick and throw things that no PC in the group has a chance to do anything versus, the above 'stone' could be a medusa so people fighting blindfolded, etc, should be an option as well as PCs having warning in both OOC and IC.
- Cap for Big Challenges is still 1.5x of the above xp guidelines.