Hey gang…

I wonder, how do you handle distributing experience points to your players?  I find it difficult to follow written adventure XP by the book since most adventures run shorter/longer than written, or hand other tangents involved. 

What we have done so far is give 1 XP per session, and 2 XP for the finale of the adventure. 

How do you handle it?  Do you think this is too little? Too much? 

Given that most adventures are 3-5 sessions long, that would require a tremendous amount of adventuring to reach Tier 3 or greater. 

Gitzman

I've always done 1 per session.

… ish

At that rate, assuming that you play every other week (and actually make all those games religiously), you are rank 3 at 26xp after a year. If you continue, you are maxed out at rank 6 before the end of the next year. That seems about right, to me.

Most people think to slow progression, rather than speed it up.

If you want to have Rank 3 PCs, you may consider just starting them at Rank 3 and give an advance every few adventures.

We play 3.5-4 hr sessions hence we use the 1xp rule.  Since I run scenarios at a very rapid pace, this works out perfectly for each of my campaigns (usually mid rank 3 between change-overs)

Since the game doesn't get any more broken as you rank up, I can't see any reason to torture the players with the prospect of 3rd tier careers, and never let them get there.

I'm leaning towards slowing the xp advancement at 3rd career, but I dont think it really matters.

jh

1xp per session. My current campaign (playing through the old Enemy Within campaign + we started off with the witch's song) has been 44 sessions so far, and even though the players are now "epic" they still are challenged by the adventures.

Expierience awards depend soley upon what the PCs accomplish in my campaign. I made this clear at the start and my players are totally cool with it, though some haggling does come into play from time to time. If the party hasn't reached a specific goal, or not really done much other than wander around a city for the entire session, I'm less prone to give our expieriece and more prone to hand out extra fortune points at the beginning of our next session. So far, this system of awards has worked perfectly for my group.

GoblynKing said:

+1

I think that's a great idea.

jh

We play 3-5hr sessions and I give out 1xp plus 1 if the evening felt epic or the players did "a good job" (roleplaying-wise, goal-achieving or other).

I also give the option for the sporadic players to raise their xp to the max (player with most xp), which everyone used so far.