Rift City Campaign - Session 46 and beyond

Well, what is there to say? Lyracian at Playing Dice with the Universe posted up a write-up of this session the day it happened, and I have little to add to that report in terms of events of the session. 

I did indeed completely fluff the whole 'summoning the elemental' thing. Not in control of my sources, that's the problem.  I rarely have much idea what the players are going to attempt (I thought they were heading back to Level 5/6 where they've been adventuring, but they decided to go back to Level 1 and attempt a Summoning instead) and I was flipping between different pdfs and files for rules and location information and maps and what-have-you, realising that I hadn't updated these locations for months (effectively there were still corpses lying about from the party's last visit) and also that I couldn't find some important notes that I know I wrote but couldn't access; meanwhile, trying to re-stock the dead monsters on the fly, I discovered that the Mithril and Mages Monster Stocker (my favoured place for grabbing a quick stat-block) was down... anyway, I was unable to keep everything running smoothly and fluffed some vital processes. Sorry guys, but there's nothing to be done now. Oh well.

I've been pondering XP in the wake of Session 46. The PCs (who are mostly, I guess, 6th Level now, though as I haven't seen their character sheets for more than a year they may be more) have been mollocking around for the last few sessions in a Level 5-Level 6 area. This I feel is more-or-less 'level appropriate'. That's where they should be. Last session they went back to Level 1 and fought a Goblin patrol and some Orcs. Otherwise, they avoided two Insect Swarms. This is not, to my mind, 'appropriate'. The PCs are big heroes now, they should I think be doing more than grinding on low-level monsters.

I've changed how XP acquisition works twice already while the campaign has been going on (close to 4 years now). After about 6 months of playing 'by the book' awarding XP only for monsters and treasure, with a very occasional small bonus for some good piece of play, with very low XP acquisition and everyone still on First Level, I instituted an 'exploration bonus'. This was a bonus based on rooms explored - I can't remember what I gave out but maybe it was 10XP or 50XP for each new room the PCs explored. However, that started to get a bit creaky when different people would come to different sessions - is the room 'new' if half the party members have already been there in a previous session? Do they get the bonus? Do the people to whom it really is a new room not get the bonus? I gave up trying to remember who had explored which room and instead adopted an idea from BECMI (in the Rules Compendium I think), where an exploration bonus of 10% of the average needed to reach the next level is given out to everyone.

This leads to several anomalous situations I think. In the last session, the PCs killed, captured or evaded approximately 120XP-worth of monsters, between I think 6 of them. They took about 300GP of treasure - even if that isn't right, I don't think it was much more than that - some SP, some GP and some gems I think, certainly not thousands of GPs' worth. For the sake of argument, the PCs got something like 80XP each from 'monsters and treasure', which given how B/X is set up are the two main ways to gain XP. At the same time, they each gained an 'exploration bonus' of something like 8,000XP (100 times their 'actual', earned XP!) for rooms that some of the PCs (not to mention all of the players) had already visited. That doesn't seem right to me. I don't think the players should be able to use the 'easy' caverns as a way to lever XP out of the fact that they're already high level. At the moment, all they have to do is take their 6th or 7th Level characters into a Level 1 dungeon and kill a few Goblins, then harvest thousands of XP by dint of the fact that they're already six levels 'higher' than the dungeons they're exploring. They get high XP just for existing.

Another anomalous result of this way of distributing XP is that low-level characters are seen as a drain. This is because the 'open table' format imposes some problems in terms of assimilating new party members, necessitating some minimum level for new players to join at. Up until now, new PCs started at the lowest Level of PCs currently in the game. When Shazam was left to die (no attempt at Elementary Staunching by the other party members, apparently because the bonus is better if you let low-level characters die) I began to wonder if this would break the campaign, with players killing off low-level PCs to get an upgrade for the next session. It hasn't quite worked like that but I think I need to trim how things work. Now seems as good a time as any to put some changes in place to prevent what I would see as 'meta-gaming' the system.

First, I think that any time a party member dies (and this will include being turned to stone and not turned back), there will be no bonus at all. Ascribe it to PTSD or something but I think that when a party member is killed the rest of the party should not be rewarded. It should be a traumatic event. They can still get the XP from monsters and treasure, but not the bonus. It's a kind of 'trauma tax'. This might have the result of making PCs more risk-averse in the future, but I'm prepared to chance it.

Second, when a new PC comes along (because of PC death or because a new player joins) I am no longer going to start them at the lowest Level in the party, I'm going to start them at the lowest XP. If the lowest Level PC is, for example, a 5th Level Cleric with 12,500XP and a new player joins, they could under the current system start with a 5th Level Elf. If the XP total is taken as the basis for the new PC, however, 12.500XP is enough to have a Cleric at 5th Level but only 3rd Level for an Elf. That seems like a better way to do it - though to be honest, I'm not sure why, it just does.

Third, the exploration bonus should be level-dependent. I'm going to try dividing the Dungeon Level the PCs were on by the Character Level they have, and applying that to the bonus. So, if PCs are (like the party now) around 6th-7th Level, but go adventuring on Level 1, their bonus will by 1/6 or 1/7 of the potential bonus. This (working with the second change, mentioned above) would mean that low-level characters would level up faster than higher-level characters - in the example above, if the 3rd Level Elf was adventuring with the party on Level 1, they would get 1/3 of the bonus, whereas the 5th Level Cleric would only get 1/5: so the 8,000 (potential) XP each PC would have got from exploring on their own Level would be trimmed to 2,667XP for the 3rd Level Elf and 1,600XP for the 5th Level Cleric. Conversely, if they go exploring on Level 7, they would gain 18,667XP (3rd Level Elf) and 11,200XP (5th Level Cleric). This (somewhat counteracting the first change, above) might make the party bolder in pushing on to lower levels, or at least, less keen to hang around at the 'shallow end', because it would be less worth their while for the purposes of XP harvesting. So between the 'no bonus for dead comrades' and 'reduced bonus for the shallows, increased bonus for the deeps' I think I'm hopefully balancing the making the party more risk-averse with an incentive towards riskier behaviour.

I hope, anyway. Of course, if I find through the Law of Unintended Consequences that things are still not right I can still tinker with the system.