Experience awards

[jibbajibba]

I introduced a new experience system in my last game.
I didn't think that assigning experience based solely on campaign objectives, ie ones set up my me the GM, were valid as everyone in the game had different motivations.
First I took my plot and worked out experience points distributed to those that took part in foiling each element. Then I asked each player to give me three objectives that their character was working toward I then assigned a value to each of these objectives as well. Experience awarded as each objecive or element reached.

So it worked out like this
Plot elements

Locate the Jewel of Judgement - 10 points
Prevent Dworkin getting hold of the Jewel - 10 points
Prevent Dworkin destroying the universe  - 40 points
Prevent Pheonix Invading Amber - 10 points
Make an ally of Pheonix having exposed Ariel's deception - 10 points
Defeating major Chaos protagonists , Honshu, Caliban, etc - 3 each

Personal objectvies (sample the numbers are xp for each assigned by me based on difficulty)
Kill Cailin (a PC) - 5
Become Warden of Seals (a position running Amber's Spy network currently occupied by another PC)  - 4
Discover Information to put Reese (NPC) , the Duke of Candles and therefore High Jutice of Amber under my control - 2

Personal objectives had to have an element of conflict as per the rule book so we could avoid "I want to learn how to draw trumps" and so give people points for just studying stuff.
You could drop objectives and replace them at any time with no penalty but the new once woudl require a degree of planning and be set in the future.

What do you think?
I thought it would mean a constant supply of xp and a way of rewarding those that pursued their own goals.

[Croaker]

Basically, I gave a few XPs for attendance, a few for roleplaying, and somewhat more for completion of majors conflict. These weren't meant to be for the actual defeat of someone: Making peace with an ennemy did count.

[Arref]

Amber PCs are composed of 100 points.
But they may be hundreds of years old.

Therefore in my own system, I do not look to give out more than a point or so of experience within a year of gaming adventures.

[jibbajibba]

Amber PCs are composed of 100 points.
But they may be hundreds of years old.

Therefore in my own system, I do not look to give out more than a point or so of experience within a year of gaming adventures.

Hmm ... but a player might tell you his character is 15 and unless you dock his points as a result that plan doesn't hold water.
Also it means that there can be little variation between charcters. If character A spends a year travelling with Benedict fighting wars and various denizens of shadow he would get a point (maybe 2) and if he sat round in Amber doing nothing he would get 0. The difference from perhaps a six month game session would be 2 experience points.
Experience is awarded for resolving or overcoming conflict. The assumption I assume is that the characters have amassed their starting points after overcoming 100 (or however many) points worth of conflicts.

[Croaker]

Yup, same thing here.

I'd had that, in both books, the character grows in power and experience over little time

[jibbajibba]

My main point though was the setting of personal objectives which can be totally separate from the core plot and at odds with the objectives of other players.
One player might elect to assist in the invasion of Amber as part of a plot to set themselves up as king. This would be in direct antagonism to the GM defined 'plot' but be perfectly fine and definitely worthy of experience if it came off.

[Arref]

Experience is awarded for resolving or overcoming conflict. The assumption I assume is that the characters have amassed their starting points after overcoming 100 (or however many) points worth of conflicts.

This is a good premise and one that I support in my GMing and play.

However, it does not hang well with your objections or comments. Do you dock 15 year old amberites start points? Has a 15 yr old already defeated the equivalent of 20+ chaos opponents? Do you give different start points to a 100 yr old royal as opposed to a 600 yr old royal?

Granted, this was not your main thrust, but if you want to critique the ADRPG rules for experience or my variations, we should agree on some yardstick.

First, the values you are giving out don't conform to the ADRPG and they don't make sense based on immortal characters. But that's your game and you haven't given enough context to really get a feel for that.

I will say a 'constant stream of experience' is inappropriate to the genre.

Second, if you only want comment on your idea (GM assigns experience based on PC goals), well I think that's a fine idea.

However, the idea that the GM needs to give out any xp at all for Amber games may be flawed.

[Nihilistic Mind]

Experience point awards depend solely on the flavor of the campaign, in my games.

I make it clear to the players at the campaign start whether or not they can expect fast advancement just in case they want to build a character with room for improvement or if they will have to build a more polished/finished character that will see a very slow experience improvement, if any at all.

In one of my past campaigns, I used experience points awards to promote conflict between PCs: If a PC killed another PC, they would get 10% of their total in points (a hundred point PC, if you were to kill it, would get you ten points). Interestingly enough, out of eight players, only one died, but the fact that this little exp award rule was out there was enough to keep things tense, keep players paranoid and creating cabals among themselves, etc.

In my current campaign, I've awarded 2 to 7 points after major story arcs have been fulfilled, which was about 6 months of gaming for each story arc. Then again, the original PCs died at the end of the first story arc. One of the PCs has actually survived the second story arc and will see the third story arc start soon. The other PC has died and the player will be playing that PC's offspring.
In cases like this, I usually allow for players to carry the experience over to their new character, as long as the campaign is the same. This way the players still get awarded for things they died/sacrificed themselves for or if they did something extremely foolish and entertaining.

I might bend the rules a little and award enough points for exalted/advanced powers when it makes sense for the character and the campaign, although for the most part, that still means for the PC to end up with Bad Stuff (can't get something for nothing).


I agree with Arref with the fact that awarding experience at all is highly unnecessary. A Player Character should, in general, be built upon the assumption that they are the perfect version of themselves and should be left with little or no room for improvement. The only problem with that is acquiring new/advanced/exalted powers. Powers are expensive, and if they aren't purchased at character creation, can be very hard to acquire, or completely impossible with no advancement at all.

Also, I usually advise for player characters to be no younger than 100 years old, and no older than 2000. Anything younger than that and I would certainly reduce the starting character points. Again, for the right campaign or character concept, I could allow things outside of these norms.

[Croaker]

My main point though was the setting of personal objectives which can be totally separate from the core plot and at odds with the objectives of other players.
One player might elect to assist in the invasion of Amber as part of a plot to set themselves up as king. This would be in direct antagonism to the GM defined 'plot' but be perfectly fine and definitely worthy of experience if it came off.

Of course, and I do agree.

I did exactly this kind of thing in my throne wars (I had always at least one PC setting himself up as an enemy of amber :lol: )

However, it does not hang well with your objections or comments. Do you dock 15 year old amberites start points? Has a 15 yr old already defeated the equivalent of 20+ chaos opponents? Do you give different start points to a 100 yr old royal as opposed to a 600 yr old royal?

I'd add that the corebook suggest doing just this at the end. Giving more or less points to different players, based on character concept.

[Trevelyan]

Also, I usually advise for player characters to be no younger than 100 years old, and no older than 2000. Anything younger than that and I would certainly reduce the starting character points. Again, for the right campaign or character concept, I could allow things outside of these norms.

I usually advise the exact opposite, that PCs should typically be quite young, and that anything above 100 years requires a particularly strong explanation.

Most players aren't really capable of accurately portraying a character that old with the wealth of experiences that itwould likely entail. And we see from the Merlin series that younger PCs are plenty capable of getting themselves into trouble. It has the added bonus that most players are happy to assume that their characters don't know much about the way of the world while still young which gives me a free hand when devising plots. If I had, for example, an older PC in the group who had spent the last few hundred years satudying the metaphysical underpinnings of the Amber universe with Fiona then it might make it harder to contrive "universe threatening" plots.

Plus, after a certain age, many things take on a sheen of general knowledge, and you end up either telling players details about every significant person or place in the game on the assumption that they've probably picked up a lot of information about Amber and the local shadows, or else you assume that the PCs are the most uniquely unobservant immortals ever encountered.

On the xp front, I mostly wing it. I don't think I've ever sat down and actively awarded a specific number of xp in an Amber game simply because the system, even using partial powers, doesn't accurately reflect the relative ease with which some expensive powers and bilities can be gained.