I don't understand the reasoning behind awarding experience in a lump sum to be divided between however many players participate in an adventure... Doesn't this bias the advancement in favor of small groups of player characters?
In my upcoming campaign, there are only going to be TWO core players supplemented by whoever else shows up: Our last campaign eventually floundered from trying to get too many busy people together to play regularly. With the awards system as it stands, episodes with just the two main characters are going to generate way more experience per than episodes with three or four people showing up. In very little comparative time, the regular players will by far outstrip the occasional drop-ins.
I mean, the problem can be solved a number of ways in my particular case ( I figure on awarding enough "off-screen" experience to the occasional players that they can keep up...), but in general won't campaigns with fewer players very rapidly result in extremely competent characters as compared to campaigns with many players?
The whole thing has an unpleasant aroma of D&D for me: It sort of makes sense to use this kind of system when the point of the game is to defeat more experience-rewarding monsters when teamed up with more players, but to tie it to story objectives which stay the same no matter how many characters are involved seems wrong to me.
Maybe I seem disappointed because the Experience Awards part of the NG was the one I was most curious about while waiting for the book, I don't know.
Keep track of the XPs the core characters rack up and give the PCs who can't always make it a per centage of that amount. The core character will still advance faster, but at least the others will have a chnace as well. Its what my group did in those situations, worked for us.
I have two players only aswell, the way I'm going to be handling exp awards is that it the base 1000 for the episode gets devided between the players AND any NPCs that play a major role. If there are no others helping them in a particular mission then I'm going to lower the amount.
What if we say tat they 1000 experience points are for a crew or groups of five... If we do then every character would get 200 Experience points. That's not all that much. So if you only had two each player would get 500. keep it at two hundred per and just dump the other six hundred... That's my suggestion. I hope I helped.
Experience Awards
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