Also, I talk below about "running around killing things", but "standing around crafting things" can be freely substituted throughout.
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Point the First: We like RP
In Avlis we want folks to RP, all the time. That's why we're here.
Point the Second: We also like XP
Even in a solid RP world like ours, the lure of getting XP (and thus becoming more powerful, learning neater spells/tricks/skills, etc.) is ever-present. It's tempting enough that it sometimes lures PCs to run around killing things instead of, say, hanging around The Canvas drinking and singing silly songs.
Point the Third: Therein lies the rub
The first two points represent an opening for tension that's obvious to anyone with the mental fortitude to read this post, so I won't belabor it--rather, let's take it as a given that there's an inherent possibility for tension between RP and XP.
Point the Fourth: We know all this already, you schmuck
Yes, we do. And we would all like to see a way to reduce the tension, so that PCs don't have to choose to either RP or get XP. One current solution is the RP'er of the Month award first proposed by Chiatroll long, long ago. It's nice, but it only rewards a few folks each month, so it's not a uniform fix. Another current solution is to have DMs reward RP where and when they see it by handing out XP cookies. The drawbacks to this are that 1) it's very labor-intensive for the DMs, of whom there are simply never enough, and 2) like the RP'er of the Month (albeit to a lesser extent), it doesn't happen uniformly enough to make it time-effective to RP (i.e., even with cool DMs handing out cookies, the amount of XP gained by running around killing things usually still far outstrips that gained by RP'ing).
Point the Fifth: No silver bullet yet
So the current solutions to this problem have their drawbacks, and JollyOrc finds the result (which is that players seem, at least to him, to be choosing XP over RP in higher numbers of late than in the "good ol' days") distasteful enough to post about it.
Point at which I really start to ramble
So RP seems to be at least somewhat at odds with XP, which bums many of us out. Current (manual) solutions haven't solved the problem, though they certainly mitigate it. What about automating a solution? Well, the obvious problem with an automated solution to this problem is that we can't write code that's smart enough to figure out when folks are RP'ing and when they're running around killing things--well, at least not without lagging the servers to an unplayable death.
But what if it didn't have to? (This is a teaser; more to come below.
)Anyone who played the Bioware mod Witches Wake (or was it Witch's Wake?) remembers that in that game you got 0 XP for killing things. Sometimes you needed to kill something, sometimes you didn't, but it was never a goal per se. When I played it I was amazed at how infrequently I fought anything; it was a pretty stark illustration of the fact that I'm more of an XP whore than I'd thought.
Bring that back to Avlis. I personally don't get to play a lot, but I like to RP when I do get online. That means I don't get XP very often (Furin is level 11, and he's been running (er, walking) around M'Chek and the more northerly nations since the end of October 2002). But more importantly, it means that every time I log in I have to choose whether I'm going to RP or run around killing things in hopes of someday seeing level 12. This is clearly not a choice that's unique to my situation--every one of us makes it explicitly or implicitly when we log in.
Point the Somethingth: The seed of my idea
But what if there were no such choice? What if in a given hour, you'd know you were going to get a certain amount of XP whether you went to The Canvas or to the Iron Mines? In other words: what if, when you logged in, whether you RP'ed or ran around killing things had no effect whatsoever on your XP advancement?
If XP progress were a (more-or-less) straight function of time online, then there would be no more tension between RP and XP. People who like talking could talk, people who like killing things could kill things, and people who like crafting things could craft things. Of course, this is a major departure from standard D&D rules, but an online D&D game is already fundamentally different from a PnP game anyway.
The more salient objection is that reducing killing-things XP (and crafting-things XP) to 0 would be absolutely untenable (socially, functionally, technically, logistically, etc.) in Avlis, so this is not my actual proposal for our fair world. But my proposal does stem from this idea.
Point the Something-elseth: The proposal
Here's where the good stuff comes in--where all this blathering reduces to a concrete proposal. That proposal is:
What if we incorporate time online as a factor in XP advancement? We could still have XP for running around killing things and standing around crafting things (and/or we could ratchet down both as desired). We could still have XP cookies for DM-witnessed RP. We could still have quest XP (both automated and DM-blessed). But in addition to all these, what if we had a mostly-offline process that awards XP for time online?
I say mostly-offline because the first objection will be that PG'ers would abuse such a system by logging in and then going to {sleep/take a shower/work/eat dinner/etc}. So we could add a straightforward (online, real-time) check that would sort of "chalk the tires" of PCs in a given area: if PC Bilbo is standing in spot X doing nothing at time T and is still there doing nothing at time T + N, that time wouldn't count toward any XP advancement for time online.
And of course, such a system could still be abused. So the XP awarded would be small--very small to begin with, just to see how things went. But even a very small amount of XP would give me as a player the knowledge that even if I log in, talk for an hour without killing or crafting one damned thing, and log off, I'm still going to be getting something for my troubles in the way of XP.
The best part of such a system is the fact that it would be (mostly) offline--hence, it wouldn't lag down the system noticeably. I.e., all calculation of time online -> XP awarded could happen once a day, or once a week, or whenever. (In the DB biz we call these "cron jobs", and they're great.) There's no reason such an XP award would have to happen instantaneously--in PnP, after all, we often find out about our XP advancements in the week following a session. Once the calculation were complete for a given PC, that PC would get a little XP cookie on his/her next log-in. Simple.
Point at which I stop typing
This idea is immature. It's flawed. It might be downright bad. But it's here now, on the boards, ready for your comments and insights. What do you folks think? Is there anything salvageable here, or have I just wasted a lot of perfectly good work time (slowly) typing this beast up?
Luckily (well maybe not so luckily) that day he met Lydia and we crumped bugbears and roleplayed together. But the first thought I had when I saw him heading to the Warrens was "WTF is he doing there ?". I have much respect for Kered's player. I haven't RPed with him often but that guy rocks as a RPer.
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