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How to deal with experience?
Topic Started: Jun 19 2015, 01:22 PM (2,645 Views)
LeadPipe
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Pokémon Trainer
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I am planning to run a campaign really soon, and I came around the issue with XP. I have no idea how I want to give out XP, and since I've seen some people advocating against the system's current unbalance in XP giving, I'd rather not follow the book as a guidance. Could you guys give me some XP advice, please? I'm REALLY unsure how to deal with it :/
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CWStra
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Pokémon Trainer
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Well, are you talking about Poké Exp, Trainer Exp, or both?
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LeadPipe
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Pokémon Trainer
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Both. I dunno how to deal with xp in general. It's always been one of my weakspots in general :P
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Doxy
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I'd love to hear about this too, if people are apparently saying the RAW recommendations aren't any good.
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BatiroAtrain
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Pyramid King
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As a GM of multiple huge games, here's my advice:

Pokemon Experience
1) Don't be stingy with it, especially in play-by-post games. Reserving EXP for big moments is fine, but make sure it's sort of plentiful. Your players won't really feel like they're progressing if they're stuck with a Level 5 mon for the first two or three sessions.
2) Account for modifiers. An average wild Pokemon battle should be worth 2x EXP minimum, trainer battles should be at least 3x. If it was a particularly brutal encounter but the PCs were still victorious, you should add a .5 to the end of that (i.e. 2.5x for a hard wild battle).
3) An EXP pool is usually a good idea, especially for PCs with full teams. Basically, when your players gain EXP, allow them to distribute it to any Pokemon in their party. It might not be realistic, but it helps a TON in keeping a balanced team. To make sure they're not stacking, though, set hard limits on the amount they can put into their individual mons (i.e. if they got 300 EXP and have three Pokemon, tell them they can only put up to 150 EXP in a single mon), or rule they have to put a minimum amount into whatever Pokemon was actually battling.

Trainer EXP
1) Don't be stingy with this either. Players should get at least 1 TXP a session in live games, even if they didn't really do anything noteworthy. Just being out in the world exploring puts them ahead of the people sitting at home. Progression is always more fun than realism.
2) Reward for things other than battles! If your party comes across some old ruins, feel free to award them a TXP for the discovery a la Fallout. If one of them talks down an ancient evil spirit that was guarding an old relic, give them a TXP for good roleplaying. If they somehow get the relic without setting off any traps at all, that's cause for another TXP. There's plenty of avenues you can explore for awarding your Trainers that don't involve battling, so get creative!
3) This is something I have yet to do in my games, but I've seen people talking about it recently so I'll pass the word along: it's recommended that you don't do Capture EXP (+1 TXP for every new Pokemon caught) in your games. If you have one or two super capture happy players, they're probably going to be a few levels higher than the other PCs early into the game if they get TXP for every new capture. It's just a little unbalancing.
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Marhatus
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I honestly follow the book's advice for pokemon XP, and give my players 1-5 trainer EXP per session (depending on how much they accomplished during that session). Every once in a while, if someone's roleplaying sufficiently amused me that session, I'll throw 1 extra trainer EXP at that player after the session, in private. Also (and I believe it says this somewhere in the book, but I am too lazy to check), if a pokemon is sufficiently helpful with non-combat stuff I'll throw them some small amount of pokemon EXP. My PTU campaign has been going for a bit over a year (though it doesn't feel like it's been that long) and we haven't had any balance problems with the XP so far, so I'm not really sure that you mean by that. But I don't expect the way I do it to work for everyone.

EDIT:
Quote:
 
Progression is always more fun than realism.
^I could not agree more with this!
Edited by Marhatus, Jun 19 2015, 02:57 PM.
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Kairose
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Batiro's advice is pretty solid. Personally, I think the book is fine for pokémon XP, just make sure the significance multiplier gets raised when the battle is difficult. For trainers, I give 3 XP per session most of the time, increasing it to 5 when something more significant (but not worthy of a full level) happens. In addition, to encourage at least a bit of capture, I give 1 level when their team is half full (usually at 3 mons, if I allow for 2 starters, this is at 4, so you have to catch 2 things) and a second level when their team is completely full (at 6 mons).

As everyone before stated, I ditched capture XP, since my previous game had players who had filled their party lose interest in catching things, but felt they had to anyway in order to continue advancing, and one even fell behind until I gave him 'temporary' levels to make up for the imbalance.
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Giant2005
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One thing worth mentioning is that Trainers are balanced around being half the level of Pokemon. It doesn't really matter how you divy up experience as long as that ratio remains fairly balanced.
In practice however, it doesn't seem to happen naturally - that ratio seems to get blown out of the water and you would be lucky for your Trainer to be 1/4 the level of your Pokemon. If you don't keep up with the ratio, the Fighter classes quickly get outshone by Pokemon and it becomes difficult to blance the game. You basically have to make a choice whether you will balance the encounter based on the Pokemon's level or the Trainer's level and neither solution is good - either the Pokemon will be too strong relative to the enemies, or the trainers will be too weak relative to the enemies.
Edited by Giant2005, Jun 19 2015, 07:38 PM.
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Feralligator
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I can't agree more with what Giant2005 just said. I've just started playing in my first PTU game, and it's already apparent that fighting classes are going to suck, due to the huge disparity in level between pokemon and trainers. I've talked with the GM about this extensively, as the more capture-happy players are already 2 levels ahead of my character, who is a water type ace/malestrom and thus usually only captures water-type pokemon he wants...
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KingMarth
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Yeah, our group never used individual capture experience. We have a single pokédex for the group, and gain trainer experience for 'dex completion as a group. This makes for a much more co-operative experience, especially as we don't mind capturing pokémon for each other by immediate trade; a capture-happy trainer is an awesome teammate with this rule. For that matter, all trainer experience is as a group, doing cool things doesn't just progress you but also everyone else. Not a fan of level disparity systems, especially with the tier progression that trainers have where each level makes a huge difference in ability. I don't mind pokémon being different levels as a level or two makes far less of a difference with them, it comes down more to moves and evolution.

For pokémon experience I can't give awarding advice, other than to pick players you trust with fair splits. We've satisfied the letter of the "must be in battle" condition by allowing trainers to keep side pokémon on the field other than in combat and still assign experience to those for observing. One thing we did after many sessions into one game was to quickly go through and tally up the experience totals of each player's team, giving a few hundred extra experience to the guy whose team was a thousand experience behind the lead player due to various things such as newly-hatched pokémon, disinterest in the fiddly tracking of experience training, and lack of replacing up with high-level new captures. I do recommend having experience training be per-session rather than per-day to allow you the freedom to declare that something takes a number of days without automatically implying a host of rewards.


Congrats on running a game, by the way. PTU is perfect for any tabletop gamer that loves customization, there's a lot of numbers to track and options to consider.
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