I have been thinking about a few issues I have with managing the game. Things work as they are, but they aren’t as straight forward or as equitable as I would like them to be. This is the first time I have run a multi-party game - so I am learning as I go along. And this game has lots of ways of making life complicated for me.
The character level spread between the parties, quite often means that I am working to integrate information from more than one source. Today I used information from 4 of the 6 books in the Adventure Path – as well as other game specific sources. That causes a bit of a timing issue for me.as events in the different books are supposed to move at different speeds. – and there are supposed to be gaps between the events. I can wing that, compress gaps, fudge a few things - but only so far. And it also makes it more difficult to manage the politics in the wider world. (I understand that I might be the only one who is concerned about achieving a reasonable level of time and political continuity - but, hey-ho, IMO it gives the world a better and more realistic feel)
To resolve this I intend to make time even more abstract, and go to a variant of a system that was widely used on NWN Servers. Characters there measured their time and level in Seasons - rather than anything else. I am going to adapt this so that there is one adventuring turn, and one Kingdom/down-time turn per calendar year (my interpretation of ‘season’). By judicious use of Fuzzy Time threads for the kingdom side of the game, I can push things along as a sensible speed for the game world. It might mean, in some cases, that a players from a group might have to run one of their entourage characters during a down-time RP session rather than their main character - but at least they will be represented.
At the same time, I intend to change the way that I award experience points. At the moment, I ‘award’ the right number of experience points to allow each character to go up a level at the end of each Adventuring Turn and nothing during the Kingdom Turn. This means every one advances at the same speed, and there is no chance to catch up to the players who were here earlier. Now I am going to start giving experience in a number of different blocks.
- Adventure XP – Based on CR of Monsters / Traps / Situations etc.
- Kingdom Round XP – which will be based around the BPs you generate / control. That means it has some chance or remaining relevant at a number of different levels.
- Down Time XP – which will reward people who use the down time system to craft or use their profession or perform skills.
- Story Line XP – This, as always, is a bit arbitrary. However, there could be two or three different award possibilities across an Adventure/Kingdom turn pair.
- RP XP – If I particularly like a bit of RP - I will hand out an XP award. Amount (etc) is purely arbitrary.
You will have the opportunity to level up at the end of the Adventure Turn and at the end of the Kingdom Turn - so two opportunities per ‘year’. This should give lower level characters an opportunity to catch up to the higher level characters - especially if you work all aspects of the game. :}
It has a second advantage for me, in that it gives me a nice system for managing XP awards for stay-at-home characters, Characters who don't post and NPCs.