One of the bigger failings of my BattleTech campaign is the power levels that the characters achieved. At this point, the characters are all extremely proficient in BattleMech combat. It's harder and harder to challenge them in that venue, and yet that is the primary facet of the game. So the topic today is, how much experience to give characters?

There are few factors that I considered when I decided to award characters a flat 3 AP per adventure. I already knew how long the game would last, approximately 125 sessions. This gave a max of 375 AP that could be earned. But I only expected people to show up 3/4 of the time, which brings it down to about 280 AP maximum.

That's actually a lot of AP, but I figured that characters would diversify and get many skills. You also need a lot of AP to bring up a attribute, so I wanted to give characters a chance to get a couple of their attributes up to above average. That it did not turn out this way is a failure on my part. Too many BattleTech combats and not enough role-playing meant that everybody was a great Mechwarrior and ok everywhere else.

Another concept I wanted to do was variable XP awards. This is so rarely done in our groups that I've found it's hard to make it work. Dave Pickering has done it successfully in his Star Wars campaign, but I think he intimidates people so they don't protest. Eric has some variable awards, but it's in general less than a 10% difference between players, so it's insignificant. I remember trying to let the players award extra XP to the best roleplayer. They just discussed it and voted such that everyone got one vote, which made the variable award meaningless. The closest I've come is not giving XP to characters that don't participate, which means making sure that those characters don't participate, a problem in and of itself.

For the Star Trek campaign that I'm working on, there will be about 12 adventures in the main story arc. There are another 12 adventures in various supplements that I can use as filler. If I use about 6 adventures a game year, that makes it 4 game years covered. And about 6 months real-time to game out an adventure a week.

Giving out a recommended 2-4 XP per adventure means characters will aquire a max of 72 XP over the course of the campaign. This is actually a good amount, so I may leave that as is. It takes about 18 XP to take a good specialty to max level. Unfortunately, it takes about 22 XP to take a good skill to max level (which raises all specializations too), and about 26 XP to take a good ability to max level (which helps in skills rolls, but not linearly).

The big disparity is that is that specializations are only a little cheaper than raising the base skill. The solution is to make raising a base skill take more time (the DS9 RPG has a better XP cost chart, so I hear). Something like 1 month per new specialization level, 3 months per new skill level. So it'll take 15 months to take an average specialization to max (of 6) and 36 months to take an average skill to max (of 5). I also want to limit skill levels to max out at the base attribute level. Attributes should take either 6 months or a year per new attribute level, which means 6 or 12 years to take an average attribute to max (of 5). Multiple scores can be trained at the same time.

This hopefully will encourage getting specializations and low skills over trying to specialize in one or two things. My role-playing adventures are more about what the characters think of doing rather than how well they do it. And having a lot of low-level skills plays to my GMing strengths.