Are You Experienced? Awarding Expo Houserules

Gold.

Magic items found.

Defeating monsters.

That is pretty much the ways to get expo in 1e by the book, as well as being in order of importance.

I find that expo awarding is one of the most house ruled parts of gaming. Me, I house rule it for pacing purposes.

In my once a month S&W delve into the Castle of the Mad Archmage, I find I need to award more expo than I would in a weekly game. My players want to explore, I went them to explore, and the only way to accomplish that is to award more expo so they can level a bit faster.

What I do with them is I offer a "room bonus" based on the number of rooms explored without taking a break to camp or re-memorize spells. The first room is worth 10xp for the party, the second 30xp, the third 60xp and so on. I cap it ay 1k per room, and dungeon levels that are not much of a challenge either grant reduced xp or none at all for exploring.

This has the potential of pushing my party to take risks. One more room could be an extra 1k xp in the party xp pool - it could also mean a TPK when they are low on HP and spells.

Does it get any better than this? ;)

How Do You Award XP in Your Campaigns?

I was listening to an episode of the Roll For Initiative podcast on the drive to work this morning and the topic of awarding XP came up.

Give XP for gold or not? Full value or modified?

Give XP for magic items found?

Give XP for overcoming obstacles?

Give XP for attaining goals?

Give XP for overcoming monsters?

Other methods?

I award for overcoming adversaries, recovering gold, ad hoc XP for attaining goals and overcoming obstacles. Session write ups award a 10% expo bonus.

I also award a small bump in XP awards to my once a month group compares to my more regularly meeting group. Not a huge bump, but it it there.

How do you award XP in you campaigns?

What Do You Award Expo for in Your Campaigns?

Sure, there's expo for killing things and taking their stuff - combat and loot - but what other things can you award expo for?

Me, I award expo for defeating an opponent - fleeing and surrender gains the same expo as killing them (although in the case of surrendering it seems like my players tend to kill most of them afterwards anyway - ah well).

I DON'T award expo for gaining, retaining or using magic items. The item itself is it's own reward. However, if it is sold before it is used, the GP gained is awarded as expo.

I have my "Attack the Darkness" houserule, where Natural 1's on an attack roll apply points of damage to a pool. The points left in that pool at the end of a session are multiplied by 10 and awarded as an XP bonus to the PCs.

When players complete an adventure or a level in a large dungeon (such as Rappan Athuk) I award an expo bonus based on the difficulty of the adventure or level - this helps balance out the lack of rewarding expo for magic items.

So, what do you award expo for?