Topic: Experience from Individually Swiped Money/Treasure

Can someone explain to me something about how experience rules work for money / treasure in a specific situation?

Normally our party splits up treasure and the experience awards are divvied up proportionally. However there's one character that is light-fingering treasure when the rest of the party isn't looking. Should the experience from the light-fingered stuff also be divided among the party, or just go to light-fingers? Assume here that this is following a combat that all members are involved in.

I can see an argument for either way. Light-fingers is taking a small additional amount of risk.  But the reward seems out of proportion.

Re: Experience from Individually Swiped Money/Treasure

To make things crystal clear we could push it to its extreme; one party member runs off with ALL the treasure. Does he/she then get a boatload of XP (level and halfway to next, or some such?)?

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Re: Experience from Individually Swiped Money/Treasure

Money is an in-game reward, XP not.

If a character stays at the inn or refuses to go into a dungeon, no, no XP for them.

If they're all in it together and one happens to grab a little extra that the rest don't know about, that character keeps the money but the XP for the adventure is still split between all participating characters.

Re: Experience from Individually Swiped Money/Treasure

The way I do it is I separate wealth and XP reward while maintaining a reason to be wealthy aside from the ability to afford things, so the character who undermines the divvying up of the loot will slowly become more wealthy, and in my game gain higher station, quicker than the others; in my case it could mean he would become a minor lord and, by local law, be able to order the others around at his whim.

Re: Experience from Individually Swiped Money/Treasure

Thanks for clarifying this, Jim (and all). That is actually what I thought as well. If it were otherwise then it would definitely change the emphasis of game play. Someone who doesn't steal from the group would then be put at a huge disadvantage in terms of advancement, otherwise.

Re: Experience from Individually Swiped Money/Treasure

Yeah, I deal with it the same way Jim does.

Re: Experience from Individually Swiped Money/Treasure

Interesting.

Considering the rock solid connection to money/treasure=xp, when said money/treasure is returned to civilization, I would think that money pilfered without the group's knowledge would count as separate xp. Especially if the money was taken before the rest of the loot was presented to the adventuring group.

However, I can understand the concept of all the treasure xp reward being spread evenly because it avoids interparty conflict. If a single player were to keep stealing all the time or steal huge chunks of the adventure treasure then things might get ugly. As a DM I would get annoyed if a player were to consistently screw over the rest of the group... but if it was a rare event based on good role-playing I would be less alarmed.

Either way, a good topic.

Re: Experience from Individually Swiped Money/Treasure

Matt wrote:

However, I can understand the concept of all the treasure xp reward being spread evenly because it avoids interparty conflict. If a single player were to keep stealing all the time or steal huge chunks of the adventure treasure then things might get ugly. As a DM I would get annoyed if a player were to consistently screw over the rest of the group... but if it was a rare event based on good role-playing I would be less alarmed.

Interparty conflict would be a by-product. Two characters can come into conflict because one is "stealing" from the party or whatever, but that's a result of an in-game action that is a result of role-playing. In-game, someone is getting some coin. That is one type of reward and it has very little impact unless the reward is really huge.

My understanding is that XPs is a total reward for participation of players in the game. The focus on XPs from money it is the primary source that is split up, much like other games would split up total monster kill xps, rather than awarding just the "kill shot" which is garnered by a single player. XP passes from GM -> Players -> Characters. If a GM awards individual XPs for this type of action,  its out of scope (where actual money value is "in scope") of the fairness of rewards. Even a single level difference at low levels can unset party balance.

Otherwise, literally, it means your best interests are served as a player, and also for your character, to light-finger as much as possible, regardless of what type of character you play. We might as well call it the Thief RPG.