XP for encounter avoidance?

[Albions_Angel]

Hi all

A post just reminded me of a question Ive had for a while.

A few months ago, during a game I was running, I built a semi-random encounter forest. On a large mat, I drew 5 large boxes and filled each one with a differing assortment of forest terrain, and then built 20 encounters, some passive, most combat. My party then had to wander through the forest and would roll 2 dice every ingame hour, a "d5" and a d20. Thus they got a bunch of encounters, randomized in a variety of close terrain, and the place felt organic.

However, after the first 2 encounters (I had planned for 8 encounters that RL day), they came to another "clearing" and just... walked round it. I let them do it once. Then they tried it again. I stopped the game and repeated to them (i had told them in grey text earlier) that the forest is full of clearings, they have been traveling through them all day, and asked them why their CHARACTERS were avoiding these clearings without making spot checks. I had no issue with not fighting an encounter, many had non combat scenarios if they could find them (one was 2 Dryads mourning the loss of their sisters in a grove of 4 great oaks, 2 of which were brutally uprooted. The party druid could easily have helped plant 2 new oaks, ensured they would grow, and the party would have received the treasure they would have got from killing the dryads anyway, bur freely given and with some information that would have been useful, for example). But just turning back as soon as I called for a dice roll bothered me. A lot.

Well I got hit with "Its still encounter completion. Its not like we lose xp for going around." I informed them that A) they were metagaming and they all knew better than that, and B) they would be getting severely reduced XP for avoiding encounters all together, if any at all. That got dice thrown at me and some sulky players.

So, giants. What say you? Obviously if a party "solves" an encounter without violence they deserve xp, but what happens when your party metagames their way out of an encounter? What about if they spot the CR HIGH encounter down the road, and rather than talk to them, or set an ambush, or actually face a CR HIGH challenge, instead just wander off? Where is the cross over between that and "solving" an encounter?

[Inevitability]

XP is meant to show how the characters learn from interacting with the world.

However, if the characters don't know something's in a clearing (no matter what the PC's think) and walk around it, they should get just as much XP as they get for walking through a monster-less part of the forest: zero. The characters didn't experience anything but 'hey, a clearing, let's avoid it for some reason'. That isn't learning, that's random activity.

[Comissar]

Personally, I would say that in order to avoid an encounter, the characters must be aware of an encounters presence in the first place. To use an example, I wouldn't give experience for avoiding an encounter with a mimic in a specific room in a dungeon if the party never enters the room in the first place. If they'd entered the room, gone "Ah-ha! My perception allowed me to spot that this chest is actually a monster that will try and eat us. There doesn't appear to be anything else of value in here, let's not try and open it and just move on instead." then I'd be more inclined to give xp. If it was a case of "We have the McGuffin from the dungeon now, we don't need to go into any other rooms, let's get out of here because I don't want to fight anything else" then they would not get the xp from the Mimic.

Replace 'Dungeon' and 'Room' with 'Forest' and 'Clearing' for your example (it's just simpler for me to consider it in terms of discrete rooms). I would say you're spot on about it being very meta-gamey, too. "Why are we going around this clearing?" "Well, we were asked to make spot checks"

If instead it was "Why are we going around this clearing?" "Without fail, the last few we've gone through we've been attacked in, so it's safer this way", there's reasonable cause. However, I wouldn't give xp in this case as the encounter is never observed to begin with. Evading is a way of solving, and is worth xp, but not encountering at all gets no points.

[Troacctid]

My solution is to just not use XP. It's a pain in the butt to calculate anyway.

[johnbragg]

I roll with encounters being Easy(x1/2), Average(1), and Hard(x2), with 10 encounters to level. Avoiding encounters by not walking through clearings isn't an encounter. No XP.

And I'm pretty liberal with what an encounter is. I use the flirtation criteria. When you're back in town at the tavern, and you're telling the cute farmer's daughter (or son) about the awesome, dangerous, terrifiying things you did, is it an impressive story? No one's going to bat eyes at you for carefully walking around every clearing in the forest.

So running from an average encounter AFTER the dice started going against you? That's an easy encounter. Sure you didn't win, but the threat of death was in the air. You accomplished something by surviving.

That time the party decided NOT to go back and finish cleaning out the dungeon after they killed the goblin band, because there probably wasn't much treasure left? No they don't get experience for that. Of course not.

EDIT THE LAST, I hope: If encounters and XP worked they way your players wanted, every Commoner in the village would be Epic Level, because they avoided encountering everything in your cosmos, and if it links to Sigil, then every other cosmos too.

[Ashtagon]

For PCs to get XP for an encounter, I generally rule that one of the following must apply:


They kill/destroy/incapacitate it. To qualify for this, the following must apply:

They cannot have previously gained XP for killing/destroying/incapacitating it.

They work around it. To get XP for working around the encounter, all the following must apply:

They must be aware that the encounter existed, and
They cannot have previously gained XP for working around this particular encounter, and
It must be an encounter that must be met for them to complete the wider quest they are on (i.e., avoiding 'wandering monsters' is common sense, not an XP-gaining exercise).

[TheYell]

You may want to create super-predators, bad enough to seek out and attack the party, and have one pursue the party if it creates a strict pattern of behavior. Like keeping out of clearings. That way if they metagame again they still have to roll spot checks to notice how the forest is suddenly silent, and you can ask them if their characters are standing around arguing too or if they are arguing OOC, and if so what are their characters doing? Keeping in the trees? And after their clearing encounter have them roll to notice the birds fleeing the timber they just left. If they call you on it hit them with the monster. Let them escape if you feel generous.

I could see getting XP for successful active stealth but not for just not playing DnD.

[shadow_archmagi]

After the first 2 encounters (I had planned for 8 encounters that RL day), they came to another "clearing" and just... walked round it. I let them do it once. Then they tried it again. I stopped the game and repeated to them (i had told them in grey text earlier) that the forest is full of clearings, they have been traveling through them all day, and asked them why their CHARACTERS were avoiding these clearings without making spot checks.

Okay, so you started a lot of these encounters with "You come to a clearing and..." and your players picked up on that. This is one of those metagame issues that I think a lot of tables have problems with, and I don't think it's fair to accuse your players of cheating. Here's a comparable, but stretched to the point of silliness, scenario:

"You're eating porridge, just like you do every morning."
"Okay..."
"Do you...." *DM leans in, smirks* "Take another bite?"

So now we have a scenario where a weirdly large amount of narrative pressure has been placed on what should be an ordinary moment. The player knows something is up; he wouldn't be presented with a choice unless it mattered. Most humans, if they don't know what's going on, are going to err on the side of caution, right? But if you say no then the DM is going to accuse you of metagaming, since you have no REASON to stop eating. So now you're being asked to make a choice where one option really, really seems like a mistake, and the other option has been called out as cheating.

The clearing thing is sort of the same. The player knows that you wouldn't say "You're walking through a perfectly normal clearing..." unless something was up. So the problem is that player and character are out of alignment, and naturally there's two solutions. First, you can ask your players to just politely ignore all their instincts and narrate their characters acting normally. Alternatively, and this is probably the more workable solution, just make it so that the characters are always on the same page as the players. Establish it in-world that clearings are gathering points for monsters, so that when you say "You're in a clearing" both the players AND the characters know that this is a place where things happen.




So, giants. What say you? Obviously if a party "solves" an encounter without violence they deserve xp, but what happens when your party metagames their way out of an encounter? What about if they spot the CR HIGH encounter down the road, and rather than talk to them, or set an ambush, or actually face a CR HIGH challenge, instead just wander off? Where is the cross over between that and "solving" an encounter?


Well, one question is, are you, as a DM, giving them a reason to want to? If I see a fire giant, what are the possible outcomes? Maybe he'll be friendly and we'll share a nice lunch, maybe he'll try to kill me. Is one of those outcomes worth risking the other? Also, as a player, is this fire giant likely to progress the story I'm interested in, or is this going to be a two-hour diversion that goes nowhere? Alternatively, I might just be thinking "I want XP. I can fight the giant for XP." in which case in about a week you're going to make a thread entitled "Why are my PCs such murderhobos?" and the answer is going to be "You set up a rewards system that gave them bonuses for being murderhobos"








Also spot checks are just the worst. Whose idea was that? Roll some dice to find out if you know something? If you succeed, then you just get basic visual information, and if you fail, you get an incredibly obnoxious, immersion-breaking frustration of knowing there is something going on but being unable to interact with it. Cut spot checks out of your game entirely.

[MisterKaws]

If encounters and XP worked they way your players wanted, every Commoner in the village would be Epic Level, because they avoided encountering everything in your cosmos, and if it links to Sigil, then every other cosmos too.

Though the commoners at a metropolis DO go up to level 28...

[Strigon]

Personally, I'm of the school that xp is meant to track experience - not being facetious, hear me out - and so should only be given out where the characters learned something. This doesn't necessarily mean that they must have actively taken note of one lesson per encounter, but it does mean that there must be some measure of challenge to it. They must have done something difficult or strenuous to avoid the encounter, in order to be given xp.

This means that a party taking measures to sneak past an ogre and get to its horde would be rewarded with full xp for the ogre. A party that ignores the ogre and its horde entirely would get no reward whatsoever.

In this case, with the party not even seeing the encounter, it's safe to say they should get no xp, and if they try to argue they shouldn't have a leg to stand on - and they know it! You wouldn't give them xp for walking past a robbery in the street and not intervening; that would be ridiculous.

[Red Fel]

However, if the characters don't know something's in a clearing (no matter what the PC's think) and walk around it, they should get just as much XP as they get for walking through a monster-less part of the forest: zero. The characters didn't experience anything but 'hey, a clearing, let's avoid it for some reason'. That isn't learning, that's random activity.

As others have said, but essentially this.

Basically, when they went around the clearing, no encounter happened. Ergo, no experience.

I'm not saying every encounter needs to be combat. In fact, I've frequently said the opposite. However, deliberately avoiding encounters is not a way to earn experience. What they did was the equivalent of saying, "I spend the day sitting in my room at the inn. How much XP do I get?" Now, if the PC in this hypothetical inn had instead gone out and (1) trained at the local dojo, (2) haggled with or stolen from the local merchants, (3) hobnobbed with the nobility, or (4) spent several hours reading scrolls at the Magicarium, I could see awarding some minor XP for doing stuff. But in this case, it's not even that - they are specifically and carefully avoiding doing anything. They're taking a pleasant, uneventful stroll.

Their reward for avoiding encounters is getting from one side of the forest to the other. Avoiding an encounter altogether is not the same as overcoming it. Overcoming an encounter requires at least some interaction with it, even if said interaction is limited to judicious use of Hide and Move Silently.

In short:
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--1i5q_eQZ--/19cxq3r2f45blgif.gif

[OldTrees1]

I give XP for overcoming encounters regardless of the manner the encounter is overcome or the nature of the encounter. However the encounter has to be encountered before it can be overcome.

In your example:
There is large very easy encounter (travel through the forest)* and 8 small encounters of various challenges.
If the PCs teleported to the other side of the forest I would give them the xp for encountering and then circumnavigating the forest. However I would not give them any xp for the 8 unencountered encounters.

If the PCs walked through the forest avoiding every clearing (even the ones without encounters) then I would again give them the xp for forest traversal but not the 8 unencountered encounters.

If the PCs checked each clearing for an encounter and only walked through the empty clearings, then I would have them roll perception & stealth checks to circumnavigate the 8 encounters they encountered.

If the PCs knew about the encounters in the clearings and thus decided to avoid every clearing as a traversal strategy. Then it gets trickier. I think I would still count those as unencountered encounters (no xp). Unless they were close enough for stealth checks.


*The traversal encounter might be too easy for any xp depending on the xp system used.

[johnbragg]

If the PCs knew about the encounters in the clearings and thus decided to avoid every clearing as a traversal strategy. Then it gets trickier. I think I would still count those as unencountered encounters (no xp). Unless they were close enough for stealth checks.


*The traversal encounter might be too easy for any xp depending on the xp system used.

I'd say that, if the PCs know that there is Danger in the Forest, and successfully avoid the danger through their own efforts, efforts which were not guaranteed to succeed, I'd credit an Easy encounter (1/20 of XP for next level, at my table.) The players came up with a strategy and implemented it successfully, and they beat the Dangerous Forest. That's more than the guys who stayed back at the inn did.

[Fizban]

You only get xp for dealing with encounters. Walking around the obvious encounter point and continuing on your way means you've had no encounter. No xp.

Following from Shadow's post:
Another, more difficult solution is to try and change the way you present information. Don't roll dice and announce they've reached a clearing: ask first how they're proceeding and any plans they might have (such as avoiding obvious encounters by moving stealthily), then roll dice, then give a meandering description of what they see along the way including multiple points of reference. Do this basically whenever the party start moving, no matter where or why. The point is that the players should always expect you to ask about minor details like if you brushed your teeth or if you climb over/around the log in addition to major details like party formation, so that when you do have a scheme your questions won't look out of the ordinary. And it shows an interest in those little character building details.

Always be rolling dice. Roll dice when they sleep, when they wake up, when they set out, during travel, after travel, whenever they stop and discuss things among themselves. Some of those dice will be your actual random encounters, some will be their spot/listen checks regarding those encounters, and some will just be for show. Even on the fake dice take a moment to go over your tables and double check some numbers, maybe backtrack and use some of the dice anyway. If you can't fake it that easily then write up some fluff tables and/or fill in the "no encounter" spots on the table with random fluff so that you're actually rolling up the sights they pass on the way with rock formations and bird sightings. The point is that the players should be accustomed to you rolling dice and checking tables regardless of the situation, so just like the random fluff questions they won't know when something's actually about to happen and can respond "normally" rather than narratively.
Although actually now that I've thought about it, the problem probably wasn't really the presentation or dice camouflage: it's the basic adventure design. What was their goal and how did the forest of dense encounters factor into it? You rolled once an hour and intended eight encounters for that day, which leaves no room for anything to not happen on a given roll. In order for a random encounter to feel random there has to be a rather large chance of it not happening, so that each time you roll dice it's probably nothing, and each time you describe a landmark it's probably nothing. Unless your group prefers to fast-forward to the action, but in that case deliberately avoiding obvious encounter areas would be silly. No amount of descriptive text or dice camouflage will cover it up if the encounters are literally running like clockwork.

I also feel it should go without saying (and hesitate to assume that you were being literal but here goes) that the encounters were all or even mostly based in "clearings." You mentioned the terrain was being rolled randomly, which should mean that every encounter took place in a different sort of area. And what's this about "leaving without making spot checks?" Players don't roll spot checks: the DM rolls spot checks to find out what the characters can see before describing an area. If they see something in the clearing, they see it and you tell them, if they don't then they walk on by without noticing (either recieving an empty fluff "you pass a clearing" or skipping to an encounter they do sense). Obviously you're not restricted to sight: they hear the dryads weeping and wailing or a dinosaur roars or they smell a rotting corpse or a badger falls on their head. You can't really complain about the characters not noticing something when you're in control of weather or not they notice it. If at that point they choose to avoid an obvious encounter then see "why is there an encounter every hour?" above.

Though I would be quite amused if a player told me "no I'm not making any spot checks" so I could confirm that they're walking around with their eyes shut. Don't even need to spring anything on them, it's funny enough as is.

[OldTrees1]

I'd say that, if the PCs know that there is Danger in the Forest, and successfully avoid the danger through their own efforts, efforts which were not guaranteed to succeed, I'd credit an Easy encounter (1/20 of XP for next level, at my table.) The players came up with a strategy and implemented it successfully, and they beat the Dangerous Forest. That's more than the guys who stayed back at the inn did.

That is what I referenced as the large very easy travel through the forest encounter. Surviving the Fire Swamp in Princess's Bride rates xp even if they avoided all the dangers. How much xp depends on the CR of the Forest vs the level of the PCs. 20th level PCs avoiding all danger while walking through a national park? No xp. 1st level PCs avoiding all danger while traversing the Fire Swamp? O.O gain a level!

1st level PCs traversing the Nine Hells while avoiding all danger? O.O!!!!!!!! How... Did you just... Um... Do you want xp, or do you prefer to remain at 1st level? What kind of reward for victory do you want in this campaign?

[shadow_archmagi]

The point is that the players should always expect you to ask about minor details like if you brushed your teeth or if you climb over/around the log....


Doesn't that get tiring though? Constantly bombarding your players with completely meaningless questions just to create a space where you could pull off that kind of trick seems incredibly exhausting. It could work, and "Roll fake spot checks all the time!" is certainly something I see GMs suggest, but it just doesn't seem worth it. Why keep the spot check in the game at all? What is it really adding?

[Strigon]

As a point of order, would your players find an obviously evil abandoned ruin, where the BBEG was said to lurk, and then leave demanding full xp? Because that's essentially what they're doing here.

[Fizban]

Doesn't that get tiring though? Constantly bombarding your players with completely meaningless questions just to create a space where you could pull off that kind of trick seems incredibly exhausting. It could work, and "Roll fake spot checks all the time!" is certainly something I see GMs suggest, but it just doesn't seem worth it. Why keep the spot check in the game at all? What is it really adding?
Well I won't claim I sustained it perfectly or fooled them all that much, but it's not that hard to try and I know I was told at least once that I got them good. Constantly may be a bit of an exaggeration, just a high enough ratio that it's more likely to be nothing than something, 3-4:1 is more than enough. Unless you're actually hiding monsters in every room that's not gonna be many fake spots per session, and unless you're actually poisoning their food every morning you don't have to ask for mundane info every hour of every day.

Plenty of players, myself included, keep track of at least some of the more mundane fluff details about their characters like if they shave regularly or check over their equipment or buy food that's not just iron rations. Checking in on stuff like that and naturally bringing up other stuff they might or might not being doing fleshes out the vast majority of time the characters spend living but not in immediate combat. And once that's been established as a regular thing you can hide stuff under it, or not. It also gives you a way to ease into the "so are you guys done here or what?" question: when the DM starts asking if everyone's eaten, geared up, or who's opening the door, it's time to get the game moving again. It should just be part of the gameflow, trading information and actions back and forth as they go about their adventure, stopping at important things and then moving on. Everyone knows there'll be a fight eventually (unless you run a very low-combat game), but it could be earlier or later in the session and there could be more or less depending on how things go, not every announcement from the DM should involve an encounter.

The spot check is part of the simulation. If there's an encounter you want the PCs to have then there's no reason to be rolling a spot check because it's a scripted event that should just happen, see previous post. If there's an potential encounter which is meant to happen/or not organically based on the simulation of both parties' personal abilities and circumstances situation, such as intelligent monsters hiding in ambush, then spot checks are what determine who notices what. If the party expects to be able to hide from things, then obviously other things should be able to hide from them, and spot is part of the hiding rules. Rolling fake spot checks and fake random encounters obviously doesn't add anything-it prevents the subtraction of immersion that comes from the obvious narrative weight of knowing dice were just rolled, by obscuring when the dice actually matter outside of combat. Doesn't have to be literally every room, but any room that has cover or concealment for hiding could plausibly have hidden creatures, so there should be a spot check weather or not there's anything hiding. It just becomes part of the description: there's a clearing, it looks like this, no one spots or hears anything out of the ordinary (or maybe the scout spots a rat, which is just a normal rat, but makes it so the spider later on doesn't draw undue attention).

It's really not that hard to roll a handful of d20's and glance over them when the PCs enter a room, and doing so makes it so your players don't have to play dumb all the time. It can be fun trying to play it cool and guess how you'd be acting normally if you didn't know you'd just failed a spot check, but I'd rather only have that happen accidentally instead of being the default. There are many layers of information and implied spot/listen/knowledge/etc checks, the further in you go the more work it is but the more layers you have to work with, it's only when you're at the bottom (rolling dice only when there are encounters) that there are problems.

[the_david]

Yes, your players are metagaming. They also seem to be telling you that your playstyle doesn't line up with theirs. You might want to focus a lot less on the random encounters and the railroading, and more on the plot of the game.

And seriously, 8 random encounters?

[Albions_Angel]

Yes, your players are metagaming. They also seem to be telling you that your playstyle doesn't line up with theirs. You might want to focus a lot less on the random encounters and the railroading, and more on the plot of the game.

And seriously, 8 random encounters?

It wasnt a normal session, but yeah, 8 encounters. Psudo random. They wernt random encounters, but what they consisted of was random (if that makes sense). Some were combat, some were information, but when you have fey infested forest and your plays must trek 3 days into the middle of it, during the changing of the seasons, in the middle of a war, yes, there will be a lot of fights.

We played for 10 hours. Our games are ALWAYS combat heavy. One session (in a game I wasnt running) was 10 hours of rolling combat. The next session was all role play. Sometimes that happens.

They had no issue with the content (and told me so), they just got upset at me asking them why their characters were avoiding parts of the forest indistinguishable to all the other parts they had been wandering through "off screen".

They normally like their encounters and often stay behind in dungeons after the objective is done to clear every last enemy and loot every corpse. Their issue was with me not awarding XP for groves they just wandered past, and for asking them to come up with in game reasons for skipping areas rather than just doing it.

[Keltest]

At my table, I will grant Xp for encounter avoidance (they did "solve" it after all), however they first need to have initiated the encounter in some way anyway, and if they avoid it in a manner that doesn't actually challenge them in some way, they forfeit a chunk of XP on top of the obvious "Don't get any loot" thing. I will, however, grant MORE experience if they, for example, sneak in and steal a map from a bandit camp without getting noticed than I would had they simply killed the bandits. Non-combat solutions exist, and I like to encourage them.

[Fizban]

They had no issue with the content (and told me so). . . Their issue was with me not awarding XP for groves they just wandered past, and for asking them to come up with in game reasons for skipping areas rather than just doing it.
Wow. Yeah, nothing else to say then, they're just wrong. "So why are you avoiding this clearing when you were fine with walking into the last two" is a perfectly reasonable question, and you sure as heck don't get xp for it when you've been given no reason to do so.