XP and rewards - any edition

[Cogidubnus]

How do people give out XP and rewards?
Do you give encounter XP at the end of each encounter, and to the whole party equally? Or do you award it based on who did what? And do you give individual rewards for RPing or dealing with a situation an especially clever way?

As for treasure, do you roll it randomly or pick items to help your PCs?

[Cicciograna]

I give XP at the end of each adventure: I usually reward clever PC with a small amount of additional XP (not too much: this reward is an addition to the bulk of XP, it's not meant to be a different source). Obviously, if a PC is smart, after three or four adventures the bump in XP becomes sound and the first differences between XP amounts of the various players begin to arise.

For what concerns treasure, I pick each item: I don't like random treasures, as the laws of probability can give birth to unexpected adjudications.

[valadil]

I usually don't give XP. I just tell people when to level. I'm doing XP for my current game though (just to try something new) and give it out per session. Sometimes players get individual bonus XP, but that hasn't happened often. I do give out extra XP for journals though. So far that XP (which is also the same as bonus XP) is 10% of what's needed to level.

Loot shows up at the end of the session too, but I've gotten complaints about that. It doesn't make sense that they can't use what they find immediately. I agree that that doesn't make sense. But I don't like spending game time to argue over who gets what. I especially don't like doing this several times in the same session. I'd rather they discuss loot distribution over email. I may try handing it out mid game, just to see how it goes (maybe the loot arguments I've seen in past groups won't be an issue with this one) but that depends on my ability to roll up loot before the session happens.

[Traveler]

XP and rewards.
For xp, one of two ways. Usually per encounter and divided equally, but there was one time (my first time) that I gave out xp after the mod in one large sum, divided equally.
Rewards... Usually they are rare moments in which the players role play very well, or just have the perfect one-liner and these usually warrent 100 xp. Not enough to even help towards the next level, but it's still a sigh of "Hey, you did that pretty well. Congratz."

[Human Paragon 3]

I give out XP at the end of the session, and each player gets a bunch of personal rewards. They have to sort of sing for their supper, which is fun because it lets us recap the session and celebrate cool moments.

Each player gets to claim each of these rewards once:

Best Character Moment (usually RPing)
Best Class Moment (Using your class features)
Best Skill Moment (Using your skills)
Biggest Blunder (And what you learned from it)
Best Group Moment (Everybody gets the same award, it's a group bonus)
Best Moment by Someone Else (Players get to give eachother some XP for coolness)

I usually keep these bonuses pretty low, and base them on how good, useful, cool or important each moment was. I will always give at least some XP if the player can think of something they did. The minimum I give is 15x level and the max I give is 50 x level. So if you're level 5 guys, the smallest award you can get is 60 and the largest you can get is 300.

It lets us level up a little faster, too.



Additionally, I give out story rewards (completing a quest) and 50xp/level for "saving a party member."