As of last weekend, I have rage-quit another tabletop gaming group. I've had to leave gaming groups for multiple reasons: moving out of town, time constraints, problems with players, just not enjoying the setting. However, the ones I actually rage-quit from all had one feature in common: the game masters (GM's from here on out) had truly f$@&ed up notions of what makes for a fair and fun gaming experience; to date, I've rage-quit four such groups. Hmm, come to think of it, there are two other common features: they've all been in the Houston area, and the offending GM's have all been staunchly conservative. Rather than go over what was wrong with each GM, I'll just deal with the primary offense with the pair of GMs in my latest group.
Both of the GM's in question had the standard traditional practice of giving out experience only to those who attended the games in question. They also gave out bonus experience for excellent (in their opinion) role-playing, for writing up campaign logs, for bringing snacks, for cooking, and so on. It's fairly standard practice for many games and gaming groups, and on the surface it may look like a good one. After all, it makes sense to reward extra effort!
However, in practice, it doesn't tend to work out so well, and it didn't work out well in this group. Sometimes, players couldn't contribute with cooking, food and so on, and so they fell behind. Sometimes, players couldn't attend a gaming session, and they fell further behind. By the end of one campaign, one player's character had become a demigod, and I don't mean that in terms of hyperbole; my and my friend's character were getting by on the middle tier; meanwhile the two latecomers to the campaign, whom I might add began at zero experience, were getting overwhelmed on a regular basis. This same GM had started a new game in a different system and setting, and due to the particulars, most of us needed to keep multiple characters and play only one of them in a session; the result was that each player with multiple characters got proportionately less experience per character, while those who could stick with one had a clear advantage. The other GM had similar practices, and as could be expected, played favorites with his good role-playing bonus awards.
I eventually (and recently) got into an intense argument over what I consider to be bad practices. One GM was at least lukewarm on my idea of giving the experience to each player rather than each character, and letting each character have the full benefit of said experience, thus eliminating the multiple character experience issue. However, they steadfastly refused to budge an inch when I said that the only way to be fair about experience was to give every player the same experience, no matter what. They said it was unfair to those who did more work, that only powergamers and the weak gamers would favor it, and it them. I strongly suspect that their staunch conservatism was at the heart of their intransigence. It didn't even matter to them when I suggested that the bonus experience be shared. Between that and other issues, I quit with much rage.
Just how hard is it to get that preferential awards actually get in the way of the fun and the fairness in non-competitive games such as role-playing games?
