Do the NPCs in Hook Mountain Massacre get a share of the loot and experience from the fights they participate in? If the fights are planned to be harder in order to make up for them having the extra NPC wouldnt they be worth more XP and possibly loot in addition? Do they only get experience and not loot or the other way round?
Do the NPCs in Hook Mountain Massacre get a share of the loot and experience from the fights they participate in? If the fights are planned to be harder in order to make up for them having the extra NPC wouldnt they be worth more XP and possibly loot in addition? Do they only get experience and not loot or the other way round?
I never assign loot to NPCs, only if they are permanent members of the party and their progression is important. In this case they are getting a fort so I'm sure they don't care much about the Ogre Loot.
I do not know the official RAW answer but some information we have implies what it is (at least for the Hook Mountain portion of this AP.)
The AP provides a story milestone method for determining level advancement and when I first started running it I planned on using it. But very shortly thereafter my change-averse, control-freak ways took over and I fell back to actual xp awards. And since the AP provides all that xp detail including story awards, I built a spreadsheet to track it. I've even gone so far as to map out the awards for future encounters and Books. Long story short out of all this rambling is that if you do the math for 4 pc's (assumed number in the AP) you end up almost exactly where the milestone method would put you. And with this being true for Hook Mountain where there might be as many as 4 NPC's supporting the pc's, the implication is that the xp is assumed to divvied up over the pc's only.
As for treasure, that's not my problem :) I let the players decide how to share and spend the treasure they find. Of course Hook provides some nice NPC role-playing grist as portions of the loot once belonged to the Black Arrows and characters risking their lives alongside the pc's might reasonably expect a proportional share of any plunder the group gains. And express dissatisfaction with any perceived unfairness or exploitation.
Full confession: I'm a WBL Heretic. As in I don't give a crap. The treasure in the AP may be mapped against a WBL chart but I wouldn't know it because the only time I've ever looked at one is when I stumbled over an internet thread about how someone was getting screwed over and I had no idea what they were going on about. In my experience pc's have plenty of treasure in most if not all campaign I've ever run or played in. (Of course I acknowledge that "enough" is an eye of the beholder sort of thing...)
We are in this book and I have a couple of players who continually bring up WBL. Knowing how far they are from anything resembling a town with a decent purchase limit I guess they are just going to be incredibly agitated by the end.
It's honestly getting a little grating.
"I'm sorry. You appear to be unduly burdened with too much treasure or too much appetite to spend. This is leading you to engage in a variety of distracting behaviors that in other more judgmental settings would be described as whining. I can solve our mutual problems in a whole variety of expeditious ways. Would you like me to take immediate action to improve our situation? A character without hit points doesn't have any WBL difficulties. Just as an example."
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JJ did speak to this, though I can't find it, but, only the PCs receive the XP. For example, there are 4 PCs and 4 NPCs; the XP is only divided by 4 and given to the 4 PCs. The loot (beyond the loot that belongs to the black arrows) belongs to the PCs. For that matter, the black arrow loot also belongs to the PCs, though they are encouraged to give it back.