Expeirence for doing nothing?

[gigobyte]

My group finally escaped the clutches of their overlord merc commander, to start a new group themselves. and now they are traveling and spending time buying and selling. I gave them 1 exp per every 3-4 days of "down time" that they were not really role-playing/playing in the plot. My reasoning is that want them to make sure they get the recommended 100 exp per year, but now they are at 76 total exp earned and it has only been 4 months of game play (but they had 1 month to get to Galatea and 1 month to sell/repair/find temp lodging/re-equip).

So that was about 30 exp in "travel time/sell time/search for contracts time" and the rest was earned through game sessions at 11/10/10/15 for the first 4 games.

Am I giving to much away...what is a good number?

Maybe I should only give them up to 100 if they didn't earn 100 per year (or maybe that isn't even a problem and I am creating a big deal out of nothing)?

Any thoughts?

[Tai Dai Cultist]

Most military "experience", to use a gaming term,  actually comes from training.  You can set up some training scenarios as adventures to gain combat experience during down times.

Alternately or in addition, you might allow the players to buy xps by expending some other in-game resouce (likely cash) to represent off-screen training during downtime.

[guardiandashi]

I wouldn't worry about it too much honestly, on the other hand you could consider a "skills degradation through "rustiness" system to offset some of it.

just thinking for a moment but what do your chars actually do during travel "down time"

for most techs, they are likely doing maintenance, repairs, and the like unless the equipment was "mothballed" for long term storage, so no biggie there.

but what about mechwarriors fighter pilots and armor crew, I mean they CAN use their mechs, or dedicated "sim pods" if they have access to them. but for some reason I suspect most transport commanders would get very cranky about firearm training and range use for some reason....

so do they just lie around and play "bed games"  etc.

on the other hand if you have /encourage / allow they could work on keeping current skills more or less in use, and possibly do basic training of other skills if they can come up with an example that is plausible for how they are trying to maintain or improve a current skill/ability.

lets say the player gets it in their head that they want to improve a chars strength obviously the best way to do this is routine weight lifting

endurance would likely involve running and carrying stuff

reflexes or agility would involve acrobatics or gymnastics type exercises and the like.

a lot of the time I made my players tell me, and and/or suggest things that the character would likely be doing to "justify" a skill or stat upgrade.

[monbvol]

A Time of War does recommend that down time XP should be limited to half the player's INT score per month.  This can be doubled for Fast Learner and there are provisions for increasing this further through training or if a particular skill is relevant.  The 100 XP per year thing is something that really seems to be intended only to work at character creation with the bulk of XP coming from actual campaign rewards once play starts.  Which also means depending on how you structure your campaigns it is possible to grant more than 100 XP per year to your players.

That said though if you do want to be really generous with down time XP rewards feel free, it is your campaign and if it works for your group and allows the campaign to be fun the rules can take a backseat.

So either way the question is what works for you and your group?

[Kitsune413]

The 100 xp per year is also an abstract thing.  It isn't, "I made 8.33 xp per month." It's more like, "I made two experience in febuary when I only practiced drinking beer five in march when I rethought the best way to change the coolant on my mech and reran the routing and twenty in april when I took those dance classes."