I can shoot just as well with practise and not having live targets. About the only thing that shooting a live person teaches you is whether you will hesitate. But fighting off a mugger will pretty much tell you that as well. Will I hesitate if I were to have to shoot someone? Possibly, as I have never shot a person before. Have I hesitated in shooting at anything else? No. Did I hesitate when I took down a mugger no. I can probably state that under most circumstances that I am a much better shot than Son of Sam. (Though proving it would be tough.)
Besides if you are going to award experience for advancing the story, why bother awarding experience for the individual kills as well?
Situation: (This was a Shadowrun experience not a Traveller one but the same could apply.)
Our party was set up and framed nicely. We also had a threat from this guy as exposure for him was going to be a bad thing. SO we decided to pay him a visit. Scouting his home we discovered that the place was guarded by a Private security firm that one of our characters had some pull with. We convinced the local watch commander that one of his contracts had attracted some very bad customers and that Corporate higher ups, had decided that a team of specialists (us) should covertly be used to stop this attack. They issued us uniforms and transportation and at shift change we became the guards of this guys estate.
We had a nice semi polite conversation with our former Mr. Johnson, until he decided that being rude was better and went for his pistol. After cleaning up the mess. we quietly bagged his body, and that of his personal bodyguard, stored the bodies in the trunks of our vehicles. Took his car out of the garage and parked it elsewhere and then sat and waited for shift change. When we changed shifts we told the crew coming on that we had a quiet night and that those Intel guys must have gotten it wrong, again. Told them that the principal had left the premisis earlier that morning headed for the office and the shift was theirs.
Is that worth more or less experience than slautering the 20 odd guards, for the simple reason that they were there? Is fencing the car really worth experience? Is not taking out the guards so we could loot their equipment worth less experience?
The story experience is, or should be, set based on relative threat level. How difficult the story was, not what kind of body count you can run up. The game is kept interesting by the story.
Now if you are running a campaign where the Characters are ruthless Pirates and all they are doing is Piracy then sure XP can be done by body count. But a typical Traveller campaign, isn't like that and T20 isn't, IMHO, like previous versions of Traveller, a hack and slash game.
How many XP do you award per credit of treasure? I mean if I rifle someones pockets and come up with, between cash and gear, KCr5 what kind of XP award do you think that should be worth?
D20 Modern doesn't award XP for cash, in fact they don't really track cash at all. It gives how to calculate xp for an encounter, based on threat level of the opposition, though it doesn't state, in my quick read, that you have to kill them to gain that experience. It also talks about XP by story not by combat. About the only place where it is XP by killing things is the Hack and Slash FRPGs. (Which score about the same way as a video game.)
As for stealing the treasure on the sly instead of shooting all the pirates then taking hte treasure? You, IMTU, gain the XP based on what that part of the story is worth, plus bonuses for good roleplaying. It doesn't matter if the Pirates are living or dead, or how much treasure there is. (Having the money is award enough.)
The difficulty of the situation sets the level of XP granted. (Which seems to be what you are saying, in your Pirate example, unless I misunderstood.)
Yet in your world, which is worth more XP?
IMTU, an adventure might be scored like this. Your goal is to stop the Dread Corsair Roberts. There will of course be encounters along the way, random things, red herrings, etc. The way I run a campaign these are taken into account in the total award for the adventure, there is no need to add additional points, for encounters.
If you stop the Dread Priate Roberts. (Steal his ship, blow up his ship, catch him in port and shoot him in the back of the head, it is all the same to the story.) You get a certain level of XP. If you don't stop him, you gain a lesser amount of XP based on how close you got. (Generally quite a bit less.) If you do something exceptional, like take him alive and turn him over, in chains, to your patron then that might be worth a bonus. Good roleplaying, for a typical adventure, is worth a bonus up to 2,000 xp. Making everyone else laugh, especially in character, during the story, is worth a bonus. Ducking under a table during a bar fight, and saving your beer, if that is the general nature of your character, is worth as much as starting a bar fight and clearing the bar, if that is in a different character's general nature. (Especially if you take the ribbing for being a wuss in character after the fight.)
To truly enjoy Traveller, at least in my experience with the game, you have to drop the D&D mindset. It is, in all fairness, a contradiction to the basic nature of the setting.
Originally posted by Laryssa:
You know what they say, practice makes perfect. If someone is pulling a trigger, he is learning how to shoot at a moving target better, if he hits that target, that means he has learned something, if he kills that target, that means he has learned how to kill something. Now if someone misses, that means he hasn't learned much, if someone doesn't kill something, he doesn't learn how to kill it. I think experience can be earned for treasure if part of the goal of the adventure is to acquire the treasure. If the treasure is acquired, then the PCs get story award experience points. The goal of the adventure is to defeat the pirates and take their treasure, and this makes the adventurers richer, and they learn from their experience in defeating the pirates and taking their treasure and thus advance their personal goal of becoming richer, that is how I'd rationalize it.
Why award experience for treasure? You might ask.
Well, suppose the PCs devise a way to steal the Pirates' treasure without killing any pirates? Should the PCs get no experience point award for stealing the treasure from the pirates on the sly? If someone "cat burgals" the pirates, sneaks into their ship, defeats their security devices and makes off with the pirates treasure while they are all drunk or asleep, do they get experience for that?
