Rant

[kippurbird]

This is probably something really inanely trivial, but I feel like complaining about it anyway.

In one of my D&D groups the DM had us write Point of Views for each session. We got XP for it and if you didn't do it, you didn't get the XP. I sort of thought that was a silly thing to do because what if life threw you a curve ball and you couldn't write the POV. You'd suffer for it. But that's just me. Anyway, there was one person in our group whose a bit... nuts. He's a bit wacky in a train wreck sort of way. He charged about in some parallel game in his own head, which irritated me a lot as it would hold up the main plot.

The one thing he never did was write POVs.

Just recently he started writing them at the cajoling of the group. They didn't want to be held up because he wasn't writing them and getting XP.

At first they were standard POVs... from his own unique perspective. And that was cool. But now they've sort of degraded into something that...

Well, you're not going to have Tampax, Michael Jackson and television in a high fantasy setting, now are you? In fact they have absolutely nothing to do with the campaign whatsoever!

And it's just driving me crazy because it's not what it's supposed to be. POVs are supposed to be the POV of the session not some lucid dream like ramblings. He's even started going Meta and bringing in the players names and their kids into them.

I'm no longer playing with the group, but still on the mailing list just so I can see what's going on and what happens to my PC who I left. I miss him dearly, he was awesome. And looking at the POVs, I can see that leaving was probably a good idea, because if they're bothering me through subspace, imagine what they'd do to me in person?

Comments

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

I sort of thought that was a silly thing to do because what if life threw you a curve ball and you couldn't write the POV. You'd suffer for it. But that's just me.

Not just you. This sort of thing has been around almost as long as D&D... bonus XP for extra activities. Hell, older editions outright encouraged it, having tables for individual XP awards in the DMG and everything.

I like everyone to be moving along at the same clip, so I don't do these things. But the concept is still very much the norm among "serious roleplayers". On one mailing list I read, someone is designing a game entirely based around this, where there are explicit awards for performing specific RP.

[acdragonmaster.livejournal.com]

The GM for the Exalted game I play in does the bonus EXP for extra stuff thing, but by "extra stuff" he means like... doing a whole bluebook, or drawing art of peoples' characters, or so on. Things that actually require a little effort and creativity. Plus he doesn't hand out a ton of extra EXP for it, either, just a little, so it more encourages people to do extra side stuff that everyone ends up enjoying than anything.