Sep 21, 2015, 4:53 PM

I really don't like 'catchup XP' as presumably when you first decide how much XP a player should earn per week, you pick the number you think feels good. Giving new characters truck-loads of XP can feel weird and disorienting.

I am however a fan of limiting the XP that the older characters can earn. The purpose of this is not actually to 'let the new characters catch up' but rather prevent the older characters from buying literally everything. As you've pointed out, XP staggering is effectively a soft-cap on XP that noone complains about and as such achieves the objective without much fuss.

@Coin said:

Thirded.

As far as the original topic goes:

Staggering XP does work, to an extent. There are exceptions. For example, if you have a player like Spider, whose obsession with gaining every little mote of XP possible leads her to obsessively running as much stuff as possible--sure, you'll have someone who is consistently supplementing their diminishing returns. (This is as close to a compliment as I am ever going to give her.) But that's an exception. And even she has never been able to keep the constant PRP running for long enough for it to make a very big difference (or perhaps that was just the way TR did XP that prevented it) without burning out.

There's no one better way to do XP; but each way does promote different styles of play and character building. A hard cap, no matter how high, will make players consider their character sheet "end game" a lot more than otherwise, for example, while a system like The Reach's/Fallcoast's will allow people to spend whatever on whatever because there's always more XP down the pipe as long as other people are active and running stuff.

Different strokes.

The way that RfK choose to handle this was by staggering the XP spends rather then XP gains, the beats per XP were raised by 1 every 50 XP. So even though the older characters were at over 1000 beats, they were at that point paying double the cost of everything compared to someone new.