Experience Rewards in RPG's (part 4)

So how do we handle experience point (XP) awards in Solar Echoes? We wanted to make sure that combat was still fun and rewarding, and yet we didn't want the focus to always be on killing everything that moves. Our goal was for Solar Echoes to be a mission-focused game, so that players would strive to work together on a team to accomplish the goals of the mission as the top priority, rather than worry about racking up XP to level up their characters. We actually borrowed a little from the Bioware concept mentioned earlier this week, where we decided NOT to award XP for killing something, unless killing a specific target was an actual mission goal (sometimes it will be, in assassin missions.) In the end, the result was much more successful than it would be in a video game environment—rather than just weave around enemies to avoid battle if there was no XP award for killing them, in a tabletop environment, players had to make choices. Can they handle a combat situation with the enemy, or would they rather try to outsmart the enemy with clever persuasion attempts in a dialogue encounter? Perhaps sneaking past the guards would be the best option, or if the guards are robots, maybe hacking them into submission would be the best approach? In Solar Echoes, we reward XP for innovation in the game and for achieving preset goals. At the end of every mission, XP awards are listed for each mission goal. If the goal was to defeat the gang of pirates and retrieve stolen firearms, “defeat” doesn't only mean killing—it also includes bypassing and outsmarting.