Experience Points

Tenets

Rewards for your time invested in role playing should come from multiple factors. Those are XP, social OOC currency (expressed here on the game as Karma), and the meaningful storylines, character arcs, and IC connections that come with in-depth RP.

To a certain extent, you should be rewarded for role playing regardless of what it’s about (because you’re investing time here). But, quality should be rewarded more richly than quantity.

Power users are people who spend 8+ hours online every day. Casual users play a fraction of that time, like people who play all day on the weekend but can’t afford to play during the week due to their work and/or school.

Both parties should be rewarded for their time. However, a casual user should be able to choose to spend their limited time on higher-stakes RP (like ST-run scenes) and receive enough XP that they can stay competitive compared to the power user who does majority bar/coffee RP.

How To Gain XP

Pose XP

We reward your time invested here through Pose XP, which grants a small amount of XP per pose over 140 characters, once per 15 minutes. These two sentences are 140 characters.

Pose XP is accumulated over the space of a week and awarded at the end of the week to a maximum of 1 XP. Each pose is worth 0.025 XP. To get 1 XP per week, a player needs to spend 10 total hours through the week, which is an amount of time the majority of our users can reasonably achieve.

Please note that pose XP is not rewarded when you turn the pose logger off. When you do not consent to your poses being recorded we can't exactly reward you based on records of that which we cannot record.

PRP/ST XP For Risk Taking

As stated in the core books, a storyteller should be able to give you a point of XP for the following acts:

• Learning Curve: Characters who’ve learned something pivotal to either the plot or their own personal character development can earn a point to reflect that knowledge. To earn that point, the player should explain why that knowledge changed her character’s world. Acquiring a new dot in a stat does not count as “learning” in this context.
• Focus (for Mages): Belief and practice are important to a mage. A player who gets deep into her character’s paradigm, plays up that mage’s beliefs, details her practices, and uses her instruments in cleverly appropriate ways, may get a point for emphasizing the mage’s approach to the Arts and Sciences.
• Status (for Vampires): Each sect maintains their own values and social strata. A player whose character earns the Fleeting Status titles earn 0.25 XP per acquired Status Title. This is done as a reflexive feature of the +status/grant command.

Heroism: A character who faces incredible odds to perform a memorable act of sacrifice or risk ought to be rewarded for stepping up courageously and doing what needed to be done. This can be against social, mental, or physical risks, awarding 1 point.

• (IC) Drama: A Storyteller can decide to give out extra points for especially deep roleplaying, dramatic self-sacrifice, or other memorable moments.
• Success: If a character has had a goal that has lasted through multiple scenes and accomplishes that goal Everyone involved in the adventure gets an extra point at the end of that story, assuming that they met their major goals and gained a sort of victory.
• Danger: If the characters faced major hazards (harrowing temptations, fights in which survival was seriously in doubt, etc.) they may gain an extra point. Note that this needs to be an above and beyond sort of situation. Any old instance of conflict is not going to fulfill this story point.
• Thinking Outside The Box: If a character was particularly clever, then she ought to be rewarded for using her head! This needs to be a situation where things could have gone seriously sideways had that character not shown that spark of wit.

Storytellers may award these points at will. A Storyteller in this case is someone who has ran a scene or series of scenes regardless of whether or not they themselves are part of staff. If you sat down and gave a group of players a narrative and a challenge and they met it, you should be able to allocate XP (send in a +request to do so, specifying the date and grid location of the scene so that we can review the logs, or providing the logs yourself).

A given character can earn a maximum of 5 XP per month in this manner.

+Votes

The +vote <player> command allows a player to indicate they enjoyed a scene with another player. This is a “casual” vote, and it’s acceptable to +vote someone for whatever reason.

+vote resets once per month and +vote does not require a description or reason. Only your first +vote for a person does anything for them in terms of XP every month. You can +vote as much as you want, so long as you have RPed with the person you’re voting for (you need to have RPed with them, which we quantify through the pose log data).

No Reflex Voting: You should feel comfortable to +vote for people because you want to, not because you feel obligation because you were just +voted for. Instead of an instant notification for +votes, you will be able to view your vote count through the +xp command.

In order to make sure people know +vote is a thing, players receive automated reminders to use +vote until they’ve used it a few times (like a nightly @mail that tells them how many +votes they received yesterday, and reminds them to +vote people they thought highly of).

Players who receive 1 to 6 +votes from unique other players in a month will receive 5 xp at the end of the month.

Players who receive 7+ +votes from unique other players in a month will receive 8 xp at the end of the month.

If you receive 7+ votes before the month is out, you can get the 8 XP early, but you will not begin to earn again until the next month.

This means that each player will probably get 5 xp from this system, and at most 8 xp. If someone doesn’t impress even a single person enough to type +vote at all during a whole month, they might get 0 xp.

The cycle is monthly so that there is not as much need for players to feel like they have to grind every week for XP. They can focus on RPing for the fun of it. XP from votes and recs come as a side-effect. Further, if you happen to have a slow week, you don’t get left behind from everybody otherwise learning linearly week by week.

+Recs

Modern Nights +recs are meant to recognize really good RP. When you +rec, you provide a reason the person deserves a +rec. Like +vote, when you get +reced, you do not get notified immediately. This is because we want to eliminate that whole, “You +recced me, so I have to +recc back” dynamic.

So that people remember +rec exists, we send out automated reminders until a player has used the command a few times.

You may only +rec 3 times in a given month. Our current data shows that people tend to RP with around 5-6 other people consistently. We chose half as much so people can thoughtfully reward those they think were stellar during the month.

The chief reason they are limited is to give them added value. You have to make a choice and put importance on who you +rec, and it should feel like an accomplishment to receive a +rec. The other reason is to ease the burden of quality-control from the staffers. This provides an upper limit to how much content a staffer has to screen.

You may swap out any of your 3 +recs during the month if you +rec someone and then later change your mind.

Like +vote, +rec resets once per month. At the end of the month, they will be added to a player’s “+recs” collection, and a BBPost announcing that +recs have dropped will be made.

Recs will are processed by staff for quality control: +recs that don’t make sense on their own or are to the tune of “thanks for the scene” get removed.

Each rec will grant 1 xp. You may only receive 6 +recs in a month. If someone tries to +rec you and you already have 6 pending +recs that you would get XP for, they will get told that they should spread the love a little and +rec someone else.

Running PRPs

You can get XP for running things. You get +1 XP/Karma for each scene you run.

To redeem XP, your character cannot be involved in the plot, but you can get Karma instead! If you involve your character in a PRP, then the XP accumulation that you get is going to be from the pose XP, votes and recs that you get as a natural side-effect of RPing from that account.

Your character is allowed to inform people about the plot and is allowed to advise people about the plot and that can still count as “not involved”, but if your character interacts with your plot in any other way, then you don't get XP for running this plot, you get Karma.

Receive this XP/Karma by running the thing (obeying all PRP rules) and then sending in a +request to staff. Identify and describe what you ran, including IRL dates.

Regardless of how much you run, you will have a maximum of 5 points given to you per month. This is a limit of 5 points of both types: you cannot, for example, earn 5 Karma + 5 XP. If you max out the XP you earn from Running PRPs in a month, anything you do the rest of that month is for the sake of doing it.

The Dinosaur Girdle

After you earn 400 XP, that’s it. You’re (mostly) done. You don’t earn more pose XP. You don’t earn more XP from votes. You do still get XP from +recs and ST/PRP engagement.

This ceiling of 400 XP is liable to be raised, but we’ll wait once a few people hit it or nearly hit it, to see if it needs to be raised.

Once you hit 400 XP, you still can evolve your sheet over time, either by your (much more slowly accumulated) XP or thanks to the XP room’s feature where you can sell off a stat to buy up another one, so you can still try out new builds on the same character.

How To Spend XP

XP expenditures are facilitated through the XP room on the game. Attributes, Abilities, Virtues, in-clan Disciplines, Spheres, and Willpower are available through flat purchase no questions asked. Other traits (out-of-clan Disciplines, blood magic paths, rituals) are obtained through the +teach command. Backgrounds are earned through role play and request. Arete is earned through successful Seekings.

Earning Schedule

In summary, here are the avenues for pose XP and the expected (estimated) gains:

Source	Casual + Mostly BaRP	Casual + Risk Taker	Power User + Mostly BaRP	Power User +Risk Taker	Max
Pose XP	4 xp	4 xp	4 xp	4 xp	4 xp
+Votes	5 xp	5 xp	8 xp	8 xp	8 xp
+Recs	1 xp	2 xp	3 xp	3 xp	6 xp
PRP/ST	0 xp	2 xp	0 xp	2 xp	5 xp
Total/Month	10 xp	13 xp	15 xp	17 xp	23 xp

While the casual RPer who takes risk does fall behind a power user who takes risk, they still stand a fair chance of being competitive.