I really like reading Jeff Rient’s Party Like It's 999 house rule. This is what it says:
At the beginning of a session […] they can roll 1d6 and spend 100gp times the roll on liquor and/or lechery. The character gains experience equal to the gold spent. […] If the die roll is equal to or less than the character’s level, the result is a rousing good time and no harm done. Rolling above the character’s level indicates things got out of hand one way or another and the poor sucker must roll d20 and consult the chart below. […] – Jeff
What follows is a long table of mishaps that range from making a fool of yourself in public to random quests and starting conflagrations. It seemed so cool, and yet it scared me.
The house rule I have used instead has no such mishaps: In order to get XP for gold, the gold has to be spent on useless things such as donations to the temple, raising of statues, drinking bouts, orgies, circus for commoners, constructing a manor house. Not included are equipment, horses, wagons, ships, mercenaries. In short, XP is granted by anything that raises your infamy or fame without providing any in game benefits. (It may also not raise your reputation since that grants in game benefits.)
This campaign has two groups of players in it. One player organized a big drinking bout. My wife then felt like she couldn’t just do the same thing and had a statue built instead. And she remarked that in time it would get harder to find cool things to do. “Hm,” I thought to myself.
I remembered Jeff’s original table of mishaps. Perhaps I’ll write a d30 table with costly and hilarious events that fit our campaign – not quite mishaps but just risqué stuff that my players would like rolling for. A tamer variant. We’ll just party like it’s 99 instead of 999…
#RPG #Old School
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Well, I never got that right, I thought you just roll on the table no matter what. Hm, maybe I should consider porting it over to my Pathfinder Campaign... I’ll ask the guys tonight. Don’t know if they have the balls to risk it. Well, the sure as hell don’t have the money as of yet, so they can think it over.
– rorschachhamster 2011-05-26 15:24 UTC
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I think Jeff’s system has the tendency to draw people to large cities at higher levels. My adventure paths had little urban variety. Shackled city practically lacked small villages; Rise of the Runelords only marginally touched upon Manigmar—not sure whether my players would have wanted more of Manigmar and less of Sandpoint; Legacy of Fire pretty much moved from a village to Katapesh and to the planes. The XP bonus system would have added pressures to move here or there that were unrelated to the AP. Maybe the system with different bonuses dependend on settlement size is more appropriate for a sandbox than for an AP—since all my Pathfinder games were APs, I’m not sure I’d use the XP bonus system without some changes.
– Alex Schroeder 2011-05-26 22:10 UTC
