Basically, don't do it.
In d20, experience points are simply the measure of how powerful a character has become. Since a reasonable DM will want his PC group to remain on a par, he should ensure that all PCs get the same XP awards. (Of course, the group spellcasters might want to spend their XP on spells and magic items, but that's their choice, and their gain in other areas.)
There are reasons why a DM might want to give out extra XP to one or more of the PCs:
1) Favouritism
The most obvious, and one that needs no explanation for why it's a bad thing.
2) Additional Damger Faced
If one PC faced a whole bunch of challenges that the other members of the group, it is reasonable to think that PC would become more powerful more quickly. However, it hides another, underlying problem.
On one hand, you might find that such awards equalise amongst the group. So, the rogue might gain extra XP one week, the cleric the next, and so on. However, if these awards are equalling out reasonably quickly, why bother to track them individually? Simplify things, and just assume the awards are going to balance out, so give out the same awards to all.
On the other hand, if one PC is consistently getting bigger awards, this must be because the character is facing bigger challenges. This can either be because they're hogging the spotlight unfairly, or it can be that the DM is providing tailored encounters, and providing bigger ones to this character. Either way, it's a flaw in the game, and should be addressed. It's no fun for the rest of the group if one PC is hogging the spotlight. (And, I'll freely admit that this is a significant problem with my own DMing.)
If this problem is not fixed, the consequence will be that one PC will move ahead of the rest of the group, so will hog more attention, face even tougher challenges, and so get bigger awards in future, and thus move even further ahead, which only magnifies the problem.
3) Exceptional Role-playing
This should be its own reward. Frankly, I don't think PCs should get XP at all if the role-playing's terrible. However, if one player is outshining the rest of the group, it should be considered whether this player is again monopolising the game. After all, good role-playing cannot occur in a vacuum, so either the other players must be contributing, or the DM is accomodating this one player over the rest. So, something's not right.
4) One-on-one play
It may be that the DM and this player are filling in time running sessions one-on-one. Perhaps they're running through a prequel featuring the PC, or doing background stuff, or whatever. While such things are fine, the rewards from such should not be in the form of XP, nor should they significantly improve the power of the PC. To do otherwise is to shift the balance of the game in favour of one PC.
There is a danger with one-on-one play that the PC gets significant monetary or magic rewards from their efforts. Such things are as dangerous as XP awards, and should be tightly controlled.
Consequences
The problem with allowing solo play, or giving individual XP awards is that one player becomes significantly more powerful than the rest. This sucks for the rest of the group, at least in d20 games (there are games built with a hero/assistant form, such as Buffy, but d20 isn't amongst them).
More powerful characters can do more things in d20, and so have a larger slice of the action. This leads to the players of the more powerful characters being more involved in the game, and the rest of the group enjoying the game less. Which is a big problem.
That is where the balance in D&D is important. It doesn't really matter what opponents the PCs face, and whether they can beat them or not. It doesn't matter if the group has hardly any magic or enough to destroy the planet, and survive. But the mambers of the group must be balanced against each other. If they're not, the players of the weaker PCs won't enjoy the game as much as they can, and the game is in danger of collapse.
As with everything else, though, there are exceptions, and a competent DM can do what he wants and get away with it.
Archived comment by Pedro:
ReplyDeleteI don't know whether I agree with what you said about awarding players the same amount of XP. I have come to realize that awarding XP for smart action and good role-play encourages both, and players as a result become more active in the game and more willing to participate in every encounter with NPCs and monsters. On the other hand, my experience with awarding players the same amount of XP is that some players will then step into the background and stay there, letting other player do the role-playing with the NPCs and the fighting for them, because after all they will get the same share of the XP anyway.
I used to run a Ravenloft 2e ed, game for over 3 years, in which the players started at 1st level and went up all the way to 12th-14th levels. During that game, I developed a simple system for rewarding XP that seemed to please the players while encouraging them to be more involved with the game. I had a piece of paper divided into equal sized square areas, each of those labeled with the names of each of the PCs. For each time a player did something clever or did some specially good roleplaying interacting with NPC or the other PCs, I would place a plus (+) mark on that character's area on my piece of paper. Similarly, a quite stupid action or bad roleplaying would get the character a minus (-) mark. At the end of the game I would count the number of pluses, subtract the number of minuses from that, multiply the resulting number by a fixed amount of XP (that went up as the characters advanced levels), add any XP gained for monster slaying, and then award the final amount of XP to that player. That procedure would then be repeated for each player. Sometimes we would also discuss at the end of the gaming sessions what were those actions during the game for which I gave pluses or minuses, and that was a good moment for me to understand what kind of campaign the players were really interested in playing. Players in my group always got much more XP from roleplaying and from their clever action than from fighting or pillaging.
In that game we did have characters with different experience levels, but that didn't affect play. I actually believe that having each character advancing in levels in a somewhat independent manner did give the players a better sense of their characters being independent and unique individuals even if they were also members of the same adventuring party.