Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
PS. It seems to me a big part of the issue for you is not being comfortable with making the decision that one player's roleplaying was good and another's was bad. That seems like partly a psychological issue, and I can't help with that. But bear in mind that the players are already trusting you to create an interesting world, to come up with appropriate challenges, to figure out how people in the world will respond to their characters' actions, to interpret the rules—and to do so more or less fairly. Giving eeps isn't a big thing compared to that. I think everyone knows that the award of eeps is partly subjective; so long as you're making a reasonable effort to be fair, and not systematically playing favorites, so that the awards average out over time, reasonable players will accept that. And if you have unreasonable players who are going to try to manipulate the process by pressuring you, they'll cause problems long before you get to giving out eeps—but it doesn't sound as if you do.
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I take your point. Thinking a bit more about my motivations, I think it comes from my idea of what roleplaying is: collaborative story telling. While I'm very happy to create well-functioning social simulations, my players see this as just the stage for their own actions, and often "break" my preparations, they deform and re-route events. And that's what they should be doing.
But when I'm in the position of handing out xps I'm suddenly an interventionist god, a parent giving rewards, Pavlov in his lab. I'm trying to tell them what "the universe" approves of about their actions...
All things being equal - assuming a fairly like-minded group with no outright disruptive people - then I think its best to aim for the maximum collaboration, input from all.
I think the suggestion to have an open question to the group, about who gets the bonus roleplayng point for the session, is a good one. It also helps people have a public discussion about roleplaying, and hence take responsibility for their own performance.