Skarg's Experience Point house rule

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by JLV

Hmm, that's strange...we never passed out XP until everyone was back safe in their staging base (whatever that was). In rare cases, if the camping location was "safe" enough that they didn't have to still be on edge all the time, we might pass them out then, but those were pretty rare cases.

I guess generally we "assumed" that if you were still on alert, you didn't have the leisure to "internalize" the lessons learned during the adventure; so you couldn't get XP until you were someplace where you could think hard and absorb the lessons from your adventures without distraction. So the GM mostly just made notes on what was killed, by whom, and any special circumstances or XP-worthy events, and then we hashed it out in the safe house.

Oddly enough, I don't think it was because D&D did it that way, but because most of us had some military experience and were used to the "hot wash" ("After Action", or "Lessons Learned") meetings that happen after every exercise or combat operation, where you study what happened and how you could do it better next time. For example, after DESERT STORM, there was almost a year's worth of "hot washes" where everyone, Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines tried to capture what went right, what didn't go the way it was planned, and how to make sure we "institutionalized" the lessons learned from the war. It led to a lot of changes in the way we did business the next time around. You don't do that in the middle of the exercise or combat operation, because no one has time to think about it then; you go with what you know and how you trained, and then fix the errors, and praise the successes later.

TFT says that too. At least, ITL page 10 "Increasing Your Attributes" says you tell the players about earned EP right away, but don't get to spend them to increase attributes until after an adventure is over and they are back safe at some sort of home base.