Cobwebbed Dragon wrote:
Damian May wrote:
I tend to favour only having players conduct one or two expeditions per calendar year but I am aware that others favour essentially travelling from adventure to adventure.
Obviously if there is something mysterious happening at their home they may jave more but I was wondering how othets did things?
Pendragon had it such that you could only go on one adventure per year, which put a great deal of pressure on the characters - they would be competing with their own ageing bodies to become knights of great renown before they deteriorated to the point that they could no longer go questing. It's a really interesting dynamic that doesn't exist in any other rules, as far as I know. In WFRP or D&D, when you might go on an adventure a week or month, or whatever, you end up with advanced characters that are only 25 years old (or less!).
So I'm with you - fewer opportunities to earn experience points per year mean that players will really need to commit to the adventures on which they do go to reach the heights they see their characters achieving. An adventure every few months suits the pace at which I run my games, and I'm relatively stingy with XP, too - plus players have to decide whether to save their XP to go up in rank, or whether to spend them on extra-professional training (skills, etc.). Again, it creates an interesting pressure on the players.
The One Ring is quite similar but not as rigidly enforced as Pendragon.
A lot of my players do seem to enjoy their "downtime", whether its administrating lands for their families, transcribing illuminated holy books, foresting or caring for relatives.....or even the occasional bit of, well paid for, research in the restricted sections of a monastery library.