Character Point Awards in GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy RPG

There are a lot of different ways to award character points.

The traditional way in GURPS was roleplaying-based: you get some amount per session based on the GM's desired rate of PC advancement, more if you roleplay well, fewer if you don't.  That encourages good roleplaying, but at the cost of the GM having to judge how well each player roleplayed, and then possibly annoying the players who got fewer points.

The GURPS Dungeon Fantasy rules instead give a system for achievement-based character points, similar to old versions of D&D and some video games.  Each PC gets this many for winning a fight based on the difficulty level, extras for finding a secret bonus area, etc.  It's more objective, which is nice.  But it's also telling the PCs what they should be doing to advance, which feels a bit railroady.

Other games have used other criteria.  Sometimes objective ones, like treasure recovered.  Others are subjective, for achieving milestones in the plot.

DF Whiterock is a zero-to-hero campaign, with lower than normal starting points for Dungeon Fantasy, so the goal is to give out a higher-than-average number of points per session, so the PCs eventually reach the heroic power level they'll need to defeat the difficult challenges at the bottom of the dungeon.  But not too many, or they'll get above the power level of the part of the dungeon they're in, and possibly get bored.

I pulled a number out of the air: 5.  In a normal four-hour session, each PC whose player showed up and participated for the entire session usually gets an average of 5 points.  If the player only made part of the session, they get fewer points.  (Note that points go with the player, not the PC.  One of my meta-game goals is to have players running their own characters.  So if someone else runs your character for you, your character doesn't get points for that.)

The other factor is bonus points for significant accomplishments.  So far, there have been 3 sessions where each PC earned 3 bonus points: the one where they rescued Lyssa and the other prisoners from the White Talon orc slavers, the one where they killed Kaernga (leader of the White Talon orcs), and the one where they killed Drugila (leader of the White Roc orcs).  By design, it's not very clear to the players what they have to do to earn such a bonus, or how many such opportunities are available.

We're 23 sessions in, so the most experienced PC (Seépravir) has earned 5 * 23 + 3 * 3 = 124 points.  Garreth and Zaber have missed just a couple of sessions each so are just a bit behind, and then Polly (a newer PC) is a bit behind them, and Elias (an even newer PC) is a bit behind Polly.  But not that far behind, because they were given more points to start, based on another formula that hasn't been made clear to the players, possibly because the GM wants to preserve some mystery, possibly because the GM is making it up on the fly.

I'm going participation points plus the occasional party-wide bonus due to a combination of trying to encourage team-centric behavior, and because it's easy for the GM.  This campaign is definitely a team game, with the players sharing their character sheets with each other rather than hiding things, so uneven point rewards would be obvious.  Any uneven point rewards given out for competitive reasons (like who killed the most monsters or found the most treasure) would encourage competitive behavior.  But it's a cooperative game, and we mostly have cooperative players, and I think that even rewards encourage that.  But we also need participation, and knowing you have to show up to earn advancement encourages showing up whenever possible.

The other thing I want to touch on is even versus uneven rewards.  D&D features character levels and "leveling up," where the PC stays at the same power level for a while then makes a sizable jump up in power.  And a lot of video games have copied this.  But, in my opinion, levels are inflexible and kind of cheesy, a remnant of early-1970s role-playing technology.  Once we had point-based game systems in the 1980s, we didn't need them anymore.  Any video game with a "level up" button makes me cringe a little: it's a video game, and the computer can easily track everything, so there's no need for such big discrete hops.  I'd rather trickle out a few points per game session and let the PCs constantly make small improvements, than withhold points for several sessions then give out a big pile of points.  The players in DF Whiterock are all involved enough to be planning ahead their future advancement anyway, so I think this has worked out pretty well.