Intermission 1
This week experience points are worked out and distributed to the group of adventurers. Typically experience points for kills are given out at the end of each battle, however, I use intermissions like this one to distribute other experience points not earned in battle, such as distance travelled and, what we call in RolemasterFRP, idea points.
Character role playing is not awarded very often to the players except in special circumstances; e.g. particularly brave (or stupid) actions that advance or allows the advance of play and/or at momentous points in the campaign; saving someone's life after putting your own neck in the noose, so to speak. I believe players are supposed to be role playing anyway and so keep the distribution of experience associated with it as special and something to aspire to achieve, rather than hand them out as a regular thing and thus lose importance. I suppose the alternate argument is that players won't role play if there is nothing in it for them to do so, however, my group of players enjoy role playing in general so it is not a big problem. Sometimes they have grumbled about this and I do make compromises. That is no reason to grumble now Cavell!
So now Cavell, Shashari and Rikku can develop to level 2 while the others will have to wait until they get enough experience to develop. It certainly feels a long time since they started out in this campaign and the three are glad to obtain newfound skills and improve on old ones.
Once all the decisions had been made by the three players (2+ hours), we spent about an hour looking and climbing down a shaft that was about 70 feet deep. This leads onto the next scenario for this campaign.
I am sure the players (and characters) are a little nervous. They have left the surface and know it will be a hard task to get back up in case of emergency, especially if someone has taken serious damage to their person.
Until we meet again ....