Replenishing Story Points

[Stormcrow]

The Player's Guide (10th Doctor edition) p. 79 says this regarding replenishing Story Points between adventures: "If [the player characters] have less than [their maximum Story Points], the Gamemaster will just replenish what they think is fitting depending upon how well they play."

Let's assume you're the GM and you're not going to simply restore a character's Story Points arbitrarily. How many Story Points is "fitting"? Can we put some numbers on the restoration of Story Points based on achievement of Personal Goals, role-playing, and adventure plots?

[senko]

Probably not.

You could give some general guidelines e.g.

Sit up the back playing on their laptop excpet for fights: 0 storypoints.
No roleplaying but participate: 1 storypoint.
Bad roleplaying: 2 Storypoints.
Normal Roleplaying: 3 Storypoints.
Good Roleplaying: 4 storypoints.

But then you hit the whole subjective issue of what constitutes normal roleplaying vs bad, do you give a new player more leeway than an experienced one. Then you have other issues like do you reward a player for completing a personal goal and not another when that other didn't get a chance or have just gone off the rails, what if its not really reasonable in context for them to pick up on something but their actions make perfect sense in character. Different system but I had one GM who expected me to stop and examine a pool for a magical fish WHILE I was being pursued by a small army of trolls intending to eat me. Apparently in his game they wouldn't have smelt me if I hid in the water and the fish would have given my character information about their missing mentor, of course my character was more focused on the huge numbers of regenerating, flesh eating beings who were bigger, stronger and right at her heals so no stopping to check out the pool.

Not to mention it would probably have knock on effects as the game is designed around the assumption that players basically start an adventure with full points or close too.

[Catsmate]

Also I'd add a couple of things deserving of reward. Most are probably under 'good roleplaying'.

• Making people laugh (without disrupting the game)
• A clever idea that progresses the game 
• Not insisting on using a clever idea that would entirely disrupt the GM's carefully crafted plot
• Providing useful background that's in character
• Doing something that's in character but the player knows is a bad idea ("Let's go visit the villain in his layer without telling anyone") without complaining
• Not using a sonic screwdriver or other magic wand
  

A long term Traveller game that I GM'd had a player that came up with a piece of background that not only advanced the plot but was an excellent idea; they party were under fire on a sparsely settled and needed ammunition and medical supplies. She used her comm to call up General Ordering and Delivery¹ to deliver the needed gear by drone (more than a decade ago) rationalising this as being logical and consistent with the background. GOD Inc and their services became a long term piece of background. That'd be worth a few story points.



¹ She was a Chalker fan