Awarding Experience Points in VTM

I've searched everywhere to see if this question was already addressed somewhere but so far haven't seen it. Does anyone know how to award experience points in the VTM ruleset? I see all of the guides on how to do it in D&D and the encounters and the character sheets in there obviously show XP. Experience points are available on the vampire character sheets but there isn't a space to assign experience points to encounters nor can I manually change that in the character sheets.

On the individual character sheets I see where I can add what experience points were spent on and the mouse changes to a hand when I hover over the experience points but not sure how it is supposed to be used because it doesn't let me type or do anything to actually track points.

What would you expect it to do else than tracking gained/spent and on what it was spent?

I'm not sure how to even add them to the character sheet to track how many points someone has before they spend them. I can't seem to change the number of points at all if I wanted to assign points to players as we went.

You can use the mouse wheel up/down or input the number directly by hovering on the case.

oh, ok simple enough. Thanks!

You can keep track of experience the player has gotten (obtained) and currently has unspent on the Inventory tab. Make sure you or the player enters in what they have spent the experience on to keep track of where the experience goes and make sure they or you have removed the experience used from the current experience.

I give 1 experience for each game the player attends. 1 experience for really good roleplay. Make them learn a skill make effort to get a new Discipline level, or at least work up til they have the experience to buy the dot they want. Use everything the players want to do in order to make more interest in the game. Like have them hunting for a Kindred who has that discipline they want. Work out to increase strength. Practice Locksmithing to get a specialty in Larceny.

Playing WoD, VtM, WtA, MtA, and HtR since VtM 1st Edition (1991). Running the games since 1992. Has shown me that if you give too much Experience too fast, the players become overly powerful with no effort. Then the game becomes hard to make interesting as you have to max out everything to give the players a challenge. I hope this helps not only on how to give experience and log it, plus ideas on how players can make personal actions in character to explain their increase for stats.

A lot of good advice there RavenSaint.

What I've always struggled with is, as you say, how to deal with powercreep. And this is my solution for 5th edition:

I have a story note, that I share with my players. Because I have certain links and it's just an easy reference for them to find the most important stuff about the city they are in. At the very top of that I write down the "Chronicle Experience". That is how much experience the characters have available to them.
There is a twist to it though. This experience is also available to all the NPC's! In fact I give my NPC's 1 exp per year of Undeath, to give them a leg up on characteres. So characters can de facto never have more experience than NPC's. But... I wrote "available". That doesn't mean that I use all the experience available to an NPC. As I see it, quite a few kindred might quickly find decent feeding grounds and sort of steady life. Or they may not be that ambitious. Why would they be as strong as kindred that does have ambitions and works hard to make it? They wouldn't... right?
All it means is that I can upgrade NPC's within a framework that doesn't get out of control. Everything seems more balanced to me, after I've started using this method and my players seem to quite like it. My NPC's don't become gods all of a sudden, but are still challenging if need be.

I have played Vampire since 1993 (I think), and experience has never been easy to balance. What works for me may not work for you. But best advice: Let them work for it. But also let them feel good about their choices, by giving them opportunities to use the things they work hard to get.

I hope that helps.


Vires Animi