- it's the DM chicken, spawned out of the ether, it was not thrown or anything
DM chicken is ridiculous and arbitrary punishment. Bad practice.
- My players earn maybe 250-350 ExP every game, a bad pun takes maybe 5, at the VERY max 20.
Don’t remove or lower character stats (whether it be gold, XP, skill points or whatever) for out of character actions. Imagine you were playing in a game of mine, having fun with the others. Now imagine every time you made a joke, I just said “5 gold pieces melt to nothing”, “you feel weaker...” or “you begin to cough...you seem to have come down with a disease. Lower your max HP by 1d6 until you find a cleric or I judge that you’ve been good”.
Arbitrary punishment for OOC is just wrong. Sure, there’s sometimes the underlying current of ‘players v DM’ in some games people run, but it needs to be tempered with ‘not being a dick’, which is certainly what the DM Chicken and removing XP for jokes amounts to.
“Dave, your shirt is blue. I hate blue. Remove 20xp from your character for coming in a blue shirt.”