A Land Far Away

The XP awarded for spawn kills on TSM appears very low or in some cases nil for difficult challenges. Several players have commented to me that the risk/reward is a bit lopsided and there have been posts to this effect in the forums. I can offer examples if any are interested. In a permadeath world, the reward for risking death should be higher IMO. I know we don't want to encourage farming for XP, but difficult challenges should bring XP comensurate with the risk. IMO this is something that gets players down on playing OOC. I am a strong advocate of slow, moderated advancement, but advancement of your PC is part of D&D after all. Anyway, I just wanted to give a voice to what I believe many players are thinking. This is by no means a gripe, just a suggestion to boost -- or perhaps review-- the current XP reward system.

The problem is that NWN2 rewards XP based on individual creature challenge, not upon encounter challenge. The rewards are going to be particularly skewed for groups of creatures... single creatures should be fine.

The general PnP formula is, for a single creature, that creatures Challenge Rating (CR) is equal to the Encounter Level (EL). All XP awards in PnP are based on EL, not CR.

For multiple creatures, every time you double the amount of creatures, you add two to the EL, unless the challenge is fractional ... at which case you ADD the CR until you get to EL 1, and then continue adding 2 to EL for each doubling. Got it ?

Example:
Single Orc: CR 1/2 = EL 1/2
Two Orcs: CR 1/2 + 1/2 = EL 1
Four Orcs: EL 1 + 2 = EL 3
Eight Orcs: EL 3 + 2 = EL 5

So a single Level 5 PC should get nothing for one or two orcs, but should get something for killing 4 orcs, and should certainly get something for killing eight orcs. But instead, in this case the PC would get 8 * 0 = 0 XP for killing 8 orcs.

What is needed is a way to reward by encounter, instead of by creature. Doing so is non-trivial from a mechanics point of view. Consider: when to award? How to divide by party / separate parties? How to set the Encounter Level (EL) in the game? What to do if some of the creatures in the encounter aren't killed?

I'm working on a spawn system where it might be possible to address some of these issues, but even if some of the questions above are answered... there will still be open questions. It probably won't be perfect... but it would certainly be better than todays obviously broken rewards system.

Also understand, that if we 'fix' this, some people will almost certainly be advancing in levels quicker than others, because they kill lots of stuff... right now, DM adventures are the biggest way to get XP, and its possible this is intended. Repeatedly farming / hunting will become another (including the case where the hunting is legitimate RP, if you believe like I do that sometimes it can be), if XP rewards are significant... but IMO with good random encounters, farming would be much more difficult.

Well that explains it then. Instead of the scripters spending lots of time to develop a PnP compatible system that rewards based upon encounter/level/party etc, can't we just stick with the vanilla NWN2 per creature reward based on the CR of the creature with a factor for the PC's level built in? If that makes sense? As for the farming issue, I would no be opposed to some type of dim ret on a per creature killed/ # game hours. So for example, you get XP for the first 3 goblins, orc whatever you kill within x game hours and then 0 xp for any number over that within the same time frame. Also, once PCs reach a certain level they should get no XP for kills below a certain CR.

This is my own personal opinion:


I really like the advancement in rate in TSM in general. I also like the rewards / xp you get from encounters there.

I wish that all other servers would straighten up according to TSM standards.

I think it's important that the different servers would be equally rewarding, and that the advancement rate for the casual average player would be roughly the same.

Personally, i don't mind that much to turn the game to more rewarding , or less rewarding(I rather less) as it matters to me that it would be the same standards everywhere.

One think that bother me is to see a player that after 2 months make to 3rd level on one server, and a player that makes it near 6th on another server.