HEEGZ wrote: In short, a purely RP character will not, and should not, level up at the same rate as those PCs that choose the hard life of adventure over the safe life of a farmer, smith, etc.
I agree with you on that. Tradesmen should not get the same rewards as "adventurers".
But there are plenty of valid adventurer concepts that are not very good at killing monsters. Sweeping them under the carpet alongside butchers, bakers and candlestickmakers is a disingenius argument.
You can play an expert spy or conman who risks life and limb going deep under cover, where discovery means death, taking risk every bit as much as a fighter standing up to a troll. You could do that in opposition to other PCs, where discovery will result in your CVC death even without a DM present, (and I know that several players have done just that) - and despite your risks, your RP, your constant struggle, your hard work you will get less reward than the guy that takes his longbow and, standing safely atop a cliff, shoots a bunch of goblins.
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As for the "Risks vs rewards" thing, frankly, its not that valid an argument. Except vs magic using mobs, the AI simply is not bright enough to present a major risk of death to any combat orientated PC that is played in an intelligent manner (at least from L3 upwards). At the very least, combat XP for mobs should be reduced to reflect the fact that these creatures are not fighting at anything like their full potential.
After all, if we are taking the risk factor into acount then my aforementioned guy shooting goblins on the other side of impassable terrain, at no appreciable risk to himself, wouldn't be getting the XP for killing them.
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White Warlock wrote: What we don't need, are insults and insinuations of favoritism.
Agreed. Note that the insults in this debate are primarily stemming from folk on your side of the argument. Not from you, but from others.
As for favouritism - ALFA, as it stands, does favour the characters that are capable of surviving extreme violence. That's not a wild accusation of favouritism, thats a simple statement of fact which really cannot be disputed.
(Ironically, those that come closest to disputing this fact are the ones that are saying they hardly get any XP from combat - in which case they should have no problem with seeing that practically nothing turned into actually nothing.)
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And let me clarify something. I am not trying to nerf fighters. I would like to see the slaughter XP that they lose by not getting 10 XP a head for (eg) randomly slaughtering some bandits replaced.
Replaced partly by DM reward using the automatic XP logger that some servers already have in place, so that if they are killing things because it is IC for them to do so, they get rewarded for that.
And partly by there being actual statics that they can participate in that require their combat skills. Instead of going out and randomly slaughtering some bandits, they go and do it because they are asked to by the militia, or the merchants guild, and they get XP for completion of the task.
But by the same token there would be other statics available that the combat folk would most likely lack the skills for (or not be offered). These might even involve the same monsters - a rogue might be tasked to sneak in and steal something, a social based character might be required to approach the bandits to complete a hostage negotiation.
