Quote from: RandallS;340091While it may not be the root of the problem, it is part of the problem.

Originally, 80-90% of a PC's XP came from non-combat activities (getting treasure). This meant the best way to gain experience was to get treasure with as little risk to your party as possible. Combats were risky an tended to inhibit your ability to go on and get more treasure so you either tried to get treasure without fighting or at least by setting things up so your side had as much advantage as possible before fighting. Pressing on for more treasure while wounded did not seem illogical as you could get treasure and its XP without a fight if you put your mind to it.

When the rules changed to where fighting monsters was the way characters earned most of their experience, combat ceased to be optional as fighting things was the best way to get XP. This changed the tone of the game a lot, IMHO.  If combat is the main way to get XP, avoiding it is silly -- and pressing on while wounded isn't very productive as being wounded makes it much harder to get more XP and remain alive to enjoy it.

Think it would be fun to play 3e or pathfinder with the old fashion XP rules?

Tunnels & Trolls does the BEST job with this problem (since the 70s).

Since the Wizard regens 1 Magic Point every 10 minutes, you can always barricade a room and guard the door while the wizard kicks back and repowers.   Then he drops a couple of heal spells and down to the next dungeon level we go!

Quote from: Windjammer;339754I'm currently reading Revenge of the Giants, and it's super nasty from that point of view. As written, it (at times) doesn't grant the PCs an extended rest for 3 encounters, something I consider really brutal.

I recently played 4e with a GM who hated the "15 minute day" from 3e so much that his 4e campaign has a rule that 4 encounters will find your ass whenever you wake up until you go to sleep.

Its even worked into the narrative as the heroes are cursed and hunted by enemies as they try to complete their quest against these enemies.

Quote from: Cranewings;340121Think it would be fun to play 3e or pathfinder with the old fashion XP rules?

I'd have a problem with it. It would mean that only rich people could have any degree of skill. I'm not even thrilled about the wealth guidelines for 3e, but the old rules would demand that characters become rich in order to level up. I don't like that. I like the idea that some high-level characters can be in dire financial straits, and not because they lost 100,000 gp.

Being high-level should not always mean you're automatically rich or were previously rich. I mean, yeah...I love treasure, but I prefer the rules allowing the option of either poverty or riches, without having to do crazy mental gymnastics to make it work in the game.

In most rules and campaigns, you had to give up your treasure to turn it into xp. So high-level characters weren't rich, they'd just had a lot of money pass through their hands

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;340172In most rules and campaigns, you had to give up your treasure to turn it into xp. So high-level characters weren't rich, they'd just had a lot of money pass through their hands

Most of the D&D campaigns I encountered, that was only true for magic items. Gaining cash (but only cash) got you XP, per the letter of the rules.

Quote from: Cranewings;340121Think it would be fun to play 3e or pathfinder with the old fashion XP rules?

I don't see why not. You would have top rethink some of the campaign design if your campaign is designed around the wealth "limits" described in the 3.x rules, however.  I always thought they were a dumb idea to begin with, but given how the 3.x rules seem to assume that characters will have certain types of magic items at certain levels, I can understand why the designers thought them a good idea.

(I probably would still not enjoy such a campaign as the combats that do happen would still be too tactical and far too time-consuming for me, but my chance of playing for more than one session before I got bored from those long combats would be much higher. LOL.)

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;340172In most rules and campaigns, you had to give up your treasure to turn it into xp. So high-level characters weren't rich, they'd just had a lot of money pass through their hands

I still have an issue with that, because you absolutely had to have been rich at some point. That should not be a necessity to achieve real skill. I understand the reasoning behind it, and it can sometimes be fun, but I'd prefer if it wasn't the default rule in AD&D and whatnot. :cool:

I don't think you can say "I was rich at some point" because you had treasure you gave up within a day for xp and magical stuff. It's like saying that the restaurant owner "earned $20,000" because that's what was in the cash register on Saturday night... before he paid $5,000 in wages, $5,000 in food costs, $3,000 in utilities, set aside $2,000 for rent, and...

When you say "rich", generally you mean that the person has a lot of disposable income. In old school D&D - or Traveller, for that matter - adventurers didn't, it was all spent before it was earned.

The money for xp thing doesn't work for me for 3 reasons.

i) Worlds with no or very little money can not exisit. So A jungly tarzan type game where there is wealth and you clear ancient temples and the like but don't then find a sack of treasure don't work (tarzan still 1st level then?)

ii) I hate the training mechanic. The idea that a 9th level fighter can wander into a town and find a guy to train them is a stretch but it you then add that they have to pay 20,000gp which is enough to buy the whole tow.. the whole economy just makes no sense.

iii) You have to jiggle the value of the xp based on the monsters. If I recall you don't dso this in AD&D but you do adjust for relative levels of the group (sorry its been a while since i used this xp model .... like 28 years). Anyway if you follwo the logic of the effect then killing a goblin and finding 20,000gp teaches you more than killing 40 goblins and finding 200pg ...why?

In AD&D1e, the xp were the same for the monster regardless of relative levels.

The xp from the treasure associated with the monster varied according to relative strengths as judged by the GM, however. So you'd get less xp for 20,000GP from a goblin than 20,000GP from a dragon. It says,

   "For example, if a 10th level magic-user takes 1,000 g.p. from 10 kobolds, the relative strengths are about 20 to 1 in favor of the magic-user."

Thus, the magic-user would get only 1,000/20 = 50xp from that treasure.

It goes on to say that yes, xp from treasure makes no sense, and that more realistically mages would study, fighters would tilt at lists, and so on - but that would be boring.

It's traditionally rationalised as blowing through money after an adventure, Conan-style. Part of experience is fame for generosity and wasteful spending

Anyway, smaller monsters would tend to have less treasure - why would a single goblin have 20,000GP? But even if they did, what it came down to was that to go up a level, a character had to have either one or two very challenging encounters, or lots and lots of easy ones. That 10th level magic-user's not racing up levels knocking over 10 kobolds at once.

There was a mechanic encouraging roleplaying. The GM would rate each player on their roleplaying, the emphasis in the text was on class - the fighters should fight, the thieves should look for traps, etc. That is, everyone should contribute their character's particular skills to the benefit of the group. You got a rating of 1-4, and that was how many weeks it took you to go up a level.

Of course you had to pay for each week (1,500GP per current level), so that poor roleplayers, it'd cost their characters four times as much to go up a level as excellent roleplayers' characters.

Like hit points, it sounds really stupid, but it tends to work alright in play.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;340412You got a rating of 1-4, and that was how many weeks it took you to go up a level.

Of course you had to pay for each week (1,500GP per current level), so that poor roleplayers, it'd cost their characters four times as much to go up a level as excellent roleplayers' characters.

Like hit points, it sounds really stupid, but it tends to work alright in play.

Well that exact quantity was totally stupid at low levels – even a perfectly roleplayed thief would have to sit around on his hands until more gold came his way so that he could buy his second level. And a character that didn't make the grade was really screwed plus stuck with maybe four hit points until he could scrounge up 3000 gold pieces or whatever.

The general idea has merit, and works better at level 5 or 6+ when PCs have magic items to sell and a reason to get rid of them, but the specifics were a mess, so IME that was one of the most-skipped parts of the DMG, running about even with the weaponless combat rules.

Quote from: Imp;340415Well that exact quantity was totally stupid at low levels – even a perfectly roleplayed thief would have to sit around on his hands until more gold came his way so that he could buy his second level. And a character that didn't make the grade was really screwed plus stuck with maybe four hit points until he could scrounge up 3000 gold pieces or whatever.

The general idea has merit, and works better at level 5 or 6+ when PCs have magic items to sell and a reason to get rid of them, but the specifics were a mess, so IME that was one of the most-skipped parts of the DMG, running about even with the weaponless combat rules.

It doesn't have any merit. It is at best a crude mechanic for awarding roleplaying but basically it's just a money sink to make sure that your 4th level character doesn't just retire, buy a house and a dozen concubines.

I favour xp for achieving objectives. I used to track xp precisely (probably something I saw in an old dragon magazine or something) each spell cast each trap bested, each foe defeated... a pain to track. So now its all done on objectives. Rescuing the pincess is worth 2000 xp shared out between the PCs that do it. Killing the dragon maybe 2000 more. In my Amber games I even let PCs set their own objectives (which have to include overcoming risk).

Generally, the gp rewards in D&D were such that the characters continued to spend out most of their fortune until mid-expert levels; and then they got strongholds, which cost them money again, so it was only really at about Companion levels that they really started to be "rich" in the "vast treasury" sense.

Which to me makes good sense.  I don't buy the idea of a dirt-poor 30th level Wizard.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Imp;340415Well that exact quantity was totally stupid at low levels – even a perfectly roleplayed thief would have to sit around on his hands until more gold came his way so that he could buy his second level.

You must have had stingy GMs. When I most recently ran an AD&D1e game, the 1st level (bar one standoffish 2nd level MU) PCs slew a basilisk, and its randomly-rolled treasure was easily 1,500GP per PC.

I am not, however, convinced that this was actually a problem for you, either. Whenever gamers sit down and chat about games, all sorts of questions come up. Some come from playing the rules, and some come from reading the rules. Some stuff looks brilliant on paper but is a mess in play, and vice versa.

Paying for training and the training taking longer for characters with poor players, in combination with randomly-rolled treasure, this worked alright. And xp for treasure relative to the challenge of the encounter, so that you could get xp for being smart not just fighting, this worked alright, too. Not brilliantly, but it worked.

The real problem was simply that poorly-roleplayed characters took longer to level up than well-roleplayed ones, and since, Gygax told us, a meaningful campaign can not be had if detailed time records are not kept, the one-week trained PCs might wander off on another adventure while the four-week trained PCs are still training... and be back ready for their next level by the time the poorly-played character has even finished last level's training! And so they get left behind in every sense of the phrase.

Something which, like the advice about the "blue bolt from the heavens" or penalising (appropriately) the Charisma of the characters of annoying players, makes sense in the context in which it was written: Gygax's basement games with a dozen or so players... you'd be looking for excuses to chuck some of them out and leave them out of the action, too.

When you have just 3-5, not so great. Who wants to sit and watch the rest of the group have an adventure while you're training?

As Kyle pointed out, the 'GP = exp' rule was a rule that sounds kind of dumb when you hear it, but did ok when played.

It was also put into place to move the levelling along.

I agree with JibbaJibba that I always hated it, and even when I played D&D, I never used it.  but when I dissected other games, I understood why it it was there.  Gygax layered his rule creation based on what he wanted to get out of it at the time.  Splitting exp up for adventures was put into place to keep the group at about the same power base no matter the different player abilities at a a table.  The training per week rule was put into action to further allow the GM the ability to determine who was ready to play and to penalize bad play.