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Apr 24, 2012 -- 3:37AM, imaginaryfriend wrote:

I am sure the admins will thank you for pointing out the errors in the XP rewards of the older BI's. They were obviously too high, but I think it would be unfair to ask the players of Swarm of Chaos or Paladin's Plague to deduct XP from their current total. Too much time has passed.

Additionally the concept of "being cheated out of XP" is just weird to me.

In From Dawn till Dusk, the xp spent at AL 20 (not counting the hazards which were present, nor Glory or Special Missions) was 135600. With 5 PCs, each PC should earn 27120 xp from defeating the enemies alone, but the Maximum Possible XP is listed as 19000. Now, I'm sure someone will mention that defeating the enemies isn't necessary, however in 4e, you don't get XP for defeating enemies, you get it for successfully completing the encounter and the difficulty value of the encounter is what determines how much xp you can "spend" to create the encounter.

In the specific case of Cities of Destinies, XP is additionally based on the number of total and partial successes, as well as the difficulty, of the encounters. This apparently caps out, so aside from intangible benefits in the last encounter, there is no benefit for a fast table to even attempt additional encounters beyond a certain point.

While I understand that the RPGA has "moved away from that" or whatever office lingo you want to use, and is using a base+quest objective reward system, but when you are regularly (a majority of year 3 mods included) rewarding less than 80% of the earned XP, then there is a serious flaw in the new system, and PCs are being cheated out of XP in the name of author's prerogative. 8120+quests is an excessive amount.

And yes, I'll use the words "earned" and "cheated" because D&D is both a rewards based game and a math based game. There is definitely an entitlement to the XP value of successful encounters. It's not being said, but what's happening is "You kill an Orc, but that wasn't a complete experience of dealing with an Orc in combat, I'd call it less than 80%" and that's just absurd.

Apr 28, 2012 -- 10:18PM, Backmask wrote:

And yes, I'll use the words "earned" and "cheated" because D&D is both a rewards based game and a math based game. There is definitely an entitlement to the XP value of successful encounters.

That's certainly a valid way to play D&D, but it's a bit myopic to consider it the one true way to play D&D.

I haven't played a campaign which assigned XP mechanically like that for over a decade, with "You gain a level after the DM thinks you've completed enough encounters" fairly solidly being the norm for me.

At the point where the DMG explicitly discusses that method, before launching into a discussion about why it's best to just give XP to everyone in the party whether or not the player even showed up (DMG, p. 121-122), I think we've clearly moved beyond the idea of "I earned 500 xp for killing that orc; if you don't give me the full 500 xp, you're cheating."

I'll confess to being especially perplexed at this point of view in the context of a living campaign, where extra XP just means you get to play fewer adventures before you level out.  If I could play a BI and receive all other rewards as normal but only half XP, I'd take that option in a heartbeat.