[Grim Tales]Ultimate XP variant!

The premise is that characters have to earn 1000 xp to go up a level. I.e. the xp/level chart increment is 1000.

Flat xp costs (to make magic items or cast spells with an xp component) are divided by the character level. A 15th level wizard who casts limited wish will only pay 20 xp (300/15). But so are flat xp awards. That wizard will only get 200 xp from a 3000 xp story award.

Monster encounters: Work out the power of an encounter (sum of the square of the CRs). Divide by the power of the party (sum of hte square of their CRs). Times by 300. That's the xp award per person. Everyone levels together (a feature of the GT system) and at the same rate as with the standard system of awarding xp.

To make it super-simple, I'd add a "0th level" for characters with between 0 and 999 xp. Just take the effects of a negative level (-1 spell, -1 to all d20 rolls, but not the killing you and having you rise as a wight) and apply it to a 1st level character. Or just start characters off with 1000 xp. Then their level is just their xp total divided by 1000.

Either way, this is just book-keeping. But it has a much cleaner, more streamlined feel, imho, than the existing systems.

You like?

A few simple examples.

Example 1:
A party of 4 10th level characters (assume CR 10 each; I'm not worried about elite scores) encounters a CR 10 monster. They defeat it. 13.333 such encounters should put them to the next level; a moderate encounter such as this is designed to provide 7.5% the necessary experience to level up. Each character gets 750 xp; exactly 7.5% the experience needed to get from 45000 xp to 55000 xp.

In my proposed variant, the calculations are as follows:

Power of the Encounter = 10² = 100
Power of the Party = 10² + 10² + 10²+ 10² = 400

Divide 100/400 = 0.25

Multiply by 300. 300 x 0.25 = 75. That's what each character gets.

75 is 7.5% of 1000 xp, the amount it takes any character to level up.

Example 2.

A 20th level ranger with various templates (CR 25) accompanied by 4 1st level halflings (CR 1 each) fights a group of 9 homebrew wraiths (8 of CR 8, one CR 12). The calculations are as follows:

Power of the Encounter: 8² * 8 + 12² = 656
Power of the Party: 25² + 1² * 4 = 629

(656/629) * 300 = 312 xp.

Note that the encounter is more powerful than the party, and so the party will be lucky to survive. They earn 31.2% of the xp it will take them to level up. The halflings don't level up any faster than the ranger does.

Hmmm. This thread sank like a stone the first time around. I seem to recall something else GT related was attracting attention; maybe people just missed it. Let's see if there is any interest now.

Cheiromancer said:

The premise is that characters have to earn 1000 xp to go up a level. I.e. the xp/level chart increment is 1000.

You like?

Click to expand...

I like. I'd thought a long time ago about using fixed xp per level but never got around to doing the maths, the "Sum of CR squared" method of calculating challenge makes it much neater.

I'd certainly consider doing this for my next D&D campaign except for one thing - I like lower level PCs to catch up, rather than all level at the same rate. In your last example survival for the ranger was a doddle compared to survival for the hobbits, and i'd want the rewards to reflect that.

Cheers

Those story based awards would probably suit you then. If the goal of a particular adventure is to reach a mountain stronghold of the elves, then perhaps a 1000 xp award can be granted. Divided by the level of each character that means that the 1st level halflings each get 1000 xp, while the 20th level ranger only gets 50 xp.

Okay ChiRo.... I would like to play along, but I need to ask you a few questions.

When you talk about CR, you are referring to the 'modified' CR, correct. (AKA the UK system, the one that is about 1.5 of the WotC CR?)

You state that the 'power' of the encounter is CR^2, is that part of your proposal, or are you assuming that is a known, true statement?

Do you know what the impact to XP awards and advancement wouild be if switching to this system?

(from a different, older, thread)
Do you know how Anubis goes from
CR*2 = EL+4 = XP*4
to
CR*4 = EL+8 = XP*16


Thanks

Yep. I mean UK's numbers. About 1.5 times WotC CR. A good place to get caught up in the discussion is probably around post 680 or 682 or so in this thread.

UK's formulas are the same as WotC's for fairly low levels and almost equal encounters, but diverges at higher levels. A +2 difference in CR means a lot more when you are 2nd level than when you are 22nd level. The EL system UK uses is logarhythmic; doubling the challenge difficulty increases the EL by +2. The experience award turns out to be related to the square of the CR.

FWIW I've been using the CRsquared method of estimating power and hence threat of encounters through levels 8-13 and it has been extraordinarily good at predicting the approximate threat level.

Cheers

Cheiro, would you prefer this discussed in this thread, or the other one? Which would you prefer?

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=2662666#post2662666