speculation - derived XP chart

[DreamChaser]

I'm glad they are going to static XP values for monsters. It means simple addition for DMs and varying that value is as they desire.

XP as CR has far greater granularity and can mean as greater accuracy like 3e's magic items.

Of course the irony here is that the granularity and accuracy of magical items is going away for 4e.

Exactly what I was going to say. In 2nd edition, everyone had their own XP chart, and only one or two (if I remember correctly) started at 1000.

You don't. Thief and bard started at 1,250 and Cleric started at 1,500. Fighter and druid were 2,000, ranger and paladin were 2,250. Wizard was 2,500. (the irony of course is that the weakest 1st level character needed the most to advance).

The progressions were entirely non-linear and there was no way, short of consulting the books, to know what your next level XP was. Druid started out needing more than clerics but that quickly reversed. Add in the chaos of the exclusive high levels for the druid and it got even worse.

DC

 

[The Souljourner]

They weren't "really easy," they were "average." They were designed to be winnable close to 90% of the time.

pg. 48 DMG 3.5 -
"A monster's Challenge Rating (CR) tells you the level of the party for which that monster is a good challenge."


So, one CR 1 ghoul with 13 hitpoints and 14 AC is supposed to be an EL 1 challenge... an "average fight" for this party of 4 stalwart 1st level adventurers? that's why I call it an easy fight. That CR 1

CR never accounted for multiple fights without resting. It was a snapshot indicator of difficulty.

pg. 49 DMG 3.5 -
"Since a game session probably includes many encounters, you don't want to make every encounter one that taxes the PCs to their limits. They would have to stop the adventure and rest for an extensive period of after every fight, and that slows down the game. An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PCs' level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources - hitpoints, spells, magic item uses, etc."

CR was specifically set up so that an equal level fight would use up 20% of the party's resources. It was specifically set up so that you wouldn't have to rest after the fight.

You're over-thinking it. It wasn't 40/3 fights per level, it was 40/3 creatures of moderate difficulty. If you encountered more or fewer of them at one time, the EL would change. And the XP would go up or down accordingly.

It was 40/3 encounters with CR 1 threats.

If you were playing in a campaign where your DM was throwing "tough, fun fights" at you, but he was still making you plow through 13.33 encounters, you were getting short-changed. There was nothing inherent to the CR/EL system that prevented the DM from throwing bigger fights at you and awarding more XP accordingly.

It's not that we were going through 13.33 encounters, quite the opposite. We fought hard battles and levelled up every 2 sessions. This is why so many people say that levelling is too quick in 3.x - the XP system was designed for easier fights, and everyone's going after the hard fights.

You definitely won't see leveling slow down. Leveling is fun. I believe they'll have a meta-game pace of advancement that they want to support, and work backwards from there.

If the average session is 4 hours and they want players to level up every once every 3 sessions or so (or, perhaps, once every 13 hours and 20 minutes of play) they'll then figure out how many "tough, fun" fights you can fit into a new 4e session of play and structure the XP around that number.

See what I said above about lots of people thinking leveling happens too fast. You don't use your current abilities barely at all and then wham, new abilities..... In second edition, you spent a lot longer at a single level and it was work to get to the next level.

I think what they'll do is something very similar to what you said, except I hope they make it more like 5 or 6 4 hour sessions

I would expect the real-time pace of levelling to be about what it was before, and for the XP system to be restructured around that.

Well, I hope they slow it down some. It was just way too easy to get buttloads of XP in 3.x.

-Nate

 

[The Souljourner]

ok, so back to charts.... this uses the 300XP for a CR 1 fight from 3.5, translated to 4e's "encounter with 5 monsters of equal level", and assuming 1000 XP for level 1, and assuming that a single level 5 guy will be a similar challenge for that group, and therefore should be of equal value.

Level	XP Total	XP Per Equal Level Monster
			(5 of which make an equal level encounter)
1	0		75
2	1,000		125
3	2,667		175
4	5,000		250
5	8,333		375
6	13,333		625
7	21,667		875
8	33,333		1,250
9	50,000		1,875
10	75,000		3,125
11	116,667		4,375
12	175,000		6,250
13	258,333		9,375
14	383,333		15,625
15	591,667		21,875
16	883,333		31,250
17	1,300,000	46,875
18	1,925,000	78,125
19	2,966,667	109,375
20	4,425,000	156,250
21	6,508,333	234,375
22	9,633,333	390,625
23	14,841,667	546,875
24	22,133,333	781,250
25	32,550,000	1,171,875
26	48,175,000	1,953,125
27	74,216,667	2,734,375
28	110,675,000	3,906,250
29	162,758,333	5,859,375
30	240,883,333	9,765,625

Ramifications of this - your bog standard CR 1 guy, say a ghoul, is going to be worth 75 XP now, instead of 300. But he's expected to be there with 4 of his buddies, so when your five member party takes them on, everyone gets 75 xp. That's 1/13.3333 of level 1, same as it was in 3.5.

"But hey wait!" you say "we just fought 5 guys, whose combined XP in 3.5 would have been 1500... why aren't we each getting 300?" Well... that's why I said levelling is going to slow down. No more "two fights and you hit level 2". You actually have to work for it.

It even works pretty well with the 8 CR less being worth no xp. When you're 9th level and need 25,000xp to level, and monsters on your level (who are pretty easy to kill) are worth 1875 xp.... you may not even bother recording the 75 xp you got off that one spare ghoul among all the Mummies.

I really like this chart... the levels are pretty smoothly laid out, monsters a level behind you give about 2/3 of what monsters of this level give... monsters one level above give about 50% more XP (might be a bit high)....

-Nate

 

[Lanefan]

Level	XP Total	XP Per Equal Level Monster
			(5 of which make an equal level encounter)
1	0		75
2	1,000		125
3	2,667		175
4	5,000		250
5	8,333		375
6	13,333		625
7	21,667		875
8	33,333		1,250
9	50,000		1,875
10	75,000		3,125
11	116,667		4,375
12	175,000		6,250
13	258,333		9,375
14	383,333		15,625
15	591,667		21,875
16	883,333		31,250
17	1,300,000	46,875
18	1,925,000	78,125
19	2,966,667	109,375
20	4,425,000	156,250
21	6,508,333	234,375
22	9,633,333	390,625
23	14,841,667	546,875
24	22,133,333	781,250
25	32,550,000	1,171,875
26	48,175,000	1,953,125
27	74,216,667	2,734,375
28	110,675,000	3,906,250
29	162,758,333	5,859,375
30	240,883,333	9,765,625

I think the first thing I'd do to this is round off all those uneven numbers to something close e.g. 2667 becomes 2500, 8333 becomes 8500, etc. 27th-30th would be 75M, 110M, 160M, and 240M.

It even works pretty well with the 8 CR less being worth no xp. When you're 9th level and need 25,000xp to level, and monsters on your level (who are pretty easy to kill) are worth 1875 xp.... you may not even bother recording the 75 xp you got off that one spare ghoul among all the Mummies.

I would. Knowing me, I'd come out of an adventure sometime 50 ExP short of bumping...that unrecorded 75 would have made all the difference!

I really like this chart... the levels are pretty smoothly laid out, monsters a level behind you give about 2/3 of what monsters of this level give... monsters one level above give about 50% more XP (might be a bit high)....

It's not bad...not bad at all. Two really big things in favour of going this route:

1. Everyone gets the same ExP for the same encounter. Nothing is worse than being the high level Pc in the party and watching the low-level types get 2 or 3 or 4 times as many ExP as you for the same battle. Yes, I know the results are the same when advancement points are on a J-curve, but the feel of getting different rewards for the same actions is just wrong.

2. It is easy to scale to slow down (or *horrors!* speed up) level advancement.

Now, different bump points for different classes, anyone?

Lanefan

 

[Plane Sailing]

Heh.

I wonder how adventures will run in the time period between the release of PHB4 and MM4

(maybe it will be like the first printing of the PHB 3.0 which had some sample monsters in the back to play with?)

 

[Oldtimer]

Heh.

I wonder how adventures will run in the time period between the release of PHB4 and MM4

(maybe it will be like the first printing of the PHB 3.0 which had some sample monsters in the back to play with?)

Bah!

Count yourselves lucky. In my days we got the MM a whole year before we got PHB... and then we had to wait another year for DMG.

Gamers of today just haven't got any patience.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Bah!

Count yourselves lucky. In my days we got the MM a whole year before we got PHB... and then we had to wait another year for DMG.

Gamers of today just haven't got any patience.

Believe me, I've been sailing those planes for a long, long, long time (started with OD&D in 1975) so I know something about patience...

 

[JoeGKushner]

Ah, missed this thread.

I was really hoping that they'd just do away with exeprience points and go the way of True 20 and say it's up to the GM when to decide to advance the characters or that characters advance every 13 encounters.

I'm mainly disappointed because it means the game is going to still heavily rely on killing things and taking their stuff for the majority of xp earnings.

Ah well, won't be the first time I've used the Wolrd Beyond Hack and Slash from Shadis 1-4....

 

[Avatar_V]

Ah well, won't be the first time I've used the Wolrd Beyond Hack and Slash from Shadis 1-4....

Apologies for the brief thread hi-jack

Not being a hack/slash fan, this comment intrigues me. Is there anywhere I could find these rules? A quick google search tells me that Shadis is a long out of print magazine, but I'm not sure how I'd go about getting ahold of stuff published in it. Have any of these rules/options been reprinted anywhere? Thanks!

 

[JoeGKushner]

Apologies for the brief thread hi-jack

Not being a hack/slash fan, this comment intrigues me. Is there anywhere I could find these rules? A quick google search tells me that Shadis is a long out of print magazine, but I'm not sure how I'd go about getting ahold of stuff published in it. Have any of these rules/options been reprinted anywhere? Thanks!

I'm pretty sure Kenzer is selling those first issues as the main man owns 'em before the old AEG buyout.