KidSnide said:
Experience points are also a major problem here. If PCs primarily get xp by defeating encounters, then churning through encounters efficiently becomes a player goal. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not going to create a game in which the players focus on the adventure itself. Why should the PCs avoid an "unnecessary" fight if defeating monsters is their objective?
If you want the PCs to focus on the adventure, you need to set the xp awards to that effect. Instead of giving xp for defeating monsters, you can give xp for story rewards (or treasure, if that's what the PCs are after). If the PCs know that they get half a level for routing the goblin tribe instead of getting 1/80th of a level per goblin they kill, that totally changes the correct strategy for handling the adventure.
In a way, that's the genius of the old 1e xp model. Putting aside the strange logic of getting xp for finding gp, it aligned the player incentives with the character incentives -- both should prefer to avoid combat and get more loot! If you want a campaign about searching for loot, make loot the xp rewards. If you want a campaign about slaughtering monsters and defeating encounters, use the 3e/4e system. But if you want a campaign about achieving story goals (or more sandbox style achievements), then that's where the rewards needs to be.
I think this is a big crux of it. In many ways, those who have abandoned rigorous XP systems and just level up "when they have accomplished something significant"/at DM whim are ahead of the game in this respect: they are rewarding advancement, not just monster-bashing.
Rather than "XP for encounters," there needs to be "XP for dungeons." Rather than 10 or 12 or 13 encounters to a level, there's 2 or 3 "dungeons"/adventures to a level. You can get the XP by beating up the monsters, but you can also get the XP by avoiding the monsters and doing other things.
In a way, this sets up an instant mechanism for doing two related things. Now, encounters can be more deadly, because the PC's are expected to have ways of avoiding them (stealth or diplomacy). More deadly encounters also provides an incentive to avoid them.
Not that all encounters should be crazy deadly, but this can help bring back the old kinds of "gotcha" monsters more as dungeon features than as encounters. You're not expected to
fight the Rust Monster or the Rot Grub, you're expected to treat them like a pit of acid or a shaft into the darkness. You deal with them, not necessarily kill them.
This, in turn, leads less to "monster manuals" as we know them, because individual monsters are rather pointless, and to more full-fledged adventures, where the monsters and creatures are intrinsic to the challenge being faced. The Rust Monster is more like a trap or an NPC, less like a combat challenge, more of a challenge related to the dungeon itself.
Imagine that when you buy the Core Rulebooks, you buy a player's book, a DM's book, and a
book full of adventures, rather than a book full of monsters. And this makes a database like the DDI exceptionally useful as well, since you can remove all the individual bits from the adventures and re-contextualize them more easily with an electronic program than you could with raw paper.
In many ways, I think this model helps me understand 1e and earlier editions better. I started with 2e, so I had XP for monsters from the get-go. 3e and 4e refined this, but maybe in doing so, they lost the
dungeons aspect of the game, the adventures that make heroic fantasy so compelling. Which absolutely include big, epic combats, but aren't necessarily
about combat.
I think if the game is going to be dragged back there, there are absolutely some lessons we want to keep, but I also think there's some exciting new ways of doing things that could be present there.
