What is the essence of D&D

[Garthanos]

You see if in an adventure you to rob a trinket ... say you were counting coup on some adversary (political perhaps) you might get zero experience points in 1e or Oe for a very interesting adventure.

And all because Gygax thought Conan/Grey Mouser and such were the only way to play.

 

[Garthanos]

You are creating an adventure/scenario for how teleportation works in your world.

The default teleport in 4e has material components for it (having things in the environment interact with that is not some huge jump its kind of a reason to have an Arcana skill) ... I am sort of against the Residuum thing because it removes an element of strategic choice and makes it more likely the heros will just have the ingredients they need a solution to that is to give discounts on ritual specific components... its much cheaper to acquire than residuum and the residuum you get out of a disenchant is relatively less than the input. Plus making the components gatherable is also cheaper in general. They are subtle house rules that accomplish my ends but less extreme than anything I ever considered in AD&D

 

[Monayuris]

So why double up... on gold its already in story a valuable resource which you can gain followers or many other things. Why make it experience when it means not getting experience sometimes when the character really did accomplish a lot? Like that skill challenge which allowed them to save their ally I gave. In 1e if they figured out how to get him back the only experience they would get is???? In 4e they would be getting experience for overcoming the challenge (OK they did get a live ally if they succeed)

Because treasure is an objective value that can be used as a gauge for the value of the challenge faced. Treasure in classic D&D is allocated based on the threat that is expected to be faced. The deeper levels of the dungeon feature greater threats and greater rewards. The lair of a dragon will contain greater treasure the a hole with some goblins in it.

This allows players to tweak the risk/reward dial by deciding how much risk to face. Do they delve deeper and face more risk at the possibility of greater reward. Do they stay in the lower levels and play it safe, but recover paltry trinkets.

Treasure for XP is tangible and objective. If I find 2000 gold that is 2000 xp. It removes a lot of the issues with milestone style leveling where you have to guess how much saving the princess is worth. It also makes it really easy to figure out things like wealth by level... if my players encounter a 4th level baroness in her demanse, I can pretty easily figure out how what resources she has (men-at-arms, servants, arcanists, etc). The sum value of her domain is roughly equal to how much XP it takes to get to 4th level.

This makes it a lot easier to world-build on the fly if this comes up in the middle of the game.

I run adventure games. The focus of my D&D games are on exploration of the unknown places in the world.

There is a world and there are places to be explored and adventure to be had. In the example you provided... I would consider that a failed expedition. The party attempted to delve somewhere but got laid up by some threat and had to find a way to escape. They failed to recover treasure, so they wouldn't get xp. It happens... sometimes you go in and end up with nothing. It's part of the game.

It sounds like this is probably not your style and that is fine. I'm not expecting you to agree with me. This approach is probably not appropriate for a political intrigue game or such. I wouldn't use XP for gold if I were to run such a game.

 

[Hussar]

Heh, I am soooo glad that back in the day, the people I played with were never so pedantic as to read that paragraph about treasure "recovered" and presume that meant that reward treasure wasn't part of xp.

We certainly never read it that way. You did the deed, you got rewarded for it, you got xp for that reward because, well, you "recovered" the treasure by doing the deed.

 

[Garthanos]

It sounds like this is probably not your style and that is fine. I'm not expecting you to agree with me. This approach is probably not appropriate for a political intrigue game or such. I wouldn't use XP for gold if I were to run such a game.

Story rewards alah 2e was abstraction entirely arbitrary how much you get for saving that princess or bar made experience points garnered around skill challenged are based on actual difficulties faced.

The 4e way would work fine for the political intrigue game or the not political one... either way.

For me if they fail one thing and it leads them to overcome a different challenge they can get experience for that too their characters were learning and making choices new ones because a twist of story takes them some place else.

Their character counting coup was not only accomplishing a political goal but getting experience based on the difficulty of the process.

 

[Monayuris]

Heh, I am soooo glad that back in the day, the people I played with were never so pedantic as to read that paragraph about treasure "recovered" and presume that meant that reward treasure wasn't part of xp.

We certainly never read it that way. You did the deed, you got rewarded for it, you got xp for that reward because, well, you "recovered" the treasure by doing the deed.

For my games, experience is supposed to be a measure of the challenges faced by the party.

When you look at treasure types, the more powerful monsters typically have more valuable treasure types. Likewise, the dungeon stocking rules place stronger monsters on lower levels and more treasure as a result.

If you have two scenarios where the challenge is the same, then the reward money does not reflect the challenge faced. So I wouldn't count that as experience.

 

[Garthanos]

Treasure in classic D&D is allocated based on the threat that is expected to be faced.

I call that adding in a middle man which may not even be an accurate one as we know them zombies do not have much gold nor does the village but stopping the hoard is both a challenge and worthwhile. (and really should result in significant experience)

Nope we arent going to agree

 

[Monayuris]

Story rewards alah 2e was abstraction entirely arbitrary how much you get for saving that princess or bar made experience points garnered around skill challenged are based on actual difficulties faced.

The 4e way would work fine for the political intrigue game or the not political one... either way.

For me if they fail one thing and it leads them to overcome a different challenge they can get experience for that too their characters were learning and making choices new ones because a twist of story takes them some place else.

Their character counting coup was not only accomplishing a political goal but getting experience based on the difficulty of the process.

In general, I prefer objective and tangible reward systems over abstract and arbitrary.

4E skill challenges are another mechanism for providing objective and tangible rewards. I know that a X complexity skill challenge will yield Y experience.

For the coup situation... I would probably grant experience points based on the wealth value of the domain that is being overthrown. It would be more difficult to overthrow a king than it would be to do such to a borderland barony.

This has the side effect of making the experience award tangible and objective to the players. A group of politically opportunistic players seeking to upset the status-quo can make an accurate assessment of the value of a given domain, and as a result make an informed decision with regard to which polity they wish to overthrow.

 

[Monayuris]

I call that adding in a middle man which may not even be an accurate one as we know them zombies do not have much gold nor does the village but stopping the hoard is both a challenge and worthwhile. (and really should result in significant experience)

Nope we arent going to agree and you are going to accuse me of rejecting the essence of D&D because that is what these threads are about.

Oh.
It isn't my intention to accuse of rejecting the essence of D&D.

My intention was more to address what I felt was a mischaracterization of my play style. I tried to keep it to the perspective of my own personal experiences and approach, but if I failed to do so and implied more than I should have, I apologize.

 

[Garthanos]

If you have two scenarios where the challenge is the same, then the reward money does not reflect the challenge faced. So I wouldn't count that as experience.

How about this old solution to that... give them Karma in a sort of virtual gold fashion. It can decrease the cost of things you buy and other interesting things.