Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8242581" data-attributes="member: 12731">First off: for this particular exercise I have gone with a baseline of 50 monsters per level, not 25 as in the Paizo default. On the other hand, quest XP is boosted considerably compared to monsters. (In Adventure Paths, completing a quest gives you 30-80 XP which is to be compared to the 40 XP of a monster of your own level)But that's not what I wanted to philosophize over...Instead have a look at the strange line in the Comment column for level 1: Cf. 1-1-2-4-6-10 to 1-1½-2-3-4-6What this does is, it compares the xp haul for monsters in this scheme with what you would have gotten if you kept the default progression. In Paizo's original scheme, you'll recall that while a monster your own level gives 40 XP, a monster one level lower gives 30 XP and a monster one level higher gives 60 XP (and so on). I have just translated that into what you would get if we replace the baseline (40 XP) with whatever this scheme is getting you.What that line is telling you is this:First off, the bolded part is your own level, so it's identical.The next number to the right is for one level higher (level 2 in this case). With this scheme you're getting 4 XP, with the original scheme you would have gotten 3 XP.Then you get 6 instead of 4 XP.Then you get 10 instead of 6 XP.For numbers to the left of the bolded number, we go down in level. The first number to the left is 1 instead of 1½, for instance.And the second (leftmost) number is 1 (because we dislike half of an XP) and 1.You can't maintain the exact same xp yields when you switch from relative to absolute numbers. So why not embrace this and focus on the upside? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />In this case we have a system that encourages heroes to take risks and track down fearsome monsters that are three or more levels higher than the heroes. On the other hand, "farming" relatively low-level critters gives less than it would have done under the default scheme.For instance, a level 3 hero gets 160 XP if his party brings down a level 7 monster in the default scheme, or four times the 40 XP you get for a monster of your own level.In this scheme, the same hero would get 35 XP (because every level 7 monster always gives that), to be compared to the 6 XP you get for a monster of your own level. This means going for the BBEG gives you almost six times the XP (5.83) instead of just four times! Any thoughts...? I find that this more accurately mirrors the actual risk you are taking. The risk vs monsters of relatively low level just isn't there, while fighting monsters higher level than yourself carries considerable risk.ZappPS. This is about rewards, not encounter budgets. The assumption is you aren't changing the way you populate encounters (that is, you still run adventure paths as written).</blockquote>

Verification