Oots 439

[hong]

Bwah?!? You honestly think that you get the same XP if you fight six hobgoblins at once as you would if you fight them one at a time, with a good night's rest in between?

That's not how the XP section of my DMG has it. Not at all.

Cheers, -- N

Er, that is indeed how you do it. The total EL of the encounter may be different, but the XP award is still based on 6 x CR of an individual hob. Which would be zero, and is probably a better indication of the difficulty of the fight than the EL.

 

[Ion]

So what is the purpose of EL then?

 

[Nifft]

Wow, that's crazy. So 20 CR 1 hobgoblins (EL 9) would be worth significant XP to a party of four 8th level PCs, but exactly zero XP for a party of 9th level PCs.

Huh. Insane. (slinks back to House Rules)

-- N

 

[Roman]

Hmm, so it appears I understood the standard XP system correctly after all.

 

[hong]

Wow, that's crazy. So 20 CR 1 hobgoblins (EL 9) would be worth significant XP to a party of four 8th level PCs, but exactly zero XP for a party of 9th level PCs.

Huh. Insane. (slinks back to House Rules)

-- N

Well, that's really an artifact of not having a continuous curve for CR and XP. IME, throwing a big mob of lowly monsters at a mid- to high-level party is rarely more than an opportunity for the PCs to showboat.

 

[iwatt]

How many people wouldn't hand over xp to Belkar's player? After all, he is staying in character

 

[ajanders]

It's all graphic references to a certain Dark Elf Who May Not Be Named.
Check the covers of his recent books.

 

[Klaus]

So what is the purpose of EL then?

To know if an encounter can overpower a party of certain level.

But the DMG specifically calls out that it's a bad idea to challenge a higher-level party with an ecounter composed solely of tons of low-level creatures. 20 1st-level hobgoblins might be an EL 8, but an 8th-level party will hardly break a sweat defeating them (hell, the Wizard 8 can probably just kill them all in one swoop with an 8d6 fireball).

When setting up an encounter, you use the Encounter Level (EL) (in the case of a single creature, the EL = the creature's CR). But when determining XP, you compare each of the encountered creatures' CR to the party's level on the XP table.

 

[delericho]

Well, that's really an artifact of not having a continuous curve for CR and XP. IME, throwing a big mob of lowly monsters at a mid- to high-level party is rarely more than an opportunity for the PCs to showboat.

Unless, of course, you use the 'Mob' template from DMG2. But, as that's not open material, I guess Belkar is out of luck.

 

[hong]

Unless, of course, you use the 'Mob' template from DMG2. But, as that's not open material, I guess Belkar is out of luck.

Ha! I was actually using a quasi-mob template for 6 months before the DMG2 came out. But eventually I went back to individual mooks, mostly because I like watching the PCs strut their stuff. I still remember a couple of great moments when the barb scored 100+ point crits on hapless thugs and assassins, killing them 4 times over.