Slowing Advancement and Other Arbitrary Restrictions

[molonel]

I love the Internet, where a difference of opinion must mean that one person cannot actually be understanding the facts.

Sigged, although on a different forum.

 

[Reynard]

Really, though, I'm having a hard time figuring out what you're trying to do. Would you like to slow level advancement? Somehow change the pace of level advancement? Fiddle with the wealth-by-level guidelines? What exactly is the goal here? Tell us, and I think we can help you.

Flat out slow it. The PCs in my 3.5 game have gained 3 levels in as many sesssion/game days, because I tend to use encounters with lots of mooks and a boss. Until they reach 8th level, tose mooks are worth 300 XP each. And I do not want to hit the mid-upper levels too quickly because that is where, for me and IMO, the game starts to get really hard to run.

Like I said, I am going to try "standardized" XP - 75 XP x CR and see how it goes.

 

[howandwhy99]

Wow, these are great ideas. I too am looking to slow my next campaign's advancements.

Half the x.p. given out. Half the g.p. given out.

jh

I use this method in my current campaign. If players are skillful about hunting down the treasure after the fight, they should be able to get that 1/2 gp. I put in more than 1/2 though, to reward for highly skilled play.

Watch Out! This method also 1/2's NPC Wealth guidelines, while keeping PC guidelines at the norm. As levels increase this will alter the CR of the creatures. For PCs, magic boosts account for about 1/5 - 1/3rd of their power, increasing with level. With NPCs assume a lower fraction by CR. It's not exact, so practice helps.


>>>As a tangent,
NPC and PC Suggested Wealth Guidelines are really just for the CR system to work simply. I see Wealth as a both a challenge and a reward. If PCs don't find it or, heck, never bother to loot, they'll be far below the baseline. This should be allowed IMO. No one is forcing loot on them. In the same way, the ability to far exceed average wealth through skillful play should be possible too. To be realistic, wealth should probably fluctuate wildly. For example, one day they might find multiple artifacts, only to lose everything they own the next day and need to hunt for treasure again (only now with whatever they can beg, borrow, or steal).

NPC Wealth Guidelines are even more arbitrary. 20th level rogue beggar-kings will likely have next to nothing on hand, while a 1st level commoner boy-king could own half the continent. An explanation on how wealth levels affect CR, for PCs & NPCs, is needed in the Core Rules.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Flat out slow it. The PCs in my 3.5 game have gained 3 levels in as many sesssion/game days, because I tend to use encounters with lots of mooks and a boss. Until they reach 8th level, tose mooks are worth 300 XP each. And I do not want to hit the mid-upper levels too quickly because that is where, for me and IMO, the game starts to get really hard to run.

Like I said, I am going to try "standardized" XP - 75 XP x CR and see how it goes.

The only concern I have about doing that is that you're likely to hose your players on big encounters. If you go with 75 xp x CR and award a bonus for beating the BBEG (a "story award" or the like), I think you'll have solved the mooks issue. Otherwise, they are getting too little for beating a high-CR (EPL +4 or more) encounter in most situations.

Just slashing XP by 1/2 or 2/3 really doesn't do it for you? It is the precisely most effective solution for "flat out slow[ing]" advancement.

 

[ruleslawyer]

An explanation on how wealth levels affect CR, for PCs & NPCs, is needed in the Core Rules.

A-frickin'-men!

Having been DMing Iron Heroes for a while now, I realize that one can't simply slap on a flat level adjustment for differential PC wealth (or CR adjustment for NPC/monster wealth), but at least a detailed explanation would be great!

 

[Baron Opal]

I pretty much threw out the xp charts and made my own. I went the "tell'em when they level" route, but that was sort of unsatisfying for me. However, I hate calculating xp. So I took a cue from Mr. Mona and came up with a flat xp chart.

It takes 60 xp to go up a level, any level. Each player gains 1 xp for overcoming a minor challenge, 3 xp for a usual challenge (one of the #13.3 / 20% consumable encounters), and 5 for a great challenge (BBEG). That way the PCs can chart their advancement and I can give out a point or two for exceptional RPing, giving me a great laugh or anything else of note.

I use, roughly, CR for this determination but it's really a guesstimate. I also run about 1/2 treasure value. Honestly, I don't really keep tract of it. I use the same skills that I used when I ran 1e. I keep a feel for what my players can do, give them appropriate treasure and make challenges appropriate for them.

Just because there is a calculation between CR, level and treasure doesn't mean it's holy writ.

 

[S'mon]

For 3e, I find that just giving out half XP works fine for me; I haven't found any need to reduce treasure hand-out. 3e suffers far more from under-equipped than over-equipped PCs anyway.

One thing I've toyed with though is guideline minimum, standard and maximum XP awards for a session, with minimum half the standards and maximum double the standard; say 300 minimum, 600 standard and 1200 maximum at 4th level in 3e. Then you can just award the PCs XP within that range depending on how much they accomplished. This avoids the excessive-XP problems from the million gp gem (1e-2e) or the killing 1000 orcs at 8th level (3e).

 

[Hussar]

An option that also works is to not break down xp by CR, but award xp by EL. That DRASTICALLY will reduce your xp rewards, particularly if you are using lots of mooks like that. The encounter you rhyme off is a EL 9, which nets a lot less per character than 30 CR 1's and a CR 6 for a 5th level party.

 

[GQuail]

I love the Internet, where a difference of opinion must mean that one person cannot actually be understanding the facts.

This is definatly one to quote. And on a similar note, you gotta love the fact that the guy starts off by saying he doesn't want to convert to another system midway through a campaign, but more than one poster suggest another system that would be a superior fit. (Not that it wouldn't necesarilly be correct, mind you...)

OP: If you wanna slow down your XP Progression, yeah, go nuts. Another way is simply to limit the kind of foes your PCs are fighting - don't make Wyrm Red Dragons leap out to be killed juest because it's level 18 or whatever, you know? You still want to keep things challenging, but lower CR foes with tactics might prove more memorable fights. But I don't see any reason why cutting the XP by 1/2 or whataver wouldn't work, so long as you keep it consistent.

I wouldn't entirely write off just handing out XP by fiat. At the start of my current game I gave out XP at the start, monitored character qattendance so only people who came got it.... but ultimately, it's more complications and heartache for the DM to deal with, and it can potentially lead to a "death spiral" where a player who misses a few sesisons is too far behidn to do anything useful so he just doesn't feel like coming any more. If you level up after major challenges, you cut out that level of book-keeping, and depending on how much crafting your party is doing I don't think it's worth worrying about.

I would agree that it takes some of the "carrot and stick" approach out of D&D, though: you no longer have a mechanic to directly reward players for getting involved in the game bar treasure, which you don't want to give away even more of. If you use some sort of Fate Point/Action Point system then perhaps bonus points could be handed out that way; perhaps a simple "I really enjoyed X" after a session could stroke your player's egos in the right places; or perhaps your group won't need the positive reinforcement of XP to keep up good roleplaying?

It's something that your players would have to be on-board with, certainly, as I've seen players on these boards imply arbitrary levelling up was tantamount to "DM Cheating": they want to be in charge of their own destiny, essentially, especially when the game has an inbuilt mechanic for it. As with any big rules change, your whole group would need to be onboard before you messed with something as omnipresent as XP.

 

[Hussar]

Going along with GQuail on this. I've been in games where the xp rewards were slowed to an absolute crawl. Now, it was a high rp game and I did enjoy it for quite a while. However, like many things, it can be too much of a good thing. Slowing down the xp awards is perfectly fine. IME, though, don't take it to the point where the PC's never advance.

I hope that doesn't come off as condescending. It's not meant to. I just had a bad (or rather less than enjoyable) experience where it was 18 months into the campaign and we'd gone from 1st to 4th level. Slow is fine. Glacial or tectonic speeds, not so much.