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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BoldItalic" data-source="post: 6840163" data-attributes="member: 6777052">(edit - I took so long typing this post that I hadn't seen Flamestrike's post just above)I entirely agree that it would have been better if two or three (or even five) like-minded players had got together to test the original proposition. That would have been much more sensible.There is another point that I think we've missed, and it's only occurred to me now, after sleeping on things. I'll try to phrase this tactfully. It's that the goals of the adventure don't match the goals of (some of) the players.We have a situation where we are testing a one-off set of characters against a one-off adventure; it's not part of a campaign. That's pretty normal. The game is designed for that. No problem.But in that context, XP and levels are no use to the players, because no matter how many or how few XP we get (or even if the DM is not intending to award them at all), we aren't going to use these characters again. The goal of the adventure is to save the world in four hours, even if all the characters die doing it. The adventure goals are not "stay alive and level up".We have a player who's personal goals are "stay alive and level up" - he's said so early on, his group play to gain levels - and that's a perfectly valid way to play the game. His characters and his play style are strongly optimized to achieve that and he's very good at it. But in the context of this test, they are optimized for the wrong thing. They are not optimized for "save the world at any cost", they are optimized for killing monsters and getting XP. So there is a mis-match.We've already hit the mismatch in the first round of the first encounter. In the context of saving the world, there's no need to kill the giants. They are just getting in the way of leaving the cave and if we can leave the cave without spending resources to kill them, that's optimal play in this context. But it's not optimal play if your goal is to maximize your XP and work towards level up. Hence the difficulty. A player whose personal goals don't match the scenario goals gets unhappy.As I see it, there are two ways to patch this up. We either change the story goals or we change the player goals. I think we could do either but we can't carry on with the test if we don't. Because even if we get over the personal issues and reach the end of the adventure, it won't have proved anything.Without rewriting any of the encounters (I'm guessing, here, because I haven't seen them), we could change the adventure goals to "get as much XP as you can, and at least reach 14th level" by, for example, backtracking to the intro and having Myrkyn doubting the competence of the PCs and setting them a challenge couched in those terms. "There are some giants occupying the teleport gate. Bring me the heads of the giants, and we'll talk." That would work. It would match the goals of this encounter to the personal goals of the player who has optimized his characters for slaughtering giants (and wolves) efficiently.Or we could change the player goals. We can certainly do that by changing the players, which is what seems to be happening right now, but it does mean that the test as originally intended gets abandoned and replaced by something else.If you want to preserve the original intention of the thread, you need to change the story goals to be couched in terms of killing monsters and find a few more players who enjoy optimizing for XP and levels. Then it's a fair test of the encounter guidelines in the context of that style of play.I think we just found out the hard way.</blockquote>

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