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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6308817" data-attributes="member: 87792">Showtime, Storytime.In the  beginning was oD&D and 1E.  And the primary source of XP in both  games was 1GP = 1XP.  If you could loot the dungeons without fighting  the monsters you gained XP faster and more safely than if you fought the  monsters.  (This is true to the point that Gygax, when he heard people  were fighting low level monsters for XP divided the low level XP rewards  by 10 - and 75% of the XP in most modules was for looting the place).Then  along came 2E.  2E demoted the status of the XP for GP rule to optional  and IIRC hit it somewhere in the DMG.  They added an XP for behaving  like a stereotypical member of your class rule instead.  Which meant  that either way fighters gained XP by ... killing things.  And there  were few other ways for fighters to gain XP.  So because killing things  rather than gathering loot was what it rewarded, people looked for  monsters to kill.  But groups who had been playing 1E tended to keep  playing the way they had before and either ignore or just not pay  attention to that rule.Next up was 3.0.  XP for GP was long gone.  Not even an optional rule  any more.  The only explicit source of XP was overcoming CR based  encounters, and opinions differed on whether sneaking past a patrol  counted as overcoming it (in which case you could farm it ridiculously  by being not seen the next time it came round) or just avoiding it.  And  3E was a clear cut shift so inertia from 1E didn't apply so much (as  well as being far further from the time 1E was common).4E came  along and made a couple of huge changes to the XP system.  The minor one  was explicit Quest XP.  (You sometimes had Quest XP in earlier editions  of course).  The enormous one was Skill Challenge XP.  You explicitly  gain XP in 4E for carrying out non-combat plans.  And it's both codified  and a lot safer than fighting.  And because combat takes so long if you  want to level up fast, you want skill challenge XP rather than combat  XP.So if you want to level up in 4E with a GM who follows the  rules the best way to do it fast is once again by avoiding combat and  instead running con games and tricks on the enemy to get them utterly  confused or fighting each other.What they were trying to cover in my opinion was the playstyle indicated although not actually terribly well supported by 2E.   Which I would call action-adventure, complete with encounter based  play.  And they took the explicit roles from 2E and just filed the  serial numbers off.My normal method is to put in potential combats and let the PCs wriggle their way out of them.Yup <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=":)" />When I look at 4e I see a lot of filling the promises made by 2E and  a lot of regularising the adventure path style play that happened in  late 3E.  Both popular.But the first set of books were short a  year of playtesting, complete with both bugfixes and very bad  presentation.  They threw out Orcus just over 10 months into developing  4e, put all the usable parts into the Book of 9 Swords and then started  completely from scratch.  And 4E was still delivered exactly to time,  having been created in 14 months rather than the 24 initially allowed  for its development.  This was one of the four critical failings of 4e  on arrival (the second was pissing off the third parties, the third  was providing the terrible Keep on the Shadowfell as the  initial adventure, and the fourth was writing the rulebooks like  instruction manuals rather than like books you read for pleasure - and  not showing how AEDU worked with fluff rather than against it).</blockquote>

Verification