XP for generating monsters

[Dr_Ruminahui]

I'm designing encounters for the next level or so and have been thinking of ways of sprucing them up.

As usual, Darren in Edmonton - no reading of this thread.

Anyway, one concept I had in mind was a trapped spirit continually raising skeletons until the players kill it/complete some other condition. I also have in mind that when they succeed in doing so, all the undead will collapse.

Now, how do I give XP for something like this? There are two issues:

1. How do I give XP for the "generated" baddies, since one way of thinking of them is as a punishment for taking too long - or to think of it in another way, if you give full XP for defeating them, you are rewarding the players for delaying with the main task. Conversely, it doesn't seem fair to not reward the players for a harder encounter, even if it is harder because they aren't succeeding.

2. How do I give XP for monsters that are killed by a plotpoint? Sure, its a plotpoint created by the players achievement in the encounter, so they should get some sort of award. But how much? If I give full XP for all the monsters, the players could allow the monsters to generate, waiting to complete the condition until they killed as many as they can handle. On the other hand, they could ignore the monsters and go straight for the condition - or just deal out damage to a variety of monsters, perhaps with condition effects that keep them out of the way - and it doesn't seem fair to penalize them for being efficient.

Anyway, please offer whatever suggestions you might have.

 

[CapnZapp]

Area 7 "Skeletal Legion" of H1 - Keep of the Shadowfell gives full xp for auto-generated monsters.

However, feel free to reduce xp awards if the players come up with a clever way of killing your auto-generated creepies in a safe non-exciting way. (Such as if they manage to eliminate all other monsters and can prepare ready actions to kill off each generated monster as it appears, without it having any time to act).

But if it's a straight-up fight, I'd give out xp as normal.

 

[DanmarLOK]

For something like this I'd be inclined to simply give a quest reward for completing the quest regardless of how they did it. If you're concerned about your players 'farming' the mobs for xp then in this instance simply inform them up front that they get X exp for solving the problem. This might actually get them to look at ways other than simply killing their way to the BBEG as possible solutions.

 

[Mesh Hong]

This seems relatively straight forward.

1: Estimate a reasonable time (number of rounds) that it should take to kill the main threat, in this case the trapped spirit.

2: Work out how many additional threats the main threat can summon in that time.

3: With the new information of projected number of secondary threats revise your estimation of a reasonable number of rounds.

3: Add the xp together for your main threat and probable number of secondary threats to get your encounter xp value.

When this combat rolls around, no matter how quickly or slowly the PCs defeat the main threat they get the encounter xp value. If they are ruthlessly efficient and dispatch the main threat quickly they get bonus xp for good tactics. If they are inefficient, things go badly, or they try and exploit the situation then (effectively) they get penalised. Either way you know exactly the outcome of the fight xp wise.

In reality I don't think your players would ever notice they were getting more or less xp than the sum of the monsters fought. I have never had my players question the ammount of xp I hand out at the end of the session.

It also really depends what the main threat is summoning, if it is minions then the PCs probably wont have much of a problem punching a hole in them to get to the summoner. However If they are non minions then things could get a bit more complicated, and if things go badly they could get completely out of hand.

hope this helps.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

Thanks for the suggestions - I'll let you all know what I come up with.