XP/Level gain & sandboxing

[Quickleaf]

I think the fundamental issue is just that when you go FAR outside the encounter design guidelines that XP starts to get to be a poor indicator of difficulty.

Totally. But S'mon was saying he uses monsters at most 3 levels lower (within guidelines for an easy encounter).

I would just say stop attaching XP to klling enemies and tie it to achieveing objectives. Not only does it take away the dreaded "Lets stop the game to pick a fight" and the ever favorite "killing is our solution to everything cause we get XP for it", it also allows you to more tightly control XP allocation and link to to advancement as better suites your sandbox.

I was thinking that a sandbox is well served by player created quests.

I think minions are definitely an issue - very dangerous to strikers, harmless to AoE controllers. I could choose not to use minions at all in my next campaign, but that feels potentially rather baby-with-the-bathwater; I like big battles with dozens of combatants, minion rules allow that.

Well, here's how I handle minions IMC. Generally they don't cluster, but they do make good use of cover/concealment (remember they can provide it for each other) and they come in waves, preferably from more than one direction. Generally I adopt the philosophy "the minions will keep coming until strategy improves." Minions in themselves usually aren't threatening IMC. It's how they set up attacks for the tougher villains or hinder the PCs objective that makes them dangerous.

I use the "lair" concept too. The PCs are assaulting an Orc fortress, and after a couple encounters, they withdraw to town intending to come back and pick up where they left off. With a "lair", the PCs must face a certain # of encounters with no extended rest (or other rest limit of your choice); if the rest before then the monster (in particular the minions) re-spawn. By that I mean reicorcements arrive.

One big problem is auto damage from persistent zone effects, in this case from a Stinking Cloud. I've already toughened minions up with a damage threshold to bloody & kill, but the Wizard's minimum 8 damage was also the minimum to auto-kill my minions! I don't mind a 7th level Wizard killing dozens of mooks with one spell, but it doesn't seem right that it should generate nearly a level's worth of XP for the group!

Well, stinking cloud is tricky because it's a moveable zone which inflicts auto damage to all creatures starting their turn in the zone or entering it with their own movement. So it is an excellent minion killer. But it isn't perfect.

What if there is a strong wind the wizard must account for?

What if there are innocents, hostages, or ally-ish people in the mix?


What if it is important for the PCs to maintain line of sight thru the area?

What if the minions have a means to move out of turn, like a leader's aura or at-will command? An immediate reaction power? That way they don't worry about starting in the zone as much.

What if there is an artifact granting them poison immunity?

What if a lurker is on the wizard's tail and it has a nasty opportunity attack?

So, hm, maybe the answer is just to focus on minion XP, as suggested above, and reduce it ad hoc to 1/2 or 1/3 depending on actual threat posed? Or even cap total session XP at say half the amount needed to level.

I'm pretty confident that whenever the next iteration of D&D comes out, minions will be worth less XP than 1/4 the XP of a standard monster.

But even if your running a sandbox game you've got to tailor challenges to the PCs. While your group's wizard might make minions easy, a group without a controller (or your group if the wizard is down) could find a mass of minions hard. A lot of it depends of context too.

 

[S'mon]

But even if your running a sandbox game you've got to tailor challenges to the PCs. While your group's wizard might make minions easy, a group without a controller (or your group if the wizard is down) could find a mass of minions hard. A lot of it depends of context too.

But I do want to have a lot of status quo encounters, which don't depend on PC level or roles.

 

[Quickleaf]

But I do want to have a lot of status quo encounters, which don't depend on PC level or roles.

You mean like drinking and wenching?


Your issue is with the amount of XP those status quo encounters (as you define them) award to the PCs according to RAW, right?

I guess you could change the difficulty/implicit assumptions of what constitutes a status quo encounter. For example, using the minion advice from myself and other posters, or tipping the odds against the PCs with terrain/situation complications.

As you've pointed out, you could slow down the rate of level advancement by cutting XP awards in half.

You could drastically break from RAW and manipulate the XP chart so that easier enemies and minions are worth less XP.

You could set XP for minion at the amount one wave of minions is worth, then throw as many waves at the PCs that you like until the complete their objective, escape, or defuse the situation.

Lots of ways to go about it

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But I do want to have a lot of status quo encounters, which don't depend on PC level or roles.

Well, it seems like any sandbox is going to have a certain amount of variability in difficulty due to this, but having been largely a rather sandbox oriented DM myself I'd say that in all editions I've run extensively you have a similar issue, much higher or lower level encounters run into some sort of issue. Exactly what it is will vary from one edition to another somewhat of course.

Maybe the XP issue is peculiar to 4e. Honestly I tend to find reasons to bring the levels of the encounters into reasonable line with what the PCs capabilities are, so I haven't really run a whole string of say level-2 encounters to see what happens XP-wise. The XP curve in 4e is a good bit shallower than in AD&D though. I'd expect you'd be seeing level advancement at something like half the rate for at-level encounters, but they probably wouldn't be all that challenging. AD&D being a lot more swingy you'd probably notice the level difference less there.

So, maybe you do want to put in an XP modifier, something like dividing by the ratio of encounter level to party level. Noting of course this will also give out MORE XP for tougher encounters. Overall you'd probably see a slight increase in advancement rate.

One thing that some people have noted with 4e is that level+N changes in meaning over a level range. At level 1 a level 3 encounter is going to mean a pretty substantial difference in opponent's total hit points and pretty meaningful difference in damage output vs player hit points. At level 25 2 levels of difference is pretty trivial, amounting to a microscopic relative increase in hit points and damage output. This might help to account for an apparent increase in leveling rate.

 

[S'mon]

One thing that some people have noted with 4e is that level+N changes in meaning over a level range. At level 1 a level 3 encounter is going to mean a pretty substantial difference in opponent's total hit points and pretty meaningful difference in damage output vs player hit points. At level 25 2 levels of difference is pretty trivial, amounting to a microscopic relative increase in hit points and damage output. This might help to account for an apparent increase in leveling rate.

I think this is right.

Thanks for the advice everyone. Overall I'm thinking that reducing or capping minion XP ad hoc may be the best approach. In the game last week, 43 level 7 minions at 75 XP/minion generated 3225 XP, equivalent to 11 standard level 7 monsters. The 4 PCs who were each 7th level got 806 XP each from the minions alone. Standard encounter XP at level 7 is 300 XP, but this fight took at least twice as long as a regular fight; maybe capping minion XP at 2 regular encounter's worth, or 600 XP per PC in this case, would be about right.

Edit: The numbers don't look so bad when I crunch them like that. We normally have 6 players, but only 4 showed up, with the result that they got 50% more XP. It was a 4 hour session and with 6 PCs the XP for the session would have been pretty much exactly what 4e expects, 1/10 of a level per hour of play.

 

[eamon]

I think minions are actually only tangentially related to this issue. Below-level encounters with below-level monsters quickly become trivial. You could do hundreds of such encounters with hardly any risk - possibly even without extended rest, though that depends on the details. And that is where minions come into it - minions actually let you run many combats before dieing of old age.

An encounter five levels higher is about 2.5x the XP - but it's way more than 2.5x riskier (a somewhat nebulous concept, to be sure).

I've been toying with the idea of removing the 1/2 level attack bonus scaling to mitigate this. You can do that entirely on the DM side of the fence, too: monsters just get an attack+defense modifier equal to PC level/2 - Monster level/2 (round before subtracting).

The second part to this story is a fundamental mismatch between play difficulty and XP-gain: encounter size. If you take a hard encounter and split it in two, it still represents the same XP; but it's probably much easier. It might be worth considering scaling back XP from below-level encounters; e.g. XP gain = DMG-guideline * min(1, 0.8^(PC - enc level)). I'm not sure it's a good idea to address this, however, since it's partially up to PC strategy to avoid getting mobbed in a big encounter.

 

[S'mon]

You mean like drinking and wenching?

It might be fun to RP out a carousing session (pre bedroom!) occasionally, with the right DM and/or players; can't recall ever doing that in a tabletop game. With some interesting tavern NPCs and the possibility of a bar room brawl, theft or duel could work very well.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Part of it is the makeup of the party. Off the top of my head in a party of 6 we have:

1 Invoker of Wrath with lots of AoE powers.
1 Wizard who took half that encounter single handed with Stinking Cloud.
1 Cleric with at least a few AoEs.
1 Monk with an AoE at will and an AoE encounter power.

That's 4 of the 6 of us who routinely use area of effect powers and for a very good reason.

Also there's an issue with wilderness (as opposed to urban) sandboxing that should have been even more present in older editions as we levelled. The 15 minute adventuring day. Not because we don't want to go very far. It's simply that we were able to unload all our dailies onto that goblin tribe. The equivalent of the wizard and the cleric blowing all their spells in the one fight.

 

[S'mon]

Part of it is the makeup of the party. Off the top of my head in a party of 6 we have:

1 Invoker of Wrath with lots of AoE powers.
1 Wizard who took half that encounter single handed with Stinking Cloud.
1 Cleric with at least a few AoEs.
1 Monk with an AoE at will and an AoE encounter power.

That's 4 of the 6 of us who routinely use area of effect powers and for a very good reason.

Also there's an issue with wilderness (as opposed to urban) sandboxing that should have been even more present in older editions as we levelled. The 15 minute adventuring day. Not because we don't want to go very far. It's simply that we were able to unload all our dailies onto that goblin tribe. The equivalent of the wizard and the cleric blowing all their spells in the one fight.

Hi Francis - slaughtering the orcs was fine - and not unexpected. I initially thought the XP seemed a bit too much, but I'm less sure now.

I still think minions are a bit too vulnerable to auto-damage effects, especially zones like the stinking cloud, relative to their XPV, and raising their damage threshold any more would have other dubious effects.

For Southlands (the next 4e campaign) I'll be halving all monster hp and using more Elites, one possibility might be to use more lower-level standard monsters as 'mooks', but they would need to be designed as quite simple to run for book-keeping purposes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It has certainly been noted that the divide between minion and standard is rather large. There's always room in there for something in between. It would be easy enough to build a stat block with half normal hit points and maybe one simple power and possibly a trait. They'd be useful as monsters that won't just fall down if you toss auto damage at them, but can still be ganked with a single solid focused hit. Going with 1/3 or 1/4 normal hit points might even be best, but you'll have to experiment a bit. Maybe make them worth 50% XP of a standard.

This is better than using lower level monsters as those will both prove pretty much ineffective, are more complicated, and probably still have a bit more hit points that you want.