Improving 52 Pages: Overkill and Monster Experience

So if we are going to be handing out experience for monsters, and the 100 xp per hit die rule is generally good in my experience, there is one situation where it appears to fall down: overkill, where a higher-level party gets an overly large amount of experience for an encounter with six giant rats that is trivially dealt with.

To put it formally, a group in control of tactics is going to have a much easier time dealing with 8 x 1 HD orcs than 1 x 8 HD giant, for any number of game mechanical reasons. The danger ... the bad player behavior that you don't want the rule to encourage ... is that players will seek out weak rather than challenging combats in order to advance. And even if they don't (because that is a rather dim view of what they want in the game), they will have a weak encounter and realize it gave them quite a chunk of experience and wonder why the system is not pushing them toward the more exciting kind of play.

AD&D, as I've mentioned before, solved this just by giving very low xp awards for low-level monsters, altogether. Combine this with exponentially increasing the amounts of xp needed to level, and you have a situation where a high-level character effectively gets peanuts even from single-handedly wiping out a company of 100 orcs. Allow me to demonstrate the special technique of statistics:

That is not a typo: a single AD&D fighter, forced to gain experience only by fighting, has to kill 138 typical 1 hit die monsters to reach second level, so I've scaled everything from there. Going up in level, this number drops to a "manageable" 53 2nd level monsters to reach 3rd, but after 7th level experience required out-climbs monster experience again. To reach 10th level, over 15,000 orcs have to bite the dust under your sword, making your share of wiping out a small orc platoon seem negligible anyway.

(As I recall from playing AD&D, we were able to level at a reasonable pace not from monsters or even monetary treasure, but thanks to the generous experience awards for magic items. And you wonder, why the obsession with taking treasure and magic items away from the party...)

Of course, AD&D being AD&D, Gygax also put in a completely unnecessary rule toward the same goal, further complicating experience awards by instructing DM's to add up the levels and HD equivalent on each side after a combat, and dock the party proportional experience if they outpowered the foe. This rule, besides being cumbersome to apply and hedged round in even vaguer clouds of subjectivity, seems to be more appropriate to the original 100 xp/hit die rule.

My concession to this logic, within the 100 xp/HD system, was to have characters gain only 10% of the usual experience from monsters they outclassed by 2 or more level equivalents, and 50% if outclassing by 1 (although I didn't really apply this last one). In practice, however, even the 10% rule created an awkward splitting of points between higher and lower level party members.

Here's my latest try, and we'll see how it does in actual play.

Rather than using division, it uses subtraction: higher level characters simply discount one or two creatures of a sufficiently lower level. Although this appears in the "basic" 52 Pages rules that only go up to third level, the intent is to increase geometrically, so that 4 monsters per character are discounted at 3 levels up, 8 at 4 levels,, and so on.

If this means that an 8th level party of 5 can plow through a regiment of 320 orcs without getting any experience ... well, after the first 80 orcs or so fall without any casualties in return, the DM is better off just calling a rout than gaming through the whole tedious sequence, hoping to overwhelm the party tanks with a slew of lucky hit and damage rolls... lest we forget the lesson of the 100 linear attacking kobolds.

Experience and Levels

This is the advancement chart for all character classes in my house-rules, for levels 1-5. It's fairly easy to extrapolate beyond, as well.
 

Level 1: 0-1499 xp (+1500)

Level 2: 1500-3999 (+2500)

Level 3: 4000-7999 (+4000)

Level 4: 8000-14999 (+7000)

Level 5: 15000-24999 (+10000)

One Chart: This is my personal preference. I like to try for my character classes to be balanced choices from the start, not artificially balanced by factors that come into play weeks or years after you've made your pick. Balance is of course secondary to making sure the party has a good selection of abilities to call on, but I'm not blind to the ways of players who may be checking out where other players are going with their character choices.

The classic example in D&D-like games is the 1250 xp needed for a thief to reach 2nd level versus the 2500 for a magic-user. Even more odd is the mere 1500 xp for the cleric, who enjoys the second best fighting stats and a unique and necessary skill set. The 1500 figure made more sense in OD&D when the cleric was a hybrid fighting / magic class who had to wait until 2nd level for spells. In fact, I get the feeling, reading old rule sets and retroclones, that experience rules - the most important aspect of strategic game pacing - suffer from a lot of received ideas, and not a lot of thought about what actually works. ("Oh my god! They had an all-class experience chart in The Edition That Shall Not Be Televised! We must purge it with fire!")

If a rogue is a weaker choice than a wizard I'd rather make the rogue stronger than make the wizard lag behind in levels. This is what I've tried to do in my house-rules, by making the rogue better at attacking, eventually good at defending (through level-based AC dodge bonuses) and able to score extra damage through sniping as well as backstabbing. I've also restricted the wizard a good deal with the only one of each spell rule.


1500 xp to 2nd Level: In my campaign, which meets weekly at best and until recently had quite short sessions, this was a decent pacing. A good session would net each character 200-300 xp and there were enough brushes with death and dismemberment to really drive home the exquisite joys of old school 1st level. 2000 would not be unreasonable, either, given the large sums I'm granting for monsters.


Progression: Each level takes about 1.6 times as many XP to reach as the previous. Not sure how this will go, naturally, but it seems in keeping with tried and true principles. The implication, in case I ever get around to cooking up random encounter and treasure tables, is that the XP of monsters and wealth of treasures should follow a similar progression.

The purpose of a sharper progression is to reduce grinding and reward taking on risky challenges. For example, if the XP to advance doubles every level (as in Labyrinth Lord, once past the 2nd level), and the XP  from monsters and treasures available also doubles every level, then a 5th level party killing orcs rather than 5th level fare will only net 1/32 of the advancement. But this system kind of breaks down when it comes to treasure. Having 32 times the treasure at level 5 as at level 1 is great but leaves very little room to go upwards in any meaningful way. Still, trying to reduce experience from fighting overly low-level monsters through specific XP reduction rules turns out to be unwieldy in practice, as you get into calculations of average party level and the like. Doing it naturally, through a level table where you need more and more to advance, seems better.

Well, those are the basics. Three categories to follow: XP from monsters; XP from treasure; and XP from ... other activities. Thoughts welcome, as always.