I'm on the record (more than once) as thinking that D&D 3.5e's experience system is "a work of sublime genius", and I stand by that. But I don't think that this carries over to Pathfinder.
You see, the main genius about experience is that it catches people up when they fall behind. 3.5e provides many ways to fall behind: death (and being resurrected by any means other than true resurrection), spending XP on crafting magic items, casting powerful spells with an XP component, being level drained, and the obvious missing a session.
But in Pathfinder, only one of those applies. They changed level drain so you just keep a permanent negative level instead of ever losing a level. They changed death so that it just gives you permanent negative levels instead of taking away a level. They changed crafting and spells so they cost more gold and never cost XP. The only one that applies is missing a session (and I'm lucky enough to be in a group where people hardly ever miss sessions, and if one person is going to miss a session, we don't play Pathfinder, though sometimes we'll play something else).
This is why, when called upon to run a Pathfinder game some time ago, I decided -- blasphemously! -- not to use the experience system at all. Which happened to be what the group was used to -- we'd just played through Rise of the Runelords without experience, leveling up only when the adventure path said we should, and it worked out fine.
How, then, do I determine when the players ought to level up? Well, I take as my baseline the line from 3.5e's Dungeon Master's Guide (page 41, Behind the Curtain: Experience Points sidebar) that experience "is based on the concept that 13.33 encounters of an EL equal to the player characters' level allow them to gain a level". So if I'm stripping out XP, I can just go straight back to that baseline. (I don't know what Pathfinder's experience guidelines are based on, especially because there's three different experience tracks to muddy the issue, is why I go back to 3.5.) To wit: players should level up once every 13.33 encounters.
Except I round up to 14, which more readily divides in two. It's become my habit to prepare 7 encounters at a time, which the party generally gets through in one or two sessions, leading them to level up once every 2 or 3 sessions. You can, of course, use a higher or lower number than 14 if you want your players to level up more or less frequently.
You can get fancy -- a particularly easy encounter counts as 1/2 an encounter, a particularly difficult encounter as two. You can choose to count encounters that the party bypasses entirely, or not count them, or count them as half. What matters is you pick an "every X encounters, the party levels up" and then mostly give them encounters appropriate to their level.
Showing posts with label XP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label XP. Show all posts
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Leveling Up Without A Rest
So most tables I've played at use the house/variant rule that you can't level up in the middle of a dungeon; you only level up if you get a proper 8-hour rest. This is so common at tables I've played with that I don't think people realize it isn't the standard rule. And it just sort of makes intuitive sense, at least to me (perhaps because it's how I first learned to play).
But I've come to the position that there's not really any reason to use this rule after all.
Realism? Is it really so much more realistic to be suddenly better at whatever it is you're doing after an 8-hour rest than in the middle of doing it?
It's a holdover from the way some video games work? One can probably name as many video games where you level up immediately when you have enough XP (e.g. Angband) as games where you need to return to town to do so (e.g. Mordor/Demise). (And some, like City of Heroes, where you immediately get some benefits of leveling up but have to visit a trainer to get the rest of them.)
Confusion over whether you have your new hit points and prepared spells? That's easy enough to answer: yes, you immediately gain your new hit points. Your new spell slots can be filled if you take the requisite 15-minute downtime for filling empty slots if you're aprepared caster wizard; you immediately get your new spells per day if you're a spontaneous caster. (Your existing depleted HP and used spells aren't restored.)
Don't want to spend half the gaming session leveling up characters? Especially in the middle of a fight? That's fine, just hold off on delivering XP until the end of the session, and certainly never deliver XP in the middle of a fight. (I've still got some players who, in their own words, "can't be assed" to level up in the week between sessions, and spend the first few minutes of some sessions leveling up, but that's fine, I like to give plenty of time at the beginning of a session for players to settle down and settle in anyway.)
Further discussion can be found here.
But I've come to the position that there's not really any reason to use this rule after all.
Realism? Is it really so much more realistic to be suddenly better at whatever it is you're doing after an 8-hour rest than in the middle of doing it?
It's a holdover from the way some video games work? One can probably name as many video games where you level up immediately when you have enough XP (e.g. Angband) as games where you need to return to town to do so (e.g. Mordor/Demise). (And some, like City of Heroes, where you immediately get some benefits of leveling up but have to visit a trainer to get the rest of them.)
Confusion over whether you have your new hit points and prepared spells? That's easy enough to answer: yes, you immediately gain your new hit points. Your new spell slots can be filled if you take the requisite 15-minute downtime for filling empty slots if you're a
Don't want to spend half the gaming session leveling up characters? Especially in the middle of a fight? That's fine, just hold off on delivering XP until the end of the session, and certainly never deliver XP in the middle of a fight. (I've still got some players who, in their own words, "can't be assed" to level up in the week between sessions, and spend the first few minutes of some sessions leveling up, but that's fine, I like to give plenty of time at the beginning of a session for players to settle down and settle in anyway.)
Further discussion can be found here.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
The Balance of Experience
A few months ago, a friend of mine was starting to put together a Pathfinder campaign, the Rise of the Runelords adventure path. At first, we only had the DM, myself, and one other player. (Two additional players joined later, but for awhile it was just the two.)
After the first session, he decided that, in lieu of doing math, he would just level us up whenever the adventure path said we should be a higher level. Which is entirely reasonable: not everybody DMs from a computer (and it's silly to expect a person to do the relevant math without an XP calculator).
But it got me to thinking about how there were only two of us, and how the XP system would interact with that, were it in use. (It would be a different XP system anyway, being as it was Pathfinder, but 3.5e's system is the one I know.) Now, I'm on the record as thinking the 3.5e experience system is "a work of sublime genius", and I stand by that, but I want to test it.
My thinking was this: if the XP system works (and is applied) properly, then, in an adventure path situation (where you have specific numbers of foes of specific CRs, and the number doesn't vary depending on the level of the PCs), parties containing different numbers of characters should eventually wind up having approximately the same ability to defeat foes (but not the same level). Which is to say: you should be able to run an adventure path as written for a party of any size and the challenges will (after the first few levels) wind up being appropriate to the party.
---
So my test was this: pit three hypothetical parties against a hypothetical adventure path.
The first party consists of two level 1 characters. The second party consists of four level 1 characters. The third party consists of 8 level 1 characters.
The adventure path consists of groups of monsters. You're supposed to be able to beat 13 opponents of CR equal to your level before leveling up, and you're supposed to be able to beat 4 even-level encounters in a day (and you're not necessarily supposed to be able to level up without resting). So I rounded 13 down to 12, and set up this hypothetical adventure path with 76 groups of opponents: 4 groups of 3 at each CR. 4 groups of 3 CR1 monsters, 4 groups of 3 CR2 monsters, 4 groups of 3 CR3 monsters, and so on.
And then I ran the numbers. Assuming the PCs always defeat their opponents and always get precisely the correct amount of XP. Assuming the PCs get a chance to rest and level up after each encounter if they have the XP for it.
By the end of the 76 groups of opponents, the 4-person party, being the baseline around which the XP system was designed, should have just about exactly hit level 20. (Or maybe wound up a bit shy, because they faced 20 fewer opponents over the course of their career than they should have if I'd stuck to the 13-opponents-per-level rule of thumb.) But, though that happened just like it should have, that's not the point I'm going to pay attention to.
I'm going to pay attention to the point when the 2-person party dinged level 20: after the first group of CR18 foes.
At the point in the adventure when the 2-person party was dinging 20, the 4-person party was just hitting 18, and the 8-person party was just hitting 16. That's completely out of balance and needs to be fixed, right? WRONG. Absolutely, blitheringly incorrect.
---
Consider this: a party of two level 20 characters has an encounter challenge rating of 22. A party of four level 18 characters has an encounter challenge rating of 22. A party of eight level 16 characters has an encounter challenge rating of 22. The system works!
(Of course, this neglects the fact that level 16 characters are a spell level or two behind level 20 characters, and it neglects the fact that the 8-person party has a massive action economy advantage. I'll assume, for the sake of perfectly spherical cows, that these two factors balance one another out.)
The first point when the encounter level of the three parties equals out is after the last group of CR6 opponents. The 2-person party is at level 8, the 4-person party is at level 6, and the 8-person party is at level 4. The three parties stay roughly on par with one another thereafter. The characters in the 2-person party wind up consistently 2 levels ahead of those in the 4-person party, and those in the 8-person party wind up consistently 2 levels behind.
Trust the XP system. Used properly, it will not lead you astray.
After the first session, he decided that, in lieu of doing math, he would just level us up whenever the adventure path said we should be a higher level. Which is entirely reasonable: not everybody DMs from a computer (and it's silly to expect a person to do the relevant math without an XP calculator).
But it got me to thinking about how there were only two of us, and how the XP system would interact with that, were it in use. (It would be a different XP system anyway, being as it was Pathfinder, but 3.5e's system is the one I know.) Now, I'm on the record as thinking the 3.5e experience system is "a work of sublime genius", and I stand by that, but I want to test it.
My thinking was this: if the XP system works (and is applied) properly, then, in an adventure path situation (where you have specific numbers of foes of specific CRs, and the number doesn't vary depending on the level of the PCs), parties containing different numbers of characters should eventually wind up having approximately the same ability to defeat foes (but not the same level). Which is to say: you should be able to run an adventure path as written for a party of any size and the challenges will (after the first few levels) wind up being appropriate to the party.
---
So my test was this: pit three hypothetical parties against a hypothetical adventure path.
The first party consists of two level 1 characters. The second party consists of four level 1 characters. The third party consists of 8 level 1 characters.
The adventure path consists of groups of monsters. You're supposed to be able to beat 13 opponents of CR equal to your level before leveling up, and you're supposed to be able to beat 4 even-level encounters in a day (and you're not necessarily supposed to be able to level up without resting). So I rounded 13 down to 12, and set up this hypothetical adventure path with 76 groups of opponents: 4 groups of 3 at each CR. 4 groups of 3 CR1 monsters, 4 groups of 3 CR2 monsters, 4 groups of 3 CR3 monsters, and so on.
And then I ran the numbers. Assuming the PCs always defeat their opponents and always get precisely the correct amount of XP. Assuming the PCs get a chance to rest and level up after each encounter if they have the XP for it.
By the end of the 76 groups of opponents, the 4-person party, being the baseline around which the XP system was designed, should have just about exactly hit level 20. (Or maybe wound up a bit shy, because they faced 20 fewer opponents over the course of their career than they should have if I'd stuck to the 13-opponents-per-level rule of thumb.) But, though that happened just like it should have, that's not the point I'm going to pay attention to.
I'm going to pay attention to the point when the 2-person party dinged level 20: after the first group of CR18 foes.
At the point in the adventure when the 2-person party was dinging 20, the 4-person party was just hitting 18, and the 8-person party was just hitting 16. That's completely out of balance and needs to be fixed, right? WRONG. Absolutely, blitheringly incorrect.
---
Consider this: a party of two level 20 characters has an encounter challenge rating of 22. A party of four level 18 characters has an encounter challenge rating of 22. A party of eight level 16 characters has an encounter challenge rating of 22. The system works!
(Of course, this neglects the fact that level 16 characters are a spell level or two behind level 20 characters, and it neglects the fact that the 8-person party has a massive action economy advantage. I'll assume, for the sake of perfectly spherical cows, that these two factors balance one another out.)
The first point when the encounter level of the three parties equals out is after the last group of CR6 opponents. The 2-person party is at level 8, the 4-person party is at level 6, and the 8-person party is at level 4. The three parties stay roughly on par with one another thereafter. The characters in the 2-person party wind up consistently 2 levels ahead of those in the 4-person party, and those in the 8-person party wind up consistently 2 levels behind.
Trust the XP system. Used properly, it will not lead you astray.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Substitution Ciphers as Clues
It turned out, near the end of the second session of my open gaming table, that the healer had actually solved the substitution cipher bounty I had provided!
The duskblade's player facepalmed about ten times in a row because the bounty turned out to be one long reference to the previous campaign, and to his last character (the elf wizard) in particular.
I gave the healer a bunch of extra experience for solving the puzzle, tempered with a slight penalty for doing it at the expense of paying attention to the goings-on of the game. Although I'm not sure what I expected - maybe for people to work on it before the game starts and after it finishes? But at least he was playing his character well - figuring out this puzzle was much more interesting to the character than anything else. Though why he took it to the mine with him rather than just solve it at the adventurer's guild, I don't know. High intelligence, low wisdom, I guess.
Incidentally, the substitution cipher I actually used was in fact the Standard Galactic alphabet. Incidentally, this is an instance where I halfheartedly, and with a modicum of success, adhered to the Three Clue Rule, which says that "For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues." Or, more loosely, provide at least three different ways to get to any given plot point.
I allowed for at least three ways to solve the cipher (with the possibility of more if the players had been clever enough):
1.) Brute force it the old-fashioned way (using observations like: "e" is the most common letter; "the" is the most common three-letter word; "a" and "I" are the only possible one-letter words; etc.) This was how the player wound up doing it.
2.) Roll well enough on your Decipher Script check that I give you some free letters, which makes (1) substantially easier.
3.) Have played enough Commander Keen that you recognize it as the Standard Galactic Alphabet, and consult the wikipedia page or other places that give the complete alphabet.
I can think of at least one other thing that could have partially helped, involving being familiar enough with the story to fill in gaps. (It involved a +1 Frost Dagger that the wizard had taken from the body of the High Priest of Vecna, then loaned to the swashbuckler/knight, then the vampire Baron Rogan took it off the swashbuckler/knight's body, then King Terek II had inherited it from him, and it's currently in the royal treasury and some relative of its original owner wants it back.)
The duskblade's player facepalmed about ten times in a row because the bounty turned out to be one long reference to the previous campaign, and to his last character (the elf wizard) in particular.
I gave the healer a bunch of extra experience for solving the puzzle, tempered with a slight penalty for doing it at the expense of paying attention to the goings-on of the game. Although I'm not sure what I expected - maybe for people to work on it before the game starts and after it finishes? But at least he was playing his character well - figuring out this puzzle was much more interesting to the character than anything else. Though why he took it to the mine with him rather than just solve it at the adventurer's guild, I don't know. High intelligence, low wisdom, I guess.
Incidentally, the substitution cipher I actually used was in fact the Standard Galactic alphabet. Incidentally, this is an instance where I halfheartedly, and with a modicum of success, adhered to the Three Clue Rule, which says that "For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues." Or, more loosely, provide at least three different ways to get to any given plot point.
I allowed for at least three ways to solve the cipher (with the possibility of more if the players had been clever enough):
1.) Brute force it the old-fashioned way (using observations like: "e" is the most common letter; "the" is the most common three-letter word; "a" and "I" are the only possible one-letter words; etc.) This was how the player wound up doing it.
2.) Roll well enough on your Decipher Script check that I give you some free letters, which makes (1) substantially easier.
3.) Have played enough Commander Keen that you recognize it as the Standard Galactic Alphabet, and consult the wikipedia page or other places that give the complete alphabet.
I can think of at least one other thing that could have partially helped, involving being familiar enough with the story to fill in gaps. (It involved a +1 Frost Dagger that the wizard had taken from the body of the High Priest of Vecna, then loaned to the swashbuckler/knight, then the vampire Baron Rogan took it off the swashbuckler/knight's body, then King Terek II had inherited it from him, and it's currently in the royal treasury and some relative of its original owner wants it back.)
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Experience in the Open Game Table
One of the major concerns I had before I started running my open game table is this: How should we handle character levels and experience?
My immediate inclination, and Justin Alexander's when I asked, was to start everybody off at level 1 (or whatever level you prefer to play at; I know 1 is too weak for many people). Each character gains experience at the usual rate for monsters they kill and RP they participate in. That's all you need to do, D&D's experience point system solves the problem for you.
---
I'd like to point out how much of a work of sublime genius the 3.5e experience system really is. A player is rewarded for each session he attends. Low-level characters gain experience faster than high-level characters, and so inevitably catch up. Low-level characters can usually contribute at least a little to a team of higher-level characters, at least until they catch up, which won't take long at all.
That's why, whenever somebody says they dispense altogether with 3.5e's rules for awarding experience, I want to bludgeon them upside the face and neck with some sort of large stick. If you just say "You all gain a level" every few sessions, or you just split the experience evenly with no regard to level, you save a few minutes punching numbers into a calculator every session, but you lose all the benefits of one of 3.5e's most well-implemented systems.
---
The open game table particularly lends itself to Alexander's last point in that comment, that the ideal method is to provide a variety of challenges, and allow the players to choose which one they want to tackle. If they discover that the centipedes in the cold iron mine are too weak for their taste, they can choose to head to the fungus-filled Stank Cave instead. This puts it entirely up to the players to decide their ideal level of risk and reward. This is very similar to Shamus Young's argument against auto-adjusting difficulty in video games.
---
On the other hand, as I commented in that comment thread, I’m a little afraid that might discourage players from keeping a stable of characters, if they have to bring each character up from zero.
How should I fix this - allow a player to, at any time, create a second character at 75% the experience of their highest-level character? This is distasteful to me, for a number of reasons. The biggest: it defeats part of the purpose of having a stable of characters in the first place: choice of what level you want to play at. "All the other characters in the party are level 1 today. Should I play my level 5, or pull out my disused level 1?" Level imbalances sort themselves out, sure, but there's a point where the difference can just be too great. So I'm going to say all characters start at level 1, and a player can, at any point, choose to create a new level 1 character, or to play one of the pre-gens I've provided.
---
Speaking of which: for players who don’t want to make their own characters or who don’t have time, I am indeed using a common stable of pre-gen characters that anybody can play, who level up just like any other character. If a player plays a pre-gen and likes it so much that they want to claim it permanently for themselves, they may do so by putting their name at the top of the paper. Conversely, if a player decides they're not super-fond of one of the characters in their stable, they can erase their name and allow anybody to play it.
I was almost afraid this might discourage people from making their own characters, but the ability to say “I brought pre-gens, you don’t need to make a character unless you want to” is an incredibly powerful tool in reducing the barriers to entry. It's worth it.
My immediate inclination, and Justin Alexander's when I asked, was to start everybody off at level 1 (or whatever level you prefer to play at; I know 1 is too weak for many people). Each character gains experience at the usual rate for monsters they kill and RP they participate in. That's all you need to do, D&D's experience point system solves the problem for you.
---
I'd like to point out how much of a work of sublime genius the 3.5e experience system really is. A player is rewarded for each session he attends. Low-level characters gain experience faster than high-level characters, and so inevitably catch up. Low-level characters can usually contribute at least a little to a team of higher-level characters, at least until they catch up, which won't take long at all.
That's why, whenever somebody says they dispense altogether with 3.5e's rules for awarding experience, I want to bludgeon them upside the face and neck with some sort of large stick. If you just say "You all gain a level" every few sessions, or you just split the experience evenly with no regard to level, you save a few minutes punching numbers into a calculator every session, but you lose all the benefits of one of 3.5e's most well-implemented systems.
---
The open game table particularly lends itself to Alexander's last point in that comment, that the ideal method is to provide a variety of challenges, and allow the players to choose which one they want to tackle. If they discover that the centipedes in the cold iron mine are too weak for their taste, they can choose to head to the fungus-filled Stank Cave instead. This puts it entirely up to the players to decide their ideal level of risk and reward. This is very similar to Shamus Young's argument against auto-adjusting difficulty in video games.
---
On the other hand, as I commented in that comment thread, I’m a little afraid that might discourage players from keeping a stable of characters, if they have to bring each character up from zero.
How should I fix this - allow a player to, at any time, create a second character at 75% the experience of their highest-level character? This is distasteful to me, for a number of reasons. The biggest: it defeats part of the purpose of having a stable of characters in the first place: choice of what level you want to play at. "All the other characters in the party are level 1 today. Should I play my level 5, or pull out my disused level 1?" Level imbalances sort themselves out, sure, but there's a point where the difference can just be too great. So I'm going to say all characters start at level 1, and a player can, at any point, choose to create a new level 1 character, or to play one of the pre-gens I've provided.
---
Speaking of which: for players who don’t want to make their own characters or who don’t have time, I am indeed using a common stable of pre-gen characters that anybody can play, who level up just like any other character. If a player plays a pre-gen and likes it so much that they want to claim it permanently for themselves, they may do so by putting their name at the top of the paper. Conversely, if a player decides they're not super-fond of one of the characters in their stable, they can erase their name and allow anybody to play it.
I was almost afraid this might discourage people from making their own characters, but the ability to say “I brought pre-gens, you don’t need to make a character unless you want to” is an incredibly powerful tool in reducing the barriers to entry. It's worth it.
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