xp proportional to actual difficulty / resources consumed?

[Spookydodger]

I was thinking about the problems of xp debt that some people encounter, and some don't.

Really, it comes down to, in most missions, knowing the "tricks". Once you know them, then a lot of missions get super easy. I don't want to encourage bad play, nor relying on tricks. Jacking up the XP would really serve to encourage both, and not the fun and challenge level.

I was thinking about the way that Dungeon Master's guide handles XP. There's CR and all that, but there also seems to be a part about how many resources are consumed. This includes things like hitpoints, spell points, potions, wands, etc.

It seems like a decent way to (carefully) approach it would be to take these into account. I know there might be a lot of room for exploiting (going into a quest, "drinking 100k plat worth of potions and then finishing it to earn a huge bonus" come to mind), but I think there is enough benefit to encourage challenging game play to make the idea at least worthwhile to discuss, if not implement.

The greatest difficulty I see is that challenge is entirely subjective. Is going into a mission with 3 bards and 3 rogues challenging, or are they dealing so much damage with warchanters, fascinate, charms, and sneak-attack that the mission was trivial? Things like "damage dealt", "damage received", "damage healed", "spell points consumed", "deaths" all factor in, among others.

So, any thoughts on what would be good indicators of "mission challenge"? After all, we get our greatest experience from our most significant challenges in real life. Perhaps it would create a tradeoff in regards to barreling through quests to get to the end. The benefit to doing so is you use less resources, but you get a slightly reduced XP as it wasn't a challenge, whereas those that put themselves into difficult positions earn the greatest personal growth (XP).

[Okita]

Shrug...

Ok, so I've only ran the blighted whatever quest of the new content... and while I wasn't in there the whole time, it seemed pretty difficult... on my lvl 14 character...

Then last night I ran West and East Threnal on my lvl 8 character... which, went a lot smoother...

Guess which quest gives out out more base XP?

[Knightrose]

If you are unable to solve your Xp debt then you probably blow. :P

[Spookydodger]

That's a horribly callous way of thinking. Not everyone is equipped to the gills. And additionally, maybe not everyone wants to have to have the optimal builds.

min-maxing shouldn't be the only true way to be powerful

[transtemporal]

I think optional objectives should be worth a higher percentage of the overall XP (an additional 25% - 30% say), have some worthwhile loot or grant extra favor. This would encourage more people to do them for more reasons (loot runs, XP runs, favor runs). When I first started playing, I wanted to do all the optionals for completenesses sake but once I figured out they weren't worth the effort, I stopped doing them too.

I also quite like the idea of adding additional awards (like the looting, ransack ones), such as Mayhem (having a high percentage of creatures on the quest on the party at once), Knowledge (exploring the entire quest map), Bestiary (killing a creature for the first time), Discovery (finding a rare item or non-magical artifact) and spot awards given out during play rather than at the end. Or awards that persist from quest to quest, "x number of creatures killed without dying". A bit like the Quake thing where the narrator booms out "Legendary!" "Godlike!".

I don't really advocate XP based on resource usage though. That doesn't really mean anything.

I was thinking about the way that Dungeon Master's guide handles XP. There's CR and all that, but there also seems to be a part about how many resources are consumed. This includes things like hitpoints, spell points, potions, wands, etc.

CR includes the idea of resource usage. For a CR (or EL) that matches the average level of a party of 4, you should expend about 20% of your parties resources. So thats potions, HP, spells etc.