Re: Experience Points
First, I just wanted to point out that the old xp system was not exponential, it was kind of linear, hence the super high attribute characters problem. The reason was not the cost but the gain of xp. A well equipped 40p+ character could easily pass 4 die rolls and even 5 die rolls and gain a ton of extra XP in a way that a lower attribute character wouldn't even face. Then when it came to battles. That hero sweeping through countless hoards of lower critters with his flaming Great Sword and adjDX 16+, or beheading a giant per turn while tanking in armor at 10+ surely made for not only a quicker XP gain, but exponential gain in so many ways.
Killing at twice or three times the rate, be able to take three or four times as much damage and keep going and going would mean that they at the end of a night's play would have earned many times over the XP of a sub par mundane equipped 32p character. So in the end the system was probably more or less linear.
Now the system changed, not only is the XP gain more or less static, but the cost is more exponential than before?!? So one can't compare the two systems in a meaningful way since different groups played differently and gained XP in vastly different ways depending on how much dice they rolled each night.
The second problem is the mix of exponential costs and static costs. Two such system will never match without strange side effects like no one picking talents until they have gained at least some attributes first. Or no one picking mana at the start for their staff because for the same price you can gain two whole ST points, except that for a good end build at 38p+ you don't want to over invest in ST early on, so you take DX first and then mana instead of the other way around for no good in game reason.
Basically a lot of gamey, stupid, more or less by the rules enforced way of leveling up your character. And not only is it gamey, it is also boring because you get less choices, which is what real gaming is all about. And no, bad choices are not real choices. You want several equally good, but different choices to choose from.
And then on top of this you change the rules about talents/spells after character generation and before. So that you in essence get a 500xp bonus for starting out a little smarter (as long as that IQ is within your final goal for the character). So one guy going 10/10/12 and then level up to 10/12/12, compared to 10/12/10 leveling up to the exact same 10/12/12 just lost 1000 XP and that "mistake" penalize you with more than 10 game nights without any XP?!?
I see why each change was made:
Straight XP per evening, with maybe a little bonus, is sooo much easier to keep track of. Good thinking, and almost every system out there has this model. But we forgot to take this straight gain into account when we set the XP costs.
40p+ monster characters made the game some what unplayable. So, make it more expensive at a certain level to reach those levels should solve that problem, right? Again good thinking, but the above solution didn't take this into account.
Skill monkeys with IQ in the twenties, just to have all the necessary talents for a spy/assasin or ranger or scholarly wizard or what ever, used to be a problem. Easy solution, let them buy talents separately so that IQ doesn't have to be raised. Again good thinking and we don't need our experienced rogue to be a super genius. But we run into problem of keeping track of the character points spent at buying extra talents if we use mIQ (which used to be the go-to solution for this), so have people spend a set number of XP for the talent; a fire and forget system without need for book keeping.
This truly was the easy way out. Sure it is an XP dump for those that can't/won't wait months of IRL play sessions to get some sort of level up on their characters at higher levels. But the side effects are many, artificial, gamey and strange. Especially when we already have mIQ system that works fine. And another often overlooked problem is that we now can't tell how much XP a character has spent by looking at the attributes. This in my eyes is a major flaw. Did that character start with IQ14 or IQ12, the difference is a 1000XP when we do the calculation backwards. And most GM usually have their players keep track of both current XP and spent XP. Or it used to be easy to count back wards if you needed total XP.
So, how should the XP system be fixed? It has been said before, it depends on the campaign, frequency of play and player expectations.
I think it would have been better to just present a system based on character points, be it mIQ for extra talents/spells and m/ST for mana in a staff or gold conversions or Fate point buys (or lesser wishes). Sure a few more values to have on your character sheet, but it would solve so many in game problems that it would be well worth it. And the mix of exponential XP costs and set costs would have been totally avoided. It wouldn't matter when you bought stuffs or in which order.
And the XP gain and XP costs should be left completely in the hands of the GM. You gain a character point at a mile stone or at the end of an adventure or at the end of an adventure series. You discuss the leveling speed before hand and then the GM keep track of the speed and the players of how the attribute points were spent. It is arbitrary and in the hands of the GM anyways, so why try to put it down on paper? Some GMs can and wants to handle high level play, others won't and as long as everyone involved knows what to expect it will be fine. Just discuss it beforehand.
And if you use the same character with another GM they can easily see your character's power level, and it doesn't really matter if your character spent a 100 gaming sessions to reach that level or 10 or you just made the character up on the spot.
In short the current system is probably as borked as the old one, just in different ways. And I don't think there will be any long lasting campaigns that will use it unaltered. Maybe a few that don't want to go down the unending road of house rulings, but if they do the XP-system will be one of the first house rules introduced.
Personally I would use an XP-system based on number of nights played. And then increase the number of nights per new attribute points by 1 for each "level"-up. So 1+2+3+4. It would make it slower and slower, but not in a drastic fashion. I would use the mIQ at a rate of 3:1, it seems to work well and present people with two good options. You would be able to save unused talent/spell points. If you raise IQ you also get one more talent. And if you want to spend stuff on m/ST for your staff I would probably put that around 3:1 as well. Limited wishes I would give out as Fate points in the way many other systems do; when you do something big, like ending an adventure it would reset to 1 if it had been spent. So if you didn't spend it before the final boss fight spend it there. XP for gold would be an advantage in my campaigns that should be off-set with some sort of disadvantage at character creation. But these would be my personal preferences and I expect to see all sorts of house rules on the XP-systems when playing with others.
And I still feel that Legacy is more a 1.5 or even a 1.25 version and not TFT 2.0 that I wished it to be. I hope the 2.0 version will come soon, I have my credit card ready! :-D
|