Experience Points

[Helborn]

There are three options to solve low stats (32 points means few talents/spells or bad survival rates), low XP gains per session and high costs of talents and spells and mana.


1) start players at 36 or 40 points
2) raise the XP given per session so that a player earns enough to gain a stat or talents or spell either every session or every other session.
3) lower the costs of talents and spells and mana


My solution is to use #3 with my players. I also use the Fibonacci sequence rather than SJ's exponential.
But then this discussion goes under the heading of House Rules.

[Zimzerveran]

Originally Posted by Helborn

There are three options to solve low stats (32 points means few talents/spells or bad survival rates), low XP gains per session and high costs of talents and spells and mana.


1) start players at 36 or 40 points
2) raise the XP given per session so that a player earns enough to gain a stat or talents or spell either every session or every other session.
3) lower the costs of talents and spells and mana


My solution is to use #3 with my players. I also use the Fibonacci sequence rather than SJ's exponential.
But then this discussion goes under the heading of House Rules.

So, 100, 100, 200, 300, 500, 800, etc. for attributes. Do you do the same for talents? Or are they still a static 500?

[David Bofinger]

So many alternate XP systems seem to be entirely ad hoc: "Here are some numbers I made up which I think are really good". Really, the question boils down to "how many sessions do you want a PC to stay at a particular number of attributes before progressing" then multiply the answer by however many XP you expect players to earn a session, which according to Legacy might be around 50 or 60.

On this basis, and assuming the players play one session a week, Legacy's XP system thinks a good time is:

• 2 weeks at 32 points
• 2 weeks at 33 points
• 4 weeks at 34 points
• 5-6 weeks at 35 points
• 2-3 months at 36 points
• 4-5 months at 37 points
• 9 months at 38 points
• a year and a half at 39 points
• ...

Given that character progression is a big part of the game and something players find fun, it seems crazy to choke it off this way. Is it really reasonable to expect a player to play the game for months between character progressions?

Instead I think these times should be constant or near-constant: at least as long as it takes for a character to fully experience playing the character at that level, and not as long as it takes to get bored of playing the character at that level. Therefore the experience costs should also be flat or near-flat. I suggest 3-5 sessions, say about 200 to 250 XP, as a reasonable time/cost to gain an attribute. I don't see any solid reason why this should get longer as the character rises in capability.

This reasoning breaks down at whatever level of power the GM thinks is as high as (s)he wants characters to go. A bit before that level, costs ought to start doubling. But that might be where the character or campaign gets retired anyway. Most importantly, this level ought to be campaign-dependent, not fixed by the rules.

The fixed price could also be determined by how many XPs are expected to be earnt during the campaign, divided by how increases are desired over the course of the campaign. If we expect the campaign to last for forty sessions, and for characters to reach 40 attributes toward the end, perhaps 250 XP per advance would be appropriate.

The core idea here is that we can generate character progression tables to solve particular problems, rather than just making something up that seems at that moment reasonable.

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by Helborn

I also use the Fibonacci sequence rather than SJ's exponential.

The Fibonacci sequence is an exponential, in the same sense SJ's table is. It's a somewhat slower exponential, about 70% as fast as the doubling preferred by SJ, but with similar consequences. The question we should ask is, "Why use an exponential at all?"

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by hcobb

If you want to allow for Tollenkars in the game you will need to switch from exponential to quadratic XP costs like this:

https://www.hcobb.com/tft/new_spells.html#gameplay

Your curve starts out exponential and finishes linear. There is no sense in which it is quadratic.

[hcobb]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

Your curve starts out exponential and finishes linear. There is no sense in which it is quadratic.

Attribute total, total XPs to get there, XPs under legacy, 1st edition
38th 2,300XP 2,300XP 1,000XP
39th 4,300XP 4,300XP 1,250XP
40th 7,300XP 8,300XP 1,500XP
41st 11,300XP 16,300XP 2,500XP
42nd 16,300XP 32,300XP 3,500XP
43rd 22,300XP 64,300XP 4,500XP
44th 29,300XP 128,300XP 5,500XP

Linear would be the same sized step every time. Quadratic has steps that increase by a constant amount each time. Exponential has a step size as a multiple of the current value.

[TippetsTX]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

So many alternate XP systems seem to be entirely ad hoc: "Here are some numbers I made up which I think are really good". Really, the question boils down to "how many sessions do you want a PC to stay at a particular number of attributes before progressing" then multiply the answer by however many XP you expect players to earn a session, which according to Legacy might be around 50 or 60.

This is the right approach... determine what is the desired pace of progression first and then design your system to support it. Ideally, however, the XP awarded should also scale somewhat along with progression costs IMO.

At the end of the day, the goal is to keep your players engaged and invested in achieving their next character milestone. Too much time between advancement just leads to player frustration, in my experience.

[larsdangly]

That's what I do in campaign play, with the twist that I had out awards in two 'dollops': more per hour of play when something juicy happens and less when not.

But I do think that a game with a different goal could have very different rewards. You could tie it to accomplishments, rolls, fights, money, whatever.

[TippetsTX]

Absolutely! Variety is the spice of life after all.

I like having multiple things to spend XP on, but as you say, there are many other ways to reward characters.

[Nils_Lindeberg]

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