Quote:
Originally Posted by HeatDeath
"Conan the Wizard" isn't the only problem the new XP guidelines are trying to solve.
Any old-school dungeon-crawl system is going to have a distinct tendency to degenerate into a bunch of teenagers (mental, if not physical) indulging their sociopathic tendencies as a bunch of medieval superhuman murderhobos, but the old system of XP for landed blows and coups-de-grace positively encouraged it.
Steve writes at length in the Companion essay about how distasteful he finds that style of play. It's no surprise whatsoever that he took the opportunity to rip that dynamic out by the roots.
The increased emphasis on talents at high experience levels is a pretty clear attempt to shift the emphasis from raw progression-as-a-goal-in-itself to roleplaying, per se. I'm not seeing how the proposals here are much more than just an attempt to re-enshrine murderhobo-ism at the heart of the progression system.
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Fortunately, I never experienced that kind of gameplay in TFT (though I certainly did in AD&D) so I don't think you can hang that on the ruleset. And shifting the progression emphasis away from stats to talents will not remove the possibility of gameplay degeneration into 'murderhobo-ism' since all you are doing is redefining what it means to achieve true power as a character.
On the subject of how XP is awarded, however, I strongly believe that a well-balanced approach includes both quantitative and qualitative elements (see one of my previous posts). Rewarding nothing
but monster-killing, gold-grabbing behavior (I find treasure-driven XP to be particularly objectionable) is what leads to 'murderhobo-ism' IMO. It has nothing to do with how XP is eventually spent.