PrimeJunta

@Logos: Systemic XP rewards use of the systems whenever possible, whether it makes sense for any other reason or not. All the IE games I've played except BG2 had respawning enemies. BG2 didn't have grinding, but it had other ways of farming XP by doing boring and repetitive things, some of which Hassat Hunter listed earlier in his excellent post. Systemic XP makes sense only in games where the game is the system -- roguelikes for example. In plot- or quest-based games, it doesn't. This is a problem that's inherent to systemic XP. You can slap Band-Aids on it in ways Stun has described above, but it remains a problem even so. I do not see why you'd want it since it's so easy to avoid the problem in the first place. All the IE games except the IWD's would have been better with hand-placed XP only. Nothing you guys can say will convince me otherwise.

I love you too, @Sarex. <3

You don't find repetitively killing the same enemies over and over boring? Then we're just going to have to disagree about it.

Edit: never mind, I'm done with this discussion.

@Logos. Please read the thread. There's nothing wrong to play a game to get XP. XP is a major incentive that directs your gameplay in fact. The problem is if the XP rewards are set so that you get maximum XP for playing the game in one particular way, because that reduces the degree to which the game supports diversity in gameplay, and it's much worse if that particular way is really boring -- like farming, for example. In that case, the game's systems reward boring behavior. I don't play games to get bored. Therefore, I prefer incentive systems which reward interesting behavior. Capeesh? As a bit of a tangent, I think one reason we're talking at cross-purposes here is that some of you appear to take the game's systems as some weird laws of nature, with the game somehow emerging from them. That getting XP for killing things is just the way things are, or should be. I OTOH think of the game as a designed artifact. It has systems which model actions and objects, reward some kinds of interactions with them (e.g. clever use of tactics in combat) while punishing other kinds of interactions with them (e.g. dumb use of tactics in combat). The XP system isn't something that's just there; it's designed, and it's designed to server particular purposes, namely character advancement, and to direct player behavior by rewarding activities the designers think should be rewarded. I.e., what you guys are saying sounds to me just fundamentally stupid. From where I'm at, you're demanding that the game rewards boring activities. That makes no sense to me.

@Stun, yes, you've made it abundantly clear that you're not bothered by unbalanced, borderline-broken game systems, nor do you mind playing games with sub-optimal strategies just for the challenge. Good for you. I'm not like that. I tend to respond to the incentives games give me. If they incentivize boring behavior, I engage in boring behavior. Then I get bored, then I quit. Therefore, I have an extremely strong preference for systems that do not incentivize boring behavior. Your molehill is my mountain. So sue me. (And yes, if the game has other good things about it, I tolerate bad systems to some degree. That line lies somewhere between BG2 and Arcanum. Never managed to complete Arcanum because it has such horrid systems, despite being awesome in just about every other way.) Edit: what I don't get, though, is that given your high tolerance for broken systems, why do even care about kill XP vs hand-placed XP?

@Ondb no it's not. However long the individual actions take, they're not synced. Fred the Fighter starts attack (30 ticks) at tick 0, Wanda the Wizard starts her spellcasting (90 ticks) at tick 35, Tony the Thief his escape move (15 ticks) at tick 44, while Marky the Mook swings at Fred (30 ticks) on tick 15. This means the actions will finish at ticks 29, 124, 59, and 45, respectively. I.e. your "turns" don't start and end at synchronized times, and the actions all happen at once. You can set all kinds of auto-pause conditions of course—hence, real-time with pause—but it's not the same thing at all as turn-based where every character takes an action on his turn, while the others wait until their turn.

Stun... I think you're still missing the point of our criticism. Well, mine at least. It's this. A bit long, but hey. I believe that good cRPG's have no single best way to play them. This applies at all levels: no single best party, no single best build, no single best thief build, no single best way to play a thief. One of the main reasons cRPG's appeal to me is that there are lots of different approaches with different advantages and drawbacks. So, one measure of excellence for a RPG system is how well it supports diversity in gameplay, parties, builds, and tactics. The IE games—well, most of them—did this pretty well, certainly a lot better than most modern cRPG's. You could play with a full party, half party, or solo; you had lots of classes, kits, and subclasses to play with; you had lots of spells and gear and even some specializations to choose from. And you had a lot to do. With me so far? Now: the problem with systemic XP—kill XP like in all of them; lockpicking or spell-learning XP like in BG2—is that it detracts from this crucial aspect. If dealing with a trap with a thief gives XP, but sending a summon to trip it doesn't, then playing with a thief in the party becomes objectively better. It becomes the right, favored way to play the game. Same with kill XP: since XP is objectively good—there's never any reason you would not want XP, assuming you want to become as powerful as you can—there's never any reason not to kill everything you see. Killing things becomes the right way to play the game, rather than sneaking, talking, or finding ways around them, even if the game's makers put in these possibilities. As you've pointed out, it's possible to balance things out by hand-placing XP for these other approaches. Yes. However, this is not necessarily easy to get right, and you have to also make these rewards somehow disable the systemic rewards they're there to offset. That's yet more work, and also often makes the game worse in other ways—where did all the beasties suddenly disappear? why can't I pick this lock? why don't I get any XP for killing this critter after all? All of this can be avoided simply by not having systemic XP at all, and making all XP hand-placed and tied to the objectives you're trying to achieve. Is it flawless? Of course not. Not rewarding combat does make avoiding combat the more attractive solution. The solution to that is in the map and quest design. Make some combat unavoidable and make it challenging to avoid combat. Yes, it would be boring if you could run past or sneak around every fight with every party. However, it would not be boring if, say, avoiding fights in the wilderness required that you have a wilderness-proficient scout in your party, and that you used that scout effectively to plan your moves so you can avoid those annoying beetles. This way, you have two viable strategies to attack wilderness maps, both of which give you a different experience but roughly similar results. You can build a party and tactics that kills wildlife as efficiently as possible. Or you can build a party that avoids hostile wildlife as efficiently as possible. The first party will get a few monster bits and other minor loot but will expend more resources fighting them. The second party will avoid spending the fighting resources, but will miss out on the monster bits. Being relatively minor, they're not all that hard to balance, and you won't have to deal with all the possible double-XP traps you'd get with systemic XP. This is good. Finally: BG2 isn't broken. It's a hell of a good game overall. Many of its particular mechanics, though, are broken. Criticizing these mechanics or other aspects of the game does not make us "IE game haters." Slinging around epithets like that isn't very helpful IMO. And I believe quite strongly that BG2 would have been an even better game with better mechanics, including for XP.

Who are you and what did you do to the real Volourn?

Hand-placed is not necessarily arbitrary. That be strawman, yo. Killing only what it makes sense to kill in order to achieve your objectives is not metagaming in the least. On the contrary, it's playing the game intelligently and in character. As to hand-placed vs systemic, I already addressed that: systemic is better for pure dungeon crawlers, hand-placed is better for quest-driven. PS:T and BG2 would have been better games with hand-placed XP. The IWD's not so much, although they would have been no worse if the XP had been intelligently placed. NetHack or Diablo would not work without systemic XP.

No. Stun... just... no. PS:T remains my favorite game of all time, but many of its systems were badly broken, and of those systems, the XP system is the worst. If you think it's an example of how they should work I just... no. I'm at a loss for words, and that rarely happens.

Yeah, that was great. Memory! Six million XP! Answer a riddle for a skeleton! Sixty-five thousand XP! Trinket that turns into a reusable dungeon with infinite kill XP grinding! Sewers with even more infinite kill XP! The XP system in PS:T was horrid and ridiculous, and a result of shoehorning the game into the AD&D mechanical mold it didn't fit. Chris Avellone has admitted as much himself.

That would be systemic. Not if the rewards were hand-placed. Systemic reward = reward that is automatically granted based on a general rule. "Kill monster of type T = X XP." "Pick lock of difficulty D = Y XP." Hand-placed reward = reward that is, uh, hand-placed. I think mixing hand-placed and systemic XP is inherently problematic. It becomes hard to balance and tends to lead to perverse incentives. Rewards should be placed to incentivize the kind of behavior the game designers think is fun. Systemic XP works great for pure dungeon crawls. Hand-placed XP works better for narrative- or quest-based games.

You know what the real joke here is? No one here even remotely suggested a systematic XP reward system. Tartantyco literally decided to Soapbox against it...in a vacuum. Kill XP is systemic XP.

Yes, systemic XP is inherently problematic because it tends to create farming opportunities, which tend to upset game balance. Avoiding or overcoming these problems is usually possible but it's a lot of work. They can be avoided altogether by hand-placing all XP.

Wouldn't the solution, then, be to reward players with an equal amount of XP for engaging in combat or avoiding it? Why totally eliminate the rewards for one of the options? That would work too. It would just be seriously more fiddly for the developers to balance, plus if they wanted to avoid incentivizing behavior like sneaking past fo the sneak XP and then returning to kill them for the kill XP, they'd have to deal with those situations as well. I'm confident the current solution will work just about as well with much less work, if they just design the maps intelligently -- that sometimes it's possible to avoid combat, sometimes not, and sometimes it's only possible under certain circumstances. The only area I'm mildly concerned about is the megadungeon; whacking things for XP is fairly central to dungeoneering. Curious to see how they address that.

Long hair isn't as easy as it sounds, because it'll bump into the rest of the model. You'll have to sort out how it adjusts to the clothing and armor too. I'd rather they spent their limited resources on something else.

No, I don't. However, I don't know if that is actually the best way to play a heavily armored paladin. Be a bit surprised actually.

I'm with Stun. I don't like doing pointless things in games. Where I differ with Stun—I think?—is that I don't think lack of combat XP necessarily makes combat pointless. It's quite easy to set up maps so that combat is either inevitable, or you have to work equally hard to avoid it as you would to engage in it, or to have a nice mix of both. Successfully sneaking past or otherwise avoiding a group of enemies can be very satisfying too. What would not be good is if one or the other was consistently the only way or best way to resolve a situation. It would not be fun if the most efficient way to play P:E would be to always run away from enemies. I would like it, however, if for example you could pump wilderness skills in your scout so she could suss out the enemy patrols, so you could then avoid them with careful timing and choice of path... and then got to a dungeon where you had enemies actively guarding chokepoints with no way past except through them. And I believe that no kill XP makes the above kinds of situations better. If you did have kill XP, then scouting and avoiding contact in the wilderness would cause you to lose out on XP, which would make it an objectively weaker strategy, which would make for less variety.

I did bind jump to something or other and taped it down while hopping around Tamriel. To level up Athletics. Boing boing boing. @BrokenMask IIRC Morrowind didn't have level scaling. Never finished Oblivion because it had it to such an absurd degree, and never bothered with Skyrim.

More: all the Elder Scrolls games. No kill XP, you improve your skills by practice and level up by practicing your primary skills. (Which, incidentally, incentivizes really boring behavior. I spent what felt like hours repeatedly blocking an attack by a rat to level up my block skill. I was younger then.)

Darklands didn't have kill XP either, I believe.

Off the top of my head, Vampire: the Masquerade (PnP) and VtM: Bloodlines (cRPG), Shadowrun Returns (cRPG), Numenera (PnP and certainly the upcoming cRPG), Call of Cthulhu (PnP). I don't remember if original DnD had kill XP or it was awarded only for treasure. And yes, I've played all of those.

How would you get that without making every fight easily winnable simply by having a party of melee DPS characters, Ctrl+A, click on enemy, repeat until dead? From where I'm at it's much more interesting if you have to play tactically in order to get your DPS characters to where they can dish out the damage without getting killed. My only concern with combat as shown in the videos was the strategic durability of the fighter. It's fairly basic tactics to have a tank hold the line, then outflank with other units to do the damage. If the tank's health gets bled off so quickly you have to rest after every battle, that's not so great. OTOH we don't know exactly what went into that fighter and how well Adam played to its strengths -- if you can pump health and deflection and improve durability with (self-)buffs (at the expense of DPS, for example), then that tactic's perfectly viable and interesting again.

@Iucounu true, but beside the point.