XP only for Questing: Some Observations

[mute688]

you are missing the point. often not killing in BG2 yields more xp than killing, however after the peaceful solution, you can still kill them for the extra xp. the lack of such xp would demotivate players from killing people with whom they reached an agreement. you can still opt to kill them from the start or even later, but you get no additional reward for doing so besides possible loot.

 

Isn't that an issue with quest design rather than the XP system? If the quest was given a completion flag after a succesful resolution which resulted in no added XP for solvng the same objective 3 times, there would be no problem. Or am I being obtuse?

[ogrezilla]

you are missing the point. often not killing in BG2 yields more xp than killing, however after the peaceful solution, you can still kill them for the extra xp. the lack of such xp would demotivate players from killing people with whom they reached an agreement. you can still opt to kill them from the start or even later, but you get no additional reward for doing so besides possible loot.

 

Isn't that an issue with quest design rather than the XP system? If the quest was given a completion flag after a succesful resolution which resulted in no added XP for solvng the same objective 3 times, there would be no problem. Or am I being obtuse?

if you get experience from multiple sources you could potentially end up with something like this happening.

 

I have a quest where I can talk this guy out of fighting, or I can kill him. I choose to talk him out of fighting, thus completing the quest and receive my experience. Then I immediately kill him and get the experience earned for killing things. Its not a quest reward this time, its combat experience. Or maybe I need to get an item from a castle. I can fight my way in or sneak in and steal it. It wouldn't be good balance if the combat method gave too much more experience due to the actual combat experience along the way PLUS the quest experience, so the sneaking version of the quest gives more experience. And then I go back in and kill everybody. This sort of thing would need to be carefully looked at in a LOT of situations if combat or other actions give experience. There would need to be some trigger that says that if I complete this guys quest and leave him alive, he shouldn't give me experience for killing him afterwords. If I have stolen the thingamajig from the castle using stealth I can't get experience for going back to kill the guards. As long as its worked out so you can't double dip in experience I really wouldn't have a problem with it, but its something that I've seen in games before.

Edited September 27, 2012 by ogrezilla

[mute688]

I personally wouldn't have a problem with the scenario you gave as long as the experience for completing the quest was substantially more that the XP for killing him after. If the XP for killing him after completing the quest was no different to killing a random mook, then I don't think it would be much incentive to kill him.

 

If the quest isn't flagged as completed after convincing him to not fight and you then receive a second lot of XP for the completed quest, that would be problematic but again would be a quest design problem, not an XP system problem.

[teknoman2]

as i said earlier, in the de arnise hold in bg2 you can sneak some dogmeat stew to a cell and have the uberhulks move away from your path. that gets 20k xp for each party member while killing them would give 6k to each. however you can still kill them after serving lunch and get a total of 26k. that means that if you opt for a certain approach you get penalized by getting a smaller reward.

Edited September 27, 2012 by teknoman2

[ogrezilla]

right, things like what Teknoman2 said are bad design. I personally don't really like quest only experience, but the game needs to be designed well enough so things like that don't happen.

[mute688]

Which to me is either an encounter design problem, in that too much experience is given for umberhulks in general (if that was the standard XP given for random umberhulk encounters) or a quest design problem if the usual umberhulk XP was substantially less.

 

It can make the XP system seem to not be working, but is actually a case of other systems being designed wrongly.

Edited September 27, 2012 by mute688

[lordgizka]

Well, imaginative solutions probably should yield more experience. As for the combat experience vs. questing experience problem, a system similar to Vampire:Bloodlines would solve this, if only dungeon crawling wasn't a substantial part of the game. As it stands, just give people an option to get extra exp by killing everything? I mean, it's their roleplaying.

[Merin]

I still think a more elegant solution is broadening your definition of "goal" or "encounter."

 

If you run into a random encounter of monster, for example, your only goal may be survival - which requires that you kill / drive off the monsters. XP rewarded. It wasn't a quest given to you or a goal in your journal... but when the encounter is generated, the reward condition is generated as well.

 

For the "sneak past or kill all in your way", it's obvious - the XP is for getting in the door... once you get in the door, plot flag drops. You can't get it for going through the door again, and fighting the guards after you sneak in gives you nothing but (if you're into that sort of thing) a fun combat.

 

Quite simply, you can arrange for the game to award XP for players who run characters that are only combat-oriented and kill their way through goals without resorting to XP per kill. On some occasions it will look similar or identical, but the subtle difference really de-emphasizes killing everything in sight "for the extra XP" strategy guide advice.

[Tuco Benedicto]

I still think a more elegant solution is broadening your definition of "goal" or "encounter."

 

If you run into a random encounter of monster, for example, your only goal may be survival - which requires that you kill / drive off the monsters. XP rewarded. It wasn't a quest given to you or a goal in your journal... but when the encounter is generated, the reward condition is generated as well.

Well, that's exactly how a "goal driven" exp system is supposed to work.

No one said it needs to be necessarily a wordy quest written on your journal.

Edited September 27, 2012 by Tuco Benedicto

[Cantousent]

The one thing I will say, again, is that objectives shouldn't reward xp based on difficulty or cleverness or how good or evil the method. Objective xp should be based entirely on how beneficial the outcome is for the PC. In some cases, there might not be any difference to how you overcome the obstacles, but in some cases there might be wildly different results depending on the method. Of course, that requires discretion on the part of the designers, but that would be true nevertheless.

[ogrezilla]

I still think a more elegant solution is broadening your definition of "goal" or "encounter."

 

If you run into a random encounter of monster, for example, your only goal may be survival - which requires that you kill / drive off the monsters. XP rewarded. It wasn't a quest given to you or a goal in your journal... but when the encounter is generated, the reward condition is generated as well.

 

For the "sneak past or kill all in your way", it's obvious - the XP is for getting in the door... once you get in the door, plot flag drops. You can't get it for going through the door again, and fighting the guards after you sneak in gives you nothing but (if you're into that sort of thing) a fun combat.

 

Quite simply, you can arrange for the game to award XP for players who run characters that are only combat-oriented and kill their way through goals without resorting to XP per kill. On some occasions it will look similar or identical, but the subtle difference really de-emphasizes killing everything in sight "for the extra XP" strategy guide advice.

ya this would be good. it just needs to be setup well.

[Merin]

I still think a more elegant solution is broadening your definition of "goal" or "encounter."

 

If you run into a random encounter of monster, for example, your only goal may be survival - which requires that you kill / drive off the monsters. XP rewarded. It wasn't a quest given to you or a goal in your journal... but when the encounter is generated, the reward condition is generated as well.

Well, that's exactly how a "goal driven" exp system is supposed to work.

No one said it needs to be necessarily a wordy quest written on your journal.

 

I realize this.

 

But too many people act as if it's "XP only for doing something for the guy with the ! over his head."

[TrashMan]

Which to me is either an encounter design problem, in that too much experience is given for umberhulks in general (if that was the standard XP given for random umberhulk encounters) or a quest design problem if the usual umberhulk XP was substantially less.

 

It can make the XP system seem to not be working, but is actually a case of other systems being designed wrongly.

 

Nope man - the problem is that the experience system like you favor encourage and condition players to kill everything anyway.

Even if the XP gain is small, it sill adds up.

[mute688]

Actually, I don't favour a particular experience system. I rarely pay any attention to what level I am, how much experience I have accumulated, how much XP to get to the next level, etc. I prefer to ignore that and simply play the game the way I want regardless of how, when or where experience is granted. I figure the devs have the sense to allocate enough XP throughout the game for me to be able to finish it, so I don't care about it. I was simply interested in the discussion.

[Maf]

After reading all these posts, I'm still unsure about how I feel about the different experience systems.

I do feel that playing with a higher difficulty and/or difficulty options (heart of fury like etc), should reward you appropriately.

But I'll trust Obsidian's choice here

[MReed]

After reading all these posts, I'm still unsure about how I feel about the different experience systems.

I do feel that playing with a higher difficulty and/or difficulty options (heart of fury like etc), should reward you appropriately.

But I'll trust Obsidian's choice here

 

If by "appropriately" you mean less, then I agree with you -- but somehow I don't think that's what you meant. Extra XP (or, for that matter, extra loot) = easier game, which rather defeats the purpose for playing on a higher difficulty level, doesn't it?

 

Anyway, my two cents:

 

If this was an open world RPG (e.g all MMOs, Oblivion, etc.) then yes, you should award XP for whatever the player does. But this is off-topic.

 

However, it isn't: This is a story driven game, and that means (at a 100k feet view) it is a game in which the player is forced / railroaded to a predefined conclusion via a series of per-determined events. Now, the player will have agency to chose the details of how you get from point A to point B, and that's what makes this a game instead of a movie / visual novel, but... Complaining that a game is "forcing you to complete quests" in a story based game is as silly as complaining that "I have to shoot bad guys in Call of Duty". Therefore, it is perfectly sensible to me to only aware XP for completing quests in P:E.