Troll Lord Games

I must say I'm a bit puzzled. Last night I CK'ed Temple of Elemental Evil. After the party had despatched the 6 bugbears, I began to tot up the experience. I noticed a startling difference...

I couldn't see any real differences between the 1e bugbear and the C&C bugbear. So how do I explain the difference in XP for each? In C&C it's 20+3 (giving 59 on average for each one) and an equivalent in the module was almost 200 for each one?

I immediately thought that the experience progression tables for the classes must be lower, but as I looked they were very close to the 1e progressions.

Any answers?
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Yes. Treasure=xp's as well. Plus I believe C&C also encourages story xp, and role play xp. Its been years, over a decade, but I think those were optional xp award methods in 1E.

I do as C&C recomends, but I do amend the xp value of treasure by what I perceived the difficulty of gaining it to be. So if it is real easy I may only give 10% of treasure value as xp. Real hard (IE near deaths/deaths, or several real close to zero HP's) 100%.

What it really comes down to is how fast or slow you want advancement to be. They had the xp requirement high to have slow advancement be the default, unless treasure amounts happen to be high. Irregardless, its up to what you want.

In 1e I always gave XP for non-magical gold received. In fact, the way C&C describes the XP awards it's very close, if not exact, to the way 1e did it. Which is why I can't explain the difference.

Taking a purely hypothetical example, one bugbear with 13hp and 11gp is equivalent to 70xp. Taking a level 1 fighter, he would need to kill 29 bugbears - on his own - just to go up to 2nd level - and these are 3 HD creatures!

It just doesn't seem right to me. Which is why I'm probably going to houserule it somehow.
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They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

Hey! Just noticed my rank is 'bugbear'!
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They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

babbage wrote:
So how do I explain the difference in XP for each?

C&C has slower progression, I suppose. I'm using the XP awards from the Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh book.

Congrats, you filthy Bugbear!
As for the progress, I was just taking a look over the bugbear. it is a bit slow, and I guess I just didn;t notice in my games because I award lots of ad-hoc XPs. Anyway you shake a monkey at the situation though, progression in C&C BtB is slower, no doubt.

......................................Omote

FPQ
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Duke Omote Landwehr, Holy Order of the FPQ ~ Prince of the Castles & Crusades Society

I think C&C's method of XP reward for monsters is good for the way I run the game. It allows more control over level progression, IMO and I can use it to encourage more RP for my newer and younger players. If I think that they need more XPs from during or after an adventure, I can assign game/adventure completion XPs as well.

So far, so good!
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Well back in Basic D&D, my DM hated treasure giving xp. He thought treasure was its own reward. It was silly that a 1d6HD goblin with 100gp in a backpack was worth more xp than the 2d8HD wolf he was riding! So instead of treasure xp, he gave 5x the listed combat xp. This system worked out well. We did not level up every session-- it was still a rare occurence, but more like once a month than once a year! It took 2 years of play for our characters to get past the 20th level mark.
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My AD&D DM also didn't like the idea of treasure or magical items giving an xp award. If you were able to figure out what an item does, all by yourself, through experimentation, he'd award you the xp for it, but otherwise, zilch.

He put together a system that gave a base of 500xp/level, awarded for roleplaying, and gave modified combat experience based on your class... thus fighters got double xp for all combat, rangers 1.5x for combat, 2x for giant class foes, paladins 1.5x, and 2x for evil... magicusers got nothing for hand-to-hand combat, but 2x for those defeated with spells...

It worked pretty well. He acknowledged that it didn't work so well for lower levels... you leveled pretty quickly, I think... but he usually started characters off at 4th level anyways, so it didn't matter for our campaign.

Having the PC's crawl up from 1st level, I've noticed how much slower the progression is than 3.X (where you got one level up for every 13 encounters, roughly). Add a high number of players (six), and we're slowly chunking along.

That leaves me to with options: give XP for treasure, or start padding the story rewards.
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I have read before you can use the 1e xp values and remove the treasure xp award and it will balance itself back out. Personally I like the 1e values over the C&C ones.
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I just worked up a document that I contributed to Dragonsfoot that give 1e style xp for monsters. If your interested shoot me an email at julian_grimm(at)yahoo(dot)com and I will e-mail you a copy of it.
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The issue I am having with experience is the stuff for magic items. I have been comparing XP values from the 1st edition DMG to the ones in M&T. Here are two examples of what I have found:

+2 (+3) Dwarven Thrower: XP value 1,500 in AD&D1, XP value 6,000 in M&T

Bag of Holding: XP value 5,000 in AD&D, XP Value 8,500 in C&C

It seems that in general, magic items net you more experience in C&C, and yet the level requirements are pretty comparable. There are, of course, guidelines on the treasure tables as to the maximum value of items awarded per treasure type...but those Treasure 1 guys seem to have a lot of scrolls and potions lying about. I guess that makes sense, but low level wizards need those +1 rings of protection. I feel that advancement is too slow without magic item XP but maybe a little too fast with it. I am probably going to use the AD&D1 values for the items that are the same and fudge the ones that aren't, if any.

Allen

Julian Grimm wrote:
I just worked up a document that I contributed to Dragonsfoot that give 1e style xp for monsters. If your interested shoot me an email at julian_grimm(at)yahoo(dot)com and I will e-mail you a copy of it.

Shot at email off. Thanks.
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Quote:
It seems that in general, magic items net you more experience in C&C, and yet the level requirements are pretty comparable.

The award for monsters is typically 33% of its AD&D brethren, so the "tripling" of magic rewards is a sort of counter... and, it also serves to prevent the CK from handing out too much, as each individual piece is "worth more" so, if the CK does decide to provide a ton of magic items the party advances quickly... as a sort of "high level characters should be the ones with the powerful items" and not "oh, you're a level one schmoe with an intelligent vorpal holy avenger." Having the XP amount for treasure be higher serves to gauge the "balance" of the item to the party, so that, as mentioned, something worth a crapton isn't allowed into the hands of no ones.

We use gold for xp but the way we do it is that the character pays someone to train him. The way it works is that a player would spend 1,000gp for 500xp. Its a good way for characters to get rid of all that extra money.

IMP

Hmm. Difficult balancing act, spinning plates, juggling knives, take your pick.

I like the idea of xp for gp because, as has been said elsewhere, it encourages the players to think of ways of getting the treasure without encountering the creatures along the way.

Having said that, I think it's unfair if the party overcomes half-a-dozen creatures which are more powerful than them, and because the creatures don't carry treasure as such get virtually nothing for the effort.

It's unreasonable to add in treasure just to boost the xp gained - that way lies monty haul.

Most of the problem, I think, is down to expectation. My players all hail from 1e and 2e backgrounds and expect a certain level of experience from each encounter, based on its difficulty, treasure or no treasure.

On the whole then, I think I will triple the monster xp (in line with Serleran's 'typically 33% of AD&D' comment), whilst reducing the xp for gp award.

I know this then throws the party back into the 'kill the monsters' mentality, but they are adult enough to know when to fight and when to run away.

When all is said an done, throwing money and treasure into my campaign to make up for the lack of monster xp would just ruin the economies of my campaign. If I want the party to progress at a certain pace, I will have to increase the award in a non-direct manner.
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They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

Does anybody just do Ad Hoc experience points?

I think that works the best: "OK, for tonight's session everbody gets X." Then there's no monster-hunt mentality, and no question of balancing the amount of treasure awarded. It also lets the DM adjust the rate of advancement.
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Sometimes my sessions turn into this, where I didn;t want to track XPs or thought that there would be some, unrewarding amoutn I just ad-hoc it.

...................................Omote

FPQ
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> Omote's Advanced C&C stuff <
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Although I've been DM'ing for 25 years or so, I've never felt comfortable with ad hoc experience. I either give too little, or too much. Ho hum.

I like guidelines, which is what the xp awards are supposed to represent.

Just had a quick thought though...

If I ran an adventure which said level 1 to 3 (i.e. start at 1 and end at 3), I could then define points in the adventure which, when reached gave the experience. So, if we say a fighter is typically average - (going off memory here which is never a good idea! ) - and needs 6001 to get to level 3, I can award 2000 at three distinct points, and forget all the monster/treasure xp.

The only difficulty with that is that there is no award for good ideas and roleplaying, still will need to do that. That's ad hoc, but I'm okay with that.
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They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

I'm seriously thinking of awarding monster XP to each party member instead of split. The way I look at it, if a fighter is alone and kills an orc, he gets the full xp. But if a fighter is with a group, and kills the orc in one attack by himself, the xp is split?? It may also alleviate the dislike of more PCs or NPCs because it means the monster xp gets split more.

Quote:
Does anybody just do Ad Hoc experience points?

No, but I don't even use XP anymore, as I feel it is not needed to play the game, and serves only to measure "accomplishment" in non-tangible ways. Now, how is that, when, arguably, everything the character is is based on the XP they have (level most decidedly which then correlates directly to HP, BtH, spell power and whatnot) but that is all a metagame thinking (and here, I mean the term as it was intended... thinking about the mechanics rather than the game.) The real tangible results are the in-game accomplishments achieved by the characters such as the slaying of the dragon or the cessation of the oncoming siege. This, too, is countered by such things as contacts, favors, and the obvious level awards, but one does not need XP to do such... anytime the CK feels the party has done enough to warrant an improvement, so be it. I find it frees the players into finding "other rewards" and consider different routes than what may, ordinarily, be a boring "we go and kill it" approach.

Just me, probably, but I abandoned the notion of XP a long time ago.

I'm all for simplicity - which is the reason I like C&C in the first place. To then have to keep track of individual accomplishments for awarding experience sort of defeats the objective for me.

I quite like Serleran's approach but it is too far down the road of 'CK knows best' for my liking. I'm all for compromise, me, so a middle approach - like the one I espoused above - sounds ideal. I don't need to keep track of individual awards, but I still need to award experience.

When all is said and done the game is class based, and their abilities are level based, as is everything they encounter. To completely do away with experience would give me too much of a headache - and then I wouldn't enjoy the game as much as I am.
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They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

serleran wrote:
Just me, probably, but I abandoned the notion of XP a long time ago.

So that begs a question...

I too dumped the concept of experience points quite a while ago. I just let people level whenever it seems to make sense in the campaign.

That worked fine for me in 3.x, where every class has the same xp chart. But I'm having a bit of a problem with it in C&C where the xp charts can be wildly different.

How do you deal with this issue, Serleran? Do you just say, "okay everone now gets x number of exp?" Or is it something else?

No, though I used that method for 3.X D&D when I was using the item creation feats and my "purcahsing feats" document where the only awarded XP was for roleplaying and not standard awards.

However, in C&C, I do not give XP at all, but simply say "ok, after the trials and tribulations, through the overcoming of significant threats to your bodily person, sanity, and the saving of the city.... you can all level." Now, don't get me wrong, wildly divergent "power levels" like a wizard and rogue, aren't going to advance together all the time, but I basically make sure everyone will level in succession when I want to shift the game to a "higher level" and stop using goblins and go with ogres, for example. I also use training which the characters can use between levels and when they advance they get something for it, but they have to spend money, time, and hope they can find a proper instructor. I also have "immediate leveling" which happens mid-adventure; here, they do not get benefits from training, but do get most of the standard level bonuses (ie, HD, BtH, greater spell access but not automatic spells [that requires training], and most class-based ability improvements.)

Its not any harder to not give XP in C&C than it is in any other game... one just has to ensure that the players are comfortable with it, and have faith in their CK. If I had players who wanted, or needed, the XP system, I'd use it.

I just don't like the calculating, tracking, and "feel" that is XP.

serleran wrote:
The award for monsters is typically 33% of its AD&D brethren, so the "tripling" of magic rewards is a sort of counter...

So if one wanted to do away with giving experience for magic items, would tripling the monster rewards be a good idea then?

Allen

Yes. Or, you can use Julian Grimm's altered XP system found in the C&C downloads section at Dragonsfoot. Tripling XP is easier, though.

I've used a rather loose XP rewards system in the past, but here is an excerpt from my house rules doc that explains how we will test drive our new EPP in our game...

****

I'm not a fan of the C&C EPP (Experience Point Progression) since it is really slow in advancing the characters - probably more so than 1e or 2e. At the same time I'm not a fan of the fast D&D 3.5 method. However I want to run adventures in such a way that the players don't have to wait 3 years to get to level 8. In the past I've been very loose in terms of ruling XP rewards - I've used no official system, but I want to change that. Therefore for a quick paced approach to XP and Level Advancement, my alternative EPP will be used...

Each HD of a creature earns 100 XP, 25% more if the creature has significant powers above any other creature of equal HD, 50% more if the creature is exceptionally difficult or 100% more if it is extremely powerful for it's HD. This works out to about 15-20 encounters per level if I use the C&C method of HD for judging the 3.5 equivalent of Challenge Ratings. For example, a level 1 Thief would have to fight off 15 rats of 1HD, where as a Fighter would have to fight off 20. Rats may not be that tuff, but try killing 20 of them when you only have 8 or 10 HP yourself!

Story rewards will be handed out rather loosely but for rules sake, here is a more standard ruling

For each successful completion of major modules/adventures, I will give out Bonus XP at a rate of 500 multiplied by the average level rated for the adventure. So a module of levels 1-3 would give out 1000 Bonus XP.

The above EPP rewards are based on a group of characters, therefore in the end, I will divide the total by the number of characters (including any NPCs), dead or alive, during the encounter.

For individual accomplishments, I will give out XP on a case by case basis, but a standard rule is 100 XP per your level for exceptional ideas and Role-playing. Role-Playing being a major factor in my XP rewards!

As you can see, you can advance quite quickly if you use your wits and Role-playing and not rely solely on the HACK AND SLASH aspect!

I will absolutely NOT give out rewards for gold or treasure found, as I believe they are rewards in themselves and should not be the source of more rewards!

*****
The rewards for HD are given out not only for killing the creatures, but for avoiding them or dealing with them in whatever creative manner they players come up with. Fractions may be used in cases where they only half defeat or half deal with teh threath.

This is just a base system from which I will no doubt flex as I hand out rewards.

Most of my problem is due to the fact that I am using old modules - the experience awards just don't translate well. I can convert the monsters but I'd rather use everything 'as is'. Then I hit upon a neat idea... 'experience waypoints'.

I took all the classes in C&C and created an 'average' experience point progression table (including half-levels). I then sprinkle these 'experience waypoints' throughout the adventure. Once the party reaches that point in the story, they are awarded that experience. Because not all classes progress at the same rate, some are higher, some lower.

This allows me a few tools: I can ensure the party is at a suitable level for the adventure without massaging the encounters too much. The party can wander off and do other things and either take forever to reach the next waypoint (an 'ad hoc' waypoint or two can be incorporated but they don't get the experience twice!), or they can end up way over their heads and - if lucky - go up quite quickly, or (more likely) end up dying a thousand deaths.

So, for example...

The party are all 1st level. The '0.5th experience waypoint' is reached and I award that amount of experience. Nobody goes up a level. Eventually the '1st experience waypoint' is reach and I award that amount of experience. A couple of players go up a level (usually the rogue and bard!). And so on...

I can do this ad-hoc as well. If the party is now mostly 4th level and wanders into a kobold cave and wipes them out, either they'd get nothing or only a '0.5th level' award. The award is relative to what level party I think would find the encounters a challenge (beyond a point though, no experience should be awarded).

Most importantly of all though, because I have abstracted this I can chuck in magic items and monetary rewards and award no experience for them - of course, I need to ensure I keep such rewards in check.

I've adopted this system because I can then closely monitor the party, ensure they don't veer too far away from the adventure they are doing but much more importantly - I don't need to work anything out! 8)
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They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

I tend to triple the XP of encounters at character levels 1-5 and double it thereafter. I also do not give out XP for gold received. So far it's been working pretty well, and I might even continue to triple XP for the characters after they reach level 6 and beyond, Im undecided at this point. XPs are earned by overcoming problems, not necessarily by killing stuff alone, so if the party causes creatures to flee from combat or surrender they still get xp and I also give challenges such as traps and puzzles a rough level of HD for purposes of overcoming them.