XP from training / study

[Conradine]

Realism is a very subjective concept.

Let's be honest: talking about realism in a world where the Tarrasque exist, and that Tarrasque can hypothetically be gutted by a Furious Berserker halfling, is quite a long shot.
Yet, I think some kind of realism, or at least internal consistency can be achieved.

All adventure books and manual are filled with non adventurer characters that are mid to high level. I don't think that every mage and evry cleric managed to slaughter a dozen of monsters or more to reach their status.

So: if you had to establish some guidelines to define how characters gain experience through non figthing, non adventurer activities, what would you do?

[Kelb_Panthera]

Experience is rewarded for overcoming challenges, not just killing monsters. This is how it's always been in 3e.

If a character has a short-term goal, and takes effort to overcome the obstacles to reaching that goal, he gets XP. Simple as that. How much XP he gets is dependent on how difficult those obstacles are and how much threat they pose to him.

The default challenge that everyone's very familiar with is: survive this potentially deadly encounter with a hostile creature(s). You can get the same XP by killing the creature, forcing it to flee, or successfully escaping from it. In all cases, you've reached the goal; you survived.

More nebulous example: negotiate a truce between two warring city-states. The encounter level (EL) of such would be set by the DM using the skill check DC's and/or levels of the diplomats they must overcome. The lack of any personal danger cuts the XP reward in half (precedent set by CW's guidelines for non-lethal combat contests) unless duplicitous envoys are attempting to whack people with poisoned beverages, cursed items, mental domination, etc.

Split the difference: Get into a guarded site and abscond with the mcguffin. If you get in and out clean, without being spotted by the guards, you get XP for each guard you directly overcame by successfully avoiding that particular guard's notice (maybe a small bonus if you also succesfully sneak-gank them and hide the bodies) and any booby traps you slipped past without triggering.


Ultimately this is a bit like cooking; there're some formulas to draw on but there's also a bit of artistry and subjective judgement to be used. Good luck.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Buy a thought bottle and befriend a natural lycanthrope of your alignment. Allow yourself to be infected, then store your new XP total, since your effective character level is now much higher. Cure your lycanthropy, then retrieve your XP total. Enjoy gaining several levels in no time flat. Repeat ad infinitum.

[Conradine]

Thanks for the contributions but I fear I have not explained what I mean.

On a purely theorical level, how much experience would gain a soldier who is seriously training in order to become a better fighter, or a mage studying in a library to get more powerful spell?

In short, could a character realistically level up without taking any kind of risk ( of death, being imprisoned, punished ecc. ) undergoing a serious and prolonged regimen of self improvement? By doing activity that can be repeated ( training, study, meditation, prayer, research ecc. ), not specific tasks ( quests ).

[Conradine]

I thought about training. In Complete Warrior there are rules for tournaments, with non lethal fighting giving half xp. But if levelling was so easy, every serious soldier would continuosly level up by sparring with his equally devoted sparring parterns, and everyone would reach epic levels.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Be a level 1 wizard with access to Precocious Apprentice (ray of stupidity). Go find a high CR animal that is fairly docile, such as an elephant. Cast ray of stupidity. Enjoy gaining lots of XP. If you want to do this a lot all at once, take some spell level reducers, such as Sanctum Spell and Forceful Magic, and apply them when you make a scroll. Those two alone will allow you to scribe ray of stupidity as a cantrip, with zero loss in power. Then you can take out whole herds at once, especially once you've gained a couple of levels and have higher level spell slots you can metamagic up (like, say, Split Ray, and Chain Spell). Elephants in particular are easy to pick off once you have access to alter self, as you can snipe them using a flying form, and they won't be able to do anything about it.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Thanks for the contributions but I fear I have not explained what I mean.

On a purely theorical level, how much experience would gain a soldier who is seriously training in order to become a better fighter, or a mage studying in a library to get more powerful spell?

In short, could a character realistically level up without taking any kind of risk ( of death, being imprisoned, punished ecc. ) undergoing a serious and prolonged regimen of self improvement? By doing activity that can be repeated ( training, study, meditation, prayer, research ecc. ), not specific tasks ( quests ).

You can, indeed, level without -much- risk but it's extremely slow going. If you have -no- risk then it's unlikely that whatever you were doing could rightly be called a challenge.


I thought about training. In Complete Warrior there are rules for tournaments, with non lethal fighting giving half xp. But if levelling was so easy, every serious soldier would continuosly level up by sparring with his equally devoted sparring parterns, and everyone would reach epic levels.

That's not sparring they're talking about in that section. That's full contact combat where both parties have agreed not to deliberately kill each other. It takes quite a while for the nonlethal damage from such an encounter to heal naturally and it's prohibitively expensive to get magical healing after every such bout.

Proper training; drilling techniques, light-contact sparring, practice grappling, etc; isn't worth half XP. It -may- be worth 1/8th to 1/4 for a whole day of training (8 hours) and the DMG suggests that it takes -weeks- of training to improve skills and pick up feats when you already have the XP, along with comensurate gold costs for training materials and trainers' time (that could be subsidized as part of training with the city guard or militia or such). That's also when you're training with someone better than you. Trying to make progress with a lesser opponent or even an equal, without the supervision of an expert, should certainly take more, perhaps significantly more, time; perhaps a month per 2 ranks +1 feat.

Given the time involved and the -necessity- of doing other things to avoid starvation and pay for training materials, it rightly takes years to make significant progress if you're unwilling to stick your neck out.

[Conradine]

Proper training; drilling techniques, light-contact sparring, practice grappling, etc; isn't worth half XP. It -may- be worth 1/8th to 1/4 for a whole day of training (8 hours)


That would mean 50 to 100 yearly XP. It's 20 years of moderate training or 10 years of intense and dedicated training to become a Level 2 Fighter. 30-40 years to reach level 3.

Well, you want to know a thing? I agree.
A level 2 Fighter may look nothing special but it's quite a badass, able to to strike down several common soldiers single-handedly.
A level 3 is a master, the kind of fighter that a common person sees as nearly invincible, not simply tough.



That's not sparring they're talking about in that section. That's full contact combat where both parties have agreed not to deliberately kill each other. It takes quite a while for the nonlethal damage from such an encounter to heal naturally and it's prohibitively expensive to get magical healing after every such bout.

Actually, it takes just a couple of weeks to fully recover from a non lethal beating. Anyway, I guess most sane minded people would not do it often due pain and scars.

[Crake]

Buy a thought bottle and befriend a natural lycanthrope of your alignment. Allow yourself to be infected, then store your new XP total, since your effective character level is now much higher. Cure your lycanthropy, then retrieve your XP total. Enjoy gaining several levels in no time flat. Repeat ad infinitum.

you missed a step. being infected with lycanthropy doesn't actually change your xp total, just your ECL. What you need to do is have yourself drained of a level, which DOES change your xp total, THEN store your xp in the thought bottle and cure yourself of lycanthropy

[MaxiDuRaritry]

you missed a step. being infected with lycanthropy doesn't actually change your xp total, just your ECL. What you need to do is have yourself drained of a level, which DOES change your xp total, THEN store your xp in the thought bottle and cure yourself of lycanthropyDrained and then restored? A bit more expensive, but doable.

[Kelb_Panthera]

That would mean 50 to 100 yearly XP. It's 20 years of moderate training or 10 years of intense and dedicated training to become a Level 2 Fighter. 30-40 years to reach level 3.

Well, you want to know a thing? I agree.
A level 2 Fighter may look nothing special but it's quite a badass, able to to strike down several common soldiers single-handedly.
A level 3 is a master, the kind of fighter that a common person sees as nearly invincible, not simply tough.

I meant 1/8th to 1/4 of the xp they would gain for an encounter with an equal level foe. Say two level 5 warriors are training together, that'd be worth between 187 and 375 XP on a day that you could spare for training. Tack on a couple weeks of training to actually increase the skill ranks and pick up the feats between levels after gaining the necessary XP to level and you still get a pretty long stretch of time to level.

This, compared to the fact you can earn enough XP to level from 1 to 20 in a shade under 2 months as a bog-standard adventurer seems reasonable, especially if you go with the "necessity is the mother of invention" paradigmn of allowing proper adventurers to forgoe the training that is necessary for more risk-averse people.



Actually, it takes just a couple of weeks to fully recover from a non lethal beating. Anyway, I guess most sane minded people would not do it often due pain and scars.

A couple of weeks is a rather dramatically long time compared to the few minutes that magic can get the task done. Though, I wonder at your math; a couple weeks?

1hp/level/day on a d12 +4 will get you from 1hp (the minimum for normal, natural healing) to full health in about 10 days and that's about as long as it could -reasonably- take. If it's just non-lethal damage, rather than lethal damage short of killing, then change days to hours for the same math. It's still dramatically slower than magical healing but it's not -that- bad.

[MesiDoomstalker]

I think your missing that those non-adventuring NPC's with several levels under their belt have never had a risky encounter. In fact, I'd wager that any NPC with at least 5 class levels (especially those with PC class levels) have been in a plethora of at least risky encounters. The difference is the frequency and relative danger compared to adventurers.

But if you want a mechanic for training of whatever variety to grant EXP gain, give them 1/4th EXP for an CR (ECL-2) encounter for every week spent training. That way a months worth of hard core training lends to one CR (ECL-2) encounter, which means well over a years worth of non-stop training will net you one level.

[NichG]

I would just avoid trying to make it about specific events. Just say - all characters actively using their class abilities gain 500xp a year even if they have no encounters. For long-lived races (>100yr), this is reduced to 100xp a year due to a tendency towards stagnation. Undead and immortals older than 500 years stop gaining XP in this way entirely - they cannot grow without outside intervention. Receiving active training from a same or higher level character doubles this so long as the skills are related. Competitive rivalries also count as receiving instruction. A character who does nothing but study their craft for a year can spend 1000gp per year per level to double this again, for a maximum x4 multiplier.

This makes a master with 30 years of experience in their trade about Lv6 on average. An ancient elf wizard who has been doing magic peacefully for 300 years is about Lv8. A rich elf being groomed for arcane power is provided trainers and does nothing but study for 300 years and ends up Lv16 and pays over a million gold to get there.

It's just so slow that it's irrelevant for PCs.

[Ashtagon]

One classic paradigm was essentially that you got token XP for killing monsters, and you could spend treasure on training in town, converting at a rate of 1 gp to 1 xp.

[Conradine]

I meant 1/8th to 1/4 of the xp they would gain for an encounter with an equal level foe. Say two level 5 warriors are training together, that'd be worth between 187 and 375 XP on a day that you could spare for training. Tack on a couple weeks of training to actually increase the skill ranks and pick up the feats between levels after gaining the necessary XP to level and you still get a pretty long stretch of time to level.


In my opinion, that would be too easy.

Let's take two devoted martialists ( Monks or Fighters; or both; let's call them Tori and Uke ). Let's suppose they take the minimum xp from your method ( 37.5 - level ). That means just 28 days of sparring to get enough xp to level up.
It means getting to level 20 xp in less than two years.
Let's say it takes another 6 months to get the 6 feats and 40-50 months for 80-100 points in several skills, up to level 20. It means 12 - 15 years, more or less.

Following that scheme, it would take at max 16 years to get to level 20, without an higher level instructor and without risking your neck.



A couple of weeks is a rather dramatically long time compared to the few minutes that magic can get the task done. Though, I wonder at your math; a couple weeks?

Well, I have not done a precise math. Roughly two weeks. :smallbiggrin:



I would just avoid trying to make it about specific events. Just say - all characters actively using their class abilities gain 500xp a year even if they have no encounters. For long-lived races (>100yr), this is reduced to 100xp a year due to a tendency towards stagnation. Undead and immortals older than 500 years stop gaining XP in this way entirely - they cannot grow without outside intervention. Receiving active training from a same or higher level character doubles this so long as the skills are related. Competitive rivalries also count as receiving instruction. A character who does nothing but study their craft for a year can spend 1000gp per year per level to double this again, for a maximum x4 multiplier.

This makes a master with 30 years of experience in their trade about Lv6 on average. An ancient elf wizard who has been doing magic peacefully for 300 years is about Lv8. A rich elf being groomed for arcane power is provided trainers and does nothing but study for 300 years and ends up Lv16 and pays over a million gold to get there.

It's just so slow that it's irrelevant for PCs.


In my opinion, this would be quite a relistic system. Thanks Nich.