Tangible XP

[Fizban]

Quarian Rex and I got off on a tangent over here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?552809-The-issue-of-eaily-obtained-material-wealth-of-mid-level-casters/page5), but I've gone from "quick" mechanical evaluation to a bit more general reaction so I'm splitting off a new thread 'cause it's getting long:

In summary, QR mentioned the tangible xp mechanics of Lords of Prime with a quote about villagers making a pact where most of them die to make the remainder into elite 1st level warriors (at a ratio of 1/6), I took issue with the idea that those promoted individuals would actually be more effective than 6x as many people, and we traded some mechanical and tonal points:

The effectiveness of the grappling commoners is based almost purely on luck. . . Even if everything works out perfectly for the commoners there is a cluster nearby where the opposite is true and a Warrior will be stabbing grapplers in the back in a few rounds.
The effectiveness of everyone but the Summon Swarm Warlock is based on luck- but I am failing to account for the double roll penalty which is a big hit. That said, the elite must have combat reflexes (or TWF) in order to be able to match 4 per round, and would need +3 dex to kill 6 per round- if the chances of a perfect round are equal for each side, they're still no more than equal (the chances won't be equal, but we're using different numbers and it's a lot of math).


This sort of thing is almost completely RP dependent. When talking about what it takes for a group to hit the Despair Event Horizon (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DespairEventHorizon) much of that's probably best left to the player's imagination. . .
Hence the whole only-use-in-a-moment-of-absolute-despair thing.
A 5 point plan to determine who is worthy to lead and then systematically slaughter the population isn't a desperate act though. If it were being presented as a mere possibility in specific response to a sweeping refusal to act, sure, but it's being presented as a Thing That Happens:

In the worst case, when no other leader is available, six villages will band together in a terrible pact. Each will have a contest or election to select a village champion. The champion, his wife (he will be provided with one if necessary), and the village headman leave the village in secrecy to meet the other village delegations. . . (etc)
That's not a population that has given up and is being salvaged, that's a group of leaders who have calculated, negotiated, and endorsed this plan (specifically in response to a lack of a leader, ha). The very fact that they're slaughtering people rather than rallying them to fight whatever this threat is proves that they didn't care about trying to in the first place.

I don't mention human psycology regarding peasants routing in battle, I mention it regarding the fact that the people who concocted this plan were either self-serving or defeated in their minds before they even hit the field (or were slaughtered). Supposedly the plan will give them a chance, but mechanically their chances were quite possibly as good or better simply by having 6x as many people, as there are no standard morale or tactical coordination mechanics that say they shouldn't be (and in the simple case of human v human attack, more bodies*time= more fortifications*more people manning them). So it's not a mechanical plan, it's an "I feel like having these people give up and be edgy plan."

And that that's all I really take issue with- I don't like edge for edge's sake, and this plan only makes sense when the villagers are already being edged. This part:

No resistance is offered by the other villages; they have lost their headman, their champion, and the will of the gods
Is just ridiculous. "Oh no, we've lost our champion, let's lay down and die!" Is there something in there about everyone in the world being so religious that you can convince hundreds of people to lay down and die because they've "lost the will of the gods?" 'Cause no, the only way that many people all give up is if you've actively beaten down the will of each individual, otherwise tons of those people are gonna bolt when everyone else goes crazy, and then it's not a neat little "pact" anymore is it? And the only sorts of threats that would actually get into people's heads like that on that scale are famine, disease, natural disaster, or serious supernatural creatures, which wouldn't be stopped by a smaller number of elites- it'd just make a smaller number slightly tougher as they scatter, and people don't lay down and die just to slightly increase the chance someone else can escape (one for many, sure, many for one, no)- unless they've been brainwashed.

And that's where I'd say the value is, not in it being a good idea, because it's not, but in it being an Evil idea that people absolutely try to convince others of. The obvious result of tangbile xp is that people will go Evil for it, so naturally people (as in gamers) want to come up with a devil's advocate situation where it actually might be a good idea, and that's what this is. But the fact that it's not mechanically a good idea, murky at best, means someone preparing for probably does not have the best intentions.


As I've tried to get across above, I think that there are plenty of potential justifications for this being an actual thing that is, one that could be used to great effect in an actual game.
Do you have a more specific example? Tactics and terrain can still go either way, and while plenty of civilians don't have the grit, there's still plenty that do: what matters is the threat to which this example pact plan is supposedly a good response. If it is only because of assumed morale problems, then it's just DM imposition, not mechanical incentive. If it's only because of the extra char-op'able bonuses above 3.5 standard, then I'd still make a point of how without those bonuses the tangible xp alone doesn't make it a good enough idea. If the plan only works if you assume non-primitive classes and rework the numbers based on a specific situation, then the example pact plan is just bad.

Hence why I'd like to hear if you have an example of when it would be used- 'cause the only thing that makes any sense to me without being suspiciously tailored, is famine. When it comes to exploiting mechanics to get past a given threat, a few correctly chosen classes+a ton of living people will stomp anyone who wants to promote people/slash their population en masse.

And more generally:

It is normally assumed that characters trained for years to get to where they are but in practice this just isn't the case. What training could a Fighter possibly do to allow him to walk away from a 100' fall? None, yet this is how the game works. It's assumed that the Wizard spent years trying to master arcane mysteries just to get to 1st level, yet a 1st level Fighter who takes Wizard as his 2nd level class skips all of that and achieves immediate arcane enlightenment, perhaps after only a few days of actual adventuring. Accepting that power and capability are a result of consuming soul residue and not the granulated accumulation of competence can have some consequence. One is that the social divide between commoners and nobles (those with class levels) is pretty vast, seeming to justify some of the worst facets of feudalism (knights taking advantage of the peasantry, samurai beheading commoners in the middle of the street for perceived insults, etc.). Another consequence would be that commoners just don't use real weapons. If their lord needs them to, then they would be permitted the Super-Soldier upgrade that is leveling and their skill would be provided by their empowerment. Even if the commoner happened to find weapons/valuables then thay had best hand them over to a noble before they are taken (where did you get something like that? Did you steal it? You must have. That is a crime...).
Tangible xp still not necessary though. Xp can already be fluffed as "soul residue" or whatever you want without changing the mechanics. NPCs can use the same xp mechanics as PCs -it's a simple question of how many encounters they actually face a year, CRs, number of people involved, threat modifiers, etc*. Non-adventurers don't face large numbers of level-appropriate threats, and if they do face such threats they likely have favorable circumstances reducing that xp. A Fighter does not train to walk away from a 100' fall: they fight monsters that hit like a truck to learn how to walk away from a 100' fall. Multiclassing already comes with built in suggestions that the PC should be studying the class before taking it, so the problem is actually the implication that said study should take years thanks to random starting ages: therefore the Fighter must study for years before leveling up, or the DM should junk the requirement.

The social divide is already there, just based on levels. The people in charge are those with the levels. They could actually "harvest" xp by forcing people into duels anyway (possibly for just running them down depending on xp modifiers), the only thing stopping it is a general assumption that DMs should disallow it (assign modifer= 0% too easy) because it's generally unwanted behavior. You don't need fancy mechanics to justify banning weapons (nor do you need weapons to farm xp). Making xp tangible is just another way of saying "I endorse farming xp+zero xp for non-farming," with some extra bells and whistles.

*From what I understand Lords of Prime is about basically turning everything into liquid numbers, so you can say things like "they killed X people so they're Y level," which is. . . nice I guess? Doesn't change the fact that NPCs still have arbitrary levels, just that instead of an undefined background they can have have a tangible xp background.

[tiercel]

In a world where game mechanics are more apparent, something like the Commoner Handbook (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?232822-The-Commoner-Handbook) seems relevant: unless retraining is not accessible while mass sacrifice for “XP pieces” is, traditional optimization even without changing class from commoner seems more feasible, never mind far less murderous.

Heck, if game mechanics have been apparent for some time, it may not be a question of retraining, but more a question of proactive optimization in line with the linked handbook above (which after all allows its commoners to still be everyday-prosperous as well as Opto-Thorp, Destroyer of Would-Be Low Level Threats).

I’d think the only reason “let’s sacrifice most of us to save the rest of us” would be arguable from a feasible standpoint, morality aside, is if the entire conceit of the campaign world is “optimization/PC options are not available to NPCs unless they ‘promote’ themselves to being ‘real characters’ first”

[ATalsen]

I’m not quite clear on what you are debating – i.e. what the two sides are.

Your premise seems to be that it’s not logical for commoners to try to ‘level up’ one of their own via sacrifice because having more commoners is better than 1 ‘slightly buffer’ person. I think that might be true at baseline, but it seems like the selection of Class and available equipment might change things. For example, if the town had no divine healing, and decided to sacrifice 6 people to make a Cleric, and equip that Cleric with some better armor (and/or weapons) that commoners could not use, now you have someone who not only is more powerful themselves, but who can provide benefits for the community (Bless, Cure Light Wounds, etc).

I’d tend to assume that things are more like tiercel says:

I’d think the only reason “let’s sacrifice most of us to save the rest of us” would be arguable from a feasible standpoint, morality aside, is if the entire conceit of the campaign world is “optimization/PC options are not available to NPCs unless they ‘promote’ themselves to being ‘real characters’ first”

Commoners may not even be “1st level Commoners” in the RPG sense.


I’ve not read Lords of Prime or other RPG mechanics-based Prime supplements, but I have read some of the published Prime series fantasy books by the author.


I think the most important thing about making XP tangible is the ability to transfer it. In a game with tangible XP the idea that “A Fighter does not train to walk away from a 100' fall: they fight monsters that hit like a truck to learn how to walk away from a 100' fall.” is at least somewhat misleading if not outright incorrect: the Fighter never learns anything from fighting or even defeating a foe, they learn when they successfully harvest the XP… which means that if that XP is not ‘consumed’ by the fighter and is transferred to another character, the Fighter never learns. Similarly, a Fighter who simply discovers a relevant number of dead bodies and harvests and consumes their XP never fights or defeats anything, they just learn.

This leads to what I think is the most important theme in the Prime world: People can NOT adventure and still gain levels, and those that do this are generally selfish and evil. I.e. that tangible XP leads to an Evil system, and may even be a commentary on real world systems with similar ‘no work, just gain’ mechanics.

[unseenmage]

... With enough actions anything can be won, regardless of where those actions really come from. We are also quite aware of why such a thing is usually never seen in game. Because the specific conditions that allow it to succeed just don't usually exist.

...
Serious question.
Is there something about this specific setting that negates the action economy?

Serious question playfully worded.
Also, what is your secret to not encountering action economy imbalance in your games? ("Asking for a friend.")

[Zanos]

I'm half-tempted to run a setting where everyone with PC levels was once a commoner who had to go through this process.

[unseenmage]

I'm half-tempted to run a setting where everyone with PC levels was once a commoner who had to go through this process.

Will they have suffered Sanity damage?

[Fizban]

I’m not quite clear on what you are debating – i.e. what the two sides are.

Your premise seems to be that it’s not logical for commoners to try to ‘level up’ one of their own via sacrifice because having more commoners is better than 1 ‘slightly buffer’ person. I think that might be true at baseline, but it seems like the selection of Class and available equipment might change things. For example, if the town had no divine healing, and decided to sacrifice 6 people to make a Cleric, and equip that Cleric with some better armor (and/or weapons) that commoners could not use, now you have someone who not only is more powerful themselves, but who can provide benefits for the community (Bless, Cure Light Wounds, etc).
I put a breakdown of how the mechanics specifically support the 6v1 commoner advantage in the spoiler here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?553642-Tangible-XP), though QR did remind me grappling is a bit harder, but yes you've pretty much got it. The part they quoted from Lords of Prime was this:

Peasant Rebellions

In the worst case, when no other leader is available, six villages will band together in a terrible pact. Each will have a contest or election to select a village champion. The champion, his wife (he will be provided with one if necessary), and the village headman leave the village in secrecy to meet the other village delegations.

At the chosen place, the champions don crude masks chosen at random, each representing a different Elder god. A series of duels to the death will follow, starting with the opposed alignments (Yellow vs Green, etc.). The surviving three will draw straws to determine the next duel. The final two will then fight to the death.

Once a winner has been determined, he murders the wives and headmen of the other champions. This, plus the tael from the defeated champions, elevates him to first rank. He returns to his own village where the men bow and pledge fealty to him.

The men of the village then dress in the colors and costumes of their old lord. In this crude disguise they visit the other villages, murdering every adult. The children are generally left to fend for themselves. No resistance is offered by the other villages; they have lost their headman, their champion, and the will of the gods, and in any case they have already accepted imminent destruction: nothing less would have made them agree to the pact in the first place. With the tael thus gained, the victorious champion promotes himself to 5th rank of a Primitive class (usually Warrior), and 100 village men to 1st rank. The men burn the old costumes in a nighttime ritual designed to divert the blame for their atrocities, don new colors, proclaim their new lord, and now the rebellion has its usurper and his army.
And it's this specific plan that I immediately wanted to disprove. I'll totally agree that a specifically tailored plan could probably get a great return on people sacrificed vs people promoted in order to save the whole, but that's not the plan given in this quote: the plan given in this quote is to sacrifice some 500 or more commoners in order to produce one 5th level elite warrior and 100 1st level elite warriors, and the only thing that would protect against mechanically without a much more specific context is a famine. But, it's presented as a Thing That Happens with those people already knowing what to do "if no other leader is available" and "they have already accepted imminent destruction." There's no threat which would cause 600 people to accept imminent destruction which 100 elite warriors could meaningfully change the course of- at least not that springs easily to my mind.

Hence a separate thread so QR or any other proponents have room to defend that plan if they wish.

This leads to what I think is the most important theme in the Prime world: People can NOT adventure and still gain levels, and those that do this are generally selfish and evil. I.e. that tangible XP leads to an Evil system, and may even be a commentary on real world systems with similar ‘no work, just gain’ mechanics.
Sure, but people can normally gain levels without adventuring- they're just limited to whatever encounters they face in their non-adventuring life (and city generation assigns a spread of higher level NPCs without commentary on what they did previously). Being explicitly transferable does make it much easier to collect from large numbers of people and transfer to one person. If nothing else it's a lot less obvious how Evil such a harvest would be when you can do the deed on-site and then transport a good, rather than having to move the victims or the beneficiary around. Interesting take as a possible real-world commentary- I'm sure it's an emergent one rather than originally intended, but those still cut.

[ATalsen]

The part they quoted from Lords of Prime was this:

And it's this specific plan that I immediately wanted to disprove.

Yes, for what its worth, I'd agree that plan seems to suck. Especially as it seems like they are not getting a 'real' class type out of it, like Cleric or Fighter, but Warrior instead.

If they could get say, a wizard, then we can start pointing to Fireball or the like as reasons why that character might provide the sort of difference a rebellion would need.



Sure, but people can normally gain levels without adventuring- they're just limited to whatever encounters they face in their non-adventuring life...

But in this case the person leveling up had to face those encounters themselves, and not just receive a tangible resource without work.

Transferable XP makes the noble class not only more powerful, but more survivable. I mean, what noble family is NOT going to feed their infant enough XP to level them one or twice just to provide the buffer against infant mortality, for example?

While you could compare it to being able to 'power level' someone specific, that still contains risk - even requires it if you assume the encounter MUST be challenging in order for the target to gain XP from it; there is no risk at all to the target with transferable XP, and can be done in instances where its simply not feasible to power level them 'manually'. Which makes for a very different game world indeed.

[Fizban]

Yes, for what its worth, I'd agree that plan seems to suck. Especially as it seems like they are not getting a 'real' class type out of it, like Cleric or Fighter, but Warrior instead.

If they could get say, a wizard, then we can start pointing to Fireball or the like as reasons why that character might provide the sort of difference a rebellion would need.
You can- with proper PC classes having twice the cost. Which is why I've narrowed my position to this particular plan being bad, though even a Wizard requires more specific circumstances to prove their worth.

Which makes for a very different game world indeed.
Yup, I expect the setting has plenty more to say on it.

[tiercel]

Why in the name of the Abyss would commoners XP farm each other when they could cultivate rat farms in abandoned cellars, send a promising youth down, and have a New Hero emerge?

Also I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that the kind of stupid commoner who is willing to be all “oh gosh, my Hunger Games tribute lost so I’m going to stand here and let myself get murdered in front of my children OH BLAAARGH imdead” is going to turn out to be a totally awesome kind of peasant rebel.

(Also, how do you even get XP for non-resisting victims who are thus literally zero challenge?)

Put yet another way, here’s how bad the plan is: it is arguably both more humane and more effective a form of rebellion for five-sixths of the peasants to simply commit suicide, leaving the Evil Nobles so dependent on so few surviving peasants to supply food and labor that they have to treat the survivors better in order to live themselves.

Protip: when mass suicide is a better plan than yours, it’s time to reconsider dumping Int/Wis so hard.

[Quarian Rex]

The effectiveness of everyone but the Summon Swarm Warlock is based on luck- but I am failing to account for the double roll penalty which is a big hit. That said, the elite must have combat reflexes (or TWF) in order to be able to match 4 per round, and would need +3 dex to kill 6 per round- if the chances of a perfect round are equal for each side, they're still no more than equal (the chances won't be equal, but we're using different numbers and it's a lot of math).


Yes, everything is based on luck, but there is 70% success luck and there's 10% success luck. There is a world of difference. And yup, throwing in Combat Reflexes, Cleave, TWF, etc. make any melee an absolute sh*t-show for the commoners. But they aren't really needed. Just one Warrior without a feat (one of the worst options to take, therefore setting the bar real low for the peasants) vs 6 grappling commoners is something that I would actually put money on the Warrior (not much money, but still). The Warrior will kill one or two per round and the commoners will see their only advantage, action economy, be hacked away. The commoners only hope of success is for both one of them to overcome their low probability for success and for that success to happen early enough in the round for them to take advantage (the dogpile). The Warrior just doesn't need to take them all out in one round. Should the commoners luck out and get an early dogpile this is not a victory. The Warrior still has @32% chance to shake them all off and reset things (42% with three, 56% with two, and just straight up murder a single grappler). Even in this 'worst case' scenario it seems to me that the commoners are at a disadvantage.




A 5 point plan to determine who is worthy to lead and then systematically slaughter the population isn't a desperate act though.


Desperate =/= spontaneous. Having a contingency plan for the worst in no way diminishes the dire straits required to enact it.




That's not a population that has given up and is being salvaged, that's a group of leaders who have calculated, negotiated, and endorsed this plan (specifically in response to a lack of a leader, ha). The very fact that they're slaughtering people rather than rallying them to fight whatever this threat is proves that they didn't care about trying to in the first place.


As I've been pointing out, even in the worst case scenario (Warriors without feats) Super Soldiers have a better chance. This is just the absolute minimum possible. Even the sporadic inclusion of the Adept (to say nothing of upgrading a few to actual PC classes) can tip the balance sharply just with Bless and the occasional Sleep.

In D&D-land class levels are a force multiplier, one that can be effective even under extreme disadvantage, and I don't think that you are really giving them their due.




Supposedly the plan will give them a chance, but mechanically their chances were quite possibly as good or better simply by having 6x as many people, as there are no standard morale or tactical coordination mechanics that say they shouldn't be (and in the simple case of human v human attack, more bodies*time= more fortifications*more people manning them).


The only situation brought up so far where the commoners have any sort of definitive advantage is in ranged combat where they are all equipped with crossbows, all have LoS/LoE to their targets to bring the full brunt of the action economy to bear, and enough time/range to make that advantage matter. That is a pretty specific niche where they have any kind of advantage at all. A single night attack and that advantage is almost completely nullified. When charge range is greater than illumination range (60' charge vs 40' torch) the advantage does to the attackers.

While fortifications can definitely be a force multiplier you must remember that multiplying by crap is still crap. The commoners will have @ the same hit chance at point blank as they do at max range. Manning the walls would also limit the number of commoners who could target those attacking the walls (can no longer range attack in ranks), thus losing the commoners only advantage, massed action economy. Any fortifications they could hastily erect would be wooden and so hacked through quickly enough. With a competent defensive force that could be enough time to deter the attacker, with the commoners distinct lack of competence it would not.




So it's not a mechanical plan, it's an "I feel like having these people give up and be edgy plan."

And that that's all I really take issue with- I don't like edge for edge's sake, and this plan only makes sense when the villagers are already being edged.


If you don't really like the tone of something and don't think that it would fit into a game that you want to run then I can't really argue with that. This is definitely something with a grimdark tone and if that's not your bag that is fine. I just can't agree with your view that there is no mechanical advantage to Super Soldiers (even Warriors, the worst ones). I get the knee-jerk reaction to side on the action economy (I do it as well), but it is discussions like these, that get me to really look at the mechanics and what might happen. Even in a 6v1 grapple (with a bloody Warrior) the commoners do not have a decisive advantage (I'd actually give the edge to the Warrior). Fortifications, when you look at what they would provide and the restrictions that come with them, wouldn't really help the commoners nearly as much as I would have assumed, in fact hindering their ability to spam.

I think that there really is a mechanical advantage to this.




I don't mention human psycology regarding peasants routing in battle, I mention it regarding the fact that the people who concocted this plan were either self-serving or defeated in their minds before they even hit the field (or were slaughtered).


I don't think anyone going into a suicide pact could really be considered self-serving. Defeated? Yup, I'll give you that. I also don't think that is an unrealistic perception of the world through the eyes of a D&D peasant. When you have a 90% chance of death when someone throws a cat in your face, when the world is filled with murderous abominations that see you as convenient snackfood or fodder for unspeakable acts, when the only way to fight back against such things is to literally eat the remnant soulstuff of the dead to gain enough supernatural strength to survive feline based projectiles, when you have accepted that your liege-lord is entitled to not only the product of your fields but a piece of your soul in exchange for protecting your low-born hide, a certain systemic fatalism can make a lot of sense.




Is just ridiculous. "Oh no, we've lost our champion, let's lay down and die!" Is there something in there about everyone in the world being so religious that you can convince hundreds of people to lay down and die because they've "lost the will of the gods?" 'Cause no, the only way that many people all give up is if you've actively beaten down the will of each individual, otherwise tons of those people are gonna bolt when everyone else goes crazy, and then it's not a neat little "pact" anymore is it? And the only sorts of threats that would actually get into people's heads like that on that scale are famine, disease, natural disaster, or serious supernatural creatures,


I think that you are just way off base here. To say that this sort of thing doesn't make sense or isn't realistic is countered by actual history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_suicide). Most of the historical examples are a good analog for this. Such things are a choice to deny an enemy a final victory. Such things are often retold in their culture and in that of their enemies as admired acts of bravery and sacrifice. Add in the ability to actually deny your opponents the power they are seeking (the xp in your skull) mixed with the ability to make them hurt (victory may be a dream but at least now that have a chance of making it a Pyrrhic one for their enemies). Even if your last hope is wiped out it still denies the enemies most of what they sought (only getting back 1/16 of the xp used to level the new army) and so can be seen as a small victory.

Actual people have done far worse acts (at the same or greater scale) with far less reason, and without even the hope of benefit that the Pact provides. Again, if this sort of thing doesn't fit with the game you want to run, I get that, but to say that it has no place in a world where you want to have things play out in a believable(ish) manner would be incorrect.




And that's where I'd say the value is, not in it being a good idea, because it's not, but in it being an Evil idea that people absolutely try to convince others of. The obvious result of tangbile xp is that people will go Evil for it, so naturally people (as in gamers) want to come up with a devil's advocate situation where it actually might be a good idea, and that's what this is. But the fact that it's not mechanically a good idea, murky at best, means someone preparing for probably does not have the best intentions.


That people will go evil for it? Perhaps not. That the BBEG would go evil for it? Well duh. The BBEG is going evil because it's Tuesday. This just adds an actual reason for the evil, as opposed to just the standard human sacrifice for 'power' from his dark masters (aka, a MacGuffin pulled from the DMs arse). Acknowledging that xp is a harvestable resource just allows us to play the game as we normally do without all of the cognitive dissonance that comes with thinking about how the world would actually work.

I don't think that the idea is inherently Evil (neither tangible xp nor the Pact). The Pact isn't something that can really be skewed for any one communities benefit and so claiming that is an evil or manipulative act on the part of the community leaders seems pretty baseless. As I've been pointing out pretty consistently, even at the lowest level, mechanically it is a pretty good idea, both from a performance point of view as well as for resource denial.




Do you have a more specific example? Tactics and terrain can still go either way, and while plenty of civilians don't have the grit, there's still plenty that do: what matters is the threat to which this example pact plan is supposedly a good response. If it is only because of assumed morale problems, then it's just DM imposition, not mechanical incentive. If it's only because of the extra char-op'able bonuses above 3.5 standard, then I'd still make a point of how without those bonuses the tangible xp alone doesn't make it a good enough idea. If the plan only works if you assume non-primitive classes and rework the numbers based on a specific situation, then the example pact plan is just bad.


Take any example from the list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_suicide). Those were all viable reasons to do something like this (to those who made the list at least) and that is just when threatened by other people, not the usual contents of the average D&D landscape. You seem to be stuck on this having to be an optimal option. It explicitly isn't. It is an act of absolute last resort. Primitive classes aren't required to make the Pact work (but you've done a good job making me realize just how effective the Warrior option really is) it is just a low-end use of the economic mechanics.




Hence why I'd like to hear if you have an example of when it would be used- 'cause the only thing that makes any sense to me without being suspiciously tailored, is famine. When it comes to exploiting mechanics to get past a given threat, a few correctly chosen classes+a ton of living people will stomp anyone who wants to promote people/slash their population en masse.


This right here really makes it seem like you are really missing the point. This is not an attempt at, "exploiting mechanics to get past a given threat". This is a story option, one that can be used to great effect. This is a story element, what story element doesn't look suspiciously tailored when examined too closely? The mechanics in question just provide a justification (and a good one). Just doing the D&D version of Masada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada) where, instead of finding two women, five children, and 960 corpses, you find a (now) small group of people who just finished eating their friends and family (to spare them a worse fate), empowered to be far more than human, who really want to let you know how they feel about it.

You now have a hook for the beginning of a resistance movement, or the origin story of a PC (or the BBEG). A hook that answers uncomfortable questions that would otherwise arise.

When you say, "a few correctly chosen classes+a ton of living people will stomp anyone who wants to promote people/slash their population en masse", you are absolutely correct, and absolutely missing the point. Having those, "correctly chosen classes", means that this last ditch option is not on the table. I have been repeating this a lot so it seems like we might be talking past each other.






It is normally assumed that characters trained for years to get to where they are but in practice this just isn't the case. What training could a Fighter possibly do to allow him to walk away from a 100' fall? None, yet this is how the game works. It's assumed that the Wizard spent years trying to master arcane mysteries just to get to 1st level, yet a 1st level Fighter who takes Wizard as his 2nd level class skips all of that and achieves immediate arcane enlightenment, perhaps after only a few days of actual adventuring. Accepting that power and capability are a result of consuming soul residue and not the granulated accumulation of competence can have some consequence. One is that the social divide between commoners and nobles (those with class levels) is pretty vast, seeming to justify some of the worst facets of feudalism (knights taking advantage of the peasantry, samurai beheading commoners in the middle of the street for perceived insults, etc.). Another consequence would be that commoners just don't use real weapons. If their lord needs them to, then they would be permitted the Super-Soldier upgrade that is leveling and their skill would be provided by their empowerment. Even if the commoner happened to find weapons/valuables then thay had best hand them over to a noble before they are taken (where did you get something like that? Did you steal it? You must have. That is a crime...).


Tangible xp still not necessary though. Xp can already be fluffed as "soul residue" or whatever you want without changing the mechanics. NPCs can use the same xp mechanics as PCs -it's a simple question of how many encounters they actually face a year, CRs, number of people involved, threat modifiers, etc*. Non-adventurers don't face large numbers of level-appropriate threats, and if they do face such threats they likely have favorable circumstances reducing that xp. A Fighter does not train to walk away from a 100' fall: they fight monsters that hit like a truck to learn how to walk away from a 100' fall.


See, that is why a purely fluff 'solution' doesn't actually improve anything. You still have ridiculousness emerging from that baseline that shapes the world in ways that no one seems to want. Even just in the last thread we saw how such things still result in 20th level commoners (progression still happens even if you slow it down and people have a lot of years before they die) and other such stupidity that we never see in an actual game (because it's idiotic). If you have the capability to level up then you would have to be an absolute moron to put those levels into commoner. If you assume that baseline (demi)humanity is not self-destructively stupid, then the only sensible interpretation you could possibly make would that there are no more commoners (other than perhaps children and young teenagers) and that every person in your world would have leveled (perhaps several times) within a few years of gaining any kind of real autonomy. If your game world is one where most farmers are rangers/druids/nature clerics, where librarians are wizards/archivists, where beggars are probably monks, and the weird emo kid in the village has an even chance of being a hexblade/dread necromancer/warlock then that is cool, it's just not a world that anyone plays in (that I know of).

What the mechanical use of tangible xp does is allow the normal use of xp in game to actually make sense in the game world. What you have here is an actual reason why people don't level. The reason why commoners don't just naturally rocket up the class levels is because even if they happen to repel a bandit attack or fight off a goblin they are not allowed to keep the xp harvested from the encounter. You now have a world where it makes sense both for a rube to venture into a dungeon walk out a couple days later a veritable demigod and for his parents to have been nothing more than cow milking peasants. That is something that just doesn't happen in the normal system.



Multiclassing already comes with built in suggestions that the PC should be studying the class before taking it, so the problem is actually the implication that said study should take years thanks to random starting ages: therefore the Fighter must study for years before leveling up, or the DM should junk the requirement.


This is the key, make xp tangible and you can junk the requirement (I have never seen a game that even thought of enforcing it) and still have apprenticeships make sense. While the act of leveling is actually only a ball of xp away, the one who holds that ball wants you to work for it/get some slave(ish) labor to make his investment worthwhile. This can also provide valuable indoctrination time (you don't want a newly empowered person to be a jerk, or rather you might want them to be the right kind of jerk). Heroes of Prime (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222339/Heroes-of-Prime) even has some rules for apprenticeship (fractional breakdown between commoner and your actual first level) that go really well with this sort of thing. You now have a great way for initial starting ages to make sense (it gets dragged out till your master thinks you're ready) and for why it doesn't apply to PCs once they start adventuring (they no longer have to wait for someones approval to eat a soul).




The social divide is already there, just based on levels. The people in charge are those with the levels. They could actually "harvest" xp by forcing people into duels anyway (possibly for just running them down depending on xp modifiers), the only thing stopping it is a general assumption that DMs should disallow it (assign modifer= 0% too easy) because it's generally unwanted behavior. You don't need fancy mechanics to justify banning weapons (nor do you need weapons to farm xp). Making xp tangible is just another way of saying "I endorse farming xp+zero xp for non-farming," with some extra bells and whistles.


Except if you actually look at things from the standard RAW perspective then you have good reason to think that any given commoner is one bar fight away from becoming a superhuman adventurer. That farmer that the noble just tried to push out of the way has a good chance of being a mid-level druid. That becomes something that the aristocracy just can't keep up with (the harder the life, the faster you would level and aristocrats lead notoriously soft lives).




*From what I understand Lords of Prime is about basically turning everything into liquid numbers, so you can say things like "they killed X people so they're Y level," which is. . . nice I guess? Doesn't change the fact that NPCs still have arbitrary levels, just that instead of an undefined background they can have have a tangible xp background.


You're about half right. It does turn everything into liquid numbers but it actually removes the arbitrary aspect. Every year a kingdom essentially harvests xp (from natural deaths and what-have-you) equal to its population (giving an average death rate of @3%, a little optimistic, but good enough) that can be divided up into monthly/weekly amounts if you want. You take the xp income of the kingdom and divide it into quarters. One quarter generally goes on sale/is awarded to favored petty nobility (one can't defend an entire kingdom on ones own), if the ruler is a vassal then he sends one quarter to the one he owes allegiance to, and the rest is for personal use.

The book gives a baseline of a ruler surviving for @20 years before he gets eaten (that is arbitrary, but it kind of works as a baseline), so multiply the ruler's share by 20 to figure out what level he could be. This would be fairly consistent across kingdoms, since it takes double the xp to get to the next level it would take another 20 years of xp income from that kingdom to get to the next level (roughly). It is also traditional to make sure that there is a nest egg for your replacement, otherwise a rulers' death could leave his realm disturbingly unprotected. There is also a helpful chart in Lords of Prime giving a breakdown of petty nobles based on the size of the quarter share they would get.

It really is a system that removes much of the arbitrary crap from figuring out what is happening in a given kingdom. There is still plenty of room to tweak things since all of the levels are based around passive generation (doesn't include adventuring) but if you want a justification why X noble is a pampered ponce who hasn't seen a day of hardship in his life and is actually powerful (a staple of a lot of fantasy and a great character to take down a peg or nine) then your world can now make sense.

[Quarian Rex]

This leads to what I think is the most important theme in the Prime world: People can NOT adventure and still gain levels, and those that do this are generally selfish and evil. I.e. that tangible XP leads to an Evil system, and may even be a commentary on real world systems with similar ‘no work, just gain’ mechanics.


I'm really curious as to where on earth you could have gotten this from. I've read the books, and they definitely reflect someone with an atheist/industrial mindset trying to enforce those values on a D&D world, but the main character doesn't really 'adventure' in the usual sense and I've certainly not seen any kind of negative judgement passed on the idea of it.

If you are actually trying to talk about feudalism, then yup, he thinks that is the most evil thing since human sacrifice, but that's not the same thing as what you are saying.




Serious question.
Is there something about this specific setting that negates the action economy?

Serious question playfully worded.
Also, what is your secret to not encountering action economy imbalance in your games? ("Asking for a friend.")


1. Nope.

2. Seriously? Mainly just experience with wargames/battlemaps/Roll20/etc. I am keenly aware of the divide between ideal application of action economy and practical application of it. Line of sight can be a b*tch and I have had many an Awesome Plan™ get delayed/shut down because I didn't consider terrain or the placement of a wall, that sort of thing. It's something that I have to keep in mind whenever I think that a problem can be solved by an arbitrarily large number of something that is otherwise useless.




Why in the name of the Abyss would commoners XP farm each other when they could cultivate rat farms in abandoned cellars, send a promising youth down, and have a New Hero emerge?


I suppose that this hasn't been mentioned before, but animals are only worth 1/100th the xp. You might get a point from a bison, or a bit from a good warhorse but the rat farm isn't really an option. This is more of a limit on player abuse that it is a limit on player reward. Kill a bag of rats? Get nothing. Kill the pack of wolves that has been stalking your village? Get whatever xp the GM thinks appropriate as you harvest what the wolves ate out of their previous victims as well. It really is an extremely flexible option.

[ATalsen]

I'm really curious as to where on earth you could have gotten this from. I've read the books, and they definitely reflect someone with an atheist/industrial mindset trying to enforce those values on a D&D world, but the main character doesn't really 'adventure' in the usual sense and I've certainly not seen any kind of negative judgement passed on the idea of it.

Just noting that I have not read any Prime RPG mechanics books, just some Prime fiction books.

My understanding is:
1) You cannot level without consuming XP
2) You can potentially get tangible XP from fallen foes
3) as far as I can tell the XP has to come from sentient foes in the fiction (may not be true in the RPG supplement)

So in the books, it doesn't matter if the main character is having adventures or not, or if they are traditional or not - those net him nothing anyway: its only the harvested and consumed XP that matters for level advancement.

In the books, the XP he gets is in fact handed off to other people - the King for example. Whether the king ever adventured or even adventures currently is not important, only that the king can gain levels via simply receiving the tributed XP.

In the book its clearly a theme that the 'system is broken' and that a king that knows he is sending waves of commoners to their deaths is evil. I'm saying that the AUTHOR is strongly presenting this as a theme in the books.

The above is me talking about the author's themes in the book, not my own opinion. My own opinion is that this definitely sets up a system where people's DEATHS become a direct resource, and yeah I find that repugnant and evil by itself - much as I would if they were killed only to be raised as undead workers, which can happen in standard D&D.

Now as far as a world run under the Prime rules, that is not necessarily the world as described in the books, I can't say for certain that people in charge would more often be evil than in a typical campaign world, but I can say that, as you note, it gives them a strong reason to be evil, in that doing so gathers them more power. Which leads me to believe that evil is incentivized more than in a standard campaign world, and not only that but that anyone who wants to level has to participate in the XP harvesting system, thus evil [leaders/rulers] will be more prevalent.

[Quarian Rex]

Re: ATalsen

The novels do a pretty good job reflecting what is included in the supplements. Limitations on xp harvesting isn't really addressed in the novels (he doesn't really fight much in the way of monsters in the first few novels, though that might change with the fourth) but that lines up well with animals being a crappy source of it (1/100 the normal harvest rate). In most 'civilized' kingdoms the citizens would be the primary source.

That is a far cry from tangible xp somehow not being available for adventuring. Adventuring is still a great source of xp. Xp that is acquired by killing monsters, the same way it has been since the very first incarnation of the game. Ridding the world of the horrors that stalk the land is not something that anyone could really see as evil, and there is really nothing in the novels to imply this (again, since 'monsters' have not been a factor thus far).

Adventuring, while potentially extremely lucrative, is also incredibly dangerous, hence why some go the route of rulership. All the power, less of the risk. Also, claiming that gaining power from someones death is inherently evil (regardless of whether you caused that death) comes off as more than a little blinded by ones own self-righteousness. Kind of like a vegan telling cavemen that they are evil for eating meat. The vegan is judging the cavemen with such an extremely skewed morality that it has little to do with the cavemen's actual reality. From their perspective the meat is right there. Eat and you can become strong and survive for another day. Saying that strength and survival is somehow 'Evil' winds up coming off as foolish.

In the Prime universe you do not have to do any unholy act to get xp. It is just there, inside someone's (or something's) head. When they die, if you don't take it then someone else will. They don't make the rules, they just live in a world where such rules exist. I don't think that there is really anything inherently evil about living in that world or living by those rules.

One of the interesting parts of the books (to me at least) is seeing a character with our gray-ish form of sliding morality trying to impose his values on an (essentially) alien world that has actual absolute morality. Even the Whites, the purest of pure good, regularly commit executions. Is that evil? Not from their perspective. They capture prisoners and check their alignment. If it is evil then they are given an Atonement spell as an offer of redemption. If they change their evil ways then they are free to begin a new life. If they reject the offered redemption then they are executed. Is that, itself, and evil act? They were given the opportunity to change and rejected it (most do). Why would you incarcerate them or any other such thing? They chose evil. What more is to be said? In a world with absolute morality, and the magic to back it up, our current notions of good and evil can be challenged (in interesting ways). This is also a great example showing that good does not have to be stupid.

I would also like to point out that the protagonist has only really seen the power struggles and infighting of a relatively stable kingdom. He has not seen the land of horrible monsters (gnolls are fellow sentients and a little too close to the human baseline to count) that is a more typical D&D world, nor has he encountered something that would be an actual, singular, high level challenge (that should be for the next book). His disdain for the system may be in part because he has not yet really seen the need for it (and leveling/power in general).

I think too that he is allowed to be a bit more judgemental about the situation because he believes that he has a superior solution (industrialization). Criticism of a system that directly keeps you alive is less of an option when you don't have something better.




Now as far as a world run under the Prime rules, that is not necessarily the world as described in the books, I can't say for certain that people in charge would more often be evil than in a typical campaign world, but I can say that, as you note, it gives them a strong reason to be evil, in that doing so gathers them more power. Which leads me to believe that evil is incentivized more than in a standard campaign world, and not only that but that anyone who wants to level has to participate in the XP harvesting system, thus evil [leaders/rulers] will be more prevalent.


I don't know if I would say that. I think that it has more to do with whether a ruler places more value on short-term or long-term power. A ruler that sacks his own kingdom can gain great personal power... at the cost of his kingdom. Even if he doesn't fully destroy it recovery will take a long bloody time (good luck with immigration after the latest pogrom) and his resources will be diminished because of it. A ruler that treats his realm well will see the population grow and he will be able to reap the rewards year after year. While Good will naturally side more on the long-term side of things that doesn't mean that Evil is always shortsighted. The most successful Evil tends to be that which plays the long game.

On the whole, most kingdoms would be incentivized to treat their commoners well (even the Evil ones). The main difference is that if a ruler decides to turn on his people then it will be very ugly indeed. That sounds like a great source of dramatic conflict, and a great setting for a game.

[tiercel]

I suppose that this hasn't been mentioned before, but animals are only worth 1/100th the xp. You might get a point from a bison, or a bit from a good warhorse but the rat farm isn't really an option. This is more of a limit on player abuse that it is a limit on player reward. Kill a bag of rats? Get nothing. Kill the pack of wolves that has been stalking your village? Get whatever xp the GM thinks appropriate as you harvest what the wolves ate out of their previous victims as well. It really is an extremely flexible option.

That’s... an interesting rule. Does it apply only to actual animals (or creatures <=2 Int) or to all monsters (say of Int 3 or more)? If the former, replace “rat farm” with “sufficiently low-CR creature that still yields significant tael”; if the latter, the game has been fundamentally changed froum most D&D settings if defeating monsters doesn’t yield significant XP. (Adventurers would have to prey on humanoid foes as exclusively as possible, presumably?)

I know, “limit on player abuse” but once XP becomes physical, it will be abused. (Many characters with an XP-feudal system may see the system itself as being such abuse, for instance.). I don’t particularly see why a noncombatant non-threat humanoid would be worth XP while a noncombatant non-threat animal is not, for instance. For that matter, if XP only comes from “people,” then fighting and looting a dangerous monster that *eats people* is worth XP, but fighting a dangerous monster which threatens people, kills people without eating them, or destroys property or kills animals is not worth XP? How does this even work — and why would the system incentivize would be heroes to preferentially go after specifically human-eating monsters? (Unless all non-animal monsters ARE worth XP, and then we are back to farming tiny monsters instead of rats.)

Actually, the game is fundamentally changed regardless — if XP is tangible, the only ways you can get it from an encounter are 1) literally killing the beings who have tael inside or 2) looting or stealing any stockpiles of loose fungible tael. Under this system, you can’t get XP for tricking, avoiding, or befriending an encounter, much less “story awards” — unless it results in physical XP pieces in your grasping hands.

Of course, this suggests another way to gain experience: literally steal it. The point of this system is that you don’t have to earn experience yourself, which means all this feudal tribute is constantly being moved around before being consumed. If you have a bunch of commoners willing and eager to die, instead of turning on each other, they can simply zerg rush tael shipments; they don’t have to win a fight, just smash and grab and run (or gulp to the sound of stirring theme music, presumably).

Coming full circle: if noncombatant peasants are still worth XP for some reason, then peasants literally have value in addition to their labor. This means desperate peasants should have something to bargain with in addition to the food they produce; instead of using mass murder to concentrate that value in the hands of a few lucky targets, they could simply seek to deny that value to their overreaching masters at all unless their demands are met.

[Pleh]

Yes, everything is based on luck, but there is 70% success luck and there's 10% success luck. There is a world of difference. And yup, throwing in Combat Reflexes, Cleave, TWF, etc. make any melee an absolute sh*t-show for the commoners. But they aren't really needed. Just one Warrior without a feat (one of the worst options to take, therefore setting the bar real low for the peasants) vs 6 grappling commoners is something that I would actually put money on the Warrior (not much money, but still). The Warrior will kill one or two per round and the commoners will see their only advantage, action economy, be hacked away. The commoners only hope of success is for both one of them to overcome their low probability for success and for that success to happen early enough in the round for them to take advantage (the dogpile). The Warrior just doesn't need to take them all out in one round. Should the commoners luck out and get an early dogpile this is not a victory. The Warrior still has @32% chance to shake them all off and reset things (42% with three, 56% with two, and just straight up murder a single grappler). Even in this 'worst case' scenario it seems to me that the commoners are at a disadvantage.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the premise here.

It was said, "6 villagers enter a Terrible pact" so is the Warrior one of these 6 villagers? That would make 5 opposing grapplers.

Seems like if the villagers had any sense of what to do against an opponent armed with a sword, none of them would make a move until they had him surrounded, then they would hold action to all attack at once. The warrior can hold initiative to attack the nearest and likely drops their number to 4, then the Warrior may make an AoO on a second one and possibly drop a second grappler. If the villagers had a strategy huddle ahead of time, they could pick their member with the highest Dex and/or Con score to be the first few attackers so as to maximize the chances of the Warrior's counter attacks to fail.

Having him surrounded provides flanking bonuses that will likely mitigate whatever BAB bonus advantage the warrior has. Even if the Warrior retreats to the edge of the ritual area to limit flanking, 5 grapplers can have at least 2 flankers and a Warrior without any feats can only drop as many as 2 grapplers per round, so there will be at least 2 flankers.

Up to 4 people can grapple at a time, so if all the Warrior's attack's fail, any extra grapplers can make free unarmed attacks to deal nonlethal damage and the warrior is flat-footed to anyone not in the grapple.

While grappling, anyone else trying to enter the grab does not provoke AoO and automatically succeeds on their Grab attempt, so it really matters most if they can get at least 1 person to successfully grab consistently (not necessarily the same person) because everyone else can just walk up and reapply the grapple for free as long as someone else is successfully grabbing the Warrior.

It depends a lot on what level this warrior is supposed to be, but I'm not so sure their odds are as good as you make them out to be (unless the grapplers are using the "everyone just run up and try to hit him" tactic that always works so well.

[Quarian Rex]

That’s... an interesting rule. Does it apply only to actual animals (or creatures <=2 Int) or to all monsters (say of Int 3 or more)?


Just animals, mainly so animal husbandry doesn't become a soul farm I would think. It is worth noting that any created creature (spell created undead, constructs, etc.) only have the xp that was used to create them (giving back only 1/16 upon destruction as per normal) so zombie/golem farms are not a viable source of xp.




If the former, replace “rat farm” with “sufficiently low-CR creature that still yields significant tael”


Except that isn't really a problem. So you now make it your goal to hunt Goblins/Kobolds/Giant Amoebas/whatever. You need over 1,000 to get from 6th to 7th level and it doubles every level. Where do you plan to find them all? The problem with rats is that they are no threat and you can actually breed them in ridiculous numbers (because rats). With anything else that is out of the players control.

Want to kill thousands of Giant Amoebas? Go find them. Your quest to do so will probably lead you to actual adventuring as you actively try to not adventure. Want to farm thousands of Goblins/Kobolds? Sounds like you are waging war on a monster kingdom. That is a campaign, not an exploit. Really, with Animals being a poor source of xp I really don't see much in the way of available exploits left.




Many characters with an XP-feudal system may see the system itself as being such abuse, for instance.


Yup, that's kind of the point. Rulers are essentially the passive xp farmers of the game and that comes with all the fun of the kingdom campaign.




I don’t particularly see why a noncombatant non-threat humanoid would be worth XP while a noncombatant non-threat animal is not, for instance.


For the same reason why cannibalism is seen as a big deal while eating a steak is not. People are worth more than animals. This is a truth in our world, why wouldn't it be true in a game world?




Actually, the game is fundamentally changed regardless — if XP is tangible, the only ways you can get it from an encounter are 1) literally killing the beings who have tael inside or 2) looting or stealing any stockpiles of loose fungible tael. Under this system, you can’t get XP for tricking, avoiding, or befriending an encounter, much less “story awards” — unless it results in physical XP pieces in your grasping hands.


That makes sense to me. How are you becoming more resistant to sword slashes from tricking someone? How are you learning to kill something more efficiently by befriending someone? How are you becoming better at shaping the arcane fabric of reality around you by avoiding obstacles? None of that really makes sense. Add in tangible xp and all of a sudden it can. Now you can befriend someone into selling you some, or trick them out of it, or avoid their defenses and steal it. You now have situations where taking actions that have no conceivable way to acquire you actual personal power can now do so.




Of course, this suggests another way to gain experience: literally steal it. The point of this system is that you don’t have to earn experience yourself, which means all this feudal tribute is constantly being moved around before being consumed. If you have a bunch of commoners willing and eager to die, instead of turning on each other, they can simply zerg rush tael shipments; they don’t have to win a fight, just smash and grab and run (or gulp to the sound of stirring theme music, presumably).


That sounds like some pretty cool plot hooks. I'm glad to see that you are starting to see all the awesomeness that can be added to a campaign by this.




Coming full circle: if noncombatant peasants are still worth XP for some reason, then peasants literally have value in addition to their labor. This means desperate peasants should have something to bargain with in addition to the food they produce; instead of using mass murder to concentrate that value in the hands of a few lucky targets, they could simply seek to deny that value to their overreaching masters at all unless their demands are met.


Except that is kind of the point of the Pact that is under discussion. Concentrating their power into a few is resource denial. When the power you have is your life, and the only way to deny someone that power is to give it (and your life) to someone else, then bargaining gets a wee bit more tricky methinks.

[Quarian Rex]

Re: Pleh

Take a look at earlier posts in this thread. In Fizban's second post he requoted the relevant bit from Lords of Prime for the peasant rebellions that we're discussing. That might clear up some of your confusion.

For the grappling, look at mu previous posts for a rundown of how it would actually shake out. For any flankers, they would increase their success chance from 10% to 12.5% with the flanking bonus while provoking additional AoO for trying to get into position. That doesn't really change my original assessment and I would still give the warrior the edge even at 6 to 1.

[tiercel]

So you now make it your goal to hunt Goblins/Kobolds/Giant Amoebas/whatever. You need over 1,000 to get from 6th to 7th level and it doubles every level.

Why “hunt”? Just farm them up to the point they are harvestable; with sufficiently low-CR monsters (e.g. some dinky magical beast) deprived of resources and harvested as young as is practical, you have a steady diet (after all, we’ve established that noncombatant helpless creatures are apparently still worth XP somehow in this setting).

Yes, basic farming won’t get you to high levels, but that’s not the point; I’m contrasting an XP farm of critters to the “Hunger Games” scenario of peasants XP-farming themselves in order to reach low to low-mid levels in any actual class.


That is a campaign, not an exploit.
Seems like to me that the campaign world is an exploit, with nobility able to accrue XP from nothing but ruling over helpless peasants, and peasants who are apparently so desperate they will exploit butchering their “willing” helpless peers for XP. It seems disingenuous to say that only CERTAIN exploits are okay.



For the same reason why cannibalism is seen as a big deal while eating a steak is not. People are worth more than animals. This is a truth in our world, why wouldn't it be true in a game world?

It seems in Prime, cannibalism isn’t a big deal — it’s the only deal. The world’s primary economy runs on eating the souls of sentient beings, it would seem.



That makes sense to me. How are you becoming more resistant to sword slashes from tricking someone? How are you learning to kill something more efficiently by befriending someone? How are you becoming better at shaping the arcane fabric of reality around you by avoiding obstacles? None of that really makes sense.

How are you getting better at tricking, befriending, sneaking past, or casting high magic by shoving your sword through someone’s skull? Murder-based XP works just fine from slaughtering the right kind of monster to lethal “noble” duels, or even just having feudal minions within your domain just die, yet makes you better at all sorts of non-sword-related skills.

The base D&D version works because you have to overcome a challenge to become more powerful. In this campaign world, you get better at skills or spells or whatever because a bunch of peasants work under (or especially die under) you. I’m not saying that makes no sense, for the intrinsically game-altering assumptions involved, but I’m not convinced it makes more sense either.



That sounds like some pretty cool plot hooks. I'm glad to see that you are starting to see all the awesomeness that can be added to a campaign by this.

Tael raiding seemed like a much, much more obvious strategy than “Hunger Games” genocide scenario, really.





Except that is kind of the point of the Pact that is under discussion. Concentrating their power into a few is resource denial. When the power you have is your life, and the only way to deny someone that power is to give it (and your life) to someone else, then bargaining gets a wee bit more tricky methinks. It’s not resource denial if you concentrate all your “souls” into a few genocidal champions who just get themselves killed and harvested anyway of all the resources your community died to give them.

Dying somewhere where your oppressive overlords can’t loot your corpse of your tasty XP pieces, though, will work — if XP is physical, then denying XP can be accomplished by denying physical access.

For that matter, if XP is physical then in principle it could be destroyed (e.g. in fire) or polluted or otherwise made unusable or unrecoverable (mixed into a slurry of sand and rock that would recover fine sifting or smelting to recover, assuming such a process would not damage or destroy the physical substance).

[Quarian Rex]

Why “hunt”? Just farm them up to the point they are harvestable; with sufficiently low-CR monsters (e.g. some dinky magical beast) deprived of resources and harvested as young as is practical, you have a steady diet (after all, we’ve established that noncombatant helpless creatures are apparently still worth XP somehow in this setting).


Except that you are doing the exact same hand-wave that always gets brought up in these kinds of discussions. Saying, "Oh, I'll just find something as harmless as rats, as fecund as rats, that matures as fast as rats, and that breeds in captivity as well as rats, so really the problem is still there isn't it?", is more than a bit of a cop-out. What magical beast of mana production do you think is a good candidate for this? What makes you think that it is a good candidate for domestication (make no mistake, that is what you are proposing)? IRL we are completely incapable of breeding great white sharks in captivity and have only been able to keep one alive for @5 weeks. Assuming that you could get a profitable breeding rate is more than a little presumptuous.

Decide to go with captive goblins because you know that they breed like minks? Congrats, you have now graduated to kingdom management with your entire population actively hating you. Good luck on the pop growth checks. It is this kind of attempted hand-wave that is functionally useless in a conversation like this. If you can think of a creature that fits the criteria and have mechanical support for your idea, then we might have something to consider, but until then it is the equivalent of shouting, "Nu-uh, it still works!".




Yes, basic farming won’t get you to high levels, but that’s not the point; I’m contrasting an XP farm of critters to the “Hunger Games” scenario of peasants XP-farming themselves in order to reach low to low-mid levels in any actual class.


Except the Pact, as has been pointed out time and again, is not a valid source of xp. It is a last-ditch act of desperation. Looking at it as an xp farm is completely missing the point.




Seems like to me that the campaign world is an exploit, with nobility able to accrue XP from nothing but ruling over helpless peasants, and peasants who are apparently so desperate they will exploit butchering their “willing” helpless peers for XP. It seems disingenuous to say that only CERTAIN exploits are okay.


Having a means of xp generation that produces at a yearly rate and requires the creation/maintenance of a full kingdom can hardly be considered an exploit. Comparing that to a bag-of-rats (equivalent) xp farm is disingenuous at best. The kingdom xp mechanic also actually solves problems (like answering how rulers are powerful without actually adventuring) while an attempted bag-of-rats exploit causes nothing but problems (as bags of rats tend to do).




The world’s primary economy runs on eating the souls of sentient beings, it would seem.


The same can be said of any campaign, the most prized form of income is xp. This is just being a little more honest about it and giving it a name.




How are you getting better at tricking, befriending, sneaking past, or casting high magic by shoving your sword through someone’s skull? Murder-based XP works just fine from slaughtering the right kind of monster to lethal “noble” duels, or even just having feudal minions within your domain just die, yet makes you better at all sorts of non-sword-related skills.


Because to murder someone you would presumably use your strengths, whether that be stabbing, sneaking, or arcane mastery, and so those skills would improve (that's kind of how classes work don't ya know). Acknowledging that leveling is due to supernatural empowerment from the consumption of remnant soulstuff allows that empowerment to express itself however it needs to. Tangible xp solves so very many problems.




The base D&D version works because you have to overcome a challenge to become more powerful. In this campaign world, you get better at skills or spells or whatever because a bunch of peasants work under (or especially die under) you. I’m not saying that makes no sense, for the intrinsically game-altering assumptions involved, but I’m not convinced it makes more sense either.


You gain strength from creatures that the gods chose to empower. Kind of like Highlander (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Highlander) but you can trade the lightning. You seem to be stuck on the idea that rulership is the only source of xp in the world. It is not. Adventuring is just as valid in this scenario as it is in any other. You just have far more options. Did one of the party recently get raised from the dead? You can now re-level him to be back on par with the party. Is the Wizard making magical swag for everyone? He no longer has to be a level behind for being generous. Have a PC get killed beyond recovery? Find a potential recruit, feed him enough power to be useful and you now have a replacement PC. It provides a lot of options.




Tael raiding seemed like a much, much more obvious strategy than “Hunger Games” genocide scenario, really.


Um... obviously? The Pact is not supposed to be a valid xp acquisition plan. It is an act of desperation, nothing else.




It’s not resource denial if you concentrate all your “souls” into a few genocidal champions who just get themselves killed and harvested anyway of all the resources your community died to give them.


Take a look back through the previous posts. It's already been mentioned a couple times that you only get to harvest 1/16 the xp that went into leveling (or just existing for that matter, commoners are considered to innately have 512 xp, but you only get 32 when they die). So, yes, concentrating all of that xp into a few does functionally destroy 15/16ths of the xp that empowered them. It is a great technique for resource denial.




Dying somewhere where your oppressive overlords can’t loot your corpse of your tasty XP pieces, though, will work — if XP is physical, then denying XP can be accomplished by denying physical access.


Perhaps you could hide your death well enough, but probably not (especially with hundreds of people like with the worst-case scenario of the Pact). Someone will most likely find it, maybe even some predator, consume it, be empowered by it and perhaps use that newly gained strength to further harm those you might know and care about. You would have no choice in that, it would be out of your hands. If you were to participate in the Pact (and should your village not win) you would know that your power would go to someone who would strike back in your name. Even if they failed you could still be content that most of your power would be denied to your foes.




For that matter, if XP is physical then in principle it could be destroyed (e.g. in fire) or polluted or otherwise made unusable or unrecoverable (mixed into a slurry of sand and rock that would recover fine sifting or smelting to recover, assuming such a process would not damage or destroy the physical substance).


Xp cannot be destroyed or diluted so that is not a worry. The only real way to 'destroy' it is to bind it to someone when they level since only 1/16th of what is bound can be reclaimed.

[Fizban]

Sorry it took a while, haven't felt like doing much but reading.


As I've been pointing out, even in the worst case scenario (Warriors without feats) Super Soldiers have a better chance.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. You're counting a much greater distance between the warriors and the commoners than I think is fair, and even if we settled on an exact matchup it'd still be more math than I think either of us wants to do to rigorously prove either way, else we would have by now.


While fortifications can definitely be a force multiplier you must remember that multiplying by crap is still crap. The commoners will have @ the same hit chance at point blank as they do at max range.
Not can be, are, and a massive one at that. You continue to assume that the warriors would all have significantly better equipment, ignore ranged volleys or simple dropped rocks, brush off the amount of time it would take to breach a "wooden fortification" without so much as considering trenches or the fact that while you're going "quickly enough" you're losing your own much more limited troops to attrition, and continue assigning "competence" modifiers which have no mechanical basis. Nope, we are not going to agree.


I don't think that the idea is inherently Evil (neither tangible xp nor the Pact). The Pact isn't something that can really be skewed for any one communities benefit and so claiming that is an evil or manipulative act on the part of the community leaders seems pretty baseless. As I've been pointing out pretty consistently, even at the lowest level, mechanically it is a pretty good idea, both from a performance point of view as well as for resource denial.
Uh, one community leader becomes the champion and their people get promoted while the rest die, leaving everything they owned behind. You're really telling me you can't see how that could be manipulated?


Even if your last hope is wiped out it still denies the enemies most of what they sought (only getting back 1/16 of the xp used to level the new army) and so can be seen as a small victory.
Since I don't see a gang of warriors as being an improvement, this is just sloppy resource denial.


Having those, "correctly chosen classes", means that this last ditch option is not on the table. I have been repeating this a lot so it seems like we might be talking past each other.
And this makes it sound like you're missing the point. If the people know the mechanics well enough to come up with this plan, then they could get those correctly chosen classes, and have a better plan. So it's not a last ditch plan, it's just a bad plan.

[Douglas]

And this makes it sound like you're missing the point. If the people know the mechanics well enough to come up with this plan, then they could get those correctly chosen classes, and have a better plan. So it's not a last ditch plan, it's just a bad plan.
Gaining a rank in a specific class requires a specific ritual, not just choosing the class. In an older version of the setting book, it required at least 1 point of tael attuned to the class you want, and the attuning could only* be done by someone who already has that class. Either way, even if you know what class(es) you'd prefer you may not have the ability to choose them.

* Technically attuning tael to a class could also be done by spending some ridiculously huge amount of tael, but that's mainly an explanation for how the various classes came to exist in the first place - for each one, someone at some point in the past spent that huge amount of tael to create a new class.

[Fizban]

All right, so there's mechanics given that limit class choice, good to know. A given cost to create a new class is the first thing I've heard tickles my fancy, except in practice it doesn't mean much until/unless you put the players in control of what is apparently quite a bit of stuff.