Pathfinder and 3.5: XP costs replaced with GP costs

[Segev]

It's way, way old news by now that XP costs in 3.5 got universally changed to gp costs in PF1, generally at a 5:1 gp:XP ratio. It was done for a number of reasons, but I don't think I've ever seen a discussion of the positives and negatives of it. In particular, it's an interesting question to ask whether you should accept that change-over when running a combined-rules 3.PF game, or if you should use 3.5 XP costs where they showed up. This also influences whether you have "level loss" or only "permanent negative levels."

On the plus side, gp is a lot more fluid and seems less "personal" to lose than XP. Getting more feels easier, even if it probably isn't (barring economy-breaking exploits). It also is a flat upgrade to item crafting: rather than increasing the crafting costs, the XP costs are just removed entirely, meaning item crafting trades time for half-price goods, and a crafter can craft as long as he has time and money. No more questions about where sedentary wizards churning out wands are getting the XP to fuel them.

The primary logistical, OOC reason for the shift seems to be the unification of XP levels party-wide. No more tracking individual XP, for the most part, because everybody in the party has the same number, and levels at the same time because of it. Nobody is lower level due to having lost a level, or having spent XP on a spell or magic item, or anything of the sort.

Additionally, negative levels - permanent or otherwise - can be eliminated with a spell. Level loss can only be overcome with XP, and thought bottles are the only way around the hard way of just going on more adventures.

On the other hand, XP feeling like a greater cost makes those spells with that cost feel more impactful. At the same time, there's no argument over whether the wizard is "wasting" party resources on "his" spells, and though he is still paying in a way, he needs to budget somewhat less for expensive components when he has XP-costing spells instead. Wish and limited wish, in particular, feel cheapened by having it cost a diamond of 25k or 3.5k gp, rather than 5000 or 700 xp. Not that that's chump change, but it still feels easier to replace than the xp. There's also some nice thematics to xp being "life force" poured into powering these very powerful spells.

And then, there's psionics. This is almost a side-issue, since PF doesn't officially have psionics. DSP is a third party publisher. But the shift means that psions and their ilk now are consuming valuable gems when they use some of their powers; in 3.5, psionics had 0 material components, and strictly used xp costs to balance things that had expensive components as spells. Or should use expense to balance them. And it makes a lot more sense that mental powers take more out of you than that they require a particular gemstone that is destroyed when used.

Finally, XP costs open up some interesting options, albeit while leaving spells and such that have them as much rarer choices to use: you can still spend those even if stripped naked and robbed blind. In PF, while it's going to cost him a lot of his experience/life force/whatever, a naked level 17 wizard can cast wish even if you take away everything he has. That same wizard can cast wish multiple times a day if he has the wealth avaliable in PF, but can actually be prevented from it by simply robbing him. Ditto limited wish.

So, which do you like better? If you're running 3.PF, which do you go with, or in what mix do you take them?

[Kayblis]

I turn any XP cost into GP at a 5:1 ratio in my games, mostly because I don't use XP in general. None of my players complain that they're "forced to be the same level as everyone else".

The "XP is a river" argument is very flawed because it relies on following all rules to the letter and doing the math every single time, whereas most tables I've played in either don't use XP or have static XP for challenges. It also relies on you already being lower level than everyone else, so you are in fact losing something here. It's one of those points in which the investor's answer is the one that makes you worse most of the game for a small profit margin in the long long run. To me it's not worth it at all.

XP costs are cool for fluff, but in the end most players will just treat the spell as a non-option if it has an XP cost, so they're never prepared or learned "just in case". The exception is Wish and Limited Wish, but even those have seen almost no use. But, when you slap a gp cost in place of that, players have a much easier time using them, because they know their funds and know they'll gain more over time without messing up their build.

All in all, XP costs are a thing from the past.

[Crake]

Personally I vastly more prefer the use of xp in item crafting, both for the fluff of it, pouring some of your life force into an item, as well as the mechanical implications behind it, and there's one simple reason for it: Past a certain point, wealth becomes easily whisked into existence, and if wealth were all you needed to craft magical items, then there would be nigh-infinite amounts of magical items strewn about the place. XP acts as a temper to that, but by making xp costs a tangible, in-game thing, you also get some interesting outcomes, like people trading XP to spellcasters for services, letting the spellcasters craft "for free", or when taken to the extreme, entire economies based off trading xp that slowly filter up to the top 0.001% of wizards who craft things of truly epic magnitude.

But, basically, if you're playing pure pathfinder rules, blood money + fabricate = infinite crafting materials for whatever project you wish to fund, and then you can just craft it without any actual expense, so there's no such thing as "when you run out of wealth", as soon as you hit that magical level 9 to get access to fabricate, and you have the important crafting feats, you can just take a break and start completely decking out your party at no expense.

[Zombimode]

The "XP is a river" argument is very flawed because it relies on following all rules to the letter and doing the math every single time, whereas most tables I've played in either don't use XP or have static XP for challenges.

While I can totally see people making this argument it is a bit like argueing that being in time is hard because keeping a precise track of time just by the sun is hard.
Sure, if you actively refuse the use of readily available and easy-to-use technology like watches being in time is hard.

Likewise calculating precise xp rewards is hard if you actively refuse to use the readily available and easy-to-use (http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/) encounter calculator.
D20srd is not a obscure source and the tools is easy as pie. Not using precise xp rewards because it's "to hard" to calculate is just a lazy excuse.

[RatElemental]

The two best arguments I've seen in favor of the change are:

1. It lets the party wizard craft stuff for the party fighter, rogue, cleric, etc. without being punished for doing so, opening up more potential for character interaction and whatnot.

2. It makes it so a wizard that spends all his down time deciphering and writing arcane script onto scrolls isn't less experienced with magic than a wizard who spends all his down time getting drunk.

Another point that comes up is that time is more of a limiting factor on crafting than exp anyway. If the DM doesn't want the wizard to deck the party out in doomsday gear, all they have to do is not give the wizard a decade of downtime to do it in.

[Crake]

The two best arguments I've seen in favor of the change are:

1. It lets the party wizard craft stuff for the party fighter, rogue, cleric, etc. without being punished for doing so, opening up more potential for character interaction and whatnot.

There's a whole wizards article dedicated to providing a means of sharing xp costs between characters so this isn't really an argument.


2. It makes it so a wizard that spends all his down time deciphering and writing arcane script onto scrolls isn't less experienced with magic than a wizard who spends all his down time getting drunk.

Performing research, learning arcane scripts and deciphering magical texts don't drain xp in any way. However, infusing parchment with the power to unleash untold forces isn't quite the same. That said, it makes just as little sense that a wizard performing research is equally as experienced as a wizard who spends his free time getitng sloshed in the local tavern.


Another point that comes up is that time is more of a limiting factor on crafting than exp anyway. If the DM doesn't want the wizard to deck the party out in doomsday gear, all they have to do is not give the wizard a decade of downtime to do it in.

This depends entirely on the kind of game you're running. Enforcing time constraints isn't always appropriate, and thus should not be considered a universal balancing factor. Not to mention time can be mitigated in a variety of ways anyway.

[Aotrs Commander]

XP costs were always considered a signpost that said: "never do this" to my players (and me, as a character). The cost is not impactful when no-one is ever going to be prepared to use the option; it's functionally the same as a hard ban.

Functionally, XP costs either a) punish the player making gear/using certain spells by pushing them below the parties' level (even if for a session or two) or b) have the play game the XP system and thus actually functionally negate the XP cost ANYWAY, because if meta-game the system, you can actually get more XP by overall by item crafting, which is even stupider. (I mean, as a cap to stop PCs ever casting Miracle, Gate and Wish, it did work...)

It also (would have) required individual XP tracking which I REALLY don't care to do. I already spend functionally a day a week most weeks of the year doing DM stuff even when I'm not actively running; my enthusiasm for tracking more than just the XP total for the whole party over 6-8 characters died many years ago when I realised how utterly pointless an exercise is terms of gain (basically none, once my similarly-aged players grew out of their teens and I stopped awarding arbitatary XP for roleplaying and also thus stopped encouraging competition about which characters/players got most XP) verses the extra work. Yes, even with a spread sheet to track XP, I just don't want to do it, I have better and more meaningful things to do with my time.

It felt like a really poor way to replace making you have to go and find proper ingredients to craft your magic items which was AD&D's solution (though that went too far the other way) - but if you want crafting to have flavour THAT is how you do it. I always felt it was also a terrible idea fluff-wise. MAYBE special artefacts might require a fragmnent of your personal essence - but something and ubiquitous as a potion of Cure Light Wounds or a +1 Dagger?

(It was clearly designed as a game-mechanic first.)

So it was NEVER used in our games, and frankly I'm glad to see the back of it; there is now an outside chance, however small, that someone might actually take an item crafting feat or something one day. (And also not punishing the players for getting Ability Drain, Greater Restoration, yes looking at you, even WITH XP costs you should never have had one.)

[sleepyphoenixx]

I prefer using XP costs, mostly for the same reasons Crake already mentioned.

I also prefer most other 3.5 mechanics to their PF versions.
Those things should have meaningful, lasting impact on your character imo, not be cheapened to a momentary inconvenience.
No offense to anyone who prefers PF, but most of the changes feel to me like houserules for players who can't deal with losing something or experiencing actual setbacks.

Basically PF often feels to me like a "carebear" version of 3.5, to borrow a term from video games.
Some people enjoy that kind of thing, some don't. For me taking away a lot of the risks just makes the game less exciting and cheapens any achievements i might make.
It also hurts my immersion if things that are supposed to be huge threats by the fluff are barely an inconvenience mechanically.


Functionally, XP costs either a) punish the player making gear/using certain spells by pushing them below the parties' level (even if for a session or two) or b) have the play game the XP system and thus actually functionally negate the XP cost ANYWAY, because if meta-game the system, you can actually get more XP by overall by item crafting, which is even stupider. (I mean, as a cap to stop PCs ever casting Miracle, Gate and Wish, it did work...)
That's a pretty flawed view imo. You're paying a feat and being behind a level (most of the time) for doubling part of your parties WBL, which sounds like a fair trade to me.
The PF version of a single feat doubling a (potentially huge with Craft Wondrous Item) chunk of your entire parties WBL seems far more unbalanced to me.

[Crake]

XP costs were always considered a signpost that said: "never do this" to my players (and me, as a character). The cost is not impactful when no-one is ever going to be prepared to use the option; it's functionally the same as a hard ban.

Anecdotally, perhaps that's true for you, but my players craft a lot, despite xp costs.


Functionally, XP costs either a) punish the player making gear/using certain spells by pushing them below the parties' level (even if for a session or two) or b) have the play game the XP system and thus actually functionally negate the XP cost ANYWAY, because if meta-game the system, you can actually get more XP by overall by item crafting, which is even stupider. (I mean, as a cap to stop PCs ever casting Miracle, Gate and Wish, it did work...)

Having custom tailored gear is a major advantage, so it needs a drawback of some kind, let's be honest. That's also not even taking into account the possibility of using item crafting as a means of making some serious money if you can find the right clients, if it had no additional cost to it, magic items would be pure moneymakers, and people would have little reason not to just pump out magic items at a campaign-wide level, not even just talking within the scope of an adventure here. If the only limiting factor for crafting was materials, but crafting magic items netted you a wealth positive from selling it, then you could just keep crafting items all the time, and the world would be flooded with items.

Now naturally, perhaps some people would actually prefer a high magic world saturated with magic items, and in such a case, sure, go for it, but xp costs serve as an in-universe explanation as to why that's not the case.


It also (would have) required individual XP tracking which I REALLY don't care to do. I already spend functionally a day a week most weeks of the year doing DM stuff even when I'm not actively running; my enthusiasm for tracking more than just the XP total for the whole party over 6-8 characters died many years ago when I realised how utterly pointless an exercise is terms of gain (basically none, once my similarly-aged players grew out of their teens and I stopped awarding arbitatary XP for roleplaying and also thus stopped encouraging competition about which characters/players got most XP) verses the extra work. Yes, even with a spread sheet to track XP, I just don't want to do it, I have better and more meaningful things to do with my time.

Individual xp tracking is quite easily solved by just having the players track their xp themselves. If you don't trust your players to do that, then that sounds like a separate issue to me. Personally, I actually prefer individual xp, and allowing players each to have their moment to shine, and give out some extra xp here and there, or for characters who aren't present to suddenly get a massive xp boost despite not having participated in a big encounter.


It felt like a really poor way to replace making you have to go and find proper ingredients to craft your magic items which was AD&D's solution (though that went too far the other way) - but if you want crafting to have flavour THAT is how you do it. I always felt it was also a terrible idea fluff-wise. MAYBE special artefacts might require a fragmnent of your personal essence - but something and ubiquitous as a potion of Cure Light Wounds or a +1 Dagger?

Not every setting has potions or +1 daggers being considered "ubiquitous". Personally, I actually also require players to go collect relevant crafting materials to craft, or at least let them do so in the process of adventuring, as such materials are generally not available in all but the largest of planar metropolises (metropoli?). Honestly, to me, it sounds like you want to play/run a much more high-magic, or perhaps even magitech campaign setting at tippyverse levels of magic integration into daily life (which is actually still possible with xp as a crafting component, it just requires a bit more thought to make happen), and that's completely fine.


(It was clearly designed as a game-mechanic first.)

Spells and the like sapping life force have actually always been something that's existed in dnd, it's just that for the most part it wasn't done through xp (though there were monsters that could drain xp even back in the day), but instead done via aging, a spell like wish would age the caster 5 years, and haste would age the recpients like, a year or something, which made elves pretty amusing spellcasters, but that was even MORE tedious to keep track of than an xp cost. Personally, I think xp costs are a more elegant solution, and unifies the singular notion of "life force", which is drained by monsters, taxing spells, and item creation all alike.

[Pugwampy]

I never use xp to craft magic . If a player makes a magic goodie for the fighter , I will give him free XP

In all my years DM,ing only one player took advantage of craft magic goodies to try and deck out his buddies and himself .

I think most players believe they pick up or buy goodies sooner or later so there is no need to waste a feat .

[Serafina]

Both the "what about naked Wizards" and Psionics-problems can be solved by not requiring expensive material components to be carried on your person.
Instead, they can just be stored somewhere else that belongs to you (your wizards tower, private home, small demiplane, mind space, whatever), and as long as they aren't stolen, you can just use them up.
That doesn't fully solve the problem for Psionics, but if you give this stuff the right feel it's not too big of an issue.


One issue not mentioned is how this impacts the Caster/Martial divide.
On the one hand, Martials had no way to spend XP other than to level up (which at times could be very far away, and sometimes you needed results right now), so it always made Casters feel even more special. Gold is a resource that everyone can spend equally.
On the other, magic item crafting is basically only open to casters, and making it more accessible makes them yet better at yet more things. Then again, with an item crafter in the party, a martial can now fund their own items and the crafter will probably be very happy to work for them - previously, that'd cause issues due to the XP-cost, so overall the change is still a net-good.

[martixy]

I don't use XP, and hate all the math around it, but I like the idea of XP costs.

I'm weird like that.

Basically, the math is way overcomplicated and don't wanna deal with it, even though the fluff around it is great. But as Crake said, at some point wealth becomes easy to just conjure up. So that creates issues for Pathfinder's approach.

Boiled down to its essence, XP is a second type of currency that exists in the game, which you can use to buy powerful or rare effects. The solution becomes obvious then - just introduce a second, rare currency which can't be acquired via the normal means.

You could for example make it diamonds, or souls/shards of a soul, or crystallized life-force or whatever, and as DM control the availability of that. Or, in PF Ultimate Campaign introduced the downtime system, which allows players to generate various types of goods, one of which is "Magic".
Both is what I use.

[Crake]

Both the "what about naked Wizards" and Psionics-problems can be solved by not requiring expensive material components to be carried on your person.
Instead, they can just be stored somewhere else that belongs to you (your wizards tower, private home, small demiplane, mind space, whatever), and as long as they aren't stolen, you can just use them up.
That doesn't fully solve the problem for Psionics, but if you give this stuff the right feel it's not too big of an issue.

That solution feels rather gamey, how does the universe know, for example, who owns what? What if you were stripped of title and land, and so you no longer technically "own" your wizard's tower? Can you still use all the components inside? That just kinda seems like it creates more issues than it solves.

For psionics, having crystals or gems that you can psychically resonate to produce powerful effects, which are then shattered upon use due to the stress, seems like a perfectly fine in-universe explanation (though then one could argue that the gems simply become gem dust and can be resold, so further elaboration required I guess), but a lot of people's appeal to psionics is pure interal power, without the need to rely on any external equipment.


One issue not mentioned is how this impacts the Caster/Martial divide.
On the one hand, Martials had no way to spend XP other than to level up (which at times could be very far away, and sometimes you needed results right now), so it always made Casters feel even more special. Gold is a resource that everyone can spend equally.
On the other, magic item crafting is basically only open to casters, and making it more accessible makes them yet better at yet more things. Then again, with an item crafter in the party, a martial can now fund their own items and the crafter will probably be very happy to work for them - previously, that'd cause issues due to the XP-cost, so overall the change is still a net-good.

Pathfinder actually provided a solution to this, the master craftsman feat, which allows anyone to craft wondrous items, or magical arms and armor, with just a single extra feat, and as I mentioned earlier in this thread, there's a whole wizards article providing supplemental rules for sharing the xp cost of item creation, so that isn't an issue.

The article in question for anyone curious. (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20060526a)


I don't use XP, and hate all the math around it, but I like the idea of XP costs.

I'm weird like that.

Basically, the math is way overcomplicated and don't wanna deal with it, even though the fluff around it is great. But as Crake said, at some point wealth becomes easy to just conjure up. So that creates issues for Pathfinder's approach.

Boiled down to its essence, XP is a second type of currency that exists in the game, which you can use to buy powerful or rare effects. The solution becomes obvious then - just introduce a second, rare currency which can't be acquired via the normal means.

You could for example make it diamonds, or souls/shards of a soul, or crystallized life-force or whatever, and as DM control the availability of that. Or, in PF Ultimate Campaign introduced the downtime system, which allows players to generate various types of goods, one of which is "Magic".
Both is what I use.

In my setting, xp (as "life force") is actually a tangible thing, and can be bought, sold, collected, and used through the appropriate means. Truly intense magical societies outright use it as coinage, with the "coins" actually being magical items that are infused with life force so as to not be easily forged, and should someone actually produce forgeries, well, then the forgeries would have just as much worth as the normal currancy, since it contains active life force. The currancy can also be, if desired, "expended" in the process of creating magic items, instead of your own, essentially acting as expendable talismans of transferrance from that web enhancement I just linked.

[False God]

Since I often don't use XP, I replace XP costs with gold, but I also allow 5:1 component replacement with gold (except when the component is actually gold). Sure, you can go around collecting bat guano and fist-sized diamonds....or you can just carry a big old bag of gold.

[HeraldOfExius]

From a DM perspective, XP costs serve the important purpose of requiring players to actually play the game in order to do cool things. From a player perspective, XP costs compete with leveling. Part of this problem is that XP costs are pretty much a caster thing, and being able to take more levels in a spellcasting class is a very attractive option. I think that there should be a cost associated with things that requires players to do more than program their PCs with infinite money algorithms, but paying that cost should complement character advancement instead of competing with it.

[Kayblis]

While I can totally see people making this argument it is a bit like argueing that being in time is hard because keeping a precise track of time just by the sun is hard.
Sure, if you actively refuse the use of readily available and easy-to-use technology like watches being in time is hard.

Likewise calculating precise xp rewards is hard if you actively refuse to use the readily available and easy-to-use (http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/) encounter calculator.
D20srd is not a obscure source and the tools is easy as pie. Not using precise xp rewards because it's "to hard" to calculate is just a lazy excuse.

That's my point exactly. The whole thing is so obnoxious to use that you need to bring your tablet, your phone or your computer into your pen and paper session because you can't be assed to actually do it by hand 4 times per session every session. Sometimes, people like to play a game without 10 extra hours of prep-time working out the math for side stuff, and saying "this is playing wrong" is just a bad argument. If the rules are made so annoying to use that most people skip them, they are bad rules.

This also raises the problem of "the players went somewhere different than I planned". Using XP by the book means stopping the game dead in its tracks each time to calculate XP, or not giving any XP until the end of the session and having to go "sorry guys, I'll do the math until next week". It messes with the flow of the game, the 5~10 minutes you took to open the site on your phone killed the immersion for half the table. It's a rule most people are better off not using, unless it's an online game and even then I don't because it's useless clutter.

[Segev]

PF did a good thing, in my opinion, in opening up item crafting to non-casters, even if it does come with a feat tax. If you kept XP costs for crafting in, but allowed the feat(s), non-casters would then have at least one major place to spend XP if they so chose.

Sounds, though, like there's a roughly even split on the question of whether, in a 3.PF merged-rules game, you would keep the XP costs or shift over to gp-only.

A potential mix that hasn't been discussed is keeping XP costs on spells (and psionics) but dropping them from item crafting. Item crafting is the one place the change-over actively is a buff/reduction in the cost, rather than (theoretically) an even trade (wherein we assume that 1 XP is worth 5 gp). Because PF item crafting just dropped the XP cost, rather than multiplying it by 5 and adding it to the crafting cost of magic items. (Admittedly, this would have complicated the math further, which is probably why they didn't do that.)

An even more fluid approach would be to simply allow 1 XP to substitute for 5 gp worth of material components in spells, but that actually swings things a bit more the other direction. In 3.5, some spells cost XP, while others cost gp, and some cost a bit of both. Letting XP substitute for gp at 1:5 ratio would open up a lot of spells that require specific material components to being "casually" cast. That is, cast without shopping for the item, first. Of course, how many games really make the casters track their supplies of specific expensive components? The whole point of the "spell component pouch" is that they don't have to track components, and giving a gp cost in theory is just to tell players how much it costs to buy what they're looking for when they can't hand-wave it with a pouch, but I wonder how many games effectively let them have a nebulous "supply of material components" that is worth a practically-liquid amount of gp they deduct each time they cast.

(Heck, I wonder if that wouldn't make an argument for doing away with generic spell component pouches and insisting casters track their material components. Even if they don't "cost" anything but some time foraging, specifying how much you're carrying and where becomes more of a concern all of a sudden.)

I'm digressing. The other way to go about the "substitutions" for components would be to keep 3.5's design, but allow a PF-like special material component ("crystalized XP" or the like) that is 5 gp per 1 XP that can flat-out be used as an extra material component in spells that cost XP in order to cast them without expending the XP, oneself.

Back on item crafting, I'm actually quite fond of having "rare materials" that you can use in magic items be treasure drops. They're worth specific amounts of gp, but only as crafting-cost substitutes for particular kinds of items (some negotiation between GM and player is appropriate if a player has a cool idea for an item that could thematically use the materials in question). Selling materials to vendors gets you half that value, as normal, assuming generic item-mart style play. The vendor still has to resell the materials to an actual crafter who will use them in making his magic items, after all.

One consequence of having "crystalized XP" or similar would be that you could potentially allow not just conversion of one's XP into this item, nor merely the use of this item in spellcasting and magic item creation, but also actively re-acquire it as XP for somebody else. In the extreme case, you could sprinkle it on your recruit's food and have them level up rapidly. In a slightly more "it takes magic and effort and isn't quite the same" narrative sense, maybe it could be used in rituals that apply various LA-adding templates, or which make racial HD "add-ons" happen. Joe is afflicted with lycanthropy as a curse, but a ritual using some XP-crystal might give him the extra additional LA to make it "natural."

Or, maybe, there is no generic "crystalized XP" to be extracted from willing donors, except by using their body parts as materials or reagents. That's why using that hill giant's hide for the leather in that belt lets that belt make you stronger: you're actually harvesting some XP from it. In this case, the "special reagents" substitute for XP cost, rather than material cost. I like this a bit less, though: the thematic ties and the use of rare materials to substitute for crafting cost makes sense and re-ties "crafting cost" to actual crafting materials, so that you have an easier time keeping in mind that you're actually shopping for specialized components to make your magic items, rather than just sprinkling gold pieces or buying random gems and powdering them to sprinkle over the item you're enchanting. i.e., it helps me, at least, remember that crafting components are not fungible, no matter how much we abstract it to "it costs n gp to make this magic item."


That's my point exactly. The whole thing is so obnoxious to use that you need to bring your tablet, your phone or your computer into your pen and paper session because you can't be assed to actually do it by hand 4 times per session every session. Sometimes, people like to play a game without 10 extra hours of prep-time working out the math for side stuff, and saying "this is playing wrong" is just a bad argument. If the rules are made so annoying to use that most people skip them, they are bad rules.

This also raises the problem of "the players went somewhere different than I planned". Using XP by the book means stopping the game dead in its tracks each time to calculate XP, or not giving any XP until the end of the session and having to go "sorry guys, I'll do the math until next week". It messes with the flow of the game, the 5~10 minutes you took to open the site on your phone killed the immersion for half the table. It's a rule most people are better off not using, unless it's an online game and even then I don't because it's useless clutter.

You CAN just record what you had them face, and then do the calculation at the end of the session, or even over the week between sessions. Heck, you can hand that over to your players to calculate, if you like.

If you really want to be radical about it, you could simply calculate the XP for the average party level, and then let the players distribute the XP between themselves. Those who are under- or over-leveled have a personal multiple they keep track of for how much XP they "really" get for whatever they take from the pool.

Both of these ideas require a lot of trust in your players, though, not to cheat. I trust mine, because it's just a game.

[Hish]

I don't use XP, and hate all the math around it, but I like the idea of XP costs.

I'm weird like that.

Basically, the math is way overcomplicated and don't wanna deal with it, even though the fluff around it is great. But as Crake said, at some point wealth becomes easy to just conjure up. So that creates issues for Pathfinder's approach.

Boiled down to its essence, XP is a second type of currency that exists in the game, which you can use to buy powerful or rare effects. The solution becomes obvious then - just introduce a second, rare currency which can't be acquired via the normal means.

You could for example make it diamonds, or souls/shards of a soul, or crystallized life-force or whatever, and as DM control the availability of that.

I agree with this. I think XP should be a fully optional subsystem, so it shouldn't be integral to other subsystems. At the same time, I don't think a simple 1:5 conversion to GP is a good answer either. The thematics of sacrificing life force for these powerful magical effects is really strong, and GP just doesn't capture the same feel. GP is just money, XP is your very soul. So the best answer is a different way to represent this sacrifice.

As for crafting, I can get behind dropping XP costs entirely. It doesn't really add anything, and crafting is still balanced by time and feat investments. I also support allowing mundanes to craft magic items if they can get the spell prereqs from somewhere else. And opening up craft(alchemy), because it's really weird that it requires spellcasting.

[Telok]

Something I'm toying around with is increasing the spell level of spells with xp costs by 1/500 xp rounded down. Keep the spells with options to use without an xpcost at the same level but require them to be heightened in order to get access to the xp costing functions.

I replaced crafting xp with a special material component requirement at 1 component per 5000 gp, minimum of one. Then I had the alchemist/potion merchants also carry the components for magic items up to 2000 gp. That worked well, I could have relatively semi-common low end magic items, potions, and scrolls available for purchase but high end stuff was looted or quested for.

[Aotrs Commander]

Anecdotally, perhaps that's true for you, but my players craft a lot, despite xp costs.

Literally no-one in twenty years has ever crafted a single item, not even a scroll.

(One player once half expressed interest in scrolls, but it was in a party that a) doesn't use XP anyway and b) has abstracted time and that we only play pretty infruqently anyway.)

(Hell, Scribe Scroll is so much considered a chaff feat, we have long let it be traded out and pretty much no wizard has it.)


Individual xp tracking is quite easily solved by just having the players track their xp themselves. If you don't trust your players to do that, then that sounds like a separate issue to me. Personally, I actually prefer individual xp, and allowing players each to have their moment to shine, and give out some extra xp here and there, or for characters who aren't present to suddenly get a massive xp boost despite not having participated in a big encounter.

Make my players do homework?

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

No, never.

It's the DM's job to do that, not the players. Not too mention the wasted time each an every week with the DM saying "right, so that was a load of CR [x] monsters" and then them having to either use the one copy of the DMG I have or have to bring their own) or, as mentioned, the even more daft idea of expecting them to go home and do that. With the exception of about one of them, they pretty much want to turn up for a couple of hours per week and play. (And yes, for the record, the DM does keep all the character sheets, or a copy of one, bare minimum, if a player wants to keep it themselves.)

As for punitively punishing players who can't make it to the session this week (y'know, for reasons like they have adopted two small children or illness or something) - compounded by suddenly, presumably, having character disappear mid-combat?

Just no.

There is a spread sheet, since I estimate all XP for the entire adventure path in advance (if it's one of the day-quest parties, we don't even BOTHER with XP, we just level up when the DM feels like it), so it is just a case of copy-paste the appropriate lines from "estimated" to "actual" XP which is a two-minute ob for me, and that is all it actually needs. There is zero gain for doing anything more complicated.


That's my point exactly. The whole thing is so obnoxious to use that you need to bring your tablet, your phone or your computer into your pen and paper session because you can't be assed to actually do it by hand 4 times per session every session. Sometimes, people like to play a game without 10 extra hours of prep-time working out the math for side stuff, and saying "this is playing wrong" is just a bad argument.

Exactly. That stuff should be handled outside of the session by the DM, and not impede play for even a few minutes.

(Hell, for the weekly sessions, I spread-sheet the initatives for every potential combat in advance. The massive gain of not havin to go around seven characters for initative, and the write it down in order for every single combat is well worth the price in iniative adjustments.)




Spells and the like sapping life force have actually always been something that's existed in dnd, it's just that for the most part it wasn't done through xp (though there were monsters that could drain xp even back in the day), but instead done via aging, a spell like wish would age the caster 5 years, and haste would age the recpients like, a year or something, which made elves pretty amusing spellcasters, but that was even MORE tedious to keep track of than an xp cost. Personally, I think xp costs are a more elegant solution, and unifies the singular notion of "life force", which is drained by monsters, taxing spells, and item creation all alike.

Stuff like that was a bad idea in AD&D and that has never changed. AD&D had a lot of REALLY STUPID ideas and some of those made it through to 3.0 and were summarily discarded. XP for item costs was just 3.x's bad idea, but the lack of an alternative meant it sat around until Pathfinder wisely put it to rest.

[Segev]

This is admittedly running 5e, where every monster is a fixed number of XP, but I just tell my PCs what their XP take is per person, and they write it down and track it. I don't even know their totals unless I ask them!

[AvatarVecna]

By default, 3.5 magic item crafting is the ability to debuff your casting progression in exchange for buffing some other stats (AC, saves, HP, attributes, skills...whatever). This is, at least by the final result, pretty similar to the choice a player makes between a full caster and a gish version - a cleric who crafts a great deal of XP into super-items in order to be a melee monster will be at least superficially similar to a paladin, for example. Pathfinder changes this by letting you turn gold+time into "more gold", as opposed to letting you turn "gold+time+xp into "more gold", so now instead of that cleric having to sacrifice casting for better stats, they just have better stats because they took an item crafting feat. Of course, PF also opened up item crafting to noncasters, so the money doubling isn't just one more thing enforcing caster supremacy anymore (or at least, not enforcing it quite as hard), so in the end this change to default casting slightly buffs everybody (the Pathfinder gold standard), which means that the interparty balance is mostly unchanged (also the Pathfinder gold standard).

The big advantage doing things the PF way instead of the 3.5 way (beyond "noncasters get to at least maybe play with these rules a little") is that gold is harder to get than XP. Like okay, even if you're not using Thought Bottles or dark craft points or using your party member's XP pools instead...well, here's an example:

A level 10 four-person party is given a month of downtime between adventures, and the Int 20 wizard wants to use the Craft Wondrous feat they picked up at lvl 6 to improve his lot in life; his party members want magic items too, but they're not willing to front XP just gold, so they can go pound sand. Well the wizard liquidates all his current assets so that he has 49000 gp (3.5 WBL for lvl 10). He turns this into 90000 gp worth of items, and the only shenanigans he's got is some mechanics that make the crafting go by faster, to the point that there's only a single day left before normal adventuring resumes. At the end of his crafting month, he's down 3600 XP, but really doesn't like the idea of being behind his teammates like this - at least partially because calculating encounter XP would either be a headache for the DM or a downgrade for him personally, and he didn't pick wizard to be inconvenienced, dammit!

So he takes 3200gp and buys 16 Heavy Warhorses (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/horse.htm#warhorseHeavy). He sticks them in a barn just big enough to hold them all (costing the 4800 remaining gp), and now they're arrayed in a 4x4 pattern. For both his surprise round and the first round of real combat, he shoots an Empowered Fireball into the barn. Horses that make both saves will take (13d6/2) twice, so average equivalent to 13d6, which has a 99% chance of making them be dying (although not necessarily dead, but being unconcious in a burning barn will take care of that quickly). If both of the Empowered Fireballs were really low damage to the point that half damage from both of them wouldn't make all these horses at least Dying, he can toss in a regular fireball just to be sure. 16 dead Heavy Warhorses is exactly 3600 XP for him. Alternatively, save the money and use Summon Monster IV/V to summon up 2d4+3d3+2 Celestial Bison. You've almost certainly summoned at least 11 holy cows, so barbeque 11 of them with your four 9d6 fireballs and once more you've made up the XP.

But let's say shooting fish in a barrel isn't your DM's idea of a fair fight and they wouldn't award full XP for it. Basically any large cluster of CR 2s at the lowest will do. Get information on where you can find a large herd of bison and go there. Scrying to zero in on them, Teleport in. 4 fireballs later, you've probably got 16 dead bison on your hands, and you can teleport out with your last slot lvl 3 or higher.

All of this is to say that even if you aren't using items or sacrifices or stealing the XP from suckers, it's not that difficult to craft all your existing money into double its worth in items, then to track down an encounter or two that can completely make up the XP; you're a mid-level or higher caster who's crafting his own items, you're one of the more powerful characters in the game and you don't really need outside assistance all that much. This gets worse they higher level you get - at lvl 20, crafting all your WBL into items would take 60800 XP, so now you're about halfway between 15th and 16th level. A single CR 22 encounter (the highest you can get XP from as a Wizard 15) gives 54000 XP. You might have to have several fights if your DM doesn't let you get more than 1 levels worth of XP at a time, but them's the shakes.

My point is this: 3.5 crafting turns XP and time into money, but the base assumption of the rest of the game is that you can turn time into money and XP, and to a degree you can also turn money into XP directly. An XP penalty for crafting items doesn't matter, because that just means you need to do a bit more fighting than your friends do...and since you're a crafting caster, you're probably powerful enough to pull that off without taking too much time. PF fixes this a bit by taking XP out of the equation - now it's just time and money, and money's harder to get than XP in PF.

[Luccan]

This is admittedly running 5e, where every monster is a fixed number of XP, but I just tell my PCs what their XP take is per person, and they write it down and track it. I don't even know their totals unless I ask them!

Of course, 5e doesn't even use XP for anything other than leveling, so you might as well just add it up yourself anyway and tell them when they level.
I've never crafted with a single character, except pre-game with an Artificer and all that amounted to was spending the crafting points from my unplayed levels to make my gear a bit cheaper. I feel I have to agree that for many people XP-crafting is either too high a cost or essentially costs nothing. There's certain to be a middle group that finds it to be "just right" in terms of exchange, but I doubt that the examples are any less anecdotal.

As it is, I think I prefer the "gather special ingredients" style of crafting, especially for 3.5 where lower-end items are often assumed to be bought easily anyway. Ingredients just require a rarity adjustment based on item power. A +1 dagger still requires feat/skill investment, but the special ingredients are common enough that you can have more than a couple exist. So there isn't a magical craftsmen everywhere in the world, but those that do exist can make magic items without you wondering where they're getting all this XP from if they aren't doing anything but spending it.

[Segev]

Am I the only one who, when playing a wizard with crafting feats, offers to make things for my fellow PCs for 75% market value? Whether there's XP cost or not, that nets me some extra gold, and saves them gold.

I have had a net total of ONE player balk at this, accusing me of trying to rip them off. They went and paid full market price for items elsewhere, and my PC made gear for the other PCs.

I then proceeded to pour most of the 25% profit into my spellbook.



For me, I keep waffling between liking the idea of using gp for spells rather than XP, and feeling like that cheapens Wish and Limited Wish and also makes Psions less sensible.

In particular, the idea that Wish is something even high-level wizards do sparingly because it's harder to recover the lost XP (however they view it IC) than it is to use magic to get ahold of yet another 25,000 gp diamond is...nice. It's also possible to wish for money if it costs XP, but that becomes somewhat less worthwhile when you have a gem of the value in money you want already in-hand.

I think, though, the biggest thing is that, narratively, spending XP and using up an expensive material component represent different things. XP represents something of you going into it.

That said, it does simplify things (a big goal of PF) to remove XP costs and just convert them to gp.

[AvatarVecna]

Am I the only one who, when playing a wizard with crafting feats, offers to make things for my fellow PCs for 75% market value? Whether there's XP cost or not, that nets me some extra gold, and saves them gold.

I have had a net total of ONE player balk at this, accusing me of trying to rip them off. They went and paid full market price for items elsewhere, and my PC made gear for the other PCs.

I then proceeded to pour most of the 25% profit into my spellbook.



For me, I keep waffling between liking the idea of using gp for spells rather than XP, and feeling like that cheapens Wish and Limited Wish and also makes Psions less sensible.

In particular, the idea that Wish is something even high-level wizards do sparingly because it's harder to recover the lost XP (however they view it IC) than it is to use magic to get ahold of yet another 25,000 gp diamond is...nice. It's also possible to wish for money if it costs XP, but that becomes somewhat less worthwhile when you have a gem of the value in money you want already in-hand.

I think, though, the biggest thing is that, narratively, spending XP and using up an expensive material component represent different things. XP represents something of you going into it.

That said, it does simplify things (a big goal of PF) to remove XP costs and just convert them to gp.

Speaking from a player's perspective, if I'm playing a crafter, I'm doing it to spread the extra money around the party, and I won't be charging them for the privilege, because the alternative is that my crafting feats help me more than they help anybody else - and, if I'm a crafting caster, I'm likely the person in least need of help in the first place. But I don't go into a game assuming that somebody else playing a crafter means they're gonna be willing to suffer the XP cost in exchange for giving me free stat boosts; they're either gonna ask me to give up XP as well as gold for it (which I'm willing to do), or they're just not gonna offer to craft me ****, and IME the latter is a lot more likely.

But this thread wasn't asking whether I prefer 3.5 or PF crafting as a player (the answer is obvious - 3.5 crafting makes mitigating the resource expenditure soooooooo much easier), it was my preference in games I run. My preference in games I run is Pathfinder, both because lost XP is easy to make up (especially for a crafting caster), and because it has options letting noncasters play with the magic item crafting rules.

[Psychoalpha]

But, basically, if you're playing pure pathfinder rules, blood money + fabricate = infinite crafting materials for whatever project you wish to fund, and then you can just craft it without any actual expense, so there's no such thing as "when you run out of wealth", as soon as you hit that magical level 9 to get access to fabricate, and you have the important crafting feats, you can just take a break and start completely decking out your party at no expense.

I feel like the point at which you're allowing Blood Money + Fabricate = Infinite Crafting Materials, then you're also allowing any of the various 3.5 tricks for either recovering your xp or dipping into an infinite pool of the same (the moment you say someone can trade xp to spellcasters for services, the methods to force people to do so might as well be infinite).



If the DM doesn't want the wizard to deck the party out in doomsday gear, all they have to do is not give the wizard a decade of downtime to do it in.
This depends entirely on the kind of game you're running. Enforcing time constraints isn't always appropriate, and thus should not be considered a universal balancing factor. Not to mention time can be mitigated in a variety of ways anyway.

There's no such thing as a universal balancing factor to begin with, so if the DM doesn't want the <whatever> to deck the party out in doomsday gear using infinite crafting tricks (of the GP or XP variety), all they really have to do is say: Hey, please don't exploit the holes in an imperfect game system for infinite crafting nonsense.


XP costs were always considered a signpost that said: "never do this" to my players (and me, as a character). The cost is not impactful when no-one is ever going to be prepared to use the option; it's functionally the same as a hard ban.

Yeah, this is more or less my experience as well. The only time crafting saw much use in 3.5 was when we were able to draw XP equally from all characters involved, and thus nobody ever fell behind, and thus it... wasn't really a cost anyway. Nobody cared if the whole party leveled a bit slower in exchange for some customized magic items, but nobody wanted individuals to do so.


That's a pretty flawed view imo. You're paying a feat and being behind a level (most of the time) for doubling part of your parties WBL, which sounds like a fair trade to me.
The PF version of a single feat doubling a (potentially huge with Craft Wondrous Item) chunk of your entire parties WBL seems far more unbalanced to me.

Except WBL is a DM guideline, nothing more. If a DM is concerned with WBL then no amount of crafting is going to double anything, and if they're not, then there are infinitely better ways of doubling your WBL than blowing xp on crafting.


Having custom tailored gear is a major advantage, so it needs a drawback of some kind, let's be honest.

Does not compute. My job as a DM is, amongst other things, to create challenges for the party. My toolset is literally the entire world and every possibility in that world. There is no 'major advantage' that can truly overcome that, outside of campaign destroying nigh-infinite loops. The only question is whether or not I can come up with meaningful and fun challenges for the party to engage with. If I can, who cares if the party has custom tailored gear? I mean, the party cares, because that sort of thing is neat and fun to have, but like... yes, it makes them more readily able to overcome generic challenges, but so does everything from individual class choice to party synergy between classes.

As with so many other things, in a game with such huge power disparities as a Fighter and a Wizard being in the same party as if they're equals, being concerned about WBL or tailored magic items being too advantageous doesn't make a lot of sense to me.


If the only limiting factor for crafting was materials, but crafting magic items netted you a wealth positive from selling it, then you could just keep crafting items all the time, and the world would be flooded with items.

Again, even in 3.5 the rules allowed plenty of tricks to flood the world with items if one assumes everyone exploits those tricks ad nauseum. The world isn't overflowing with items for the same reason the world isn't (or is!) carved up into empires run by ancient dragons who have the benefit of both being high end spellcasters and also dragons: Because that's not the world the GM wants to run, and anybody trying to turn it into such a world should probably be prepared to step up and GM. :p


Not every setting has potions or +1 daggers being considered "ubiquitous".

Not every setting has humans, either, but that doesn't make the statement that 'something as ubiquitous as humans' a reasonable one for like... basically every published setting and most homebrew ones people are widely familiar with.


But as Crake said, at some point wealth becomes easy to just conjure up. So that creates issues for Pathfinder's approach.

It's not really any more difficult in 3.5, just slightly more elaborate.


The whole thing is so obnoxious to use that you need to bring your tablet, your phone or your computer into your pen and paper session because you can't be assed to actually do it by hand 4 times per session every session.

We don't trust pen and paper, especially since most of our campaigns go up to level 20. There's way too much stuff to keep track of, cloud saving means nobody forgot their sheet at home, etc, etc. Basically everyone uses a digital device of some kind, and if somebody didn't the DM would require a digital copy of their sheet to be made and kept up anyway.


Am I the only one who, when playing a wizard with crafting feats, offers to make things for my fellow PCs for 75% market value? Whether there's XP cost or not, that nets me some extra gold, and saves them gold.

Er.. I guess? When I'm a crafter I don't charge my fellow PCs anything for the service. They're my friends, and arguably more importantly them being better equipped will do a better job of keeping me alive and us all surviving more powerful challenges. Trying to turn a profit on top of that just seems... enh. To be fair, they tend to have the same attitude about helping fund my spellbook if I'm playing a Wizard.

[Crake]

Literally no-one in twenty years has ever crafted a single item, not even a scroll.

(One player once half expressed interest in scrolls, but it was in a party that a) doesn't use XP anyway and b) has abstracted time and that we only play pretty infruqently anyway.)

(Hell, Scribe Scroll is so much considered a chaff feat, we have long let it be traded out and pretty much no wizard has it.)

Again, that's your table's anecdote, and while I respect that your table has not engaged in crafting in 20 years, it doesn't change the fact that it is quite clearly apart from the norm.


Make my players do homework?

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

No, never.

It's the DM's job to do that, not the players. Not too mention the wasted time each an every week with the DM saying "right, so that was a load of CR [x] monsters" and then them having to either use the one copy of the DMG I have or have to bring their own) or, as mentioned, the even more daft idea of expecting them to go home and do that. With the exception of about one of them, they pretty much want to turn up for a couple of hours per week and play. (And yes, for the record, the DM does keep all the character sheets, or a copy of one, bare minimum, if a player wants to keep it themselves.)

Well, firstly, homework implies I'm asking them to do it away from the table, secondly I didn't say that the players should calculate, their xp, I said the players should track their xp. So at the end of an encounter, or session, or whenever you normally give out xp, you say "Okay, you guys got 400 xp, except for bob, he got 600 xp becuase he's a level behind", and the players write that down onto their xp total on their character sheets, rather than you having write it down somewhere to track it. Clearly that's the expectation since, y'know, the xp total is on the player's character sheet.


As for punitively punishing players who can't make it to the session this week (y'know, for reasons like they have adopted two small children or illness or something) - compounded by suddenly, presumably, having character disappear mid-combat?

Just no.

I don't run my game when all the players can't attend, so that's just a you thing. I was referring to when players made active choices which resulted in not participating in an encounter for one reason or another, perhaps the party split up for some reason, or one of the party members didn't want to enter the spooky cave, or any other number of ways it could go down.


Stuff like that was a bad idea in AD&D and that has never changed. AD&D had a lot of REALLY STUPID ideas and some of those made it through to 3.0 and were summarily discarded. XP for item costs was just 3.x's bad idea, but the lack of an alternative meant it sat around until Pathfinder wisely put it to rest.

Here we would have to agree to disagree then, "terrible price of power" is a fairly standard magical trope, and one that a lot of people, myself included, like to have in our magical system, and while I respect that your table isn't part of that subset, that doesn't mean that it's a bad idea.


Am I the only one who, when playing a wizard with crafting feats, offers to make things for my fellow PCs for 75% market value? Whether there's XP cost or not, that nets me some extra gold, and saves them gold.

I have had a net total of ONE player balk at this, accusing me of trying to rip them off. They went and paid full market price for items elsewhere, and my PC made gear for the other PCs.

I then proceeded to pour most of the 25% profit into my spellbook.

I did this once, and had very much the same experience with the one player refusing such an offer :smalltongue:


For me, I keep waffling between liking the idea of using gp for spells rather than XP, and feeling like that cheapens Wish and Limited Wish and also makes Psions less sensible.

In particular, the idea that Wish is something even high-level wizards do sparingly because it's harder to recover the lost XP (however they view it IC) than it is to use magic to get ahold of yet another 25,000 gp diamond is...nice. It's also possible to wish for money if it costs XP, but that becomes somewhat less worthwhile when you have a gem of the value in money you want already in-hand.

I think, though, the biggest thing is that, narratively, spending XP and using up an expensive material component represent different things. XP represents something of you going into it.

That said, it does simplify things (a big goal of PF) to remove XP costs and just convert them to gp.

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. There are times when I think about throwing away the xp costs, but then very much the same notions cross my mind, and it just doesn't sit well with me, not to mention it completely breaks any kind of magic item economy.


I feel like the point at which you're allowing Blood Money + Fabricate = Infinite Crafting Materials, then you're also allowing any of the various 3.5 tricks for either recovering your xp or dipping into an infinite pool of the same (the moment you say someone can trade xp to spellcasters for services, the methods to force people to do so might as well be infinite).

Well, firstly, I view wizards being able to find means to conjure up infinite material wealth perfectly acceptable, as I think it's something within the realm of high magic, but I don't view it as being on par with having infinite xp, so I limit said methods of xp generation, no thought bottles, no level drain -> craft -> restoration tricks, xp spent cannot be recovered, because if you treat it as an actual resource to be spent, things like dying and level draining make you "drop" some xp, while the methods for recovering it let you "pick up the pieces", but when you actively spend xp, you're putting the xp into something permanently, the xp has been expended, and can no longer be recovered.

As for trading xp for services, well, firstly the rules as such stipulate no amount of coersion, magical or mundane, can make someone part with their xp, they have to willingly, in full knowledge of what it means, give up that xp under no duress, so forcing people is impossible. That said, as I mentioned earlier, what it DOES open up is magitocracies who create an economy where xp is the currancy in which all services are traded, and peasants will willingly sap away their own xp to fund an effort-free lifestyle, while the xp slowly trickles upward in the economy to the wizards who now have a steady supply of xp to craft whatever they want.

So yeah, I guess it makes "xp theft" possible in that sense, but through an interesting means, and it also provides an compelling backdrop for a campaign setting.


There's no such thing as a universal balancing factor to begin with, so if the DM doesn't want the <whatever> to deck the party out in doomsday gear using infinite crafting tricks (of the GP or XP variety), all they really have to do is say: Hey, please don't exploit the holes in an imperfect game system for infinite crafting nonsense.

Well, at the same time, saying "please don't do that", when there's no plausible, in-game reason why not to do such a thing creates character dissonance, not to mention it is as much metagaming as hitting a troll with fire when your character doesn't even know what a troll is. If you're not the kind to think too much about the minutia of such things, then it's not really a problem, but if you're the sort of DM who extrapolates things out to the entire campaign setting, then it's hard to accept "please don't do that" as an answer to a problem.


Yeah, this is more or less my experience as well. The only time crafting saw much use in 3.5 was when we were able to draw XP equally from all characters involved, and thus nobody ever fell behind, and thus it... wasn't really a cost anyway. Nobody cared if the whole party leveled a bit slower in exchange for some customized magic items, but nobody wanted individuals to do so.

Well, as I've stated many times in this thread now, there's a web enhnacement for that. (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20060526a) As to whether it becomes not-a-cost if the whole party falls behind, that depends on whether you run a tailored or status-quo style campaign. If you run tailored, then yeah, since everything is leveling up/down with the players, it'll never be a problem, but if you run a status-quo game, then things are what they are, regardless of what level the players are when they get there, so being a level behind, or more if you continue to spend xp, will become a drawback.


Except WBL is a DM guideline, nothing more. If a DM is concerned with WBL then no amount of crafting is going to double anything, and if they're not, then there are infinitely better ways of doubling your WBL than blowing xp on crafting.

I disagree with the notion that crafting doubles wbl in the first place anyway. Most of the wealth the players will earn will come in the form of magic items, and those are sold at half price, so really what you'd be doing is liquidating your wealth at half price, and then crafting custom gear, rather than having the random collection of gear you hobbled together over your adventuring career.


Does not compute. My job as a DM is, amongst other things, to create challenges for the party. My toolset is literally the entire world and every possibility in that world. There is no 'major advantage' that can truly overcome that, outside of campaign destroying nigh-infinite loops. The only question is whether or not I can come up with meaningful and fun challenges for the party to engage with. If I can, who cares if the party has custom tailored gear? I mean, the party cares, because that sort of thing is neat and fun to have, but like... yes, it makes them more readily able to overcome generic challenges, but so does everything from individual class choice to party synergy between classes.

As with so many other things, in a game with such huge power disparities as a Fighter and a Wizard being in the same party as if they're equals, being concerned about WBL or tailored magic items being too advantageous doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

If you look at what I said through a DM vs Players lens, I can see how you might come to this conclusion. The 'major advantage' I mentioned though, wasn't over the DM, it was over themselves without tailored gear. Having tailored gear makes the party better equipped to deal with your challenges.

But again, if you run a tailored game, where the goalposts shift with player power, then it ultimately becomes irrelevant, since you're just going to make things harder for the players for having done that. Part of the reason why I vastly prefer a status-quo DMing style, as it lets well equipped, and well prepared players actually enjoy their advantage, rather than punishing them for it by making the game harder.


Again, even in 3.5 the rules allowed plenty of tricks to flood the world with items if one assumes everyone exploits those tricks ad nauseum. The world isn't overflowing with items for the same reason the world isn't (or is!) carved up into empires run by ancient dragons who have the benefit of both being high end spellcasters and also dragons: Because that's not the world the GM wants to run, and anybody trying to turn it into such a world should probably be prepared to step up and GM. :p

You're right, the question really comes down to "what do you think is an acceptable use of magic". Personally, on the heirarchy of magical power, I view "infinite mundane wealth" very low, while "infinite magical wealth" would be very high up, but other DMs may view things differently. Choose the rules that suit your setting and your DMing style.


Not every setting has humans, either, but that doesn't make the statement that 'something as ubiquitous as humans' a reasonable one for like... basically every published setting and most homebrew ones people are widely familiar with.

I wouldn't call such magic items ubiquitous for the expected dnd setting, unless "ubiquitous" was a hyperbole. The DMG doesn't give an NPC barbarian a +1 weapon until 7th level, and it doesn't give a rogue a +1 weapon until 9th level, so unless you have 7th+ level NPCs being considered equally ubiquitous in your campaign setting (which the standard dnd setting most certainly does not), then you can extrapolate my statement to be a more tactful way of saying "yeah, the standard dnd setting doesn't have such magical items as ubiquitous by any means".

That's not even mentioning the fact that you can't purchase a +1 anything in any settlement smaller than a large town.


It's not really any more difficult in 3.5, just slightly more elaborate.

I assume that, by pathfinder's approach, martixy meant the removal of xp costs, not saying that infinite mundane wealth is any more or less difficult in 3.5

[Aotrs Commander]

Well, firstly, homework implies I'm asking them to do it away from the table, secondly I didn't say that the players should calculate, their xp, I said the players should track their xp. So at the end of an encounter, or session, or whenever you normally give out xp, you say "Okay, you guys got 400 xp, except for bob, he got 600 xp becuase he's a level behind", and the players write that down onto their xp total on their character sheets, rather than you having write it down somewhere to track it. Clearly that's the expectation since, y'know, the xp total is on the player's character sheet.

I don't recall the last time when anyone actually wrote down XP on their character sheets and not just had the DM track it. (And track it out of session, at that.) We, as players, don't need to know; frankly, we only need to know when we level up. (I certainly don't care when I'm a player.)

But again, if we did, that would mean an extra five minutes at the end of the session arsing about while it is calculated by hand (since if Monday's session was indicative, neither OpenOffice nor Word Mobile would touch my docx files, there's no chance they'd manage the xlsx and that would also mean me having to have the tablet with me and on (or that's another two or three minutes for boot-up)) for all my players to be writing it down, when they have to go, because they all don't work for themselves and get to choose their work hours like I do (and two of them have young children that they sometimes have to bring down to get back to bed for school or feeding). So we would have to finish five-ten minutes earlier (which considering we only play for about two hours per week is a significant chunk of the time). For what gain? Writing down a number?

So, no, there is absolutely no gain in the players even writing their XP down, doubly especially in having different XP, triply so when there are seven characters.




I don't run my game when all the players can't attend, so that's just a you thing.

If we did that, we'd never play. It is actually more like the minority of the time we actually get all of the players and not just four or five of the seven each week, given family, health and generally life intruding.

And who can make the day quests (out of a potential group of players far higher than you could ever manage to run as a group) varies wildly, so again, penalising someone in XP/level because they couldn't make it down from Birmingham on the particular occasion that, say, my mate is running Judge Dredd and who is a police officer and has four kids and thus only limited days to do it, would be grossly unfair.

[Crake]

I don't recall the last time when anyone actually wrote down XP on their character sheets and not just had the DM track it. (And track it out of session, at that.) We, as players, don't need to know; frankly, we only need to know when we level up. (I certainly don't care when I'm a player.)

But again, if we did, that would mean an extra five minutes at the end of the session arsing about while it is calculated by hand (since if Monday's session was indicative, neither OpenOffice nor Word Mobile would touch my docx files, there's no chance they'd manage the xlsx and that would also mean me having to have the tablet with me and on (or that's another two or three minutes for boot-up)) for all my players to be writing it down, when they have to go, because they all don't work for themselves and get to choose their work hours like I do (and two of them have young children that they sometimes have to bring down to get back to bed for school or feeding). So we would have to finish five-ten minutes earlier (which considering we only play for about two hours per week is a significant chunk of the time). For what gain? Writing down a number?

So, no, there is absolutely no gain in the players even writing their XP down, doubly especially in having different XP, triply so when there are seven characters.

Sounds like you're making mountains out of molehills. Maybe don't calculate it by hand if it takes so long, use the d20srd or donjon encounter calculator, and have it done in 20 seconds, and if taking 2 seconds to write down 3-4 digits on their character sheet is too much effort for your players.... It's a matter of seconds, not minutes, and definitely not five to ten minutes.


If we did that, we'd never play. It is actually more like the minority of the time we actually get all of the players and not just four or five of the seven each week, given family, health and generally life intruding.

And who can make the day quests (out of a potential group of players far higher than you could ever manage to run as a group) varies wildly, so again, penalising someone in XP/level because they couldn't make it down from Birmingham on the particular occasion that, say, my mate is running Judge Dredd and who is a police officer and has four kids and thus only limited days to do it, would be grossly unfair.

Then... don't? I'm not really seeing your point? Run party-xp all you want, I'm not against party-wide xp gains regardless of the circumstances, but it's not something I would want to run, especially since it clashes with my tangible xp notion, your character doesn't grow from things they weren't involved in, but you do you.

[Psychoalpha]

Well, firstly, I view wizards being able to find means to conjure up infinite material wealth perfectly acceptable, as I think it's something within the realm of high magic, but I don't view it as being on par with having infinite xp, so I limit said methods of xp generation, no thought bottles, no level drain -> craft -> restoration tricks, xp spent cannot be recovered, because if you treat it as an actual resource to be spent, things like dying and level draining make you "drop" some xp, while the methods for recovering it let you "pick up the pieces", but when you actively spend xp, you're putting the xp into something permanently, the xp has been expended, and can no longer be recovered.

My point was that anyone who considers Infinite Crafting to be a non-desirable outcome at their table is going to plug the whole, so arguing that System X allows Infinite Crafting but System Y does not is a little misleading since that's only because you've done something you don't allow for someone else to do.

tl;dr - There's no infinite crafting unless the DM allows it, so infinite crafting is not a valid objection to the system.


As for trading xp for services, well, firstly the rules as such stipulate no amount of coersion, magical or mundane, can make someone part with their xp, they have to willingly, in full knowledge of what it means, give up that xp under no duress, so forcing people is impossible.

Sorry, man, but this is literally just the same kind of handwavium (XP can't be forcibly extracted or coerced out of someone because the GM says so) as me saying that GP for magic items doesn't result in Tippyverse levels of infinite crafting because it doesn't. Any setting is going to fall apart if you start looking too closely at why it works the way it does. So once again, it's not the use of XP as a system that keeps it from happening, it's you the GM saying it's not going to be allowed to happen.


Well, at the same time, saying "please don't do that", when there's no plausible, in-game reason why not to do such a thing creates character dissonance, not to mention it is as much metagaming as hitting a troll with fire when your character doesn't even know what a troll is.

There are no plausible, in-game reasons for so much stuff except "That isn't the setting we're playing in." that getting hung up on this is odd. It's the same reason why people tie themselves in knots trying to explain why there aren't guns in plenty of fantasy settings that otherwise have the knowledge to discover and produce it, like saying that something something physics works differently, as if combustion not working the way it should is more plausible than just saying "Nobody's discovered it, nobody will, because this isn't a setting with guns. Just like a million other inventions that seem obvious in hindsight but took us thousands of years to get to RL."


As to whether it becomes not-a-cost if the whole party falls behind, that depends on whether you run a tailored or status-quo style campaign. If you run tailored, then yeah, since everything is leveling up/down with the players, it'll never be a problem, but if you run a status-quo game, then things are what they are, regardless of what level the players are when they get there, so being a level behind, or more if you continue to spend xp, will become a drawback.

Fair enough, sort of. Our groups don't really do status-quo games because it's too adversarial. The social contract of our groups tends towards the DM setting reasonable challenges, and the players engaging in only reasonable levels of optimization. If we start encountering too many things that a reasonable level of optimization simply can't overcome, and it doesn't appear that our inability to overcome it is a deliberate narrative choice by the DM, then clearly we need to step it up a notch. It's the kind of escalation of force that doesn't really have a winner, since we would quickly reach a point where there's nothing that could possibly stop us, or the DM is just declaring that rocks fall and everybody dies.

Striking a balance with this may be possible when the DM is as clever as their most clever player, but that isn't always the case. A tailored approach where things range from easy to impossible but we always trust that it's for purposes of the story, rather than because we're suffering 'drawbacks' because we wanted nice things rather than taking whatever generic nonsense the DM dropped for us in the last pile of treasure.


I disagree with the notion that crafting doubles wbl in the first place anyway. Most of the wealth the players will earn will come in the form of magic items, and those are sold at half price, so really what you'd be doing is liquidating your wealth at half price, and then crafting custom gear, rather than having the random collection of gear you hobbled together over your adventuring career.

This comes down to a nitpick over what WBL even means. If you find a magic item that would cost you 10,000gp to buy is it 10,000gp towards your WBL or 5000? And if you sell it, is your WBL now 5000gp less than it was before? If you use that 5000gp to make a magic item that costs 5000gp to create does your WBL stay the same, or is your WBL now another 5000gp up because the item you just created is worth 10,000gp?

Which also brings up the nitpick of the economy in the first place since if you try and sell a 10,000gp item you pick up as treasure it only sells for 5000gp, but if you make an item that costs 5000gp to make it sells for... what, 5000gp? And if you can sell it for 10,000gp, like a merchant, why didn't the other... just agh. See above re: handwavium and don't look too closely.


But again, if you run a tailored game, where the goalposts shift with player power, then it ultimately becomes irrelevant, since you're just going to make things harder for the players for having done that. Part of the reason why I vastly prefer a status-quo DMing style, as it lets well equipped, and well prepared players actually enjoy their advantage, rather than punishing them for it by making the game harder.

Except that's not how a tailored DMing style works. The goal posts don't shift so that things are always challenging no matter what you do, they shift so that things are always fun, and what fun means to any given group is going to be subjective. Some groups will always want to feel challenged and so yeah, those posts will shift in that direction and tailored items are there because people enjoy customization. Some groups will always want to feel overpowered, and so they will be. Most groups will want a mix, and so some challenges will be overcome easily, some will require about the same effort as before, and some will be incredibly difficult or even impossible. Which is about the same range of thing one would expect in a status-quo game, the only difference being the DM decides ahead of time which band a given challenge probably falls into instead of consulting whatever premade world chart he made ahead of time.

While I lean heavily into sarcasm and derision much of the time, please let me be clear: I've got no problem with status-quo games, where things are what they are and that's that. I've played in games like that, and if I know ahead of time that's how it is, cool. There's plenty of people who prefer to only play like that, and they aren't wrong. But a tailored experience is only inferior if the DM is inferior, in which case a status-quo game is going to suffer as well. A competent DM running a tailored campaign where challenges run the gamut isn't going to feel any different than a status-quo one.


I wouldn't call such magic items ubiquitous for the expected dnd setting, unless "ubiquitous" was a hyperbole. The DMG doesn't give an NPC barbarian a +1 weapon until 7th level, and it doesn't give a rogue a +1 weapon until 9th level, so unless you have 7th+ level NPCs being considered equally ubiquitous in your campaign setting (which the standard dnd setting most certainly does not), then you can extrapolate my statement to be a more tactful way of saying "yeah, the standard dnd setting doesn't have such magical items as ubiquitous by any means".

That's not even mentioning the fact that you can't purchase a +1 anything in any settlement smaller than a large town.

This is def one of those things that depends on the nature of the setting. The distribution of magic items in Forgotten Realms is going to be very different than in, say, Dragonlance. Sub in homebrew worlds as you like to either end of the spectrum.

We tend to play in Greyhawk, but with slightly more of a FR bent, where adventuring parties are fairly common and mid-range (7-14) level NPC adventurers and ex-adventurers are not unusual, but again we also keep our campaign stories going up through level 20 and tend to have the old PCs become NPCs in the background of the next game, either as movers and shakers or stories the PCs have heard of (depending how far down the road the next game is timewise).


I assume that, by pathfinder's approach, martixy meant the removal of xp costs, not saying that infinite mundane wealth is any more or less difficult in 3.5

I believe I was saying that system abuse to get infinite anything isn't more difficult in 3.5 because it uses XP than it is in pathfinder (that uses gp), it just requires jumping through a few more hoops.

[RatElemental]

I believe I was saying that system abuse to get infinite anything isn't more difficult in 3.5 because it uses XP than it is in pathfinder (that uses gp), it just requires jumping through a few more hoops.

As an example of this, there's the old nipple clamp of exquisite pain + symbol of pain + distilled joy combo.

[False God]

As an example of this, there's the old nipple clamp of exquisite pain + symbol of pain + distilled joy combo.

Honestly I don't think I'd throw a fuss if my players had to do some BDSM to get infinite anything.

[Aotrs Commander]

Sounds like you're making mountains out of molehills. Maybe don't calculate it by hand if it takes so long, use the d20srd or donjon encounter calculator, and have it done in 20 seconds, and if taking 2 seconds to write down 3-4 digits on their character sheet is too much effort for your players.... It's a matter of seconds, not minutes, and definitely not five to ten minutes.

Well, assuming that you can use those offline, because I don't have a mobile and can't access the net through my tablet down the club, same applies - it means the tablet has to be taken and set up and used and arsed about with (because it means either adding the mouse or fighting with the touch-screen...

There is still literally no point in doing it, since no-one has cared about the XP totals - for ANY game we've run, D&D or otherwise - for a good decade-and-a-half, because it functionally adds nothing to the game other than a track for the DM to tell the players when to level up (and to gauge encounter modification for the module/adventure path when writing it), even when 3.0 made the bad decision to try and make it. (Hell, I notice later PF APs just flat tell you when to level-up for them as can't be arsed with XP entirely.)




Run party-xp all you want, I'm not against party-wide xp gains regardless of the circumstances, but it's not something I would want to run, especially since it clashes with my tangible xp notion, your character doesn't grow from things they weren't involved in, but you do you.

And what I'm saying is, when you are dealing with a group of players who median age is one year shy of forty and over, who have (young) families, commitments and/or health issues, you don't have the option NOT to do it that way, even if you wanted to, because you cannot garentee that you will have all of the same players making week to week, nor even to the one-day sessions you run four times a year. So you either have to never play more than, like, maybe once or twice a year (at irregular intervals when you can actually get the correct players all to turn up) or live with the fact that you have to run sessions without all the players, probably more often that not.

[Zombimode]

Well, assuming that you can use those offline, because I don't have a mobile and can't access the net through my tablet down the club, same applies - it means the tablet has to be taken and set up and used and arsed about with (because it means either adding the mouse or fighting with the touch-screen..

Why would you want to calculate XP rewards during the gaming session? It's not like you level up during session.

I mean if you really don't like typing values into a form and pressing a button I could see why you would avoid the Encounter Calculator. But hard to use or time consuming it isn't.

[sleepyphoenixx]

Why would you want to calculate XP rewards during the gaming session? It's not like you level up during session.

I mean if you really don't like typing values into a form and pressing a button I could see why you would avoid the Encounter Calculator. But hard to use or time consuming it isn't.

You can calculate the XP rewards when you build the encounter. Or just eyeball them, it's not like it breaks anything if the players don't get the exact XP RAW says they should.

That said i can understand Aotrs Commander's position. If nobody bothers using anything that costs XP there's no point tracking them, no matter how little work it is.
And if removing XP costs means your players actually use things that would normally cost XP instead of avoiding them like the plague it'll probably even improve your gaming experience.

That's highly group dependant of course.
My group rather like using spells like Limited Wish or crafting and i consider the XP cost an important balancing factor for those.
You could accomplish something similar with a gold cost, but i like the fluff of XP better and - at least in my experience - players are more conservative with things that cost XP instead of money.
It also has the side effect of being a nice little handicap for spellcasters (who are often leveling up a little behind the mundanes in our games).

[Calthropstu]

I have always done this at my taes. The xp cost crap makes zero sense to me. It never caused problems for me.

[Aotrs Commander]

Why would you want to calculate XP rewards during the gaming session? It's not like you level up during session.

I don't. I go home, bring up the spread sheet on which I have already worked out the estimated XP for the adventure path (while doing the significant modications required for seven PCs), and just copy lines from "estimated" to "actual" and job done. (And then maybe send an email around to say they levelled up, and even that really just specifically for that one player who likes to do it mid-week.)

My point is, that is absolutely all the input/output XP needs. The players don't need (or want) to know what the XP totals are or have to write them down, and to do that, you'd have to do it in-session. (They don't have their character sheets for a start (nor would they want to have to remember to bring it with them every week); except for the one player that likes to keep a copy, who just leaves a periodically-updated copy for the odd occasion he's not there.)



(For the day quests, we don't even do that, the DM just decides when we level up - when a given party of characters (given what we have in rotation) only sees play once or twice in maybe 12-18 months, you'd never get anywhere otherwise.)



I don't bother with the encounter calculator, actually, I eyeball it the same way I've always done, which I carried on doing after the first time I generated a 3.5 encounter and realised what a complete waste of space EL was.

(Actually, once we've finished the current APs, we'll likely be moving over the PF XP system, as most of the AP for future use will be PF rather that 3.5 mechanically, so it makes sense; but I've only ever used CR as solely "how much XP do they get" anyway.)

[Endarire]

As someone who dislikes expansive components for crafting (at least in terms of EXP) and casting/manifesting (G/EXP costs), as GM I let players choose between paying EXP or paying more money to get the item/spell/power. Infinity Engine games never had monetary/EXP costs for spells, and I never heard anyone complain about those, but I also know that was a modified 2E D&D ruleset for a specific video game instead of trying to anticipate everything a player would do with component-free wishes.

For limited wish, and psionics in general, I preferred the EXP cost since it made the spell and powers more usable. Still, there are plenty of overcosted abilities, and, in general, abilities with expensive components are those.

[Coidzor]

It's hard for me to say. I sort of have a love-hate relationship with both XP costs and with replacing XP costs with increased gold costs.

Then there are times where either can just be janky as heck, or where I disagree with the fundamental idea of the gate-keeping that they wanted to do in the first place by having the extra cost.

[Crake]

My point is, that is absolutely all the input/output XP needs. The players don't need (or want) to know what the XP totals are or have to write them down, and to do that, you'd have to do it in-session. (They don't have their character sheets for a start (nor would they want to have to remember to bring it with them every week); except for the one player that likes to keep a copy, who just leaves a periodically-updated copy for the odd occasion he's not there.)

Well, that's not correct. You as the DM get to decide how often players get xp. The default assumption in the DMG is that xp is awarded either at the end of the session, or the start of the next session, and that same default assumption assumes XP costs, so you're just straight up incorrect on what you're saying there.

[Powerdork]

I'd like to point everyone to the Experience Rewards section of the Dungeon Master's Guide (page 36), which offers this definitive statement:


When the party defeats monsters, you award the characters experience points (XP).

It then suggests, in another paragraph, things you might choose to do to make it easier:


You may wish to award experience points at the end of a session to enable players to advance their characters in level if they have enough experience points. Alternatively, you may wish to give out XP awards at the beginning of the game session following the one in which the characters earned it. This gives you time between sessions to use these rules and determine the experience award.


Meanwhile, over in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook (page 399):


Although you can award experience points as soon as a challenge is overcome, this can quickly disrupt the flow of game play. It’s easier to simply award experience points at the end of a game session—that way, if a character earns enough XP to gain a level, he won’t disrupt the game while he levels up his character. He can instead take the time between game sessions to do that.

Those are the basic stances offered as guidance to everyone who decides to run one of these games using the core set of books.