About level grinding and Mobs

[Samael Morgenst]

Have you ever indulged in this past-time? Butchering low level creatures for XP and fun?

Also, has anyone experiences with fighting mobs (from Cityscape)?

Cityscape is a canon (official) supplement book for Dungeons & Dragons edition 3.5.

This is a weird "monster" that appears in that book:

MOBS
Mobs are large groups of people, bound together by anger, fear, and the desire to do violence. The mob mentality overrides normal behaviors, moral strictures, and even alignments of those who compose it. In most instances, a mob might have a particular target or subject that has
aroused their anger, but anyone or anything who gets in their way is subject to attack.
A mob is treated as a single entity, much like a swarm, but is composed of Small, Medium, or Large creatures. A mob must be composed of creatures of the same type, and a riot that consists of creatures of different types is best modeled as two (or more) separate mobs forming a single encounter.
A mob can be an extremely diffi cult challenge, not merely because it is dangerous, but because it is often made up of innocent people. Some are swept away by violent emotions, but some might have legitimate grievances; others might actually be mystically compelled to action (this is particularly true of a throng of children). PCs should attempt to find some means other than
violence—or at least other than lethal violence—for dispersing at least some mobs. Reducing a mob to 0 hit points causes it to break up and disperse, leaving some members of it dead or injured; see below.
A mob consists of 48 Small or Medium creatures, or 12 Large creatures. Larger groups are represented by multiple mobs. Most mobs are transient, lasting for at most 1d4+1 hours before dispersing.

---

The stat of a Mob make it WAY more dangerous, rulewise, than a group of 48 first level commoner (it's treated like a CR 8 monster).
What may explain that, if we were trying to find a somewhat plausible explanation?


And...
that would be a good way to grind up to level 16 massacring first level commoner...

[Beni-Kujaku]

that would be a good way to grind up to level 16 massacring first level commoner...

Considering twice as many opponents is generally considered to amount to CR+2, 32 times as many opponents should amount to CR+10. If a commoner 1 is CR 1/4, then 48 of them at the same time should be CR 8. Now, this is the theory. In practice, it's obviously wrong if each individual commoner cannot ever meaningfully damage a level 8, but the mob is indeed supposed to represent the combined strength, both in attack (if there are enough commoners, then a few of them will roll a 20 and will automatically damage you) and in defense (many HD to represent many creatures, and swarm traits represent the fact that killing one of them is pretty meaningless). Also, there is an increase in power due to the fact that the people in the mob do not use Commoner saves and HD, but racial saves and HD, which are still a bit higher. A mob of fighters is the same as a mob of commoners, after all.

Slaughtering low level monsters is definitely a way to grind your levels. But really, a party of 4 level 15 would need to kill around 160 mobs to go up a level, or more than 7500 people. At that point, the kindgom should have sent their army to investigate and capture the threat, and your party isn't fighting low-level mooks anymore. And that's even considering mobs would still form after the first two have been killed.

[InvisibleBison]

You don't get XP from killing enemies, you get XP from overcoming challenges. Slaughtering a bunch of random people just for the sake of killing them won't give you any XP.

[Ignimortis]

You don't get XP from killing enemies, you get XP from overcoming challenges. Slaughtering a bunch of random people just for the sake of killing them won't give you any XP.

QFT. All it gets you is a swift drop to the bottom right of the alignment chart.

[Samael Morgenst]

Slaughtering low level monsters is definitely a way to grind your levels. But really, a party of 4 level 15 would need to kill around 160 mobs to go up a level, or more than 7500 people. At that point, the kindgom should have sent their army to investigate and capture the threat, and your party isn't fighting low-level mooks anymore. And that's even considering mobs would still form after the first two have been killed.

If the party includes a spellcaster, you can incite / create a mob with the opportune spells (like Emotion: Anger).

I guess you could target only small settlement, travel a lot between one place and another, and take care to disguise yourself as orc / humanoid raiders.

And slaughter some goblin mobs, not only humans.

[icefractal]

This gets into the whole "what does XP actually represent" thing. In normal gameplay, you can just handwave the exact connection between fighting that Otyugh and becoming 6th level, but when you focus on it, weird situations arise.

For example, there was a thread (quite a while ago) named something like "the school of hard knocks method" about the result of any fight giving XP. Which was that if you have a group of people who fight each-other (non-lethally) every day, they'll reach 20th level extremely fast. If those people are elves and spend a "brief" few decades doing this, they can reach deep into epic levels. IIRC, the inventor of this method demonstrated its effectiveness by taking a nap in a still-burning campfire (having so many levels that the damage was trivial).

And it's not easy to disqualify these fights either - they're fighting legitimately tough foes (each-other) and nonlethal fights do usually still give XP. Plus, they could fight to the death after a certain point, as they'll be able to easily resurrect each-other. And if "you'll get resurrected so it's not a real risk" was enough to prevent getting XP, most D&D parties could never get past mid-level.

Another approach is to say that you're extracting something from the foes to get XP. There was a campaign log on here using such a system, where you only got XP by extracting it from dead foes (from their brains specifically, IIRC). Which makes it finite at least, but also is a substantial change to how D&D usually works.

My attempt to rationalize it (not used in a campaign yet though) was along the lines of:
1) Real planes slowly generate XP over time.
2) Sapient creatures can absorb this XP just by living there.
3) Just existing is the slowest, then studying, then intensive training, then using it in life-or-death situations as the fastest.
4) Different people absorb it at different rates, with the fastest outliers being like 5x or 10x the norm.
5) Absorption is faster on a ley line, and much faster on a ley line nexus.
6) Some rare people are "ungrounded", meaning they always count as being on a ley line nexus.
7) PCs are ungrounded and have highest possible base rate, generally speaking.

The intent being that PCs can level at at somewhat close to the rapid pace seen in many adventures (although still somewhat limited, some downtime may be needed), but people in general aren't hitting 20th level by their late teens. Plus the existence of ley-line nexi and the fact that only real planes (not demiplanes) generate XP gives a reason for high-level people to actually care about and fight over the material plane instead of ****ing off to their own astral realms.

[RNightstalker]

QFT. All it gets you is a swift drop to the bottom right of the alignment chart.

What does QFT mean?

[Thirdtwin]

What does QFT mean?

QFT means "quoted for truth."

[Crake]

words

As was stated earlier in the thread, simply fighting and killing isnt enough to generate xp, its overcoming challenges.

Sparring with a partner every day isnt overcoming a challenge.

Studying to pass your mages college entrance exam on the other hand would count as overcoming a challenge.

The posted theory about people slowly generating xp does kind of work, but i think for different reasons than you posted. People work towards overcoming challenges every day, and its these challenges that cause them to accumulate xp, its not just a flat passive thing.

I think the closest in universe representation of “xp” was actually done with anima in world of warcraft shadowlands, I think it was a pretty decent representation of what “xp” is, and how you build it up as a soul.

[icefractal]

As was stated earlier in the thread, simply fighting and killing isnt enough to generate xp, its overcoming challenges.

Sparring with a partner every day isnt overcoming a challenge.

Ok, but now try to define "challenge" in an objective way (rather than 'the GM decides'). I've tried and it's not easy.

Consider a situation like this:
The PCs are traveling along a path, when they encounter a group of highway robbers. Mistaking the PCs for random schmucks, they demand a "toll" of 50 gp, which would be trivial for the PCs to pay. However, as the PCs are against robbery and want to keep the road safer for others, they choose to fight the bandits instead. The bandits are dangerous enough to potentially kill a PC, but it's unlikely, and in fact nobody takes more than easily heal-able damage during the fight. Do the PCs get XP for that?

In most D&D games, the answer would be yes. In fact, even if the robbers would have accepted surrender after the fight starts and would have settled for taking the party's coin rather than also looting gear (meaning that the fight has objectively low stakes for the PCs), most players would still expect to get XP for it and most GMs would award XP for it.

So with that in mind, what makes the sparring not count? No stakes? Ok, wager money on each match. Or wager status - at the end of each year, the 25% lowest ranked people are demoted to near-slaves for the others for that upcoming year. A fight to avoid a year of captivity is definitely something that PCs would get XP for.

It's not easy to construct a set of conditions that makes fast grinding impossible, but yet still gives XP for the things adventures generally reward it for. The answer in actual play is "the GM just says no to off-screen grinding", but that's not an answer for a thought experiment.

[Crake]

Ok, but now try to define "challenge" in an objective way (rather than 'the GM decides'). I've tried and it's not easy.

Why is this a requirement?

As an aside, I would argue that there is a level of novelty vs routine that would determine the outcome.

Doing the same thing over and over isn’t conducive to character growth either in game or in real life, but overcoming novel challenges regularly has been shown to promote development irl, and I think its reasonable to translate that in game.

Effectively, repeating, or “farming” the same thing over and over with rather predicable outcomes would quickly hit a wall/cliff of diminishing returns

[Samael Morgenst]

But there is already a "wall" and is defined by the core rules: CR +8.

[Crake]

But there is already a "wall" and is defined by the core rules: CR +8.

The books never call that out as a hard rule, but rather state that past that point, you as a DM need to evaluate if this is a challenge worthy of giving xp to your players

[Samael Morgenst]

Well, at the very least it says that - untill that point - you should get XP.

[icefractal]

Why is this a requirement?

I was assuming a thought experiment, because in an actual game the answer is 99% of the time going to be:

As a player: No, you can't grind mobs to level up; talk to the GM if you want the pace to be faster.
As a GM: Just tell the players no, simple.

Leaving aside the fact that a lot of games don't even use XP. For example, when GMing 3.x, I use either:
A) Milestone advancement (ie. the party levels up after certain goals have been met)
B) Fully in-fiction advancement. For example, in one campaign I'm running, all advancement (past low levels) is via consuming what are effectively minor artifacts (but fairly abundant). And however you get them (finding, stealing, bargaining for, seizing, etc) is valid.

But as a thought experiment it can be interesting.
Speaking of which, this seems promising, but a more precise criteria would be necessary:

Doing the same thing over and over isn’t conducive to character growth either in game or in real life, but overcoming novel challenges regularly has been shown to promote development irl, and I think its reasonable to translate that in game.

Effectively, repeating, or “farming” the same thing over and over with rather predicable outcomes would quickly hit a wall/cliff of diminishing returns

[Crake]

I was assuming a thought experiment, because in an actual game the answer is 99% of the time going to be:

Right, i get that, i more meant, why is it a requirement within your thought experiment, like, how'd you come to that conclusion? I ask because-

Speaking of which, this seems promising, but a more precise criteria would be necessary:

-for the same reason, I ask: why is a precise criteria necessary? Different groups, different players, different characters, different GMs will all have different ideas about where the line is, and that's okay, because, just like in real life, people are different. There doesn't need to be a one-size-fits-all forumla that you can use to calculate exactly when something stops providing xp, when it starts to feel routine and repetitive, I think that's the point where the DM can just make an executive decision.

[Thirdtwin]

Question: how are you, as a player, encountering Mobs specifically as opposed to just "assembled groups of individual people?"

[Samael Morgenst]

You can use spells as Emotion, drugs, mind control, or even certain kind of bardic music.

---

By the way, "farming" innocents isn't more or less what Paladins of Slaughter, Antipaladins, Ravagers and Thralls of Demogorgon do on a regular basis?

Actually, isn't what even a party of 1st level CE orc Barbarians would do?

[NichG]

Ok, but now try to define "challenge" in an objective way (rather than 'the GM decides'). I've tried and it's not easy.

Consider a situation like this:
The PCs are traveling along a path, when they encounter a group of highway robbers. Mistaking the PCs for random schmucks, they demand a "toll" of 50 gp, which would be trivial for the PCs to pay. However, as the PCs are against robbery and want to keep the road safer for others, they choose to fight the bandits instead. The bandits are dangerous enough to potentially kill a PC, but it's unlikely, and in fact nobody takes more than easily heal-able damage during the fight. Do the PCs get XP for that?

In most D&D games, the answer would be yes. In fact, even if the robbers would have accepted surrender after the fight starts and would have settled for taking the party's coin rather than also looting gear (meaning that the fight has objectively low stakes for the PCs), most players would still expect to get XP for it and most GMs would award XP for it.

So with that in mind, what makes the sparring not count? No stakes? Ok, wager money on each match. Or wager status - at the end of each year, the 25% lowest ranked people are demoted to near-slaves for the others for that upcoming year. A fight to avoid a year of captivity is definitely something that PCs would get XP for.

It's not easy to construct a set of conditions that makes fast grinding impossible, but yet still gives XP for the things adventures generally reward it for. The answer in actual play is "the GM just says no to off-screen grinding", but that's not an answer for a thought experiment.

XP as D&D treats it is at least partially a meta-game construct. So given that I think its fair to determine it via a meta-game thing - if a player isn't willing to spend their uptime doing something, it doesn't grant XP. Even by RAW, XP is subjective.

But lets say you want something that would let you calculate the XP gains of NPCs and thereby simulate 'how powerful this army should be after training for a year' or whatever, then I think you have to make XP more of an explicit in-universe thing. And that means you can introduce objective stuff on top of the kind of vague 'challenge' idea. E.g. XP is a consequence of the degree to which a character's choices have changed the timeline compared to the distribution of timelines generated by that character having been born with a random different soul - literally the degree to which a cosmic force can look at the world and say 'this person mattered', which in turn grants that person power as the universe itself pays more attention to them. Now if you have a life of death fight, but its only your life on the line, you get a little XP but not much; however if its a trivial fight where millions of people's lives are on the line, then you get adventurer-scale XP. Which basically reduces to milestone leveling for adventurers, and NPC levels being proportional to how important they are in their communities - kings are high level not because you have to be high level to win the throne, but because holding the throne means your idle choices of what to wear can set fashion for entire countries and so you start to get just XP almost for existing. That roughly dovetails with the sorts of things you see with NPC levels not correlating to NPCs being combatants, but at the same time explains why adventurers zoom up the level charts in months when there are thousand-year-old elven mages who haven't broken level 9.

[InvisibleBison]

By the way, "farming" innocents isn't more or less what Paladins of Slaughter, Antipaladins, Ravagers and Thralls of Demogorgon do on a regular basis?

Almost, but not quite, in a rather significant way. These kinds of people massacre innocents not because they gain something by doing so but out of an ideological commitment to murder.

[Thirdtwin]

You can use spells as Emotion, drugs, mind control, or even certain kind of bardic music.

Would you mind going a bit more in-depth? Like, what are you, as a player, saying your toon does standing there in the middle of the town square that makes the DM say "okay, these 48 individuals that you have individually angered now have the Mob template appended to them and are worth more XP than their individual lives would be worth normally?"

Bonus Round: how are you doing it if the DM doesn't have the DMGII?

[wilphe]

This all sounds like work

What's wrong with boiling an anthill?

[icefractal]

The fact that a single normal ant isn't a creature by D&D rules and doesn't give XP.
Maybe if it's a big enough ant-hill that it counts an Ant Swarm? But if it's that ant swarm, then your puny 1d6 (x1.5 for AoE) fire damage from the pot of boiling water isn't going to make much of a dent.

Same reason that the commoner railgun does 1d6+Str damage with a range increment of 10'. Live by the RAW, die by the RAW.

[Darg]

You're supposed to ad hoc XP rewards if the difficulty outstrips what the intended EL is supposed to be.

An encounter so easy that it uses up none or almost none of the PCs’ resources shouldn’t result in any XP award at all

As for the the "training montage" way of gaining XP, it depends on the goal. If say, the goal was to defeat your master in combat as the final step of completing some specialized training that would work. However, just beating each other up has no goal other than metagaming a game mechanic. That wouldn't count. You aren't overcoming anything.

You must decide when a challenge has been overcome. Usually, this is simple to do. Did the PCs defeat the enemy in battle? Then they met the challenge and earned experience points. Other times, it can be trickier. Suppose the PCs sneak past the sleeping minotaur to get into the magical vault—did they overcome the minotaur encounter? If their goal was to get into the vault and the minotaur was just a guardian, then the answer is probably yes. It’s up to you to make such judgments.

The getting to the vault is the completion of the challenge. Just successfully sneaking by a minotaur is not enough on its own to warrant reward.

[Samael Morgenst]

Would you mind going a bit more in-depth? Like, what are you, as a player, saying your toon does standing there in the middle of the town square that makes the DM say "okay, these 48 individuals that you have individually angered now have the Mob template appended to them and are worth more XP than their individual lives would be worth normally?"

Bonus Round: how are you doing it if the DM doesn't have the DMGII?

It is a though exercise, level grinding is unsuitable for real play anyway.
If the DM doesn't have the DMGII I would send him a pdf by mail.

About "creating" a mob, it would involve conquering a settlement with your small horde of subjugated orcs / mindless undead then place the innocents in a pit an magically influencing their mind into a frenzy, mabye with the help of drugs.

Anyhow, the core description of a Mob explicitly mention magical influence as possible cause.

[Morphic tide]

There's text in the DMG regarding training time as an option that can be used as a limiter to power-leveling:

You can mandate that to gain any of the newfound class-based benefits earned by advancing a level, a character needs to perform some overall training. This training requires one week per every two levels, rounded up. Training requires a character to train with a character of the same class who is higher in level and costs 1,000 gp per week. If no such trainer can be found, the cost is the same, but the time required is doubled. The money goes into fees, consultants, material component experiments, and other miscellaneous expenditures. Without the training, a character cannot acquire more hit points, class features, saving throw and attack bonus increases, spells per day, skill points, new spells, and so on.

109 weeks entailing 109,000 GP per 20th, 218 weeks but same price-tag for the first to hit 20th. Plus the time taken to acquire the XP, which is what the power-leveling exploit is for, and the gold, which turns into a rather horrid sinkhole. It gains efficiency as scale increases due to the members training and consulting eachother, which reasonably would wave such expenditures altogether, but needing it to run for four years to reach a 20th-level character is a pretty significant logistical problem for mass killing XP sources (though on the upside, you can write down the slave value as GP contribution). And in the case of spellcasters, the material components are expended, so you need some rather screwy things to supply those in bulk for any "School of Hard Knocks" approach.

[Thirdtwin]

It is a though exercise, level grinding is unsuitable for real play anyway.
If the DM doesn't have the DMGII I would send him a pdf by mail.

About "creating" a mob, it would involve conquering a settlement with your small horde of subjugated orcs / mindless undead then place the innocents in a pit an magically influencing their mind into a frenzy, mabye with the help of drugs.

Anyhow, the core description of a Mob explicitly mention magical influence as possible cause.

Well it's a pretty boring thought exercise. Yes, if the DM decides to indulge your desire to serially murder otherwise innocent sapients in batches of 48 at a time then yes, you'll get levels faster. But there's nothing you can do in the diegesis to make the DM put a template on anything the DM doesn't want to.

I mean, let's say your character managed to get knocked up by a dragon. The DM is still in charge of the NPCs and how they're modeled and is well within their rights to tell you that, no, your baby didn't get the half-dragon template, it just didn't take for whatever reason. Even if that's DM fiat, it's DM fiat that the game expects to have happen due to the delegation of authority that a DM-player setup implies. You can optimize all kinds of things in 3.5e but optimizing around the presence of specific configurations of npcs is going to be fundamentally fraught because npcs are definitionally in the DM's domain.

Now sometimes 3.5e gives players tools to achieve certain things that affect the way NPCs are modeled, that's also true, but you still haven't listed any. Yeah it can be brought about by "magical influence," but that doesn't equal "a spell," never mind "a spell a level 1 character can cast." Emotion--well, Emotion isn't a 3.5e spell, it's a 3.0 spell. I don’t see any drugs that say "the afflicted creature is compelled to form a Mob (as per the DMGII template) as soon as possible if it fails it's addiction check" or what have you, and drugs also cost money which runs up against WBL concerns. The closest thing I can see in bardic music that could pull off such an effect on an efficient time scale is mass suggestion, which you get at character level 18, and there's still nothing in suggestion's description that forces the DM to model "a bunch of angry commoners" as a Mob, even if you explicitly tell them all to get really angry and attack you explicitly. The DM could say "okay, all 18 commoners you fascinated attack you one at a time, roll initiative" and they (the DM) wouldn't be forced to change their mind just because you sent them a pdf they may not have even read. Even this gang of henchpeople you supposedly have: how did you get them? Where did they come from? And did it take a longer time to obtain them than just biting the darn bullet and going adventuring like a normal character?

Now I've looked at your run of topics in the last couple of days and it appears you have an interest in exploring characters that are evil in some fashion or another. That's cool, you can do that. But the clear intention of all this here is pretty close to asking for free EXP to be a serial murderer, and I find it difficult to see a DM not saying, at the very least, that if you want to kill a bunch of commoners you're just going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: one at a time, with the pittance of EXP that comes with it.

[wilphe]

The fact that a single normal ant isn't a creature by D&D rules and doesn't give XP.

IRC this is an AD&D thing.

Every creature gives at least 1XP


And yes that is also stupid, but it's stupid in the same sense with less steps

[Samael Morgenst]

How much xp would give boiling an anthill of Devastation Paragon Ants?