FowlJ wrote: The way XP is normalised to 1000 per level is new. It also doesn't meaningfully alter encounter building.
A 5-person party needs to fight around 25% more/stronger creatures to earn the same XP per character as a four person party. That is not new. Whether it's because the XP is split 5 ways instead of 4 or because the party wide XP gain is reduced to 80% (which is what the encounter scaling rules do) is irrelevant.
Irrelevant?
In one approach you have "a Goblin is worth 5 XP. Four Goblins is worth 20 Xp. If four heroes fight four goblins, they each gain 5 XP. If five heroes fight four goblins, they each gain 4 XP"
In the other you have "a Goblin is worth 5 Xp to each hero of a four-many party. If you have more or less players, the Goblin is still worth 5 XP, but you need to change the number of goblins to make it so".
At least we agree the new system doesn't do anything the old couldn't.
So why change from easy and straightforward and familiar to convoluted and strange?
Mathmuse wrote: Zapp wrote: First off, how do I get the full post quoted (not truncated by the three dots as seen above). I checked the FAQ, but it said nothing about a maximum quote length? I do it manually myself, including having to write in nested quote and bold and italic BBCode by hand because those don't cut and paste. I am fluent in TeX, LaTeX, troff, HTML and CSS, and MediaWiki markup languages. Such is the life of a mathematician.
Zapp wrote: Mathmuse wrote: But if you want to see the underlying mathematics of what XP and level really mean in terms of character effectiveness, that gets into exponents and logarithms. I wrote it up last year for the playtest forum: The Mind-Boggling Math of Exponential Leveling. Not sure what you're gaining by characterizing levelling rules as "mind-boggling".
After all, you can have your player characters level up every three sessions or so (regardless what they're doing or who they're doing it against)... and absolutely everything works fine.
Since this is so, there is no actual need for xp awards to be involved or calibrated or anything else. You could replace it all with the following rule:
"You begin play with 1 XP. Each time you accomplish something or defeat a monster, you gain either 0 XP or 1 XP each. Here are the xp totals you need to reach a new level:
Level XP requirement
<Snipping purely linear list>
This works identical to the published rules (regardless of which rules we're talking about) if the DM wants them to. And if the DM doesn't want them to, well...
I might be misunderstanding your intentions here, but I see no reason to mythologize experience points. There is zero science behind it. It's all an illusion meant to give off the veneer of objectivity, so new players can forget the hard truth that every body is at the level their DM wants them to be and their adventure needs them to be. :-)
Cheers People use... Damn how irritating it is for the quote to cut off like that. Here I'm only getting the two first words of what I wanted to quote!
Mathmuse wrote: People use that system. They call it giving up on XP and going by milestone-based leveling. It works especially well with Paizo adventure paths, where the PCs are supposed to level up 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through a module and at the end of the module. I had to switch to it myself in my Jade Regent campaign, where the players derailed the campaign, so I let them attend a secret meeting of 130 oni to learn the oni's new strategy against their new plan. They killed 100 of those oni by collapsing the roof (Order of the Stick scene). That moment of awesomeness gave them way too much XP.
But the milestone system requires making milestones, deciding how many encounters are needed for the right time to level up the party. If the players keeps derailing the adventure, as mine do, then they often have a long time between leveling up.
There is science behind leveling in roleplaying games. Jason Bulmahn improved the XP system when he upgraded Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 into Pathfinder 1st Edition. His method got rid of a flaw called "empty levels." By analyzing that improvement, I uncovered some of the science.
Let me explain the basics of the science. Suppose that a campaign is about stopping an invasion from the Orc Empire. The PCs battle and defeat 20 orc soldiers and advance to 2nd level. What should they defeat to advance to 3rd level? Simply another 20 orc soldiers? That would make 3rd level easier to reach than 2nd level. If the challenge between levels was always 20 orc soldiers, then as the PCs became more powerful, they would level up faster and faster.
Thus, the challenge is supposed to increase by level. 20 orc soldiers to reach 2nd level, 30 more orc soldiers to reach 3rd level, 40 more orc soldiers to reach 4th level, etc. is quadratic leveling, because the total challenge to reach a level is a quadratic function. Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition uses quadratic leveling: reaching 2nd level requires 1000 xp, reaching 3rd level from 2nd requires 2000 more xp, reaching 4th level from 3rd requires 3000 more xp, etc.
The weakness of quadratic leveling is that the challenge does not increase fast enough. People want about the same number of encounters during each level. If they kill 30 orc soldiers at 2nd level and 40 orc soldiers at 3rd level, then their characters need to be about 33% stronger at 3rd level compared to 2nd level so that they have the same relative challenge at each level. If they kill 100 orc soldiers (or 10 orc super-commandos, each equal to 10 orc soldiers) at 9th level and 110 orc soldiers at 10th level, then the characters are 10% stronger. For each level the percentage improvement decreases: 50%, 33%, 25%, 20%, 17%, 14%, 13%, 11%, 10%, etc. Eventually the improvement becomes so small that the new abilities are not worth giving distinct names, instead, a few numbers gain +1. Those are called empty levels. Leveling up becomes boring.
Jason Bulmahn fixed that in Pathfinder 1st Edition. Each level makes a character 41% stronger. I call this system exponential levels. It ought never have empty levels, but a few other flaws in design did create levels that felt empty, such as Barbarian 13th level. Pathfinder 1st Edition used the same system for assigning XP that D&D 3.5 used, where each creature had a fixed XP value.
In Pathfinder 2nd Edition, Jason Bulmahn and the other Paizo designers realized that they could simplify the XP system because of exponential leveling. They shifted a paradigm. Instead of each creature having a fixed XP value, each encounter that makes the party members struggle with the same effort has a fixed XP value. A 1st-level party fighting a 1st-level creature gains the same XP per person as a 2nd-level party fighting a 2nd-level creature. A 4-person party fighting 4 creatures gains the same XP per person as a 5-person party fighting 5 creatures. Experience points are about the experience. The amount of XP per level can therefore be a fixed 1,000 xp.
You are explaining many things I already know.
You seem to think you need to explain relative vs absolute xp values, but that's not what I'm reacting to here. That a level 1 monster can be worth exactly the same to a level 1 hero as a level 19 monster to a level 19 hero is entirely fine. That 4 heroes fighting 4 creatures is equal to 5 heroes fighting 5 creatures is also neither new nor controversial.
I'm trying to discuss the specific design decision to assume four-man parties. There is nothing "simple" about packaging a four-man assumption into the xp values of monsters. There is nothing it does that you couldn't do with the regular system. It doesn't make anything better. If your party isn't four man, it makes things worse.
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Zapp wrote: I'm trying to discuss the specific design decision to assume four-man parties. There is nothing "simple" about packaging a four-man assumption into the xp values of monsters. There is nothing it does that you couldn't do with the regular system. It doesn't make anything better. If your party isn't four man, it makes things worse. They need to put the baseline somewhere in oder to have degrees of difficulty that make sense. Where would you have it?
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Zapp wrote: You are explaining many things I already know.
You seem to think you need to explain relative vs absolute xp values, but that's not what I'm reacting to here. That a level 1 monster can be worth exactly the same to a level 1 hero as a level 19 monster to a level 19 hero is entirely fine. That 4 heroes fighting 4 creatures is equal to 5 heroes fighting 5 creatures is also neither new nor controversial.
I'm trying to discuss the specific design decision to assume four-man parties. There is nothing "simple" about packaging a four-man assumption into the xp values of monsters. There is nothing it does that you couldn't do with the regular system. It doesn't make anything better. If your party isn't four man, it makes things worse.
So you are saying that the mathematics that is causing all your argument is that the Pathfinder table divided by 4 in advance rather than forcing the GM to divide by 4? Because sometimes the GM needs to multiply by another number instead of 4, such as 3 for a 3-person party or 5 for a 5-person party, when constructing an XP Budget for an encounter? The XP gained by an individual character never changes for a given level and difficulty.
(No need to answer quickly, because I am heading off to church. I'll be back at 2pm EDT.)
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Zapp wrote:
In one approach you have "a Goblin is worth 5 XP. Four Goblins is worth 20 Xp. If four heroes fight four goblins, they each gain 5 XP. If five heroes fight four goblins, they each gain 4 XP"
In the other you have "a Goblin is worth 5 Xp to each hero of a four-many party. If you have more or less players, the Goblin is still worth 5 XP, but you need to change the number of goblins to make it so".
You are not making a sound argument here.
If it bothers you so much, multiply the listed creature XP by 4. Boom - you now have your 20XP goblin or 240XP black knight and you can divide this reward across your number of players.
You seem to imply that you previously ran pre-written adventures without adjusting the encounters for more or less players. This was not the intended way to do things in PF1. For proof, see any PFS scenario. Doing it your way led to the difficulty spikes as outlined by others in this thread. The new system introduces one extra step to this - multiply the XP by 4/player count.
If you WERE adjusting the encounters in PF1, you were still supposed to do maths to avoid under-scaling or over-scaling the encounter, and if anything, that maths is simpler now than it used to be, as detailed by Mathmuse.
Pretty sure the intention of this system is for GM to have absolute control of when parties level up, specially during Adventure Paths you could have the party be at X level regardless of size. It used to be that different party size would result in being at a different level from intended and that would balance the difficulty... Now they don't want that. You're gonna be level 5 at the start of book 2 no matter what.
You adjust the encounters as they happen so there's always the intended challenge level for a given group. This make the play-experience more homogeneous mechanically for groups all over the world.
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