Post by klamath on Jun 18, 2008 8:53:53 GMT -6
Reading over the EPT rulebook I've run into what seems to be a glitch in the experience rules. I was wondering how others had handled it.
OD&D introduced a rule giving characters reduced experience for dealing with easier challenges; a seventh-level character would receive only 2/7 experience for killing a 2 hit-dice monster, for instance. E.P.T. generalizes this rule so that at higher levels characters simply receive a fraction of the experience regardless of the threats they face. At very high levels, this reduction is severe—an eighth-level character gets only 10% of the normal experience award, for instance.
So far, so good. But the rulebook states that above level 9 a flat 10,000 points are needed to achieve the next level. It notes that since ninth-level characters receive only 10% of their experience value, attaining level 10 really means accumulating 100,000 points, and that since at level 10 and above characters get only 5% , higher levels require 200,000 points. The difficulty here is that, according to the table, moving from level 8 to 9 requires 90,000-120,000 points (depending on profession), and because eighth-level characters only acquire 10% of experience, they actually need roughly a million experience points to reach ninth level.
It is hard to believe that Barker intended this, or to square this with the much smaller number of points needed to rise above ninth level. Of course, it is possible that Barker simply never noticed the problem. In an early Dragon, he stated that no character in his game had risen beyond eighth level—and this was in 1976, when his campaign had been running some two years.
The obvious fixes are to disregard the reduced experience point totals, ruling that every level above 9 requires 100,000 points, or to keep them but change the raw experience needed for level 10+ to 100,000 points rather than 10,000. Both seem to fly in the face of the rules-as-written, though,
OD&D introduced a rule giving characters reduced experience for dealing with easier challenges; a seventh-level character would receive only 2/7 experience for killing a 2 hit-dice monster, for instance. E.P.T. generalizes this rule so that at higher levels characters simply receive a fraction of the experience regardless of the threats they face. At very high levels, this reduction is severe—an eighth-level character gets only 10% of the normal experience award, for instance.
So far, so good. But the rulebook states that above level 9 a flat 10,000 points are needed to achieve the next level. It notes that since ninth-level characters receive only 10% of their experience value, attaining level 10 really means accumulating 100,000 points, and that since at level 10 and above characters get only 5% , higher levels require 200,000 points. The difficulty here is that, according to the table, moving from level 8 to 9 requires 90,000-120,000 points (depending on profession), and because eighth-level characters only acquire 10% of experience, they actually need roughly a million experience points to reach ninth level.
It is hard to believe that Barker intended this, or to square this with the much smaller number of points needed to rise above ninth level. Of course, it is possible that Barker simply never noticed the problem. In an early Dragon, he stated that no character in his game had risen beyond eighth level—and this was in 1976, when his campaign had been running some two years.
The obvious fixes are to disregard the reduced experience point totals, ruling that every level above 9 requires 100,000 points, or to keep them but change the raw experience needed for level 10+ to 100,000 points rather than 10,000. Both seem to fly in the face of the rules-as-written, though,
