XP system flawed?

[oodyboo]

He means that when you find a squad of 4 skeletons your 2 mages could obliterate the whole squad with 2 spells each while your front row fighter and rogue sweep up the remains. But instead you're "forced" by the game mechanics to only cast 1 spell by each mage to make sure your chars without AoE attacks can tag all the skellies. That's what he means by incentives for stupid behavior.

The game does nothing to force this. Only your personal demons and skewed sense of reward make you feel compelled to obsess on this. (likely instilled by games like WoW)

Since my posts seems to be ignored, I will repeat the important paragraph here:

Monsters respawn indefinitely and there is no level cap. You can farm experience until the end of time if you want to. What this means is that there is absolutely no drawback in the rare cases when one of your characters misses exp on a particular monster. You can kill as many as you want to make up for it, and in fact it is faster, less tedious, and your party will end up with even more XP than you would gain from OCDing on the XP gains. And killing those extra monsters will drop even more food for your hungry prisoners. How's that for convenient?

Also, at the end of the game you will likely be partially through a level. So it won't matter much if your guys are level "13.4" or "13.8"

Bottom line, it's a game and have fun with it. It is intentionally designed not to be focused on perfecting character builds and imho is better for it.

[stepsongrapes]

Bottom line, it's a game and have fun with it. It is intentionally designed not to be focused on perfecting character builds and imho is better for it.

While I agree with the general thrust of your post, I would argue that the current system cuts against just taking things in stride than assisting it.

If the philosophy is to just take things is stride, a more reasonable design would have simply been to assign equal XP to the whole party. By choosing a fine-grained mechanic for XP, the devs are saying that who hits and who doesn't matters. They didn't have to go that route. A detailed game mechanic essentially is a statement that the player should be observant of the mechanic more, not less.

[Kostas]

The game does nothing to force this. Only your personal demons and skewed sense of reward make you feel compelled to obsess on this. (likely instilled by games like WoW)

Since my posts seems to be ignored, I will repeat the important paragraph here:

Monsters respawn indefinitely and there is no level cap. You can farm experience until the end of time if you want to. What this means is that there is absolutely no drawback in the rare cases when one of your characters misses exp on a particular monster. You can kill as many as you want to make up for it, and in fact it is faster, less tedious, and your party will end up with even more XP than you would gain from OCDing on the XP gains. And killing those extra monsters will drop even more food for your hungry prisoners. How's that for convenient?

Also, at the end of the game you will likely be partially through a level. So it won't matter much if your guys are level "13.4" or "13.8"

Bottom line, it's a game and have fun with it. It is intentionally designed not to be focused on perfecting character builds and imho is better for it.

Look again. The word "force" is in quotes. The game doesn't force it, but it rewards it. That's why I used the word "force" in quotes. I'm sorry that wasn't clear to you. (quit with the WoW already)
Your posts aren't ignored. You are the one ignoring the fallacies pointed out in them.
Monsters respawn indefinitely so what? Does that mean one system of xp is superior to the other? No it is indifferent to this argument.
How is not getting full xp not a drawback? You make no arguments on how this system is better. You just keep on repeating "accept it and have fun with it".
We're not talking about acceptance. We're using metagame concepts to logically argue in favor or against various xp systems. Which one is fairer. Which rewards clever actions. Which restricts choices. Which rewards unnatural behavior.
Again I must ask, if the rule was the other way around would you notice any difference? Would you complain? Would you be again praising the DEVs for a job well done because they can do no wrong?
If you don't care about this game mechanic (since the game has respawning mobs anyway) why do you care if it's changed to something others feel more sensible? Others who do care about it?

[seebs]

He means that when you find a squad of 4 skeletons your 2 mages could obliterate the whole squad with 2 spells each while your front row fighter and rogue sweep up the remains. But instead you're "forced" by the game mechanics to only cast 1 spell by each mage to make sure your chars without AoE attacks can tag all the skellies. That's what he means by incentives for stupid behavior.

The game does nothing to force this. Only your personal demons and skewed sense of reward make you feel compelled to obsess on this. (likely instilled by games like WoW)

Look, we get it. You are so amazingly cool and old-school. You hate WoW. You hate "games like WoW". And that makes you SO much more credible. Seriously, I should just give up and send you my original DM and CSB disks, you're more worthy of them than I will ever be. Wow. I just wish I could be you.

But back in the real world, "you take a 37% XP penalty unless you X" is pretty similar to "forced to X" in practice. It's nothing about a "skewed sense of reward". It's more a belief that rewards ought to be at least roughly stable.

[Thels]

(likely instilled by games like WoW)

Can we like quit the WoW bashing? There is no such thing about making sure everyone in the party gains the same amount of XP in WoW. Heck, XP is not important at all in WoW, since you'll reach the hard cap long before having seen all the content. If you don't like the game, sure, but there's really no reason to blame WoW for everything and then some. Try bringing up reasonable arguments instead, please.

[oodyboo]

Look, we get it. You are so amazingly cool and old-school.

Good points.

You hate WoW. You hate "games like WoW". And that makes you SO much more credible.

Actually I played WoW for many years, I had 10 level 85 characters in full epic gear when I quit. I quit not because of the game at all, it's actually quite good. I quit because you are forced to play it with other people, the vast majority of whom have a never-ending obsession with stats and gear instead of learning the game mechanics and playing well. Once my friends stopped playing, it was no longer fun.

Seriously, I should just give up and send you my original DM and CSB disks, you're more worthy of them than I will ever be. Wow. I just wish I could be you.

I appreciate the offer but don't bother, I'm enjoying playing LoG.

But back in the real world, "you take a 37% XP penalty unless you X" is pretty similar to "forced to X" in practice. It's nothing about a "skewed sense of reward". It's more a belief that rewards ought to be at least roughly stable.

Back in the real world experience is not quantitative. But in the world of Grimrock there are no 37% penalties. If you use the following simple guidelines I promise your exp will be fine.

1) prioritize attacks from least to most damage
2) throwing weapons on all/most of your party members works excellent for exp tag.
these are great for mages so they don't waste mana on weenie monsters too, or even on your strong characters that often "one-shot" monsters. they never miss
3) if one of your guys misses his attack, just strafe around until he manages to hit. if he misses a lot, see #2

That's pretty much it. If you attack like this, with very little effort you can get "full exp" for almost every (~95%) monster in the game. There are a handful of 4x skeleton groups but they aren't worth worrying much about. Use the same guidelines above to maximize exp, but if one guy misses 90 exp it's really no big deal. With this strategy my characters are all within a couple hundred exp of eachother, I suspect none of them has missed more than 750 total exp by the time I got to level 6. You can easily make up for tiny bits of missing exp when you get to uggardians or lizards - they respawn and give 500exp a pop. There are even skeleton guys in the prison early on but they give so little exp it's nearly as ridiculous to wait for their respawn timer as it is to reload every time one of your toons misses exp.

This means you can kill approximately two extra monsters on level 6 or 9 and make up all the exp you possibly missed in the entire game up to there. You can respawn them easily by changing level or probably resting nearby.

So really, there's a bunch of these threads going around and it's pretty unbelievable when you consider how easy it is to resolve. I have posted the above explanation in different words at least three times.

To be honest, before I had played through to see the respawning monsters this was one of my pet peeves about the game too, but once you realize there is essentially an infinite pool of experience for the taking, obsessing over a few hundred missed exp seems insane.

[Sir_Veillance]

Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Not sure why you think this is a flaw.

Because if a mob "has" 100 xp,

But a mob does not have 100 xp, this is how it works in real life too, the more you fight the better you get. Who cares about splitting it up, I mean that's what experience is right? Fighting experience?

[legends of grimlock]

Funny how these xp threads keep popping up. For a detail explanation on how the system works is in this post I wrote up awhile back. The exp system is more flawed then you would actually imagine. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1197

[Kostas]

Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Not sure why you think this is a flaw.

Because if a mob "has" 100 xp,

But a mob does not have 100 xp, this is how it works in real life too, the more you fight the better you get. Who cares about splitting it up, I mean that's what experience is right? Fighting experience?

This is a game not real life. We're talking about game design choices merits.
(Also it doesn't work like that in real life either, it's much much more complicated)

Funny how these xp threads keep popping up. For a detail explanation on how the system works is in this post I wrote up awhile back. The exp system is more flawed then you would actually imagine. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1197

What's funny is how accurate this is:

I all the threads that describe some anomalies in the game, the posts are alle the same: Some simply want to know, how the system works, others explain it to them and state, that the system is flawed. Then many people come and say, that they do not see that flaw, and that they have fun, and all the other should accept it or go play other games or the like..... it's always the same.

[Rob]

I honestly read through this thread and the only thing I feel is that it was a waste of intelligence from both sides. Neither side has offered any compelling argument why one would be better than the other.

Pertaining to the original question in the header: Is there any form of experience system that is not flawed? If characters learn at the exact same rate, that breaks my idea of them being characters. If two of us went to the same classes, same courses, we would still not be in the exact place. Whether martial, physical or academic.

Likewise, if we went to the same course, and classes, both would likely learn something (naturally depending if we want to learn or not, but that is a different thing.).

I honestly feel that the experience system is fine. I would not feel it less fine if it worked like D&D, but it wouldn't improve it in any way either. I always felt that system was hamfisted.