The XP for Combat Megathread! DISCUSS!

[Curious_Tongue]

If I see a room full of 20 traps, and each trap is worth 10xp to disarm, then the drive collect xp will make me disarm every one of them. I'll move on to the next room with a mild dopamine high that comes from a sense of accomplishment which then motivates me to fully collect all the xp in the next room and keep that high going.

If I don't have the promise of that buzz, and I go to the room full of traps, I think to myself "Meh, I only need to disarm a handful to get past safely."

Receiving no buzz from the trap room, I enter the next room and find a few enemies, and I think to myself "What's the easiest way of getting through this area?"

I get sick of trying to find the quickest way through quests and decide to give the game a rest. With the game providing no dopamine, I get no withdrawals, and I find that I never bother getting back into it.

 

[dryan]

 

[imweasel]

Jesus Christ I am burned out on this thread. I made the mistake of joining the same conversation on the Obsidian board too and my caring center just collapsed. See you guys in a few days. Maybe. Carry on the good fight DraQ.

Too bad so many people know what is good and don't want to end fun, amirite?

 

[SCO]

Pitiful addicts

 

[Curious_Tongue]

neurotransmitter connoisseurs

Fixed

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Small, bite sized servings of dopamine, on a bed of creamy serotonin, garnished lightly with endorphins.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

I haven't read the thread and this has likely already been noted, but Styg has implemented an interesting approach for Underrail with the oddity approach. I dig it.

I imagine it could be used in a hybrid way, where quests and feats give primary XP and while kills do not, discoverable items which are obtained only by exploring the map fully and killing is necessary could be a good reward.

 

[crufty]

with a class & level based system, the same xp for each kill, distributed evenly across each party member present at the start of combat but only given to those participating at the time of the kill.

XP should be handed out for each successful action that contributes to the advancement of a PC.

Also--XP for each GP spent.

 

[DraQ]

The mega-party getting captured by ruffians is a writing flaw, a suspension of the suspension of disbelief, if you will.

It can be just as much a mechanical flaw.

It makes sense for group of people to be captured or effectively forced to surrender sometimes and it thus makes a valid narrative building block. It makes no sense for this group to grow so much in power to steamroll this ambush just because player spent several h popping wolves.

Game stories aren't infinitely malleable and XP systems are too abstract and divorced from low level mechanics to handle too much player freedom. If you are to use XP system, you've got to tie it to the story elements which implies restricting what you dole out points for.

I don't see why the systems have to be one or the other, particularly when you have a party-based game.

If you'd like to match narratives to both learning from solving quests and actually fighting, why not develop something that rewards both?

Because then you'd effectively have to develop two systems at once, with disparate abstraction levels too.

Just a thought: what about a system that had fighters learning more from combat, thus leveling up faster "in the field", but taking less XP from quest solutions. The corollary would be that intelligence-based characters would earn less in the field, but take in more XP when turning in quests, reflecting the fact that they have to 'dwell' on what they've learned to truly gain use out of it. This would also introduce a dynamic where some types of characters level in a slow-burn sort of way, while others are an a-ha! lightbulb type. I mean, if we're talking narrative dissonance, the swordfighter finding out who stole someone's pig isn't going to make him handier with the blade, and an aged greybeard wizard blasting a goblin with a magic missile isn't exactly going to teach the old dog new tricks.

The problem here is that you're still mixing abstraction levels.

Up close no one is learning anything by turning in quests. Learning is a process. The difference is in approach - either you try to monitor and reflect learning process as well as you can, which yields you a complicated use based system, or you abstract the approach distancing yourself from what actually happens and try to just nail the right results not the whole process - this yields you much lighter XP system, that unfortunately needs to be actively supported by the content. In such system it isn't as much turning in quests and achieving intermediate goals that advances the character's abilities, as assumption that character(s) *must have* handled the obstacles prior to achieving this point and thus can benefit from whatever they learned that way.

This method is actually better suited for games that have definite gameplay focus, because in, for example, combat centric game you can be at least resonably sure that the activities undertaken to handle obstacle were at least somewhat related to combat, so you can forgo monitoring what individual characters could have benefited from solution.

OTOH it still doesn't reward combat explicitly so it still doesn't disincentivize avoiding tactically or strategically undesirable combat and ensures that all working solutions, even unforseen by the devs, are rewarded, while not allowing reward multiplication by out of character behaviour (no, Munchkin Retarded is not a valid alignment and isn't in character).

Basically this places ordinary kill or otherwise activity-specific XP in an unhappy middle between a system that tries to model character learning via extensive bookeeping and relies on patching over loopholes to avoid abuse, and system that tries to motivate correct character behaviour by removing possibility of abuse along with any reference to actual learning process.
It's a system that can't model learning process and discern loopholes from legitimate use cases, yet still keeps the mechanics that makes loopholes possible. It basically discards all the interesting parts, keeping only loopholes.


Now, I'm somewhat partial to the mechanics you proposed, but it still carries the problem of degenerate solutions over (because differentiated rewards are still rewards), and if you replace reduced/increased rewards with completely class specific XP sources, it's basically use-based in dsguise. It might make an interesting system in party based game, and introduce sorts of internal conflict (fighter would benefit the most from killing things, but another character might then get none), but it would require the same sort of complexity effective use-based would to patch over grind issues (especially given that it would require balancing finite and infinite XP sources to avoid metagame) and it would not be as effective as goal XP in adressing multiple rewards problems - it wouldn't even address this problem as effectively as use-based refinement I proposed, because while there can be a cost to developing one skill instead of another (opportunity cost - single character can only learn so many tricks), advancing one character doesn't inherently limit another.

 

[DraQ]

Are you drunkposting

shitposting.

I read a comment somewhere that said that there were two types of CRPG fans, roleplayers and rollplayers. Which means some people like getting into character and shit, some treat it more a like game. Roleplayers accuse rollplayers of being part of the reason why they can't get a good CRPG.

Some games seem to satisfy both groups, but from what I understand about the direction Sawyer wants to take PoE, Sawyer has decided that rollplayers are the enemy. I think that's very unfair.

Actually, the conflict isn't between rolplayers and roleplayers.
It's between people who want their games to be cohesive wholes, with mechanics and narrative tightly coupled, whatever they might be, and those who want them as segregated and independent from each other as possible.

So tell me, Curious_Tongue , how does it feel to have Hamburglar Hepler as your natural ally?
Because your desires are not just reconcilable, but perfectly compatible - she wants the game part neatly segregated out and skippable, so that cRPGs can be "played" by those who don't like games, while you just want story and in-universe sense to have no bearing on stuff that actually happens during gameplay (and your precious loopholes, don't forget about loopholes), so that cRPGs can be played by people who don't like role-playing.

Spoiler

Disgusting vermin.

b) make sure quests are not restricted to the banal variety; for example entering the windspear hills and being forced to kill Ajantis' party triggers the Firkraag quest, you didn't have to get sent from town if I recall. Exploration should trigger the quest systemically in the game when you initiate activities in a certain area, you shouldn't always have to have a guy telling you go do x and y.

That's the way quests worked in Morrowind and I see no reason why they shouldn't work like that in an XP-based game.

c) for extremely long areas or multipart quests (e.g. the Cult of the Unseeing Eye), perhaps XP rewards can come in stages - small percentages could be offered as certain quest goals are reached, with the lion's share coming at the end. This can give people a sense of progression on a more micro scale since people seem to desire it
d) there should be many more quests available than are needed to reach max level, and to me, there should be many more quests than one would realistically complete in one playthrough
e) certain quests could be gated based on past actions, race, class, attributes, party composition, etc

I've only given this about 5 minutes of though and I know this would require an immense amount of time to create enough content density while developers work with a limited schedule and budget. But that's kind of along the lines of the direction I would have gone with a BG2-esque game with that type of immense quest density. This would also require designing of high level gameplay that doesn't completely trivialize the later stages of the game since players could decide to grind quests and reach high levels earlier, but personally I think that needs to be a goal anyways, to preserve the fun of the endgame.

I agree.

I'd add that XP rewards should be only given for quests that aren't just chores or heavily depend on the kind of character you play, unless gated.

Your thoughts are both reasonable and interesting. But the problem is, they simply fail to connect to reality, the whole system feels off, it makes combat pointless, it systemically rewards players for doing as they are told.

Again, then why does this problem mysteriously not appear in about *every* other genre?

I'll tell you why:
Because most cRPG players are sadly disgusting instant gratification junkies not unlike the morons whining about old games being pointless because they don't have achievements on steam.
Worse, you shouldn't be even inconvenienced by being told what to do (as in interacting with content this game actually has as opposed to the one it doesn't), because you are incapable of feeling satisfaction out of your own performance, cleverness and mastery of game mechanics, because you need to be told that this here was worth 200XP so you should derive 200 satisfaction from it.

You say exp-per kill removes the choice to spare the enemy, but this is a fucking lie

lrn2rd.
It doesn't remove it but it makes it objectively the wrong choice to make.

Fact is the old system gave us a choice, this one removes any meaning to it. The old system trusted the player, this one doesnt.

What choice does the new system deprive you of?

Apart from leeching off XP welfare or cheating the system to get several times the XP you should be entitled to, that is.

Jesus Christ I am burned out on this thread. I made the mistake of joining the same conversation on the Obsidian board too and my caring center just collapsed. See you guys in a few days. Maybe. Carry on the good fight DraQ.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

Now, that being the case, should it be highly encouraged? My answer is, absolutely yes. I'm going to replace 'should combat always be highly encouraged' with 'should there be an inherent reward for combat' since we're talking about XP. And to head off the inevitable: no, "fun" doesn't count. "Fun" is the result of good game design, it is not an ingredient in and of itself. I mean strictly a gameplay mechanics reward.

Flawed premise. The rest of your post may look elaborated to the clueless morons who brofisted you but that's not getting past me.

-Rewarding combat generates more combat. If combat is the only approach that will consistently get you to the end of the game you want to maximize that.

-Then you can scrap the non combat approaches. Skipping the XP rewards, which boost the only consistent solution to the game, will be frustrating.

-Your game becomes a combat centric game. And then you have a pseudo RPG a la Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate.


It works the opposite way. XP rewards for combat works well in a game where you can completely avoid combat. You don't need the essential boost the XP provides to combat efficiency.

And then you can have a true RPG.

 

[DraQ]

tl;dr:

 

[Lhynn]

Your thoughts are both reasonable and interesting. But the problem is, they simply fail to connect to reality, the whole system feels off, it makes combat pointless, it systemically rewards players for doing as they are told.

Again, then why does this problem mysteriously not appear in about *every* other genre?

I'll tell you why:
Because most cRPG players are sadly disgusting instant gratification junkies not unlike the morons whining about old games being pointless because they don't have achievements on steam.
Worse, you shouldn't be even inconvenienced by being told what to do (as in interacting with content this game actually has as opposed to the one it doesn't), because you are incapable of feeling satisfaction out of your own performance, cleverness and mastery of game mechanics, because you need to be told that this here was worth 200XP so you should derive 200 satisfaction from it.

Strawman more DraQ, please. I wasnt aware you were that desperate.

Xp per action is simply superior because it rewards player for their actions instead of for walking tru a checkpoint.

You practice your skills on a tense, non ideal enviroment and you learn from it, you get better. It doesnt matter if its instant or if the system rewards you with the sum of it after reaching a "checkpoint", really, it doesnt, thats not even what im arguing.

Im arguing that giving the same exp for completing a task, independently of how you completed it is shit, because it removes meaning from your actions, it suddenly doesnt matter how you got there, if you fought for your life against a settlement of angry orcs, or if you just took the small path to the side of it.

Granted, the second choice is more sensible, anyone that isnt a sociopath would probably pick it. But it simply makes no sense from a character growth standpoint (that is deeply related to your combat prowess) to reward them in exactly the same way. It also goes against the sense of adventure that should be what these games are about.

Now, i know DX:UR system was shit, it encouraged a shitty way of playing the game, it detracted from the enjoyement of it, etc. But you have to understand several things, first its that that game relied heavily on locations that you would never visit before, so in a way you felt bad if you didnt milk them. The second one was not because of being instant gratification but because of the knowledge that there was not a hard cap on the amount of praxis points you could get coupled with the fact that experience in the game was limited, so anything you didnt get was forever lost.

The reason action/xp gets rewarded on the spot is because its the most efficient way to do it, the computer can calculate it and give it on the fly instead of waiting an arbitrary amount of time, there is no good reason to withhold it from the player, but there isnt any reason not to do just that either, i dont give a fuck.

What choice does the new system deprive you of?

To turn down quests. As they are simply the only one and only way to progress. xp/action keeps you moving forward while not forcing you to undertake things you dont want to. Also quest xp is extremely limited in anyones mind (as much as quests there are in the game) xp/action isnt, as long as you keep doing shit and exploring the world, youll be fine.

 

[crufty]

here's a thought

if you get xp for killing, should you lose xp for getting hurt?

 

[Old Hans]

XP should only be awarded by gold pieces the way jerry gygax intended it when he created D&D back in the early 60s

 

[DraQ]

Xp per action is simply superior because it rewards player for their actions instead of for walking tru a checkpoint.

It's inferior becuase it rewards - note: *rewards* - player for their actions regardles of whether they have purpose.

This leads to player simply maximizing actions, without giving a single fuck about purpose.

You practice your skills on a tense, non ideal enviroment and you learn from it, you get better. It doesnt matter if its instant or if the system rewards you with the sum of it after reaching a "checkpoint", really.

...and since reaching a checkpoint implies you have practiced your skills, having tackled preceding obstacle(s), you get an XP reward. Simple, eh?

Im arguing that giving the same exp for completing a task, independently of how you completed it is shit

Then surely you will agree that rewarding dumber, less optimal actions with more XP is washing shit down with a glass of fresh diarrhoea.

because it removes meaning from your actions, it suddenly doesnt matter how you got there, if you fought for your life against a settlement of angry orcs, or if you just took the small path to the side of it.

Actually, removing artificial arbitrary value assigned to individual actions restores their intrinsic meaning.
Because once you stop concerning yourself with settlement of angry orcs being worth 2000XP while finding a side passage only 1000XP (or other way around, important thing being that if you find the side passage, then backtrack to kill orcs, you get delicious 3000XP!!!), you start thinking about the consequences of your actions. Maybe killing the orcs is just needless waste of resources you will need once you reach the Swamp of Terror, Plains of Despair, or whatever ominous location name the dev has come up with?
Or maybe killing the orcs will prevent the impending raid and save human settlement not far away? Or the other way around - there was no threat of impending raid, but the orcish war/hunting bands returning to razed settlement will get pissed the fuck off and come to exact bloody vengeance on nearest pink-skinned bastards with atrophied jaws? Maybe orcs are actually bethesdian/blizzardian variety orcs and can prove valuable allies later on? Or maybe if left undisturbed they will ally with the big bad and fuck everything up royally?

Granted, the second choice is more sensible, anyone that isnt a sociopath would probably pick it. But it simply makes no sense from a character growth standpoint (that is deeply related to your combat prowess) to reward them in exactly the same way.

Actually there is the best possible reason for that. To avoid assigning arbitrary values to the way player tackles the problem. Player should come to their own conclusions regarding what course of action will be the most desirable, and designer should encourage that by assigning in-universe consequences to them.
Differential XP is a cop-out.

Want another reason?
Robustness. Checking single condition that is equivalent to achieving actual goal ensures that all approaches are covered and no approach is covered more than once. Checking individual approaches not only means that nonsensical solutions, like sneak-backtrack-persuade-kill-anyway are rewarded much more than any sensible ones, but also that any sensible solution that works within mechanics, but hasn't occurred to any of the devs is not rewarded at all. Came up with something clever? 0XP for you, should have stuck with bashing heads in like good little int 3 barbarian.

Now, i know DX:UR system was shit, it encouraged a shitty way of playing the game, it detracted from the enjoyement of it, etc. But you have to understand several things, first its that that game relied heavily on locations that you would never visit before, so in a way you felt bad if you didnt milk them.

The most important thing I understand about it is that it turned enjoyable gameplay elements into fucking chores and potentially interesting gameplay decisions into trivial, single variable optimization problem.

Bottoms up!

The second one was not because of being instant gratification but because of the knowledge that there was not a hard cap on the amount of praxis points you could get coupled with the fact that experience in the game was limited, so anything you didnt get was forever lost.

Meanwhile if you have XP cap, whatever XP you don't get early translates into wasted opportunities to use delicious high level abilities and stuff. See that band of pissed orcs coming at you because you razed their settlement? If only you ground more early in game you might have had fun opportunity to incinerate them all with a massive fireball or gassing them dead with cloudkill, since you haven't it's menial work for you.

To turn down quests.

Already posted about it (several times).
Only quests/goals/events player shouldn't be able or wiling to turn down should yield any sort of XP reward.
It also means you don't have to concern yourself with earning XP while playing the game, but pay attention to what you're doing *in* game and its context.

I'm not a

apologist and feel no need to support any design decision he makes, only the actually sensible ones.

 

[Untermensch]

I don't believe how dense some codexers are.

It should be fucking obvious the best practice is to give the players the same amount of XP, regardless of the way they tackled the challenge.

Giving XP for killing makes combat the "right way to play the game", which, again, is very obviouly bad design

 

[DraQ]

here's a thought

if you get xp for killing, should you lose xp for getting hurt?

For getting butthurt - certainly.

 

[Lhynn]

Bullshit, all your arguments come down to "i want to roleplay a adventurer that grows in power without the need to fight". And that to me is shit, it goes against the very motivation to be an adventurer instead of a mercenary.

I dont want to work for anyone, unless they fucking beg me. I dont want to need their quests, because i believe carrying a package from A to be should not be rewarded with xp to your combat class, but taking on a pack of lions should.
I really see where you are coming from, i do, so much that most of your words are wasted on me, but i disagree on a fundamental level.

To me an adventurer should grow stronger by tackling risky encounters, and the system should reward that. To you it should reward any approach equally to avoid conditioning a single solution to a problem, not only that, every action should have context within the game, if it doesnt it should not be rewarded in any way. I just hate both notions, i think they go against the spirit of traditional D&D and should be put down.

First, the rpg does not get to tell me what to think or what context do i give to my actions, it should leave that part to me like it has in better rpgs. Second, i dont want to feel obligated to take on any quest, if i want to go on my own and stumble with adventure i should be able to, not only that, the game should encourage me to take that approach instead of giving me a list of chores that will make me stronger, BG did this superbly.

I dont know what to say man, it appears im not going to convince you and as i said before, i know exactly where you and Zombra are coming from, i just believe its shitty and boring. They lack soul and are anti-fun.

 

[crufty]

suppose at an abstract level

xp could be rewarded for successful actions that contribute to the overcoming of a challenge, scaled according to risk of approach (not risk to PC i.e. no level scaling). the more insane the approach, the greater the XP reward.

 

[Lhynn]

My other problem with this approach is that it makes XP irrelevant, they might as well award levels when they feel its necessary for the plot.

 

[crufty]

My other problem with this approach is that it makes XP irrelevant, they might as well award levels when they feel its necessary for the plot.

that would be some stones though, imagine the inverse

imagine a game ending at a certain point because the PC wasn't high ENOUGH level

"The arch-necromancer collapses in a heap. As you go to grab the macguffin, your nemesis the arch-necromancer howls with laughter. With his final dying unbreath, he casts a spell which instantly kills you and your friends. since y'all are too low level to resist. Try harder next time bub! T H E E N D"

 

[sser]

The mega-party getting captured by ruffians is a writing flaw, a suspension of the suspension of disbelief, if you will.

It can be just as much a mechanical flaw.
It makes sense for group of people to be captured or effectively forced to surrender sometimes and it thus makes a valid narrative building block. It makes no sense for this group to grow so much in power to steamroll this ambush just because player spent several h popping wolves.

Game stories aren't infinitely malleable and XP systems are too abstract and divorced from low level mechanics to handle too much player freedom. If you are to use XP system, you've got to tie it to the story elements which implies restricting what you dole out points for.

Why would one make more sense than the other? You're getting into the territory of faux freedoms for the player vs. actual linearity. It's not rocket science to find a way to this, either. If you want the player to be captured by a bunch of nobodies, make sure that the player can't get above their level before that happens. If your world is completely open, you either avoid bad writing like this altogether or you jam it down the player's throat a la Elder Scrolls with the demonic-armor wearing ruffians that jump out of the bushes like cartoon characters, or the flip side: killing a dragon when you're fresh off the boat wagon. Do note, by the way, that it is bad writing and it's also bad gameplay. Dragon Age had a scenario where you could be captured or fight your way out -- but what you suggest is that the designer just railroad the player for the sake of narrative. Having the characters captured by rogues is not that fucking interesting and not worth the time, and won't be worth the time if the player plays the game again.

And a game structured around quest-only XP is going to be forever rigid with not much in the way of varied gameplay experiences. Not only that, but you think it avoids elements of grind -- it won't. The dumb side-quests like fetch this or find out who stole the neighbor's milk will be those wolves in the forest.

The problem here is that you're still mixing abstraction levels. Up close no one is learning anything by turning in quests. Learning is a process. The difference is in approach - either you try to monitor and reflect learning process as well as you can, which yields you a complicated use based system, or you abstract the approach distancing yourself from what actually happens and try to just nail the right results not the whole process - this yields you much lighter XP system, that unfortunately needs to be actively supported by the content. In such system it isn't as much turning in quests and achieving intermediate goals that advances the character's abilities, as assumption that character(s) *must have* handled the obstacles prior to achieving this point and thus can benefit from whatever they learned that way.

You're thinking too hard. I'm not at all mixing anything. The idea is to try something new, not blow minds. I find the concept of fighters learning in the field vs. wizards learning at home to be very interesting. It fits the narrative if you want it to and it's a gameplay element in and of itself. If we're speaking strictly on narrative-terms then quest-only-XP clearly makes the least sense and a system that gives XP for a lot of things makes the most. Gameplay-wise, quest-only-XP just feels like something trying to be different, not something that's of sound design. It feels a little too much like Grand Theft Auto, turning in quests and having a big cash reward appear on the screen in balloon letters. That's cool for a game like GTA, because the fun stems from the players own actions. But for a game that's supposed to simulate the progression of multiple characters I imagine it would feel divorced and lifeless.

This method is actually better suited for games that have definite gameplay focus, because in, for example, combat centric game you can be at least resonably sure that the activities undertaken to handle obstacle were at least somewhat related to combat, so you can forgo monitoring what individual characters could have benefited from solution.
snip

You’re not using your imagination. You are not thinking outside the box. What I’m suggesting has not been done before, to my knowledge, so applying oldschool game mechanics to it would be pointless. If you were to complete a questline non-violently, you’re right, the warrior-types would not benefit. It seems like players would want to look at solving problems based on who gets what, right? There are many solutions to this I can think off the top of my head – recovery XP for warriors when turning in quests (rubberband XP, which shouldn’t be too troubling if you’re already willing to accept a baseline XP gain via quest-only-XP), training facilities to keep your warriors sharp, or just big wilderness areas where you can take your warriors not only for them to learn, but bring your wizards to try out what they have learned, etc. Many games have it that dead or unconscious characters do not gain XP, leading to a fragmented nature in who gains what. It’s not a giant leap to build another system of XP gain and distribution that is not super linear.

And gaining XP is necessarily use-based by design. Otherwise you get the issue - the biggest issue - that other people were talking about: the futility and pointlessness that tickles the back of your mind while you slog through any monster encounter that does not feel immediately important. The player should be thinking, cool, I get to fight these things and work my way toward bettering my characters. What I feel is that the player will actually be thinking, so, could I have avoided this fight altogether, or if I can't, is it important to the quest at all? Every non-important encounter will feel like this because there’s hardly any feeling of reward and I can pretty much guarantee PoE, like every RPG, won’t have every encounter be a narrative-driving combat scenario. There will be banal shit to get through, just like all the other games, except it will be even worse because you don’t even get anything for it.

 

[Mangoose]

If I see a room full of 20 traps, and each trap is worth 10xp to disarm, then the drive collect xp will make me disarm every one of them. I'll move on to the next room with a mild dopamine high that comes from a sense of accomplishment which then motivates me to fully collect all the xp in the next room and keep that high going.

If I don't have the promise of that buzz, and I go to the room full of traps, I think to myself "Meh, I only need to disarm a handful to get past safely."

Receiving no buzz from the trap room, I enter the next room and find a few enemies, and I think to myself "What's the easiest way of getting through this area?"

I get sick of trying to find the quickest way through quests and decide to give the game a rest. With the game providing no dopamine, I get no withdrawals, and I find that I never bother getting back into it.

But doesn't the action that you are thinking about how to efficiently navigate a room in itself representing a skill that should be rewarded XP? I mean, what should happen is that no matter how you get through the room, hallway, etc., you get XP when you reach the end. The fact that your character is intelligent and clever enough to avoid traps without spending resources and extra time is in itself a skill, in other words.

I mean I do disagree that you need a quest in order to get XP. But giving XP for "organic" objectives of allows much more variation in playstyle.

 

[epeli]

Underrail's "oddity" XP system is pretty good, I think. Basically you can find certain kinds of "oddities" spread across the world (as quest rewards, treasure in locked rooms, and enemy drops) and you use them up to gain xp. You can only gain xp from a certain type of oddity X times (far less than you can find if you collect every single one), so this way you'll end up with the same xp in the end no matter your playstyle. If you're killing dudes, you get your xp as drops; if you sneak and explore, you find them in dangerous out-of-the-way places; if you do quests, you get them as rewards.

Of course the flavor behind the system only works for certain settings; it's good for post-apoc, since each of those oddities represents a kind of ancient/lost technology that your character will understand after using it.

edit: description of the oddity system

I haven't read the thread and this has likely already been noted, but Styg has implemented an interesting approach for Underrail with the oddity approach. I dig it.

Oh yes, this. I came here to mention the same thing. It's just brilliant. Why hasn't it been done before? Why aren't more RPGs doing it?

It's so liberating if you're a powergaming junkie. You can stop viewing every encounter as "how will I get the most exp out of this?" You can stop doing unnecessary things like needlessly disarming a roomful of traps because "muh xp". It really rewards the outcome rather than how you got there. Not to mention it makes exploring even more addictive enjoyable and oddities can be a convenient way to flesh out the background lore of a game world.

Underrail is not merely bringing us back to pre-decline times, it's actively improving CRPG gameplay mechanics.