Sigil: City of Doors

So, what is your opinion of the current amount of gold per monster kill, either through loot or the gold amount per killing monster?

How about the amount of loot or the value/usefulness of loot?

The prices of the equipments in stores?

Amount of experience you gain per killing monster? And are you generally more into slow leveling or fast leveling?

Did you die yet? :P How about death penalty?

Or monster difficulty so far? (does it make you think your actions a bit more and making it challenging, but not overly so?)



Initial impressions are valuable to SCoD :)

So far the only thing I've seen on equipment is that if I recall correctly the Staff of Blasting (or whatever it is called, it's the +d6 Eldritch Blast staff available at Minerva at the Bazaar) is priced 21k for both the minor and greater version. Again, if I recall correctly.

Dying... only when it's US Pacific afternoon/evening timezones and there's no one else on. Nothing like a party member dying instead of you, you know? ;) Then again things went better when I found a mage NPC willing to Stoneskin me for 70gp, which really is a life saver. So kudo's to the person who put in that one.

I've noticed sell prices are capped at 200gp (at least at the vendors I've seen), I figure this is to boost PC to PC trading? Which isn't much of an issue to me since item prices seem to be alright for such a cap.

Death:

Maybe it's me, but I'm not hot on the money loss on death. The Xp loss is pretty minimal, that doesn't bother me, but it takes a bit to make that jink back. It's mostly a problem when going out alone of course, so I don't do that often since I'm playing a caster type.

Enemy Difficulty:

For my level, I know what I can and can't do. The ghouls in the grey waste are annoying with their stunning attack or whatever. But I think that's mostly because a ) I'm just letting them get too close, and b ) I always roll low :(

Gold and Goods:

As I said, losing gold when I die is what hurts the most. That goes hand in hand with cost and making money. I don't expect to have the best items at my level, but I'm finding it a little hard to make any headway with money.

Loot:
I haven't found anything really useful at all yet. I pretty much sell everything I've picked up so far. But maybe I'll find something fun later. It's pretty early to tell with that.

Tip: don't sell everything for gold immediately, but keep it on you. You don't lose items on death so that's a way to not lose much gold if you don't carry much.

Few adjustments we DMs have been thinking after that testing of last few days:
- Lesser gold penalty on death.
- Possibility to get back to place of death (as it seems to be rather party + RP splitting currently), but this might cost a bit gold... it will be tweaked to be fair.

Mr_Otyugh,Aug 16 2009 wrote: "Something, something,"

Initial impressions are valuable to SCoD :)

Generally speaking; I prefer fast leveling and I tend to be against experience death penalties due to the fact that I cannot spend hours grinding, just to get that next 10%.

I'd say the 1% experience penalty is not staggering when you are playing a low level character - recently I died in the game and lost two points of experience because of it.

However, at higher levels things tend to become somewhat different for NWN2 persistant worlds. For a level 15 non-ECL character, the death penalty is going to be at least 1050 points. It is not a big figure in itself. But when it is coined with monsters that kill you while the reward for killing them is around 1-20 points of experience - I can understand the tantrums.




Erm, but my combat experiences in SCoD do not go further than the previously mentioned death. I charged against a zombie and it rolled a natural 20.

*nods* we do want reasonably fast leveling early, and especially at 25th level+ it will slow down to a crawl... will probably need alot of adjustments on xp, monsters and levelling the first few months of beta though, so its not completely finalized.

Mr_Otyugh,Aug 16 2009 wrote:So, what is your opinion of the current amount of gold per monster kill, either through loot or the gold amount per killing monster?

Having had the pleasure of dying early and often, I think I can speak knowledgeably about this topic! :D

wrote:How about the amount of loot or the value/usefulness of loot?

Deri has not actually picked up any drops yet. She didn't feel like it would be fair, since mostly she was cowering near the middle of the group trying not to be bitten by rats or skewered by goblins! She has made a more than fair amount of gold by just tagging along and emoting. Even if she had not been ressurrected twice, she would have come out ahead on gold, I think.

wrote:The prices of the equipments in stores?

These seem pretty reasonable to me.

wrote:Amount of experience you gain per killing monster? And are you generally more into slow leveling or fast leveling?

By and large, I felt like the combat XP was extremely generous. In fact, it seemed disproportionately generous relative to RP XP.

RP XP has been quite bountiful as well, however. That is something I really like, as my bias is that, particularly on an RP server, it ought to be a greater "learning experience" to meet a tiefling, floating skull, dabus, or githzerai than it is to kill a rat in someone's basement. Having said that, it's simply a fact of life that XP for killing things will almost always be more plentiful than RP XP.

Levelling rate is irrelevant to me, by and large, as I tend to play lower-level characters in any case.

wrote:Did you die yet? :P How about death penalty?

I had the good fortune of dying while a DM was around a couple of times, so it turned out that Deri only had flesh wounds. ;) I know that there is another thread with this topic, but I would suggest something like a penalty-free respawn on the first three to five levels, as well as respawn-on-the-spot at those levels.

Deri has 6 hp, and even with mage armor, has an AC of 16. She has a very good chance of death every round, since even a BAB 0 monster has a 20% chance of hitting her, and she will not survive most hits. If I had been forced to run all the way back from the mortuary after each death, it would have been very boring.

wrote:Or monster difficulty so far? (does it make you think your actions a bit more and making it challenging, but not overly so?)

It seems to me that the combat has been pretty challenging, but not unfairly so.

To summarize:
1) Combat seems reasonably balanced.
2) PvE XP seems appropriate to generous.
3) There has been a good frequency of RP XP, but more is always welcome!
4) Monster dropped-gold feels right.
5) I haven't checked out the loot, so I am not sure that I can comment.

XP:

So, Razzuul and Nastasia met some new players today and we thought we'd team up to protect them and get them introduced to the server. But, they ended up getting 5xp a kill.

I can understand not wanting your high level characters to let the low characters to piggy back on them for some free levels, but I think that was really detrimental to our RP experience as we couldn't really adventure anywhere together without stopping the lower characters from progressing at all.

Being the only four characters on the server it really made it seem like we were being discouraged to work together with lower level characters (and really, new players in that same sense). I know that's not the goal of what you've done, but it can give that impression in a way.

We are continually testing and adjusting the xp, and we've still not even been live a week, so give us time :)

The goal was, as you expected, not to have low level characters be an xp booster for higher level characters and also let them get power levelled by higher level characters. So there is a "soft" 5 level range limit on parties, where the ones below this get an xp penalty for not learning as much just tagging along experienced adventurers. Other similar servers have a hard 5 level range limit where none get xp if the party ranges more than 5 levels, so thats where we started from philosophically.

That said, I did hear examples of sums of xp the lower levels got tagging along with higher level group and I too feel it was a bit harsh... Most likely I will reduce the xp penalty somewhat, and also possibly extend the range to 6 levels, to improve things.

I am a fan of slowly adjusting systems until they feel right, so just have patience :)