Topic: Simplified XP system?

[Ecthelion]

HARP uses the risk of the encounter as the basis for the difficulty of the XPs. So an encounter against weak enemies might only be a Medium Minor Goals while a combat against very tough opponents might be a Very Hard Minor Goal. So simply assign a goal difficulty depending on how difficult the combat will be and award the corresponding XPs. In the house rules document on my homepage you will find some guidelines how we award XPs for RM using a goal-based XP system which is adapted from the HARP system.

[dutch206]

Not wanting to blow my own trumpet or anything.... :-)

Rolemaster Companion VI had a simplified experienced system by which the GM determined the experience of the "day" the character had in comparison to normal human activity. A "medium" day was worth 50 experience points, an "easy" day was worth about 12 (average for Elves), and an "absurd" day was worth 1500 ep.

It also meant that a character would gain about 2 levels every 3 years, assuming 5 normal days a week and a couple of easy days.

This is the system I use for advancement by out-of-play characters.  It provides a good guideline as to what's been happening during down-time.

[Marc R]

It almost feels like you should determine the difficulty of a combat after the fight, rather than before. . . .

If you pull an indiana jones, and just one shot kill the scary guy with the tulwar in the market, how much of an "experience" was it after all?

I guess that may be a bit meta, but I'd think a raging fight with 20 low level goons that goes on for 40 rounds is more of a learning experience than casually shooting one high level goon and ending the fight before it even gets started.

[Mourglin]

This probably won't be a lot simpler way to calculate exp, but I toss out all the multipliers for exp except the 'single combat' x2.  Everything else is x1.  I have been using this .xls file for a while now and it seems to work fairly well and is intuitive enough to keep the players from worrying about the book keeping all the time.  Also I tend to emphasize RP'ing over the rest so I add from 1-10k of exp for rp'ing based upon my discretion and a bit of dialog with each player about what they did to help push the story or develop their characters.  Here is the .xls link if you want to check it out..  The real reward should be the rp'ing itself and I should not hand out exp for it, but it does help motivate players to stay on track and be a bit more committed to the story arc.

Mour

http://madison-art.com/stuff/RM-Experience.xls

[lev_lafayette]

I've been working on some ideas and I kinda came up with this one... it meshes FRP, HARP, and other ideas you fine people.

XP comes from 3 general categories (plus bonuses):

Figure out a base XP award per day
    a boring day is worth 10xp (sitting around an inn),
    a medium day is worth 50 (traveling/training),
    an exiting day 100 (combat occurs, minor goals achieved),
    and a spectacular day 250 (major goals achieved)

Wisdom from past times... From RoCo VI, rule 6.2

Mundane Day 0 - 1 ep., a day spent in bed.
Trivial Day 2 - 3 ep
Routine Day 4 - 8 ep
Easy Day 9 - 16 ep
Light Day 17 - 32 ep
Medium Day 33 - 64 ep
Hard Day 65 -128 ep e.g., Heavy workload, possibility of danger
Very Hard Day 129 - 256 ep e.g., Dangerous work
Extremely Hard Day 257 - 512 ep., Continuous  dangerous work (probably most active adventuring)
Sheer Folly Day 513 - 1024 ep ., Highest level of workload for normal persons
Absurd Day 1025 - 2048 ep
Insane Day 2049 - 4096 ep The highest level possible for even heroic characters see Guiness Book of Records
Phenomenal Day 4097 - 8192ep
Virtually Impossible Day 8193 - 16 384ep Very difficult for superheroes.

There was also a daily activity roll with SD modifiers for "down time".

[edxs]

I don't like the 2^n scaling from that list, at least at first glance. I'll try to come up with something I like on the spot, though it may end up being significantly worse, though I hope better. From experience, it's not uncommon to have a brutal day in RMSS and get more than 16000 experience. If it's too hard for a superhero, I would hope my mortal PCs would advance more than level 1 to level 2.

If we go by standard RMSS difficulties plus "Mundane" (nothing happens), I'll take

0 Mundane
1 Routine
2 Easy
3 Light
4 Medium
5 Hard
6 Very Hard
7 Extremely Hard
8 Sheer Folly
9 Absurd

We can assume Mundane is worth 0, but exp(0) equals 1. Either we normalize after the fact or just ignore it and grant minor experience for surviving an extra day.

Then, I want to make 2 more reference points to fit an exponential curve.

The easiest would be a commoner - let's say an artisan, because we all know laborers, farmers, and slaves have Hard days every day, and they can't all be level 50 at age 25   - and the expected adventurer in my campaign. If you use this approach you can tailor daily experience to your campaign quite easily.

Average week for our artisan: let's say 2 Medium days, 1 Hard day, 2 Light days (Monday and Friday?), and 2 Routine days (weekends) every week. I want my 45-year old artisan to be rougly level 20. so that's 45-18 = 27 years at 52 weeks per year, or 1404 weeks to get 500000 experience. I end up with:

2*1404*a*exp(b*1) + 2*1404*a*exp(b*3) + 2*1404*a*exp(b*4) + 1*1404*a*exp(b*5) = 500000

Now for our adventurer. I'll assume 1 rest day (Routine), 2 uneventful travel days (Light), 1 eventful travel day (Medium), 2 busy days (Hard), and one dangerous day (Very Hard). This is just going off how I would off-the-cuff guess at difficulties if I were GMing. Obviously many will disagree. I reckon an adventurer who had crappy terms of employment that didn't give any vacation time would hit level 20 in maybe 2 years. This gives me:

1*104*a*exp(b*1) + 2*104*a*exp(b*3) + 1*104*a*exp(b*4) + 2*104*a*exp(b*5) + 1*104*a*exp(b*6) = 500000

These two together give the following equation:

-a*exp(b*1) + a*exp(b*4) + a*exp(b*5) + a*exp(b*6) = 4451.56695157

Well, that doesn't make things very simple. If I assume a complete layabout who undertakes absolutely no challenges will fail to reach level 2 by the age of 60, my constant 'a' will have to be less than 4.57 (edit: I screwed up here and forgot to multiply by 7 days/week. If I corrected this, my Absurd experience would end up in the millions so I'll leave it be). 2 experience for a worthless day seems fairly reasonable, so I'll try setting it to 2.

This gives me a 'b' of 1.231583160748 (far too precise) and the following scaling:

0 Mundane: 2 EP
1 Routine: 7 EP
2 Easy: 23 EP
3 Light: 80 EP
4 Medium: 276 EP
5 Hard: 945 EP
6 Very Hard: 3238 EP
7 Extremely Hard: 11095 EP
8 Sheer Folly: 38018 EP
9 Absurd: 130274 EP

Well, damn. A single absurd day could rocket you from level 1 to 9. This seems slightly crazy, but I wouldn't classify a day as Absurd unless it involved running a marathon while dodging spear-throwers and then scaling a 200' glass wall to fight 3 dragons on an oil slick while dodging gunshots from veteran snipers, so maybe it's not completely crazy.

If I change my worthless day to being 4 EP, I get the following:

0 Mundane: 4 EP
1 Routine: 12 EP
2 Easy: 37 EP
3 Light: 111 EP
4 Medium: 338 EP
5 Hard: 1024 EP
6 Very Hard: 3102 EP
7 Extremely Hard: 9404 EP
8 Sheer Folly: 28505 EP
9 Absurd: 86404 EP

This might be slightly more reasonable. My 2 theoretical people will still level at the desired rate. Frankly, I'll stick to the standard experience system or a goal-based system as a lot can happen in a single day, and eyeballing the difficulty of an entire day will likely elicit more groans from players than telling them their moving maneuver was not Sheer Folly just because they used a Fate Point to avoid falling into a coma.