Learning spells from scrolls Options

[DavidW]

Posting to validate vote (my reasons aren't terribly original, broadly they're Sikret's "pro" case)

[Ardanis]

I always use Sim's DEFJAM to eliminate XP gain for learning spells and disarming traps. Guess my vote.

Do you mean that a warrior who kills an army of orcs to save a village should gain the same amount of xp he would gain for killing 4 or 5 orcs? I don't think that I agree.

He would recieve XP for killing 4-5 orcs and another XP reward for completeing the quest to save the village from orcs. Quest and combat XP are different things. In fact I'd reduce XP gain for killing to minimum to avoid temptation to solve a quest peacefully, then going killing way, gaining twice as much XP as a result. Sadly there doesn't seem to be an easy way not to make a CRPG too discrete XP-wise with such limitation.


PS To elaborate my conception in general.

From roleplaying perspective it's killing orcs, disarming traps and learning spells what makes a living for adventurer in terms of XP. But at the same time it's exactly what bring metagaming aspect in.
As example - there was no XP for traps/locks in BG1, so people either disarmed them with a thief, used Knock spell, or simply rushed ahead with the beefiest tank, whichever method was more suitable. In BG2 I think most of players would bring a thief no matter what. Do you see my point yet? The XP rewards cause (and they often do it on subconsciuos level) to go powergaming way.
The situation with spells isn't that bad (as you can't learn the same spell ten times on a day), but is still worse than in BG1.
One might say that for a tactical mod the roleplaying aspect isn't that important, but I disagree.

This post has been edited by Ardanis: Oct 9 2008, 12:38 PM

[Fillian]

My vote is to leave it as it is, but I'd support the modification of removing the ability to erase it. My justification for feeling this way is based on two points:

1) Not every journeyman wizard in Athkatla got to his professional stature by adventuring and killing monsters. There just aren't enough dungeons in Faerun for that. Thus, it's reasonable to assume in the Big Picture that wizards often improve their skills by means other than killing kobalds. Thus, the notion of the 'academic' approach to gaining experience is not off the mark.

2) I can't speak for all players, but I know I use scrolls to get a dual-class mage character out of his awkward stage of second-class remedial work and into the fun of enjoying both classes as soon as possible. I get enough character-building drudgery in RL that I don't really say 'oh goodie' when I run into those experiences in my gaming. The whole dual-class thing is a remnant of a game designed in 1974 and 'upgraded' in 1979 when the AD&D player's handbook came out. Sheesh, back then, you had to do TRIPLE-class to become a bard: first fighter, then dual to a Thief, then roll over into a bard!

Anyway, Sikret, you go ahead and make your mod design decisions as you see fit -- democratic, autocratic, whatever -- because I trust you to make the right choice. It's like that with my PnP GM, who once, after I spent a good fifteen minutes explaining why his interpretation of the rules was off the mark, listen patiently to me and then said, "All of the things you said make a lot of sense, and I think we're going to go ahead and do it my way anyway, OK?"

GM's prerogative. :-)

[Sikret]

Ok, thank you very much everyone for your input. When I started this poll, my mental state was 50-50 between the two options, but reading the arguments and re-thinking and reconsidering them made some difference; so, the poll was, in general, very helpful to me.

let me summarize what we have got so far:

Arguments for option 1 (leaving it as it is):

(I) Cheaters will cheat anyway; so don't bother to block cheat.

This was mentioned in my initial post and was echoed by almost everyone who votes for option 1.

This argument alone is not convincing to me. If I was supposed to take this argument as something convincing, I shouldn't have fixed any other exploits in the game, but I have blocked lots of them. I can go even further and say that if I was thinking that this argument was convincing, I wouldn't have even fixed most of the vanilla game bugs I have fixed in IA. Let me give you an example:

If you play the game without IA, Boots of Speed can be exploited in a particular way. The boots bonus to speed could stack with the speed bonus of (Improved) Haste, resulting in a character with quadruple speed. I have fixed this bug in IA even though the statement that "cheaters can cheat anyway" is still true and a cheater who wants to have a character with quadruple speed can still use editors to give the (x4) speed to his character. Nonetheless, the fact that a cheater can cheat this way or the other didn't stop me from fixing the bug.

The same is true for every bugfix and exploit-fix in the game. Cheaters will always have ways to undo your bugfixes or exploit-fixes and to re-create those bugs and exploits in their games (the easiest method can sometimes be deleting files from the override folder), but this fact doesn't provide any valid argument for not fixing bugs or exploits.

If there are still n ways to cheat xp in the game, it can't be a wrong decision to block one of them and to leave the cheaters with n-1 ways to cheat (unless we can find other and independent reasons against blocking the exploit in a particular case; and this is what leads us to argument II below).

(II) Argument from early-game difficulty:

This is by far the strongest and most convincing argument in favor of option 1 in the poll. It goes as follows:

The xp that a legitimate player can gain by learning spells is a handy tool to add to party's power at early stages of the game. Since, most IA players find the early stages of the game difficult. Removing the xp from learning spells can make the game unnecessarily a lot harder.

The value of this argument can't be assessed by merely theoretical speculations. What I will do is this:

I will temporarily apply the suggested tweak and will ask IA's testing team (or at least, some of them) to start a new game and play from the scratch and report to me whether the lack of xp for learning spells does (or doesn't) make any significant and noticeable difference in the game's difficulty for them.

Practical test is the only way to settle this question.

None of the other arguments for option 1 look to be convincing or appealing to me. The argument from dual-classing (for example) actually works in favor of option 2, because (as I mentioned in my second post in this thread) relying on the easy xp of scrolls to activate your character's first class after dual-classing is itself a very questionable method.

Arguments for option 2 (removing the xp):

(III) Legitimate players have no reason to say "no":

This argument says the opposite of what argument (II) above says. It says that if a player doesn't really intend to abuse the xp exploit of erasing and re-writing spells from scrolls, he has no reason to worry about this tweak, because the total amount of xp a legitimate player gains via learing spells in the entire game is so small that he won't notice any change in his game.

Just like argument (II), this argument can only be assessed after I receive my testers' reports of whether they notice any significant difference for absence of the xp or not. Until then, I can't say much about this argument nor about argument (II).

(IV) LZJ's argument from unlimited scrolls from HLAs:

This one is a very strong and decisive argument. The Scribe Scroll HLA suuplies the party with an unlimited stock of scrolls which can be used for unlimited xp

(V) Argument from fake learning failure:

This is the argument I offered here.

Unlike the way it works in pnp, failing to learn a spell is a mere joke in BG2, because the mage is still allowed to retry learning the same spell over and over again. Hence, learning spell in BG2 needs no special effort or luck or whatever and consequently, it doesn't deserve any xp.

Conclusion:

As far as theoretical arguments are concerned, the arguments for option 2 seem to be stronger and more convincing to me. The only thing which stands between me and choosing option 2 as my final decision is the argument (II) in favor of option 1 mentioned earlier in this post (the one which requires empirical tests). I will postpone making the final decision to when I receive my testers' reports to see whether the lack of xp gained via learning spells does or doesn't affect their games in any noticeable and unpleasant way. The results of practical tests will tell me what to do.

Thanks again, everyone. The poll will remain open for a while, but I will unpin it in the near future.

[lroumen]

Do you mean that a warrior who kills an army of orcs to save a village should gain the same amount of xp he would gain for killing 4 or 5 orcs? I don't think that I agree.

There is of course a possible exceptional case: If those orcs were summoned by magic, then I would agree that killing them shouldn't give xp and the total xp should be gained only after killing the source (= the boss who has summoned them), but even in that case, none of those orcs should have xp value (even the first one who appears). This is also the justification for why summoned creatures don't have any xp value in the game.

Just to respond to this matter. Sorry for my late reply.

If your mage clears a town of 1000 orcs. I don't agree that upon killing the last orc he should obtain the same XP as for the first orc. After killing so many there is likely nothing new to learn from offin gyet another orc. XP scaling is a feature that certain games use to accommodate this irregularity. From clearing the town of orcs you can of course gain an XP bonus, but this is independant from the fact that your killing orcs, but rather for the finalisation of the feat or 'quest' if you will.
Also, if you've never seen or killed a gnoll before and a foe summons gnolls, why should you not learn from that experience and gain XP?



I do feel that it is to be admired that you want to be consistent with PnP rules, however, not every player knows every PnP rule .

[Sikret]

If your mage clears a town of 1000 orcs. I don't agree that upon killing the last orc he should obtain the same XP as for the first orc.

To be honest, I don't see the connection between the discussion about orcs with the topic at hand. The previous time I replied to it just becaue it was an opportunity to explain the justification behind removing the xp value from summoned creatures.

But if you mean that I should decrease the xp of a monster type depending on the number of them who are already killed by the party, you should have opened a new topic for that suggestion. If I agreed with that suggestion, I could probably find a way to implement it, but I don't agree with it . It's not even how it generally works in pnp (though a DM can implement such local rules in his games).

Let's stay on-topic.

[Kerkes]

ahm...
I sell most of the scrolls...
Money!!!!
Re-writing them is useless in IA, leave it as it is IMO.

[Raven]

I voted to remove the xp for writing spells. I don't like the way it can be used to boost xp for a dual-class character (e.g. the main character dual-classes to mage, kicks out all the other party members temporarily, then learns lots of scrolls for free xp).

I don't like the idea of free xp, it doesn't make sense to me that the same xp one gains from defeating a tough IA enemy can be obtained by learning three or four scrolls.

xp from removing traps/opening locks is a little different IMO and should stay because the thief has spent points (which could be put somewhere else) on these skills, plus the xp awarded is far less and there is no exploit possibility.