High Level Quests and Doing It Hard Core
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The thing with higher level quests giving more EXP..yes, it is true. Whenever I'm level ten or 11 and I die, i LOATHE it so much. A lot of times I'm forced to respawn and lose 40% of my experience, that means going from lvl 11 or such back to 8 or 7, however when you are level 6 and respawn with 40%, you merely go back to level 5 in most cases.
So yes, the time difference in regaining those levels are agrivating when you are higher level, and I do believe that is why a lot of people don't quest. However, I don't like changing the idea that exp should be upgraded at higher leveled quests.
Should a level 13 super fighter level up just as fast, if not faster as a level 1 noob fighter? Heck no, the level 13 should have to work 13 times as hard for a level since he's so darn strong allready.
The stronger you get, the harder and more riskier it is to level up. That's like D&D 101.
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The last time i did a high lvl qurest with Ruby I think it was slum tower and well, we didnt get far as the monsters were bigger brute then us, and that's saying a lot since we had Belaern with us and he's a scary brute >_>
Sometime, when you dont have certain classes on those high lvl quest, you cant get far. I cant really tell what classes are needed where since I havent manage to get a high lvl enough to go try those quest (shakes an angry fist at HarryMcScary)
High lvl when you die and you are stuck to respawning for lack of gold or whatever, you drop more lvls then if you were lvl 5. The lack of funds to pay for your own raise or even healing to help present said death gets harder when you hit high lvls. A number of high lvls relied on the crafting system to make money. Maybe now they could rely on the bounty system?
anyway… for me currently the issue of not doing high lvl quest is simply the fact that I dont have the lvl and cant seem to make it pass 7.
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Perhaps reduce the respawn penalty above a certain level.
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In high level quests i found to successes you needed a very specific group to do the quest successful
Usually one good scout.
2-4 Tanks
1 Really good healer
2 buffersHonestly when i did high level questing i always brought Jason with me because well Rond was a fighter, and Jason was a Cleric of Imater with empowered healing! and some nice juicy ways of helping me protect the others in my party.
depending on the quest to certain special spells would be prepared for our clerics and wizards, and if you lacked knowledge on the quest uh-oh.
Like many people would probably bring Cilwa around just because of all her healing, spells, songs, wands etc.
But i agree with alot of people here after 6-7 there that..high risk low reward kinda feel
i felt my rewards were better doing healers kit shop over say frost giants
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Why are people respawning at high levels? Why not getting the raise?
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Lack of money to do so, wouldn't fit in with IG reasoning, you're alone for whatever reason, entire party wipe, respawning to save time in fear of a server crash, etc.
I was actually amazed at how many people were borrowing money from me when me and my gang were all level 8 or higher. I was buying potions and wands for them all the time because they didn't have any money.
There are some weirdos out there(like myself) that respawn just so they can re-do old quests, earn some money, etc. I believe the majority of the high levels who die however respawn just because there isn't any way to get raised or ressurected without metagameing out the wazoo.
//Psst, Evil fighter of Bane, I totally got killed out here in wilderness by ent. You're the only person I remotely know/is high enough level to actually save me, can you come raise/ressurect my Palidan body? I'll pay you back. Sorry about the hastle. =(
The above still happens much more then many people think. Not sure what DM policy is exactly about it though. Personally, respawning and taking the exp hit is better then taking the DM wrath for metagameing and possibly getting banned.
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Why are people respawning at high levels? Why not getting the raise?
I don't know how rich other high level PCs are, but the gold used to be an issue. I know that when Gurm has the gold and he dies on a quest, I always OOCly ask the PC he knows the best to use his gold for a raise or resurrection, but that is not always possible, even if it makes IC sense for at least one PC to do it.
Sometimes, it does need the whole group to get past the backspawns and/or the terrain back to a temple that will rez the PC. I've actually had all three cases happen over time, the group abandoning the quest to rez the PC, one PC dragging the body while the others wait (or don't wait) and waiting in the fugue for others to complete the quest and rez Gurm.Fun fact: having a lvl 5+ druid on the quest makes body-carrying an easy task, provided said druid accepts to play the role of the pack bear.
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@Swifty:
The stronger you get, the harder and more riskier it is to level up. That's like D&D 101.
Not sure this is accurate. I'm sure the DMG says 13 encounters of your Challenge Rating for a 4 person party should level you. This implies that you should continue to level up at the same rate, if the encounters you meet grow at the same rate. Now I know that in NWN, you expect to see many more encounters per level than DnD because they move through so much faster, but the principle might still be expected to hold true.
You could argue that if a quest at level 3 drains your resources almost to nothing and yet you can gain in all 2-300XP, or up to 10% towards your next level, then tackling an appropriate quest when you are level 9 should dole out maybe 1000 XP (10,000 to next level, 10% of which is 1000XP). Now, I've been on DM quests that gave that level of XP reward, and a good DM often pushes the players well beyond their comfort zone. But most scripted quests when you are in the middle or towards the higher end of the party, you might gain say 300 XP and if you're level 9 or 10, you are towards the higher end of most parties tackling scripted quests, which means you have to engage in possibly 33 scripted quests to gain level 10, and many quests you can gain somewhat less than 300 XP. These quests have a high chance of one of the party dying. That's kind of low odds to get to level 10 in my book. This does not take into account that a character should also be gaining XP from DM managed adventure and intrigue which often gains you more XP, it it is still a long haul to gain levels above level 7 and the risks of dying increase. I must qualify this by saying that if you're a level 7 on a quest with two or three level 9/10'ers you can gain 1-2000 XP on a challenging quest and live to tell the tale, but the higher you go, the less this happens as you tend to be towards the higher end of the party.
// My maths may be wrong and I'd love the enlightened DnD'ers to correct my assumptions.
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I don't really care about a quest not netting you a profit in consumables, gold and XP, normally they should be a kind of trade-off, where you invest money/stuff to get experience, or the otherway around. However, at high-level, why would you invest in getting even higher level, if you can already do 'enough' neat things to be able to enjoy yourself. Live to adventure v.s. adventure for a living…
At high-level, from the limited things I've seen, scripted quests seem more about fighting and less about things that interest me, like solving a puzzle, discovering background stories, getting something to work etc. (this can't be helped much, just the nature of the computerized version of a RPG, and that once you solve/discover/etc. something once, it is not really repeatable while giving the same sort of satisfaction..).
Losing X% (whether it is 40%, 25%, 18% or whatever the breakdown is between respawn, raise, resurrect) of XP eventually comes down to losing more than one level, which means you don't just lose a few spells, a feat or an attribute point, but all of the above. And it takes forever to recoup as 'older' characters, regardless of level, will have less people they can quest with (as pointed out by several people already).
Why are people respawning at high levels? Why not getting the raise?
For me usually one or more of the following not exhaustive list:
-) not enough money to even pay for the basic raise death, because you blew it all on gear trying to prevent needing a raise in the first place or gave it away to other characters needing it more than you.
-) no-one available to drag you back to a temple.
-) no play-time available to wait for the length of time it would take for someone to drag you back to a temple at dead-slow speed.
-) without you respawning and lending a hand, there's not going to be any survivors to bring you back anyway, and even more XP/gear/time etc is lost.
-) Gear is more important than XP. Although losing 40% of your XP is bad, losing your 1d6+1 weapon, religion-related outfit that basically just weighs you down but you can't store anywhere and all the little things that are too good to just throw away, not good enough/too specialized to use (yet), but have no suitable apprentice to give them to yet, your 16+ powerful&expensive wands, +2 rings etc. etc. to a crash is even more crippling. If you have had that happen to you a few times, you get conditioned to just respawn ASAP and grab your gear and save your character.P.
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At level 10, you have a total of 45,000 EXP
A Ressurection as it is now will cause a loss of of around 5400, assuming you are exactly at or near the 45,000.
At level 9 if you did every quest in a day you could do at level 9 you would get around 2500 exp, assuming you did not die again through all those quests.
At level 11 you have a total of 55,000 exp and a Ressurection makes you loose around 6,600 exp
If you did every quest you could do at level 10 in a day you would get around 1500 exp. This is because the quests give less EXP then they did at level 9, and there are less total possible quests to do.
When the option for True Ressurection was removed at temples, the people who would do risky quests dropped and the people who would quests to get the gold needed for TR (which was an average around 6,000 coin required) dropped.
I myself would run the level 7-12 quests daily and end up with the money for a TR in about a week, which also produced high level characters as a result, since there is 0 EXP loss for a True Ressurection
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So a possible fix would be to re-implement the True Rez option, and if the 0XP loss was an issue, just make a script so that when TR is used, remove a custom amount of XP. Takes away some of the "holy crap dont want to delevel again, not doing quest" without giving a free pass back to the playerbase.
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If there was a place to buy raise dead scrolls somewhere in the module, then the fear of dying wouldn't be so intense. I would spend alot of coin to buy a scroll to get me raised by an ally to save respawning. XP loss would still happen, but would be less than respawn and I can live with that.
For me, less XP to prevent epic characters is fine. What I want to see is more loot.
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on the original topic:
-many things were listed you need for a high level quest including a good team. I'd like to point out that if you have limited playing time, you won't only level slower, but you can't make IC friends easy, so you can't take a high level quest.
-I'm reluctant to try new quests because it is much more risky. And I think I'm not metagaming them more then anyone else.
I've made my fighter only to try new quests. I decided not to care if he dies. :DOn Moloch's other question:
I'd change XP system, not respawning. I'd reward people with two or three times more XP on levels they were once higher then. (for example a lvl 9 guy dies a few times and becomes… lvl 3. -yeah, happened to me- I'd give him 3x XP on lvl 3-6, 2x on lvl 7-8. )
Reasoning.
1, People who die more, get more money as low lvl quests cost less and thus pay more. (at least I don't spend much with my wizard. ;) ) this makes the economy imbalanced. People who died a lot have more funds.
2, It really ruins my fun -and I'm not alone with it- to get back to half of my previous lvl and loosing advancements of several weeks just because i had a laggy fight and then ignorant fools spawn monsters on me while grabbing my stuff. (just to send me a kind tell like this one: "what are you doing, man?!")
3, won't raise max lvl, as you'd still earn the same amount of xp on the highest level you had. You'd have to crawl through every level once anyway.problems.
1, might change average level. might or might not be a bad thing.
2, the fact people relevel faster would mean less gold income during the process. This might change gold-balance. might or might not be a bad thing.ect.
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A lot of the quest givers' dialogue are quite ambiguous. "Hey, I need help but you'll need more people", without mentioning at all what to expect on the quest. Its hard to justify both IC and OOC getting a team together to go help this guy I just met who needs help with some unmentioned quest. So, if some of the higher level quests that are rarely done were expanded in the scripted conversation, I would be more likely to try them out.
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..you can't make IC friends easy, so you can't take a high level quest..
I don't have trouble making friends, it's just that they tend to not stay in my level-range (due to either me dying or them being played more), and 'burn out' quicker than my own character.
@Khamal:
What I want to see is more loot.
As a player I like more varied, specialized loot, but my characters can't afford to carry around three different weapons, two armors, 3 sets of cloaks etc. etc. So I end up carrying only some generic, average gear that's 'good' in most cases but never great, and juggling with not-quite-bags-of-holding - that might still eat your belongings if you actually try to put more than a shield and armor in -. It would be nice to have some sort of storage available to non-faction characters, NPC-Novo could for instance start 'renting' out space in his chest like the PC did? It would also make a crash, or otherwise lost corpse less bad if you had a small cache with a few potions, some gold etc.
P.
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From personal experience the vast majority of people are absolutely terrified of going on a high level quest without an absolutely optimal party. A lot of times I'll log on and start sending tells to people if they'd be up to go on a quest with so and so, and many times I'll get "not enough frontliners" and "I just got level 10 and don't want to die because a DM event is coming up", and it really bums me out. I mean, what good is playing an adventurous game if you're not gonna have any excitement by large possibility of death?
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On a side note, Pilgrims is a freakin' death trap.
I mean, c'mon. Packed with Secondary Damage: Death poisons and respawning + dispel + Death Gaze + paralysis baddies? Waaay too rough, without even counting the other three nasty evokations you generally take to the face doing it.
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Why not have a PC cleric raise you? Its hella a lot cheaper than having an NPC doing it and I died -alot- back in the day and wasn't even that high level. Just make your guy is buddies with a few priests in town and that should go along way. It doesn't solve the problem of losing your loot but I don't recall having anything valuable enough that much of the time that was worth respawning for and spending the next two weeks releveling.
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There are no level 9 clerics around with a few exceptions, and they may not be able to raise a person due to alignment.
Also Ressurection has a lower EXP cost then raise dead, so many more take the option of Ressurection instead