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Unoriginal One posted:Kill XP tends to be pretty anemic in 2nd ed., most of your big gains are going to come from quest rewards.  incoming:Originally in D&D characters only gained experience by completing adventures and by finding and selling treasure - this is also the reason why magic items have an XP value associated with them. Getting experience from killing monsters was an optional rule that quickly became the de-facto standard, although characters were still expected to get XP through quest rewards as well as finding treasure. Even by the time of AD&D's first edition, characters gained XP through all three methods. The AD&D first edition DMG points out that treasure has to be sold and converted to a transportable medium (i.e., gold) or safely stored in the player's stronghold to count as experience, and treasure doesn't count for as much if the party is stronger than the things they beat up to get it - the book specifically gives an example of a 10th-level magic-user taking 1,000 GP from 10 kobolds only being "worth" 50 GP/XP because the kobolds pose so little threat. Additionally, the DMG notes that magic items don't provide XP when not sold, since the items are presumably providing value through use instead of as wealth. The DMG also notes that players treat creatures sold for gold pieces the same as any other treasure or valuable goods in terms of how much XP they gain, awkwardly providing an XP incentive to sell captured enemies into slavery. Second edition AD&D relegated XP from treasure to the status of an optional rule, only leaving in mysterious XP values for magic items that no longer can really be bought or sold in the (then) current edition, and subsequent editions have done away with it entirely - however, XP rewards from monsters did not increase commensurately in 2E AD&D, and it seems like this was done deliberately in order to slow down character advancement across the board and tie character advancement more heavily towards "results-based adventuring", i.e. completing quests and objectives instead of wanton murder.
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Jul 1, 2016 22:22
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JustJeff88 posted:In the P&P game, Resurrection had a very expensive material component (a 5000 GP plus diamond or some such) but could bring back someone dead a very long time (centuries) and without a body. Raise Dead needed a mostly whole corpse and wouldn't work on full-blooded elves. Baldur's Gate was frustrating because it was possible for someone to die so hard their body quite literally exploded, but nothing could bring them back from that despite Resurrection being in the game and otherwise following 2nd edition rules very faithfully. So, you either reloaded or lived without that character. Their gear, miraculously, survived fully intact despite their flesh and bone being scattered over a radius of several metres. My gaming group never actually got rid of our old 2E books, so let's look this up... Partly right; Raise Dead costs the target 1 point of Constitution permanently, didn't work on elves, required the target to make a system shock roll to successfully come back to life, and the target is brought back in a weakened state requiring a minimum of one day of bed rest for each day they spent dead. Oh, and there was a maximum upper limit on the number of times Raise Dead would work on the same target based on the target's starting constitution score, so die too many times and Raise Dead stops working on you. The time window was a modest day per caster level of the priest. Also the body has to be mostly intact and it doesn't work on creatures who die from reaching their maximum age. Resurrection does away with most of the restrictions - it works on a creature who's been reduced to a bare skeleton, restoring them completely to full health and allows them to immediately engage in strenuous activity. It also works on elves, has a much more generous time limit (10 years per level of the priest). There is no constitution penalty and there is no limit to the number of times a creature can be resurrected. Unlike Raise Dead, it has material components (the priest needs his/her holy symbol as well as holy water). However, the priest casting the spell instead immediately ages three years and can't cast any spells or do much else until they've rested (full bed rest) for a number of days equal to the level of the creature being raised. The target must still make a successful system shock roll to survive coming back to life. Note that unlike later editions, Raise Dead / Resurrection possess neither expensive material components nor level drain penalties. Reincarnate, in contrast, is a hilariously awful option for priests. At the same level as Resurrection, the only benefit it possesses over Raise Dead/Resurrection is that it indeed does not require a system shock roll. However, there are some major loving caveats to using the spell as written - the table provided only has three of the PC races - human, elf, and gnome - with a sum total chance of 18% for rolling one of these, with an additional 15% chance of "DM's Choice' where if your DM was super nice he'd give you another PC race that qualified you in the same class. However - HOWEVER, even if you were an elf who won the lottery and reincarnated back as an elf, you straight up lost half your HP and half your character levels permanently - no way to restore it. If you happened to reincarnate as a difference race where your existing class was no longer valid or possible, you instead lose half your HP and start back at level 1. If you reincarnate as something incapable of taking PC class levels (such as a fox or a badger) or a monster race, you lose half your HP, all of your class abilities, and can't gain class levels or experience points in any class unless your DM is willing to sit down and do the legwork to design rules for a new PC race and allowable classes / advancement limits for your new race. Druids, in contrast to their later 3rd edition/Pathfinder hilarity, not only gain no access to Raise Dead/Resurrection whatsoever, they don't get access to Reincarnate either. There was never a helpful reason to actually cast Reincarnate. Ever.
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Jul 22, 2016 06:58
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