Barkeep
Posts: 4435
Joined: Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 12:28
Experience change idea: give experience pools to monsters
I've read a bunch of proposals for changes to the experience pool to limit victory dancing and (hopefully) make the experience system less confusing, but I haven't seen this one yet. It seems like a pretty obvious idea, so there's probably a major hole I'm missing. If it's a repeat, many apologies.
Idea: Each monster has an amount of experience it can give you (the same amount as now). Various actions taken near the monster (attacking it, being attacked by it, etc) incrementally transfer experience to the player. On killing the monster, the remaining experience is transferred to the player. A monster's experience pool can never be refilled, and summoned monsters start with an empty pool. Allies empty a monster's pool like you do, but only transfer some percent of experience to the player.
So, for example, you're a caster who wants to train fighting. You're in Lair and see a giant snail. Hit it with mephitic cloud (transfers some experience) and start bashing. Each swing will transfer some experience, and so you'll have some experience in the pool to train fighting. Even if you need to retreat and nuke it to death, you've had some chance to train fighting.
Or, you're a summoner. See an ogre, and surround it with spammals. As they injure it (and are injured by it), your experience pool fills slowly, and by the time it's almost dead, the pool is already empty -- it's no longer optimal to try and sneak in for the kill.
There are a bunch of things that'd need to be decided -- what actions should drain the pool? I'd argue that in a lot of encounters, escaping should be worth something (getting away from an early centaur is huge for some characters), so maybe blinking or quaffing !haste or reading a scroll of fear would work. And deciding on a rate at which it should be drained is a definite balance issue.
Finally: it might also make sense to have the skill that was used in an event see at least some exercise, even if it's disabled in the skill screen. If you're hitting monsters with a mace, you can't totally avoid training maces and fighting; that experience would be taken off up-front. Maybe experience transferred by summons would exercise summoning?
I don't worry too much that people would intentionally leave monsters alive -- I want that hydra dead not because I want experience, but because it's dangerous. I do worry a little that there might be scummy ways to abuse this (go around and mephitic cloud tons of monsters over and over again?) but most of them seem like they'd just get you killed.
Thoughts?