ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I don't know if this should be reported as a bug, or an idea. Anyway, I want to discuss the experience penalty.
I probably have missed a previous discussion on this subject, but I didn't find any with a quick search.

I think the text saying, for example, that the skeleton race has a 40% penalty is misleading.

Just for things to be easier, let's look at a fictional race with 50% exp penalty.

What 50% penalty means in the game, is that if I need 100 XP points to go from lvl1 to lvl2 with a vanilla race (Cornac), then I would 150 XP with this fictional race.

I don't think that's what the intuition dictates. My intuition at least will say that with a 50% penalty, every incoming experience would be divided by 2, hence, you would need 200 XP points to go from lvl1 to lvl2.

As the wiki says (http://te4.org/wiki/experience) it is not the XP gained that is changed, but the XP needed per level, and I find this extremely confusing.


I think it would be better to change the text "experience penalty" to something else in the tooltip for the races (maybe "level penalty" ? The wiki for the Ghoul use for example "experience per level: 125%"), or to readjust the values that are displayed to:
Higher: -13%
Halfling: -17%
Shalore: -20%
Thalore: -25%
Yeek: +18%
Ghoul: -20%
Skeleton: -29%
Dwarf: -20%
(note: values are obtained from the SVN, they might be different in 1.01)

Of course, your mileage may vary, and you may think it is my intuition that is wrong, so discuss !

I assumed it could be either, personally. (Either a modifier to EXP required to level or EXP gained.)

Retooling the EXP penalty displayed values, without extra explanation, still doesn't change the fact that it could be either.

This is essentially something that should be explained with a tooltip or a tutorial snippet, I'd say. It's quite the hard distinction to explain quickly.

Does it really matter?

The most important information to convey is that some races will level more quickly than others... but since the level up thresholds aren't linear, even if I know exactly which interpretation is meant it doesn't tell me a whole lot about how the race will play.

I think it's fine as-is, 50% penalty would mean I need 50% more exp. per level. That makes perfect sense to me.

Personally I think all races should be the same. It's a single player game... if you want to play OP thalores, skeletons, etc. be my guest. I play them. Most dungeons scale with level, and the XP penalty could be helping you in dungeons like dreadfell. Lvl 30 dreadfell is much tougher than lvl 20 dreadfell.

Edit... I think I should write an addon.

Canderel wrote:Personally I think all races should be the same. It's a single player game... if you want to play OP thalores, skeletons, etc. be my guest. I play them. Most dungeons scale with level, and the XP penalty could be helping you in dungeons like dreadfell. Lvl 30 dreadfell is much tougher than lvl 20 dreadfell.

Edit... I think I should write an addon.

An addon is probably the best way to handle this. I imagine the number of people who want to play a balanced character (which is then potentially made OP through their skill and a bit of RNG luck) is considerably higher than the number of people wanting to play an OP one by default.

Canderel wrote:Personally I think all races should be the same. It's a single player game... if you want to play OP thalores, skeletons, etc. be my guest. I play them. Most dungeons scale with level, and the XP penalty could be helping you in dungeons like dreadfell. Lvl 30 dreadfell is much tougher than lvl 20 dreadfell.

Edit... I think I should write an addon.

In some cases, the exp penalty can actually be a GOOD thing. Let's take Insane difficulty. I failed my first few attempts at insane mode simply because when I completed the initial tutorial dungeon I started in, I was level 6 because the insane difficulty boosted monster levels so high. As a result, as soon as I entered the world map, I got the assassin event, which promptly sent me straight back to character creation. Level 6 is the threshold to get the event, so if you want to not have a chance of getting it, you need to be level 5 or less while traversing the world map. Exp penalty can be helpful for accomplishing this if you want to kill all monsters on the floor for as many opportunities for loot as possible.

This is just one example, there are others I can think of. (the lower the level you reach Vor's Armory, the easier clearing the OP wyrms will be if you leave and come back at level 50. In this example, I reached Vor's Armory at level 44 on insane as a halfling, which isn't a lot of breathing room insofar as scaling goes.)