Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Bug/Glitch: Unfair XP distribution (minor spoiler)

There are several encounters in the game which gives you different amounts of XP for different solutions without any good reason.

Example: the old church in Cyseal (attention: minor spoilers ahead)

When you approach the door of the church one of the stone warriors starts a dialogue. You are forced to play rock, paper, scissors with him. If you win the door opens and you get 2100 XP for each character (4p party). If you lose you have to fight against all four stone warriors before the doors opens. You get 1450 XP for each stone warrior and party member.

Let's do the math:

Winning the argument: 2100 XP
Losing the argument: 4x1450 XP = 5800 XP

So you get more than double the XP for losing the argument?!

What's the point in giving the player a choice if one outcome is so much better than the other? I think you should get at least a more balanced XP distribution for winning the dialogue argument. Or there is no point to include it at all...

Most RPG's with enemies giving XP have this... in Baldur's Gate II's endgame they had to resort to giving each questresolution without combat massive XP's to combat it.

Obsidian itself will counter it now with Project Eternity NOT giving XP per kill (something I proudly support).
Unless it's like that, balancing XP for killing and other quest-resolutions will always be difficult...

Or they could just adjust the Winning argument reward to be the exact same as killing all the monsters...

It would even be logical to make the Win reward more XP than the fight as you might lose some stuff dropped by the ennemies.

This. It's not that hard really. In D:OS there are no respawning enemies. Each encounter is designed manually with a predefined amount of enemies. Why not giving the same amount of XP to both winning an argument or losing it?

thats not unresonable at all.

You get more Xp for doing more, i.e. fighting all the warriors which are not easy.

if you dont fight them its only natural to get less xp. C&C.

Thats what RPGs are supposed to be, not giving same rewards to every player for anything he does or dont do.

True, except that the feat here is to convince the opponent to consider you as an ally.
There is no difficulty in failing a check ... So to reward a failure more than a success isn't helping at all.

The other point being that while what you said isn't much of an issue in other RPG, in DOS there is no respawn, so the XP quantity that you can earn is limited. Favouring a way to resolve a quest isn't helping the sense of freedom at all.

Logically I agree with Hiver but with respect to game mechanics I agree with Devye. Right now it's more rewarding to brute force your way through every encounter than using charisma.

Its not a failure or success. Just different outcomes of your decisions or skill.
There is no favoring of a specific way to "solve" anything here either.


And you actually do not need to get every last point of Xp, nor you can - at all.
Its not actually necessary to grind and max out XP, the game is perfectly playable without it.

Since i restarted the game more then 20 times so far i usually skip various smaller sub quests or specific solutions regularly and it doesnt create any problems at all.

How hard is the difficulty check for winning the argument (the number your opponent has on his side of the rock-paper-scissors interface that determines how many pips are filled every time they win a round) ?

I think the amount of XP rewarded would depend on that. For example, when you obtain the missing teleporter pyramid and have a verbal joust with the bathing mayor's wife, she gets 8 pips for every won round of rock-paper-scissors, where as the player gets 2. Obviously that's a very difficult argument for the player to win, requiring either a lot of luck or a significant investment in social skills on the player's behalf.

The latter is worth rewarding (and is, actually - you get a nice chunk of Charisma Experience if you win that argument). Where as Hiver suggested above that fighting all the warriors is "..not easy..", neither is winning the argument with the Mayor's wife. They are simply different types of challenges, requiring different types of investments, and this game goes through the effort of providing multiple paths through these challenges and tries to make social skills seem as important as fighting skills.

So, (again) it would depend on the difficulty of the debate with the Stone Warrior. If the odds of winning the argument are in the player's favor even without an investment in social skills, the reward should be weak to reflect that. If, however, they are in the Stone Warrior's favor and a healthy investment in Charisma is needed to have a reasonable chance, that should be reflected with a decent reward. If the odds of winning the argument against the stone warrior is slim enough, I can even see winning the argument being worth more experience than simply fighting the stone warriors. We shouldn't assume one route is the harder one simply because it involves combat and the other doesn't.

So you're basically saying that a warrior without many points in charm should just skip every dialogue/RPS game because he would be always better off while fighting?

Sorry, but that's the complete opposite of freedom and exactly how it should NOT be. If I invest points in charm I expect to be able to avoid combat encounters because I haven't invested the points in combat abilites. That doesn't mean that fight or dialogue win should offer more rewards. It just means that one way is easier for me because of my leveling/character build decisions. Same is true for someone who puts all points in fighting ablities. Why should someone who invested all points in combat abilites be over the top rewarded for choosing the "easy way" and fight each and everyone? He shold have a fair chance in the RPS game as well but it's of course harder for someone without many points in charm.

So I completely disgree with you. The reward for both outcomes should be exactly the same no matter the difficulty. The game shouldn't motivate the player to always choose one way. The player himself should decide how to play and he should be rewarded as equally as possible no matter how he decided to tackle a sitution. That sounds difficult on paper but in many situations (like the one in my example with only two results) it's very easy and there is imo no reason why the difference in reward should be THAT big.


@Hiver
Well, that's just an excuse. Of course you need XP to level up and gain new abiliites and stuff. Or course it's not a grinding/farming game but that's not the point here. The point is that the game mechanically favors one type of gameplay/approach above another for no apparent reason.

I agree that C&C can result in different outcomes, even mechanically wise. But why should anybody try to win that specific dialogue if the reward for fighting the stone warriors is always the "better option". It's not like the stone warriors were the most dangerous enemies in the game which can't be defeated. They are not harder to defeat than the mob exactly before them and a lot easier to defeat than the enemies that come after them. I agree that in a "true" C&C situation this would be a lot different. But that's not a C&C situation with let's say something that results in different storylines, or different quest outcomes. The only result is a mechanical reward (in XP). There is no difference in story or whatsover...

I think what's "worse" (relatively--I don't see this unequal XP gain to be a big problem) is that in a number of cases, you get more or less XP depending on the dialogue decisions made. EARLY SPOILERS FOLLOW

For example, when you help out the 2 lighthouse Legionnaires and they report to Aureus, you get more XP for playing along and letting them go home versus revealing the truth that you cleared out the undead. Another example is Tom, the brother of that maid in mayor Cecil's home that you discover was killed in the cave. When you lie to her and tell her he's fine, you get more XP than if you tell her the truth. These are more questionable in my mind, because it's not a huge difference in what you did (kill vs. talk your way past), but a decision of how something is told.

But overall--only if you're super concerned about squeezing every last drop of XP, then yes, it would matter. However, I suspect we can all roleplay as we like, and still end up at level 20. It's impossible Larian took the exact XP you need to reach max level, and then provided precisely that amount in the game (quests + monsters + exploring etc). There's probably well in excess 50,000 (just guessing) extra XP above max so everyone should have a fully trained party, unless you actively avoid a few too many side quests.

In that first scenario you do get +1 rep for telling him that it was you who cleared the lighthouse. So with meta knowledge it's +1 rep vs some extra exp.