Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Whats up with the low (xp) rewards?

So I started to notice something weird. Kills give little to no xp in this game. Case in point:

I was fighting the spiders under the abandoned village and noticed I got like 13 xp per kill. Giant spiders (and these are phase spiders at that, which are tougher) should reward triple digits worth of xp.

I ran a DND campaign where I had a lvl5 party fight roughly this amount of spiders and they almost got to lvl 6 from that session. It gave them more then half the xp needed for the lvl.

I noticed it at other places to but this example was the most jarring to me. I finished the spider matriarch fight but was honestly appalled by the reward. Both in XP as in loot.

Is there a reason why xp is given out in such a restrictive manner?

A lowly gnoll gives more xp than the giant spider sending swarms of her poisonous babies at you.

It really does not matter as you hit exp cap soon enough (4,6 levels roughly) and there are much more enemies than exp needed.

I think it does matter though. Specially in the fights where XP is the only reward. To then get slapped in the face and walk away eith less xp then a normal goblin should give is kind of insulting and gives almost no incentive to do these fights...

If you mean it doesent matter in the EA because theres a lvl cap in place.... well sure. There is. But isent testing to see what lvl people reach if they do everything important to do as well?

Do you get XP for succesful rolls, on a slightly related note? I avoided the initial fight at the ruins with the raiders and thought, that is 100xp per character gone, could have gone a long way. I think every action you take should grant XP. On combat XP or in general, I think it is fine for the EA, as there is a cap that you will reach rather soon, so it does not matter and is likely to be adjusted. Personally I do not see the need for giving XP from mobs at all, but from interaction and solving quests in certain ways.

The highest level enemy in the entire act is like level 5 or something. You reach the current level cap of 4 waaaaay before the end of the act. At least I did, and all the fights are completely do-able at the current level cap. The experience rewards seem completely balanced to me.

Giving xp equal to the xp that kills would give seems fair. Maybr then set the xp thst kills give after that to 0 so people sont double dip.

How are people reaching this xp cap so quikly though? I investigate pretty much everything I meet and think I only got the gobbo camp left to investigate but im stuck somewhere between lvl 3 and lvl 4.

Lvl.2 and 3 came insanely fast and then it was like hitting a brick wall.

I hit level 4 while investigating the blighted village, and still had quite a few quests either unfinished or unable to complete due to bugs. I don't know if I'd call it quickly, because it still took a good many hours.

XP should mainly focus on quests and exploration. Else you feel to need to do fights to level up instead of cleverly avoiding them.

Why would you feel like you need to avoid them? Avoiding unnecesary fights with dialogue I can understand but actively avoiding them I dont...

And normally in dnd you dont get xp for exploring or questing either. Normally gold or some other reward is the incentive and you get thr xp from encounters. Unless the dm is using milestones or something simular, which is fine as well but I dont feel thats the approach that Larian was going for?

Many games offer different approaches for solving a quest. Only XP through fighting counters the idea of roleplaying. I thought DnD would have evolved since the 80s.

D&D has. The DMG has a (admittedly small) section on noncombat encounters, which says:



There is also the "milestone" approach which is definitely appropriate for a story-based CRPG:

Oh you think lvl 4 is bad, play pnp and try to get from 19 to 20, or even 10 to 11. Honestly you tend to fly through levels 1 - 3 in D&D mostly because the risk of dying at these levels is so high. After this though your beginning to hold your own, and the xp needed increases significantly the higher level you get. This is so your party builds up the necassary resources (gold, weapons, hp potions, etc) to survive the higher level fights. from levels 1-3 you really don't need alot of magic items, even at 4 you can get by without them. After that you begin to need more costly equipment, including higher level healing potions, more gold to scribe spells, buy spell components, maybe a base of operations, potions of cure disease, raise dead etc.

Yeah, levels 1 and 2 are basically "tutorial" levels. Many DMs start games at level 3 with experienced players. The XP curve reflects this.

I know the curve in pnp. But im just referring to bg3 here. Where lvl 2 and lvl3 came so fast and the time to lvl 4 seems to take ages. Even if thr fights that ive done since hitting lvl 3 are many times bigger then the ones before it.

It feels like it isent tweaked at all

Overall you get too much XP imo. Leveling from 1st to 4th on the same map before you're even half finished with it is a bit much. Yeah it's a busy map but still. I've had one long rest per level. So one level every day for the characters. It feels too fast.

The devs had stated previously that they intend to reduce the amount of XP you get from killing things to make non-combat solutions not only more attractive but more viable in terms of game progression.

They think you get to much?

A basic goblin should give 50xp. A phase spider 700, ettercap 450 etc etc.

All of these examples i mentioned give double digit xp ingame and while the goblins might be divided by 4 (havent checked yet if its 50xp if multiplied by4) but also have more health and abilities then a base goblin does.

I appreciate that they want to make talking to get out of fights (for example) viable as well but those options currently dont reward any xp at all right? Maybe they still need to implement that or something but everything just feels abit....off. atm.

The PnP D&D5 games I play certainly don't link XP to killing and looting.

My current GM, in fact, doesn't even bother with XP but simply levels us when he feels it appropriate. It works. I can't remember the last game of Pathfinder or D&D I played where we gathered XP simply for killing things, it has been linked to story and completing quest-lines for as long back as I can remember. That's the beauty of PnP RPGs, your GM/group can determine how such things are handled.

Thats lvling by threshold or atory progression. And thats indeed a viable way to approach leveling. It generally prevents murderhoboing for 1 and thats always a good thing to prevent.

In bg3 tho we do get xp for killing things and outside of completing quests and succeeding skill checks seems to be the only way to gain xp.

Some fights simply dont reward the player imo. Phase spider fight in particular is horrid. Nezt to no xp for a very hard fight and the material reward you do get is....quesionable considering what you had to fight to get it.