Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General We need Non-Combat XP

Not saying we shouldn't say it, but keep in mind the studio too. With Divinity 1 and 2, they have proven more than trustworthy when it comes to handling their games. I agree with you, but we also aren't dealing with a company like Ubisoft or EA.

We definitely need to be awarded XP for successfully completing an encounter in a non-violent way avoiding combat. As it stands (similar to the problem DOS2 had) the game awards killing everything for XP. This is not optimal and it would be best to award players that choose non-combat solutions as well without penalizing them. Two good ways are the following:

1) Have encounters award a certain number of XP independently on how you solve them. If you kill them, get the XP. If you avoid the combat successfully get the same XP. If you avoid successfully the combat and then decide to kill them anyway, get only the same XP and not double the amount.

2) Milestone leveling. Get to a certain level once you reach certain points in the game.

So... I think with BG3 being a 'DND'-type game, i'm pretty sure you don't get EXP for doing talking in DND, you gain experience from combat. At least that's how i understand it, from the games of DND i have played..

That may be why it's the way it is.

On the contrary, you may gain xp from objectives in D&D, no matter how many creatures you killed or not. There are many campaigns and GMs that use milestones for XP gain.


And even if you use xp per kill, you receive xp for quest competition and stuff like that.

Gaining XP is currently pretty tedious and seems to be much harder then you would think. Combat is a pretty difficult so as the only option for xp it makes the game much harder to play. Save often.

Yeah as a DM and as a player, I effing HATE milestone leveling. It basically does the opposite; no reward for combat other than loot, and you ONLY level up based on plot progression. A very VERY bad system in a game where players can go off on 100 different sidequests and fights and get zero reward for doing so. At least with DnD 5e, I as a GM can be like, "yeah, you go up a level for x sidequest." That would not work well here.

For BG3, I think they need to keep the exp based level system, and just add leveling for objectives/non combat as well.

This would be a very useful thing for someone to test during EA: play the game doing everything possible to avoid combat and see how badly you end up being off in terms of your XP position at the end of it. My playstyle is to avoid combat as much as I can, and any ROLE-PLAYING game that punishes avoiding combat is rotten game design.

100% agree!!!! we need non combat rewards

I feel like this is conflating a few issues. Having quest progression as a primary method of gaining XP doesn't necessitate a low level cap (which POE1 admittedly had, but this was primarily down to resources and imitating games like BG1, where you would probably only reach Lvl 12 maximum).

It's entirely possible to implement POE's approach to XP without that.

Also, I'm a bit confused about your comment that there's no way to solve quests besides hack n' slash? You can do pacifist runs of the base game and reach the end at a decent level with less than 50 kills (I think the record is between 10-20 kills, but involves a degree of exploits).

I wonder if the original Baldur's Gate should have given at least a few experience points, 10 or so, for reading the many books located all over the place? The writers put a lot of time into some of those, but it always felt like reading the books was more of a distraction from the game action. Later in the series some of the books had advice on how to defeat certain monsters ... that was a great idea. It's always cool when Scooby Doo finds a clue!

The Dungeon Master's Guide actually includes basic instructions for 'Milestones' and 'Levelling without XP,' (P.260-1)

Personally I always DM with milestone XP because my group has a mix of roleplayers and power gamers. The power gamers tend to want to maximise their XP and feel like they're missing out if the roleplayers circumvent fights with creative roleplaying solutions. So milestone quest XP keeps everyone happy.

+1111111

Well lets think as roll20 DND 5E.

Besides combat of course, combat still should award XP. DMs since old circa D&D are incentivized to reward roleplay in the Dungeon Master Manual, exploration and intelligent solutions during sessions, now the constraint we have is due to this being a video game, so you have a set of limited options thought by the designer. One way to break the mold for example is allowing to have multiple "right choices" as if it fits the character roleplay. So I can parlay my way, bribe, intimidate, attack the person and receive the XP for that encounter, you will give all matters of gameplay satisfaction.

But giving multiple solutions have a caveat so for the sake of discussion I will present the weakness of giving xp to multiple solutions, but as a opportunity to show what I at least believe is a solution, of course a experienced game designer can have 10000x better ideas on how to solve this and still keeping up with the Project Manager schedule due to their experience.

What happens when dialogue gives XP right away because we are still talking about a game, people will definitely want to improve this xp for maximum power gains. So they will do the dialogue and grab their knives and stab whoever they just decided to solve with peace talks for extra XP and items. This might limit Good Aligned locked classes, but there is still a wide array of exploitation to be dealt with. The famous True Neutral (but not so neutral, Im just a villain in disguise because my DM didnt allow me to roll that blackguard) and the Evil aligned players, so to avoid having this incentive to be a murder hobo, you reward XP by encounter and maybe even like people mentioned by the end of the quest the game can have a hidden XP calculator by the player deeds during this mission and reward accordingly so you remove the MMO mindset of I need to grind those mofos for xp!
The player could still think that is optimal to murder everyone since I will get the XP+Item rewards, so you usually balance in session by giving an exclusive reward pool and extra XP by solving this quest in X way that fits the description of intelligent solution or fitting the roleplay of your character. But an important observation not every quest needs to be a well thought solution sometimes the tragedy of conflict is bound to happen even if the player wants to avoid it at all cost.