Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Can avoid fight in smart way also give exp reward?

There are situations where you can do things without fighting but then you lost all exp.

There are places where you can push lever or move object to kill enemy and most of time you get 0 exp.
For example when you throw big stone on adventurers before catacumbs.

I'd love to be able to talk my way out of a situation and get experience for dealing with it in a non-violent manner. Sometimes those checks are hard and I'd like to be rewarded for it. That also opens the doors for having varying ways to proceed through a playthrough. A reward for a pacifist playthrough, Undertale style? Heck yeah.

Yeah it makes leveling up and surviving the later "obligatory" fights difficult when the optional ones don't offer XP rewards for getting out of them through persuasion or intimidation or what have you.

Totally agree, OP. This is a core characteristic of a good role-playing game and it completely baffles me why Larian has chosen to do things the way they are right now. If anything role-playing your way out of a situation, including combat encounters, should give you more XP. But I will gladly settle for roughly equal XP. No XP is just ridiculous, and does not reflect how D&D works. And halfway-decent DM would absolutely give you plenty of XP for innovative role-playing, including persuading, intimidating, or talking your way out of situations.

Totally agree with this. Also hate having NPCs steal my XP by getting the kill shot on a MOB that my party too 3/4 of its health. I do like the fact that you get XP through dialog sometimes.

The related issue is gear. If you choose the "Evil" option, you miss out on lots of good goblin gear.

THis is exactly how things work in D&D. You get XP because you deal with a difficult situation not because you go around killing commoners for meager XP gain. I support this suggestion wholeheartedly.

I think that the exp might be rebalanced before launch and they'll add this.
You could very easily reach lvl 5 np at all in Act 1, I dunno but that seems a bit silly to me if there's going to be three Acts.

Edit: Come to think of it you could probably get even higher than that.
That was me thinking of it while skipping a ton of content too.
I think that maybe we level a bit too fast atm.

I'd be surprised if anyone disagrees. Seems like a major oversight, but presumably easy to fix.

I can't find the source right now, but this is one of these rare cases of criticism that Larian directly commented on and said will be fixed

I hope so. I usually prefer finding a solution where everybody can be awesome to each other instead of having a massive scrap the ruins the décor. IMHO the game shouldn't just be about fighting or preparing to fight. Okay, it's not quite that but too many RPGs feel like they have an undue focus on combat.

The dice-rolls in dialogue are the bane of my life though.

The tricky bit is avoiding a double-dip for XP. For example, you de-escalate a fight through a dialog and you get XP for that peaceful solution, and then you quickly turn around and kill the enemies to get even more XP by fighting them.

To avoid that kind of exploit, a game can simply pause the scene while the enemies retreat, not allowing player action. The scene where you can talk your way into rescuing the Goblin at the windmill without a fight almost works like that, without a forced pause. The goblins disappear pretty fast.

But not every situation lends itself to that. For example in the Zhentarim hideout, you can defuse a fight by turning over the chest to the leader, then wander around, trade with one of them, and deal with freeing the Artist if you want. Or.... you could turn around after delivering the chest and kill everyone for the XP. The writer of that area want the Zhetarims to persist, not magically disappear after defusing the encounter.

The way to solve that could be to have a flag that prevented XP gain from kills in that area if you've already received XP by avoiding the initial fight. That could seem a little weird though, since players are used to seeing the XP after every combat. And the programming would have to account for every possible combination of actions by the player. It's easier just to award XP for kills, which I guess is why so many games work that way.