BX Combined Rule Book Printed and Bound

Just put this together this morning.

I had printed the pages long ago, but had never bothered to bind them. Talking with +Gothridge Manor  and +Rob Conley  recently about BX Essentials (which I also have now and which I think is a great publication) got me thinking I should get off the pot and bind those pages up.

The sections are integrated (Basic Part 1, followed by Expert Part 1, followed by Basic Part 2, then Expert Part 2, etc.), as per the suggestion on p. B3, though obviously without cutting up my original books!

Compound XP Bonuses: A Viable Alternative to "The Worthless 10"?

I noted in two previous posts that a 10% bonus to earned XP doesn't give you anything.
     See post 1 here.
     See post 2 here.

A follow-up thought I had was to try a compound XP bonus. This would simply be a matter of applying the XP bonus to your XP total each time XP are awarded, rather than only to the just-earned XP.

So it would work like this:

• Session 1: You earn 400 XP. Your XP total is 400. Apply your 10%. That gives you 440 XP.
• Session 2: You earn another 400 XP. Your new XP total is 840. Only now apply your 10% to that number (instead of to the 400 XP you just earned). That gives you 924 XP (instead of the 880 you would have had if you were applying the bonus only to the XP just earned).
• Sessions 3 and beyond: Just keep applying the 10% XP bonus to your total XP each time more XP are awarded.

Again, using the OD&D Fighter XP progression as a baseline, and assuming an increase of one level every five sessions for a character with no bonus, we'd get the chart below. I've included the numbers for "no bonus," the traditional "10% to earned xp" covered previously, and the "10% compound bonus" for comparison. The yellow cells are where a fighter would level up depending on the bonus applied. The word "lap" indicates that the character jumps a full level ahead of a no-bonus character.

What you get is the fighter with the compound bonus advances at an accelerated (perhaps too accelerated) pace relative to one without the bonus. The fighter with the compound bonus "laps" the no-bonus fighter at session 15, hitting level 5 at the same time the no-bonus fighter hits level 4. He then gradually increases his lead as he moves toward lapping the no-bonus fighter a second time at session 35. At the end of that session, the no-bonus fighter rises to level 8, while the compound-bonus fighter hits level 10.

Would the compound bonus work? For a long campaign, I think I would not want to use it. For a short to mid-length campaign, perhaps going to only level 5 or 6 or so, I think it could be an interesting way to handle the XP bonus in a meaningful way. But even then, I don't think it would be a better way than the simple, flat 25-30% bonus to earned XP from my previous posts. I think the higher flat bonus to XP earned might be the cleaner way to achieve the end I'm seeking.

XP Bonuses Part Deux

A couple readers requested I do the table for 20% and 30% bonuses. So I've done those along with a 50% bonus and a 100% bonus (just to push things to extremes). I did these all with the assumption of a leveling pace of one level every five sessions for an unmodified fighter.

So here's what you get:

At a 20% bonus, the fighter with the bonus levels up consistently one session before the fighter with no bonus.

At a 30% bonus, the fighter with the bonus gets to level 2 one session earlier, then consistently levels up two sessions before the fighter with no bonus. In other words, the fighter with the bonus will be one level ahead of the fighter with no bonus roughly 40% of the time.

At a 50% bonus, the fighter with the bonus gets to level 2 one session earlier, then consistently levels up three sessions before the fighter with no bonus. In other words, the fighter with the bonus will be one level ahead of the fighter with no bonus roughly 60% of the time.

At a 100% bonus, the fighter with the bonus gets to level 2 two sessions earlier, then "laps" the fighter with no bonus on session five, and from that point on remains permanently one level ahead of the fighter with no bonus. Which of course makes sense, since the XP requirements double at each level.

My thought is that to make XP bonuses meaningful, you'd really need to do something like the 30% or 50% bonus, assuming an average progression pace in the ballpark of this model's one level per five sessions.

Regarding XP Bonuses: The Worthless 10%

I've often felt intuitively that a 10% bonus to earned XP doesn't give you much, if anything. I decided to look at some actual numbers to see whether that was true. It is.

I made a series of calculations, using the OD&D Fighter XP progression as a baseline:

Level 1: 0 XP
Level 2: 2,000 XP
Level 3: 4,000 XP
Level 4: 8,000 XP
Level 5: 16,000 XP
Level 6: 32,000 XP
Level 7: 64,000 XP
Level 8: 120,000 XP
Level 9: 240,000 XP

I did my calculations based on the pace (in terms of number of sessions) needed to level up.
I did this for three scenarios:

1) earning enough XP per session for an unmodified fighter to level up once every 20 sessions
2) earning enough XP per session for an unmodified fighter to level up once every 10 sessions
3) earning enough XP per session for an unmodified fighter to level up once every 5 sessions

I then plugged in the numbers for XP per session for a fighter with no XP bonus, and a fighter with a 10% bonus for each of those three scenarios.

This is what I came up with. The yellow cells are where each fighter (bonus and no bonus) levels up.

As you can see, the fighter with the 10% bonus gets no significant edge over the fighter with no bonus at all.

In a campaign with an extremely slow level progression (averaging 20 sessions per level),  the fighter with the 10% bonus starts to pull ahead around session 37 of the campaign – leveling up three sessions before the fighter with no bonus. But of course in this scenario, it's taking 40 (or 37) game sessions to hit level three.

In a campaign where PCs progress at twice that speed  (averaging 10 sessions per level), the fighter with the 10% bonus starts to pull ahead at session 19, but only levels up one session sooner than the fighter with no bonus. The fighter with the bonus stays exactly one session ahead for the next 20 sessions and for some time beyond (though the next scenario suggests he will widen the gap a bit more much later on).

In a campaign with relatively rapid level progression (averaging 5 sessions per level), the fighter with the 10% bonus pulls ahead only at session 35, and only by one session, and then only because the XP requirement to progress suddenly stops doubling. If the XP progression kept doubling, it appears the fighter with the 10% bonus would never pull ahead of the fighter with no bonus.

So it seems that unless a) you play with a really slow level progression or b) you get to higher level play where the XP requirements flatten out, a 10% XP bonus will have no appreciable effect on game play.

D&D BX (1981): Additional Demi-Human Class Options

Tinkering on my break times today with alternative demi-human classes for BX...

Dwarven Cleric
   - Max. level 12, min. CON 9. Prime req. WIS.
   - Infravision, stonecraft, languages and saves as dwarves.
   - Armor, weapons, turning, spells as clerics.
   - XP/HD as per table below.

Elven Thief* 
   - Max. level 12, min. INT 9. Prime reqs. INT & DEX (13 both = 5%, 16 INT + 13 DEX = 10%).
   - Infravision, spot secret doors, ghoul immune, languages, spells and saves as elves.
   - Armor, weapons, thievery, backstab as thieves.
   - XP/HD as per table below.

Halfling Thief
   - Max. level 12, min. DEX 9, min. CON 9. Prime req. DEX.
   - Missile bonus, AC bonus vs. large, hard to spot and saves as halflings.
   - Armor, weapons, thievery, backstab as thieves.
   - XP/HD as per table below.

I made sure that the dwarven cleric, elven thief, and halfling thief all had level cut-offs preventing them from getting attack rolls or hit points that exceeded those of their by-the-book fighter counterparts. Otherwise I tried to make sure the max levels of these new classes were not horribly far from those of the by-the-book fighter types either. Dwarves rise to an equally high level as clerics or fighters (level 12 -- and roughly the same XP). Elves rise slightly higher as a spellcasting thief than as a by-the-book spellcasting fighter (level 12 vs. level 10 -- but again roughly the same XP). Halflings are substantially more proficient as thieves than as by-the-book fighters (max. level 12 vs. max. level 8 -- and a significant XP difference) but it seemed reasonable to me that halflings would be rather better thieves than fighters given their size and natural stealth.

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*I don't bother calling the elven thief a "magic-user/thief" since I assume that elves are magical by nature; I typically don't call the by-the-book elf a "fighter/magic-user" either.