Suggestion: new/dynamic XP system

[Mark]

Hi Folks,

I've been away from Angband/forums for years, but had an idea pop into my head I wanted to share.

There are (or at least, were) certain monsters in Angband that the seasoned player knows to stay away from - they are dangerous, and offer little reward.

There are others that are somewhat harvest-able - like orcs - because they drop loot, and if one kills enough, and the chance of something useful becomes noticable.

Well.... ...I wondered if we can change the way XP works in the game, that it not only scales with level (higher level = fewer XP from a monster), but also, the more often you've killed that type of monster, the fewer XP you get. (Obviously, the positive way to phrase this is, the less often you've killed something, the more XP you get). The hope would be this results in making player choice of 'will I try to kill x... [black reaver][drolem][etc]?' more tantalizing - at least for the first few a player comes across - even if the monster in question is not usually worth engaging.

What do you think?

[PowerDiver]

When playing my own version, I changed the rule so that you get 1 exp for each monster type you kill, and potions of experience granted you the experience for killing the shallowest non-unique monster you had not killed yet. I prefer it this way.

[Thraalbee]

Sil has this xp model. It is great there. However it is a big change since this leads to a soft xp ceiling.

[Estie]

OPs proposal would lead to a game where it doesnt matter what you kill - IF xp were a relevant factor in making that decision. However, xp can be (mostly) ignored in the current game.

Some people might not ignore xp, for whatever reason; however, when it comes to playing the game in any competitive way, they are. Ask the people who win competitions how much they take xp into consideration when trying to win or look at thunderf00t's thread - he dives as fast as possible, only making one stop for xp when he finds a -clone monster and a druj.

The factor that decides what needs to get killed and what doesnt is loot, either because you want its drop or because its in the way.

Now you could make the same argument replacing xp with average drop quality.
And there I disagree - drop quality should not always be proportional to the difficulty of getting it dead.

The point imo is to make the game interesting. This may be subjective; I like the current state where the above holds true for part of the fauna but with some duds sprinkled in (molds, hounds, Qs, beholdes). It leads to a more varied game than without duds, or with everything valuable behind a wall of duds (former Zephyr hounds).

[Thraalbee]

+1 to that. Sil makes it work by being a very different game. Fewer levels with semi forced diving due to xp model as well as the game timer limits your options a lot. You get a tighter and more intense game but I cant see how that would work in vanilla Angband

[smbhax]

I'm not sure how it would balance out but my thought as a player is that it would kind of suck to get punished with a decreased reward for killing a monster just because of how many times I may have killed that type of monster before.

Also, maybe I'm misremembering, but when you examine a monster, doesn't the XP reward it lists already imply it's based on the level difference with your own character?