Handling XP and loot in a non-violent encounter - love it! (*SPOILERS*)

cdx

I haven't seen anyone mention that although probably I just missed it. The enemies giving up in the first dungeon was handled great! I remember all the disagreements over at Obsidian forums with the debates about kill XP. I think what they did works fine but as I was hoping for a very BG-like game it didn't feel right for me.

Here it was an extremely pleasant surprise. Here she is (the baddie) and all the help. Sneak, stab, speech, give up, then...

You get the exact same experience as if you killed each of the guys individually. Not the sum, but actually you get experience for each of the enemies. Perfect. It's like kill xp without the killing.

And what about all these items on the ground? It that the equipment they were carrying? Yes, seems like it. I can actually loot all of them without killing them! Demanding they drop all the items...

...

Of course. It makes perfect sense. How come nobody thought of that before?

Now I don't have any incentive to metagame and attack once they're leaving. Also, on another run, with my sorcerer, the last couple of magic missles hit her after she surrendered and she turned red but didn't mess the whole thing up and attack. Just kept going. Then I went to see if she'd be fine (I could speak with her) in the entrance room and it was all good. Nice.

Have a non-violent (well, after the backstab) encounter and get the exact same kill XP and loot anyway:

helmo1977

I agree. It is nice to see that you get the same reward whether you do it in the good or bad way. It encourages carefully reading, thinking and role playing

AlexT

Thanks for the kind words. The design principle behind this was that loot and XP rewards should not penalize players who choose one solution over the other. I actually had to request some new engine functionality to make that possible, but on the plus side, modders can now use the same approach very easily, should they choose to do so.

There are of course other consequences down the line for killing certain characters (like Korlasz) instead of sparing their lives, so the choice you make still matters.