XP of companions?

Kennis

All;

I was wondering if anyone else had seen this issue. I was looking at what the XP was of the companions when I go them to see if they matched what they were when I left the Korlasz family tomb. Now, it looks like there was no change in Viconia, Edwin, or Baeloth when you pick them up. Now when I picked up M'khiin, she had 200000xp and Charname had 231406xp - so I'm assuming that that is the range when you pick them up.

Now for the weird part. The following are in the party: Charname, Viconia, M'khiin, Edwin, Baeloth. Charname just crossed the 250000xp barrier in the Dwarven Lich cave and something appears to have 'bumped' the XP of Viconia, M'khiin, and Edwin.

Charname 245,223 250,642 +5,419
Viconia 238,670 250,000 +11,330
M'khiin 213,315 250,000 +36,685
Edwin 228,883 250,640 +21,757
Baeloth 254,330 259,748 +5,418

The only override I have is for no XP cap, but this appears to some sort of unrelated item that may adjust the XP of the party members when you find then that needs to be turned off if they are currently in the party. I'm likely going to go into EEkeeper and adjust the XP back down.

TheArtisan

Don't quote me but I believe a recent patch added a script to even out large discrepancies in experience when you reach certain milestones. I didn't have it happen in BG1 where I hauled around a significantly under leveled Yeslick for the entire game but SoD might work differently.

Kennis

Wow- I hope that isn't true. There should be an option to turn that off if that's how it works - I'd call the current 'fix' a bug. Just seems against the spirit of the 2e pnp ruleset, at least after they join your party. Dorn I can easily see as he's obviously done 'something' after leaving the party originally.

sarevok57

I noticed that this was happening in SoA as well with the new patch, as soon as I came out of irenicus' dungeon, yoshimo got an XP boost to match up with my fighter/thief

mf2112

Kennis said:

Wow- I hope that isn't true. There should be an option to turn that off if that's how it works - I'd call the current 'fix' a bug. Just seems against the spirit of the 2e pnp ruleset, at least after they join your party. Dorn I can easily see as he's obviously done 'something' after leaving the party originally.

How is it against the spirit of the 2e pnp ruleset? If you are referring to the mechanic of the XP actually being added after the game determines your charnames current XP then I agree it is a little kludgy but I would rather think that the NPC's are smart and independent (okay, except for Minsc ) and doing something versus sitting around drinking or waiting on charname to actually motivate and push them into doing something.

TheArtisan

Trust me, it's at least better than picking up Jaheira or Khalid in SoD at level 1 just because you recruited them then booted them immediately after Beregost.

Kennis

Recruiting and booting I can agree with an xp adjustment for. Or Dorn doing something in the meantime - perfect example. In my case, they NEVER left the party. Between two battles and M'Khiin gets a 35k xp boost out of nowhere. That's what I disagree with. I used EEKeeper to reset them.

TheArtisan

There's clearly something wrong if you had them from the start and they still had such a large discrepancy. It seems more likely that somehow they didn't get enough experience from when they were first recruited. Which... makes sense since the scripts level your party based on increments.

I can't speak for how the levelling system actually works but I assume it's something like the following scenario: the milestone you're closest to is 200,000 experience, while the previous one was 161,000. Your PC is 199,999 experience when you recruit M'khiin, and as a result she starts with 161,000 experience. Now suppose your PC has 200,001 experience so she joins with 200,000 experience instead. Unfair, right? That's why when your 199,999 exp PC passes the 200k milestone, M'khiin (who is about 40k exp lower than she should be) gets such a massive boost. It seems unfair, but unless there's a much more accurate experience detection system I can understand why this happens.

Kennis

My situation was actually similar to what you've described above - When I picked up M'Khiin, she has 200,000 and Charname had 231,406, so M'Khiin fits in that range. That's just what to me I disagree with. If I've kept her in the party the entire time, she should be advancing at the same rate as everyone else, not given an artificial boost in the middle of the dungeon. I mean, if I wanted to game the system booting her out and then bringing her back into the party that's one thing, but if she's never left the party, then she should always be 31k behind, since there's no adventure that she has gone off on her own to do, as would happen in old PnP. The numbers ultimately wind up being so large, I don't see a need to give the companions an artificial boost 'after' joining - maybe 'before' joining, so that they're pacing the Charname to within 1,000. Maybe that's the answer - make the milestones at 1,000 xp boundaries instead of 39k, 50k, or what have you, so that an artificial mid-party boost doesn't happen - they are gift wrapped at no more than 1,000xp below the CharName on joining.

Bubbles

Hehehe, this XP issue started a long time ago in BG1 where many NPCs can only be recruited late in the game and their XP really gap the core party members too much to be relatively useless to be made core members. Then now they patch that issue possibly too well it creates a different issue in the view some players ^^.