Multiclass XP Penalty Bug

jww

I've run into a bug while playing the Beamdog-curated version of Aielund Saga on the current public release of NWN:EE. I haven't tested yet to see if it affects the standard NWN campaigns in addition to Aielund. I have no mods installed besides the ones that the NWN:EE client auto-downloads to play the curated version of the campaign. (This takes place in Act II, if it matters.)

With a human Fighter 4/Bard 2/RDD 4, everything works fine.

Once I advance to RDD 5 (Fighter 4/Bard 2/RDD 5), I immediately get a 20% xp penalty (on both enemy kills and quest rewards).

Prestige classes (like RDD) aren't supposed to have any effect on multiclass xp penalties, and a human with two base classes (fighter and bard) should never be impacted by any sort of multiclass xp penalty at all, because for a human it ignores the highest-level class when determining if the other classes are out of sync.

So, what's going on? Possibilities I can think of:

1. Is the prestige class rule broken for multiclass xp penalty calculations?

- or -

2. Is RDD mistakenly classified as a base class?

... but neither of those match the behavior I'm seeing. In both of those scenarios, there would also have been an xp penalty at Fighter 4/Bard 2/RDD 4, because if you ignore the highest-level class (human favored class rule), you're left with one class at level 4 and one at level 2, which is more than a one-level difference, which would result in an xp penalty. Since the xp penalty is not applied at 4/2/4, and doesn't start until 4/2/5, something else must be going on.

And, is this bug in the base NWN code and somehow nobody caught it? Or is it introduced in Aielund Saga? (Again, I'm playing the Beamdog-curated version of Aielund Saga.) It seems unlikely that the multiclass xp penalty calculations are open to modders, but maybe they are.

Daz

It's a bug in the base nwn code, I think BD is aware.

jww

Thanks for the info. Anyone know if it affects all prestige classes, or only RDD? (Or is it not related prestige classes at all?)

sarevok57

i've seen this happen with a paladin/monk/ champion of torm, being human i believe i was paladin 6 monk 2 ( which is all good because of human ) but then when i hit a certain level of champion of torm ( prestidge class ) i was also getting the penalty at one point,

now i don't remember completely what level/levels were doing it since i made this character months ago if not last year or so, but i do remember getting an XP penalty when i wasn't supposed to be getting one

jww

My guess, since it wasn't happening at 4/2/4, is that the check for highest-level class (for human and half-elf favored class) is bugged to not filter out prestige classes, but that the next step, to determine if there's a penalty in the remaining classes, might still be working correctly.

That would mean at 4/2/4, it was still counting fighter as the highest level class, but RDD 4 and Bard 2 didn't generate a penalty.

But then at 4/2/5, it (incorrectly) used RDD as the favored class, leaving the two base classes at 4 and 2, and thus generating a penalty. If it's really only a single check that's broken, it hopefully won't be too hard to fix.

bloody_noob

I also noticed this behavior and I tried most Versions on Steam and found that it was working as expected in the last 32bit build (NWNEE-1.78.8186-32bit) but in no other builds on Steam (tried .34-.30 and then .19).

I am getting the behavior described with a human rogue(4) / fighter(6) / weapon master(7)
And the only fix dirty workaround I can think of is editing classes.2da and remove XP penality for all baseclasses

Old_Gith

I have confirmed this xp penalty bug. Humans are not getting credit for a second base class or a prestige class apparently. I have also reported several months ago this but I haven't heard if they were working on a fix.