Rask wrote:You basically can't solo level a mage, which causes people to make a fighter/barbarian and level it to 20 then RCR it into a magic user. Kind of not really a fun way to make proper progression. I remember things being much easier on new players in the past than it is now. Nobody likes to die to BS like being insta-stripped of spells then cast-spammed over and over for 25+ damage a round when your casters HP is only like 30. This basically forces people to do the aforementioned leveling style of using a fighter to grind out most of the levels and abusing the RCR system. It's either that or you have fun grinding for 10XP a kill and going nowhere.
Actually you can... But the problem is always going to be that players do not know what to do. For example back in those 'good old days' the server had these superfast wolves that one shot killed any character with less than 8 HP, and those buggers tended to spawn very close to each other.
The only way to kill those wolves at level one was to get a heavy crossbow and just hope, hope that your dexterity modifier of at least 3 was good enough to nail few hits before they cought up to you.
Well, back then there was no rest limitation so you could kind of make do with magic missile spam... But then again... most new arcanists took nothing but defensive spells at level 1, and even if you did, well you wanted to keep those early slots for defensive buffs to avoid dying... And that one lonely magic missile was not enough to kill a wolf.
Thesedays, if you go to the graveyard, the damage reductions make heavy crossbow nearly useless. You need to keep switching between slashing/bludgeoing to go past the damage reductions. However, the good thing is that you can kill most things by just dealing around 4 points of damage. Thus a single magic missile could be enough to kill one undead - and Sorcerous Sundries does sell staffs with endless cast of caster level one spells.
The only problem is that the Staff of Magic Missile can cost your character up to 4k~, and by the time a brand new player on a brand new character can afford it, they tend to have overleveled its useage. The Staf of Frost is cheaper and can be gotten for 1.5K~ and is a feasible option after running some of the quests near BG... However, the only place where that is useful is the Bandit Cave, which is kind of hidden on the northside of the Baldur's Gate - two transitions required while graveyard only takes one. Not to mention that to get these staffs you still need to know to look for them in the Sorcerous Sundries... If you have not played the original BG, how would you know where to look?
As for the amount of experience, actually that '10 points of experience' per kill has remained the constant for the... how to put it kindly... 'RP builds' over the years. What has changed, however, is the number of maps. Thus the mobs give less experience than they used to as there are more areas you can explore.
And as others have discussed, if you do not know where to go or what to do, exploration can lead to death and repeated experience penalty. Well... That is until you learn to abuse the fact that you are not pushed down a level.
So, if you want to make things easier for the new players, remove the death penalty. If you just postpone it to level 10 - then they get get hit with a sudden 1k experience loss, and it will come out of the blue even if they have read about it in the Myrkul dialogue. Now as for five free deaths, that actually serves the old established players more than new ones. It is very easy to get rid of all your free deaths just trying to figure out the graveyard... So... Why not just remove the experience penalty altogether and implement some kind level based timer before you can get back in game?
Edit: I mean it would make Steve happier!
Me: *Dies once and wants to get back all the lost experience, so I go do a mindless quest grind.*
A random Steve pops up: 'I want to RP with you, CAREBEARSTARE-style!'
Me: *Glare that would send chills to the back of a pitfiend, and they are on FIRE!*
That random Steve: 'But--- But, RP!'
Me: *NO!*
That sad Steve: 'Fine.' *Sobs.*
).
