Clear the moathouse quest?

one thing ive been really curious about. why is it that when you start a new game with some alignments, the "clear the moathouse" quest does not appear in your logbook at all? even in some obvious cases where it's clear that the party's mission is to clear it.

for example when you speak to terjon after delivering the news in neutral good, he tells you about moathouse and the quest appears in the logbook. but when playing lawful neutral and talking to the village elder about moathouse, it does not.

now granted, pretty much all of my playthroughs have been with a neutral good,true neutral or neutral evil alignments so ive never played the other alignments any further than hommlet quests. does the quest appear later in the moathouse or perhaps it shows as completed once lawful neutral party clears the place out for example?

 

I think being told to "start looking there" shouldn't qualify as being given a quest to clear it out.

In the original module, (PnP) weren't you just supposed to check it out and report back?

I think someone should actually say, "Go and remove the evil that haunts that retched moathouse" in order for it to be a quest.

And yes, I want credit for my ever so clever and spooky wording.

 

That's a tough call Gaear, I think so many of us have become so accustomed to getting it as a quest it may break a few hearts to remove it.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my group of PnP folks are going through the moathouse now and the biggest discussion is, why should we risk our butts fighting all these bad guys if we get paid the same for just reporting they are there.

TOEE the cRPG doesn't give us the opportunity to merely check in with Burne and Rufus to "report" the activity, we really have no alternative but to clear it out, (not to mention who wants to miss out on the xp and loot).

Well, there you have it ... my 2 cents.

 

IMO, many of the XP rewards for quests completed are far too small for the amount of work involved to complete the quests. I can understand 25XP apiece for some of the early FedEx quests, but there are other things that take a lot more effort and expose you to a lot more danger -- have hardly any more XP when finished.

Granted, some of the harder quests involve killing a lot of monsters which in itself gives lots of XP.

 

this is a bit off-topic, but if i were to design a xp reward system, i'd only give out xp for solving quests and nothing else:

• no more grinding
• no more teh bestest wayz to do it
• much easier control of how much xp is to be gained in the game

 

That's probably a little too far from the RAW for most folks. One of the attractions of ToEE is how faithful it is to the SRD compared to other games of the genre.

 

but that particular part of the rules is total bullshit. it shouldn't matter if you rescue the princess by teleporting in, grabbing her and teleporting out, sneaking in and sneaking out with her, or slaying every fuckin' one in the dungeon and rescue her. it makes players go on a killing spree for xp.

 

If you feel that strongly maybe you should seek out a different ruleset, I understand PathFinder awards far less xp for killing foes and mainly focuses on quest completion, although I do find your overuse of curse words a little on the offensive side.

Please try and relax, this is a friendly place for friendly discussions.

 

Sirchet has it right. That part of the RAW isn't a bug, it's a feature. If you want a game that does it some other way, you either need house rules or something other than D&D 3.5.

 

If anything, D&D 3.5 is more civilised wrt this than previous editions of the game. I think the notion that XP could be awarded for 'storytelling reasons' and achieving goals regardless of how many baddies killed came in with AD&D2; in AD&D1 XP was gained for killing, for gaining treasure (1gp = 1XP) and for successful use of character abilities (casting spells, picking locks etc), IIRC, which certainly seemed to skew things in favour of 'hack n slash'. A consequence of evolving from a wargames background I guess.

 

WOW -- kill one hill giant, grab all of his loot and jump up 10 levels!

I have seen games whereby one only improved abilities by using them. For example, you could improve your open lock skill by finding an impossible lock and try-try-try to open it.