(that said, your comment prompts me to wonder about the domain of videogames, where there typically isn’t DM judgment restricting XP gain. You’ve also written about World of WarCraft and I find myself curious if the 2 year emperor trick works there)
Most multiplayer games have some way to limit XP gain from encounters outside your difficulty, to avoid exactly this sort of cheesing. The worry is that it allows players to get through the content quicker, with (possibly paid) help from others, which presumably makes it less likely they’ll stick around.
(Though of course an experienced player can still level vastly faster, since most players don’t take combat anywhere near optimally to maximize xp gain.)
That said, Morrowind famously contains an actual intelligence explosion. So you tend to see this sort of stuff more often in singleplayer, I think. (Potion quality triggers off intelligence. Potions can raise intelligence.)
It absolutely does not, precisely for reasons #2 and #3 I listed.
Game designers—especially designers of extremely popular games with large budgets and armies of playtesters—do not, as a rule, tend to be idiots. And they would have to be very stupid indeed to allow a very serious and very obvious exploit that has, furthermore, been known for decades.
This is why I find things like the aforesaid Two-Year Emperor “exploit” to be insulting to my intelligence as a reader. There’s few quicker ways, than that, to ruin any possible enjoyment of a story.
(that said, your comment prompts me to wonder about the domain of videogames, where there typically isn’t DM judgment restricting XP gain. You’ve also written about World of WarCraft and I find myself curious if the 2 year emperor trick works there)
Most multiplayer games have some way to limit XP gain from encounters outside your difficulty, to avoid exactly this sort of cheesing. The worry is that it allows players to get through the content quicker, with (possibly paid) help from others, which presumably makes it less likely they’ll stick around.
(Though of course an experienced player can still level vastly faster, since most players don’t take combat anywhere near optimally to maximize xp gain.)
That said, Morrowind famously contains an actual intelligence explosion. So you tend to see this sort of stuff more often in singleplayer, I think. (Potion quality triggers off intelligence. Potions can raise intelligence.)
And of course the entire genre of speedrunning—see also, (TAS) Wildbow’s Worm in 3:47:14.28(WR).
It absolutely does not, precisely for reasons #2 and #3 I listed.
Game designers—especially designers of extremely popular games with large budgets and armies of playtesters—do not, as a rule, tend to be idiots. And they would have to be very stupid indeed to allow a very serious and very obvious exploit that has, furthermore, been known for decades.
This is why I find things like the aforesaid Two-Year Emperor “exploit” to be insulting to my intelligence as a reader. There’s few quicker ways, than that, to ruin any possible enjoyment of a story.