How does party xp work

[robertthebard]

I was fooling around on another server that I play on, and got invited to join a party. I went where he was and he just wanted me to stand around and let him fight the boss monster, so he could get experience. What's up with that? Isn't it like in BG, where the party splits exp. Also, it was a party vs party mod, do you get exp for killing other pc's in that kind of situation. Note: This is a server vault, and he was a lvl higher than me, so it would have been a fair fight, not just me being a pk.

[Legolas]

It really depends on the server. There are two widely used ways of dividing experience.

The first one is the one where they hate the idea of low level characters tagging along with the big boys, letting the high level characters kill tough monsters and leveling up really fast.
Servers like that often award XP to individual players. You dealt the killing blow, you get the reward.

The second one is the standard approach, where everyone gets experience as long as they are near. The amount of experience they get depends on their level and the levels of others in the party. Basically, the higher the level, the larger the share of XP you receive. A level 1 character tagging along with a level 20 character gets next to nothing, whereas 3 lvl 4 characters and one lvl 6 character will all get a decent share.

On individual servers, you may see that everyone in the party gets an equal amount of experience, or that only parties where the partymembers are no more
than 6 levels apart gain experience. Sometimes no XP is handed out at all, and DMs keep an eye on the players and decide when and how much XP they deserve for their actions and RPing. There are lots of different possibilities.

In your case, it may be that only those who fought get experience, or only the one that dealt the killing blow does, and your friend wanted to make sure he was the one to deliver it.

As for killing other players, yes, you should get experience for that. Although I've yet to encounter any PKs (I hide in the roleplay modules section) or get one of my characters involved in a duel with another adventurer...

[robertthebard]

The second time I was in that world, I hooked up with a guy who kinda just had me for back up, and I leveled up really fast, for about 4 lvls, so I think that the exp is split. I had a really cooperative partner on that server, and we split xp fairly evenly, as far as I could tell, and we did split duties on the killing too. We also had a stack of raise deads, as it was a pretty dangerous place. I just didn't get the logic of inviting me to join a party, and stand around just doing nothing so that he can gain levels. I really wanted to do him in, but I just left the party and left. Thought about going where he was after I left and killing what he was fighting, but didn't want to be childish, which is why he walked out of there in one piece, as far as me doing anything to him. What gets into people? I spend a lot of time developing my characters too, but I'm the first one to want to party up in a mod, especially a hard one. Thanks for the info though, sure to come in handy.