Difficulty settings and EXP

[Endugu]

Hi there!

As Ive noticed changing the difficulty setting in Icewind Dale (HoW) also changes the amount of experience points the party recieves for defeating foes or fulfilling quests.
However, unlike whats said in the manual, if I lower the difficulty, I get more exp, not less!
I dont know the exact multiplier, but it seems to me that you recieve the normal exp while playing on "normal" and one step harder or easier gives you the 1.5 exp. Lastly, playing on the hardest/easiest setting seems to reward the party with the double amount of the experience point normally gained.

I dont really see the point of this, as it makes the game on higher difficulty not that much harder, since your characters will be reaching higher levels more rapidly.
And on the other side, playing on "easiest" makes the game very easy, since not only the monsters are less tough, but the chars will again be reaching higher levels more rapidly.
Not to mention its tempting to set the difficulty higher/lower just before talking to Arundel after youve completed a quest...
Is all of this a known bug or an intentional design decision?

And does anyone know if theres a mod or something similar out there that just removes the changes to the distributed exp on all difficulty settings, like they handled it e.g. in IWD2?
Or is there a way I can do so myself (with an editor or similar)?

[Aerich]

I didn't know about the XP getting higher on Easy, but I'm pretty sure it's a game design.

XP is awarded differently in 2nd Ed D&D (IWD/HoW) compared to 3rd Ed (IWD2). It's set XP vs. a sliding scale.

Normal gives you 1.0, Hard gives 1.5, Insane gives 2.0. Have you played on Insane? Monsters do double damage, although they don't have increased HP, to my knowledge. There are also more of them - 4 ogres instead of one in the cave outside Easthaven, for example. It's quite a bit harder at the start than it is later on, for precisely the reason you mentioned. However, it's still harder in the sense that if you make a tactical mistake you get killed quicker, as you have less margin for error.

I've played the whole way through on Insane before, and one of the toughest fights was against the roomful of jackalweres (top left of that level) in TotL. The extra spellcasters with the big 4 in Lower Dorn's were a bit of a shock as well.

[Endugu]

Thanks for your reply.

Yeah, recently started a game on insane and noticed the four ogres in the cave as well.

Still, I dont see how this has something to do how AD&D 2E handles exp compared to D&D 3E? As far as I know, the only difference is that in its recent versions, all classes need the same amount of exp to level up.
So I dont see, why the "hard", "insane" etc cant work in IWD like they do in IWD2. But I guess theres nothing I can do about it anyway.