This isn't done yet, but whatcha think of what I have so far?
OK first of all, I gotta say it's time to take a step back and take a deeeeep breath. I can tell that Vince is getting a bit carried away, and being none too polite anymore (all this talk of us being heavy-handed, arbitrary and unfair?), so I gotta make something clear.
1) We can't get ahead of ourselves. Some assumptions are being made about things without asking for clarification.
2) 4 is the party standard. Period. It's not negotiable. 4 *is* the "sweet spot". It's been the basis for everything D&D for as long as I remember. The CR rating of creatures itself is based on parties of 4. With a party of 4 you can have a fair distribution of classes, you have an opportunity to use your brain (tactics), and you can actually make a hack-n-slash run something suitable for a role-play world. Add to that that it is easier for our scripter(s) to define a system with this as the foundation, and this is all I need to know that it's the right thing for Alventyr.
3) RP XP will be the same for everyone. It's totally seperate from kills, and thus will not be altered by party size.
4) You can't think of party size XP in terms of getting an XP "bonus" either. When you are in a party of 4 you get [b]normal XP[/b]. When you are in a party of less or more, the XP will change.
5) We are definitely encouraging people to party. That is the kind of server we want to run. We do NOT want to encourage soloing, but we DO want to encourage partying. Granted, at first we may not have a ton of people online all the time, but I am willing to bet that when they get into the world, they won't care about what rate of Xp they are getting because we are trying to make the world as immersive as we possibly can.
Vince, you should know this better than anyone. You are one of my most active content providers, and your excitement about bringing the world to life and how that will affect the players is what we are all about.