I was just saying in the 2nd Ed vs the FFG ed that I wasn't taught about gaining experience when I played Talisman as a kid, so when I got the 4RE it was quite new to me that you got experience when you have 7 STR/CRF worth of trophies. Oddly enough I find it less fun being able to level so easily, rather than relying on the objects you find, the various streams (oh how you wanted to be cursed at the time if you drew a stream) and gaining the odd stat increase by going to the crags, the forest or a helpful stranger.

The other night my wife and I played the a short game with the Dungeon for the first time, using the suggest house rules that were proposed over at BGG by jober72:

1) Increase the starting stats (Strength and Craft) with 2 or 3 points each. Alternatively give the players 3 or 4 points to distribute between Strength and Craft. This way it will be reasonably easy to kill at least some of the encounters.
2) To make it more possible to catch up with a high level character, use a progressive number for the value required to gain new stats. For instance require current value plus two to gain stat (i.e 5+2=7 to go from Craft 5 to 6 and 10+2=12 to go from Craft 10 to 11)

For the first one we did 3 points to distribute as you please, so as I had a wizard I did 2 strength and 1 craft so I might survive a couple of the Dungeon monsters. In terms of the short game it was a good idea and really helped.

Now the 2nd rule I really liked, I thought it gave more balance to gaining stat increases and is more inline with what I grew up with in roleplaying games where it got progressively harder to gain levels. While I'd still prefer to play without the trophy system I suspect we'll use this house rule going forward.

What do others think about gaining experience? Do you use the trophy system? Do you ignore it or use something like above?

In the old days (2ED days) you could gain only Strength by fighting. The Craft was much harder to get. 4ED did make game a little easier by introducing Craft Trophies.

I probably ranted about it somewhere already so bear with me In the old days we played very long sessions of Talisman, sometimes a whole weekend. We were adventuring and not running for the Crown so the Characters were getting ridiculously strong. Among other house rules we were using a sort of progressive Strength gain. In our case though it was designed to slow down the progress of the strongest Characters. You needed Trophies for double your Strength to gain one more point (so 8 to go from 4 to 5, 12 to go from 6 to 7 etc.). Side effect of this rule was of course much easier Strength gain for weak Characters. It was a breeze before you got to Str 4.

I didn't have a chance to play such a long session of 4ED so I'm not sure how would this house rule work with it. Balance of the game changed since 2ED although I can't quite put my finger on it.

i sort of like the double to get the trophies