Dungeons and Dragons Online: Join the beautiful game

The XP report is accessed by pressing "x" and serves as your "scorecard", keeping a running tally of your base and bonus XP as you progress. Bonus XP on the report is given as a percentage of your base XP, running anywhere from 8% to 25% depending on what you accomplish. A good policy is "kill and smash everything," because the more you do, the higher the XP bonus. The only time this is an exception is during a few quests here and there where you are specifically asked by the NPC to take care to not destroy or kill. In those cases, the quest instructions will be very clear as to what you need to do, so you don't have to worry about mistakenly failing the quest because you didn't know.

Smashing breakables have another bonus: loot! Breakables such as barrels, vases, crates, and sarcophagi all have a chance to drop loot -- mostly cash or potions -- as well as the occasional angry skeleton. Be prepared to defend yourself if you happen to be in a crypt, but for the most part just be prepared to pick up lots of goodies. Enemies can also drop loot in the form of small purple treasure bags, which are different from breakables in a very significant way: there is one for everybody in your group. If you're in a group of six people and pick up the bag, the other five people in your party will still see it and everyone gets their very own. The bags almost exclusively contain collectibles, so if you've set your collectibles bag to auto-gather like we talked about last week, the item won't take up any extra inventory space. Feel free to pick up as many as you can find!

Your XP report also shows bonuses if you do the entire thing with no re-entries and no deaths. They're pretty self-explanatory, but I'll hit a few high points of how to make sure you acquire your bonuses. If everyone in the group has run a particular dungeon 5-6 times before, feel free to zerg to your heart's content. In those cases, everyone knows "Okay, take a right, then a left, then stop because there's a trap at that crossroads and we have to go around." In other cases, it's okay to take your time and pay attention. If you come to a big empty room with a shiny, tempting chest at the far end, guess what? It's a very very bad idea to go charging in because it's not going to end well for you. Send in the rogue to scout it out first, or at the very least proceed slowly to see what happens. Traps in particular can mean instant death if they catch you unaware, and if your entire group dashes in and gets wiped out by a trap, you'll be forced to re-enter from a tavern, thereby losing both your persistence and flawless victory bonuses. Better to take your time if you don't know for sure that an area is safe. Sending someone in to disable traps will also help out that tamper bonus on your XP record.

While we're on the subject of taking your time: explore! Unless you're in a timed dungeon, it is going to be well worth it to hit the M key and look at your map to see where you have not been yet. Visit those places. Often you will find additional (optional) objectives that will net you extra XP. You also stand a high chance of finding secret doors that will increase the XP on your scorecard, rare encounters that come with chests full of loot, and more monsters that will increase your XP and give loot. One more quick loot tip while I'm at it: if you see something on the ground, be it a plant, furniture, or just a pile of rubble, don't overlook it. If it's sparkly (I refuse to make a vampire joke, sorry), go over there, pick it up. More loot!

Dungeons and Dragons Online is a beautiful game, DDO Plat is what you really need and most of their dungeons were created with exploration in mind. Visit all the little nooks and side tunnels, explore the contents of rooms, and scout for secret doors.