I had my familiar actually knocked unconcious (leaving behind a body/etc that was called my familiar's name but onconcious) and recieved no XP penalty. I then used the summon feature to re-summon it and it died again with no XP penalty. The second time didn't leave a corpse however.
Now however every time I kill an NPC I get a warning that I have 249 XP penalty remaining, killing an NPC doesn't remove the penalty, but every time an NPC dies in my proximity I get the notification and no XP. The number doesn't seem to change or anything.
I still get full exploration XP and the "Turn in quest" style XP for rats in the sewers is still XP I recieve, but when NPCs die I get the message.
Not sure if DM fixable or what but figured worth a post. I've not summoned my familiar since the incident so don't know if that accounts for anything.
I've had a lot of experience with familiars dying... Seldin died 10+ times. Empirical evidence suggests to me that the system works like this:
- If the XP penalty would not drop you a level, then the XP is taken immediately
- If the XP penalty would drop you a level, then the XP isn't taken immediately; It becomes a debt that you must pay back; Every time you kill an NPC, whether you got XP for it or not, you will get a message explaining how much XP debt you owe.
This was probably in place to keep people from re-rolling HP, and exploiting the scribing and learning of Wizard spells, etc.
If the XP you make on quests is not going towards the debt, then I'd assume that there is a bug. With Seldin, XP I made on quests went towards paying the debt.
Hope that was helpful in some way.
Fixed! Thanks. No bug.