Simpler Treasure System with (mostly) Random Loot

[eamon]

The new system in three lines:

1. The DM randomizes (most) loot.
2. Items are sold at half price, instead of at 20% of list price.
3. All treasure parcels containing magic items are raised by one level.

A handy link for random loot generation suggested by Obergnom is Quartermaster - Asmor.com. Don't forget to raise only the items by one level; the gold rewards should stay the same!

[sblock=Similar ideas and criticisms]

• CapnZapp suggested simply randomizing loot but handing out 5 times more than normal. This is only just slightly more powerful but more more swingy and doesn't need a sale-price adjustment.
• If you don't like raising items levels by one, I have also figured out an alternative that hands out a few extra parcels instead in this post.
• keterys notes that raising the sale price means that wacky items that might be interesting but not powerful are more likely to be sold, which may be an issue for some. If it is for you, definitely think about something more along the lines of CapnZapp's approach which doesn't modify sale price.

[/sblock]
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...and now for the why's and how's of the above modifications...
Motivation:

I don't like the 4e wealth system much: It presumes that players essentially get items they can really use. But that's problematic:

Problems with RAW:

• It's poor for immersion to have wish-lists. These are boring, and remind you of the fact that your character isn't really in the world, he's finding stuff you prepicked-not what matches the story line.
• It's a hassle for DM that now need to keep a close eye on what they're handing out; handing out useless items seriously gimps players.
• On the other hand, full player-conceived item choice can heavily favor finding exceptionally specific (broken) items.
• Item creation rituals are usually pointless.

I'd like to fix the wealth system. I think it's important to realize what a house rule here should achieve, and particularly what it won't bother trying to achieve.

Aims & Scope of Houserule:

• The wealth system should be more robust in the face of DM laziness, mistakes or simply misunderstanding where a player wants to take a PC: I don't want to have to spend tons of time selecting the right items; if I select nonsense or even occasionally something random, this shouldn't be a major set-back to the party.
• No wish lists should be required or encouraged. Party-tailored items should be rare and used for dramatic effect, not the default. It's always cool to find a great and fitting item, but that should be a real cool find, not the norm (gee, another item that's perfectly tailored to my needs!)
• The system will NOT address the availability of overpowered items. If a 6th level iron armbands is an attractive buy even at 10th level, players will have enough gold to buy this. This fix is about the wealth system, not specific items. On the other hand, since there's no wishlist nor expectation of tailored items, you're no longer in the quandary of either denying a bloodclaw-wielder his weapon of choice or overpowering the PC: you can avoid including it without impacting the wealth system or getting into difficult situatoins. He could buy or forge the item anyhow, but he may get it a bit later (which can be a balancing factor). Really broken items will need to be addressed seperately and not by this fix.

So, these are the aims. Next up, expected wealth by level.

 

[eamon]

Wealth By Level mathematically analyzed.

Item Value By Level:
Items values scale almost geometrically, though there is a bit of a zig-zag (levels 5n+1 and 5n+2 are worth a little more and levels 5n+4 and 5n+5 are worth a little less than expected). For simplicity, I'll just take the average here. Both geometric and arithmetic averages are actually close here; the worth of a n-th level item is about 244 * 5^n/5. This is useful because now we can express everything in terms of #'s of items of the PC's level. I'll call the unit for wealth for a level+0 equivalent item 1ei.

Wealth By Level:
I've looked at expected wealth by level before on the wizard's forums:
Wealth-By-Level guidelines for high-levels...

In short, your wealth should increase by a factor five over the span of five levels, or, on average, by a factor 1.38 each level.

If you look at the DMG guidelines, a character is expected to have a net worth of 2x a level-1 item + a level+0 item + level+1 item. Wealth by level is thus 3.83ei at the start of the level. To maintain parity, thus, you must increase your wealth by 1.45ei (being 38% of 3.83ei) over the span of the level. Any more than this, and you'll be slightly ahead of new characters, any less and new characters will actually have more wealth. I don't think it's good if new characters start off at an advantage, so any guideline should have at least this much. Due to the exponential nature of the curve, if you earn more than this, you'll only be a limited fraction of a level ahead of the curve. Earning a full factor 5 to much each level would represent a 5 level head start, but small errors tend not to matter much (a good thing!).

Treasure Per Level:
The DMG guidelines suggest that a 5-person party finds about the equivalent worth of 11.5 ei. 2ei hereof is in raw wealth (i.e. plain gold or equivalent). So, you find about 2.3ei per person (0.4ei hereof in gold) but gain only 1.45ei: the rest is presumably loss or a head start vs. new characters. In short, you expected to lose no more than 0.85ei; otherwise you'd actually come out ahead by recreating a character (not a good thing for the game). This is about equivalent to selling 1ei, since that's about 0.8ei loss - plus some some extra loss. This will be our key balancing point.

Treasure System Guarantees:
The system should ensure that characters gain at least 1.45ei in wealth but certainly no more than 2.3ei (which would represent the absolutely lossless optimal character that retains full value from all items he ever finds for all levels). The lossless character is not even 1.5 levels ahead of a new character, which demonstrates the stability of the base system. Ideally, earnings would be about 2.3ei, and losses also about equivalent, but that less important, crucial is net wealth.

 

[eamon]

Why the 20% sale price needs to go

Ok, so how can we let PC's gain 1.45 to 2.3ei wealth per level without resorting to wishlists?

Possibility #1: Just Use Gold
We could just hand out 2.3ei of raw gold and let them shop. This just follows the DMG precisely; PC's will be a little weaker because they can't use gold right away but need to find a shop first and/or craft an item (but can't craft higher-level items). On the other hand, they might make a bit better decisions than the DM. (The DM can still restrict availability of specific items from shops and in any case that's not the focus of this house rule anyhow).

While this works, this is boring (we never find items, only gold), and potentially troublesome for roleplaying since it makes it absolutely crucial to have fairly easy access to a magic item shop - and the PC's need to drag around absurd quantities of coinage.

Possibility #2: Just Use More Items
We can't just hand out more items and hope for the best - because of the extreme difference engine in 4e economics, you lose 80% of all worth each time you sell an item. This means that you'd need to hand out almost 5 times more items than usual to compensate if you keep the base system. That sucks, because it makes the system volatile: sure, maybe you can't use all of those items, but if you're getting that many items, all of the sudden maybe you can (through luck or retraining) actually use a few, and that would represent a huge increase in weath; the system isn't very robust. The problem traces its roots to the high cost of selling: the difference between buying and selling is so huge that it makes a big, big difference whether you get the right item, or you just get gunk.

And that's exactly what we want to avoid: it shouldn't dramatically alter balance if you occasionally get something useful or less useful. Selling stuff at just 20% of the list-price causes problems.

Low Selling Price is not Important for Balance
It's worth noting that this big loss isn't necessary for balance. Because the total wealth rises exponentially an fairly rapidly so, any savings you make at low levels quickly become irrelevant at high levels simply because of massive, massive price rises. Even without any buy/sell price difference, you'd still need 5 10th level items to afford just one 15th level item: in short, you just can't reasonably save up low level items to get a big boost later on because higher level items are just that much more expensive. Some value loss is reasonable when buying and selling, of course, but the current approach makes wishlists and/or tailored items critical to reasonable balance.

Recap
Inevitably thus, to permit some random item choice without unbalancing the game and heavily favoring the lucky few PCs versus the unlucky rest, we need to reduce the inefficiency of buying/selling (or disenchanting).

 

[eamon]

Tweaking the Selling Price

Effective Worth of Random Loot
I'm picking a selling price of 50% of the original instead of the RAW 20%. There's no particular reason to pick 50%; but it's easy to calculate, and it happens to be the sell vs. buy ration for scrolls, which nicely fits in, thus. With this new selling price, I'll guess that:

• 10% of all found items are still tailored to the PC (perhaps by shear luck, or because of story-related awards)
• 15% are mostly useful, though not fully worth their cost; let's say they retain 75% of their net worth
• 25% are dubious. These retain 50% of their value, and might be sold, but might not be - it's also just easier to keep stuff and not hunt for a shop.
• 50% are junk and will be sold at 50% of their cost.

Under this (hopefully reasonable) model, the average item will be worth 58.75% of its list price; to get the same net worth as under the DMG guidelines, you'd need to find 70% more items than previously.

Better Selling Price means Less Loss
On the other hand, the old system presumes that you lose up to 0.85ei per level. Let's say that that loss is due to some base costs (rituals, story-related, items becoming less useful as levels rise by competition of slots, consumables) but also due to selling items inefficiently, however. Under the new system, transaction losses will be lower, so PC's should earn slightly less to compensate.

I think a high estimate for transaction loss is 0.8ei, equivalent to selling an item of your level each level. Under that pessimistic assumption, the new system would have only 0.5ei loss, so we can assume 0.55ei total loss. Assuming this (low estimate for) the loss, PC's should earn 1.45ei+0.55ei = 2ei each level. 0.4ei hereof is still in terms of raw gold, so that leaves 1.6ei worth(!) in magic items - still to be compensated by the fact that items you find are no longer tailored.

Recap
At 50% sale price, we need to find 70% more items to compensate for no longer tailoring items. However, loss will be lower, so we no longer need to find 1.9ei but only 1.6ei of items (per level). Since 1.6ei * 1.7 = 2.72ei, per PC, under the new system, you should distribute 2.72ei in items, which is (unsurprisingly) somewhat more than under a non-random system. The amount of gold you distribute remains unchanged at 0.4ei per PC per level.

 

[eamon]

Putting it all together

The old system distributed approx 1.9ei per person rather than the 2.72ei required when you randomize loot. This means that we'll need to add treasure parcels or raise the level of treasure parcels. As it so happens, 1.9ei * 1.38 is only slightly less than 2.72ei: so if a DM simply raises the level of all magic-item parcels by 1, the new system balances out (roughly, it's a tiny bit low, but that shouldn't matter).

That's easy eh?

The Complete System:
If you allow selling items for HALF price rather than one-fifth, and raise all item treasures by one level, and finally choose magic items randomly (e.g. using Asmor's Quartermaster) then the game retains its normal balance. The fact that you sometimes need to sell items you just found is then balanced out by the slight increase in overall treasure and the fact that reselling involves only 50% loss rather than 80% loss. The PC's will need to be able to spend their wealth buying magic items for this to work.

Balance assumption made
You're "random" picks are assumed to roughly ensure that 10% of items are things the PC's would have picked anyhow, and 15-40% of items are things the PC's wouldn't buy, but won't sell even if there's something interesting on offer. By design, however, if you violate this assumption balance will still largely be fine.

For instance, if by chance you give the PC's only trash, they'll be just 15% behind - which is OK. If you accidentally give em 25% perfectly tailored items they'll be 6% ahead. Both of these margins represent a fraction of a single level, in part because sale price isn't all that different from buying price so it's no longer that important to get just the right stuff.

The second assumption made is that most of the loss PC's experience over their career is due to selling due to the difference engine.

Both of these assumptions were chosen conservatively to avoid accidentally overpowering PCs. Also, raising item levels by 1 is slightly less than demanded for balance. That means this new system will most likely produce slightly lower wealth than the DMG system, but with more player flexibility: if you use this system, expect existing characters to look a little more like new characters (that should generally have lower wealth but more appropriate items than naturally grown characters).

[sblock=minor variant]
Raising treasure item levels by one means handing out a parcel of level+6, however, so perhaps that's unwanted. If it is, you can instead add extra parcels equivalent to 0.82ei per person. For various party sizes that's then:

• 1 PC: add a level+0 item
• 2 PC: add a level+2 item
• 3 PC: add level+2 and level+0 items
• 4 PC: add level+3 and level+0 items
• 5 PC: add level+3 and level+2 items
• 6 PC: add level+5 item
• 7 PC: add level+4 and level+2 items
• 8 PC: add level+4 and level+3 items
• 9 PC: add level+5 and level+2 items
• 10PC: add level+5 and level+3 items
• 11PC: add level+4, level+3 and level+2 items
• 12PC: add level+4 and two level+3 items.

This list gives small parties slightly more p.p. that large parties; the idea here being that randomized items are harder on small parties; though even the 1 person party gets just 1ei instead of 0.82ei extra and the 12 person party gets 0.73ei per person.[/sblock]

 

[eamon]

So, what do you think? Is anyone going to try changing sale prices to 50%, raising item treasures by one level and then randomizing treasure?

I hope it'll be a much more natural (and easier to DM) mechanic with similar results to the RAW system.

 

[the Jester]

How do you randomly generate magic items?

I applaud your efforts and look forward to more elaboration on this theme.

 

[eamon]

How do you randomly generate magic items?

I applaud your efforts and look forward to more elaboration on this theme.

You pick whatever you think is interesting, or flavorful given the scenario. Alternatively, if it's a published adventure, you just pick the default item they sometime name (why do they do that in the first place? oh well, handy for this). Or, you open the adventurer's vault, go to the index, pick a page, and roll a few dice to choose a row ;-).

It doesn't really matter. If you think the party should consider some aspect they rarely do, include an item that hints at that. Or pick an item they wouldn't have chosen voluntarily, but might still like - now you can, without nerfing them; since they can just sell it. That platinum pouch is now a fine find. Or a belt of sacrifice.

Since it doesn't much matter anymore what you pick, you can do whatever suits your fancy. Personally, I think it's cool to equip BBEG's with items the player's recognize. Sometimes they (the players) can use the powers, sometimes they can't, but in any case that's not such an issue anymore ;-).

Every once and a while, you can give em something they really want - there's nothing wrong with that; and you're unlikely to manage that much more often than 1 in 10 times even if you try, which you no longer have to...

 

[fuzzlewump]

Cool. I'm interested to know what players would think of this system, rather than wishlists. Personally, I don't even use wishlists, I randomly decide what level items each player will get for the level, they pick what item they want, then I give it out over the course of the adventure. I think the sense of 'wonder' certainly is gone, but it still remains as 'where is the item I picked going to show up?' The key isn't to just randomly place the item, "You pick whatever you think is interesting, or flavorful given the scenario," as you advocate.

I guess that's why I'm interested to see what players would think. One way is fitting the scenario around what the players want (wishlists), and the other is to fit the items around what scenario the DM wants(flavorful to the scenario and storyline that they made up.) Myself, I would find it harder to make up scenarios and items that only I want to see, and even if I did, I don't see how that would be more rewarding to the players.

That said, I definitely think as long as this system ends up at the same place, with the players selling the random crap given to them and picking out what they want anyway, I don't see a problem in general, since the players end up with what they really wanted. Of course, the whole magic shop/department store was never immersive in my mind.

 

[aco175]

First thoughts is that feels right and would be something I would use. Although I did always like random treasure tables, they did sometimes throw some weird things around. I've been finding that I have been giving out less treasure than I 'should' be the last few levels so I created a room where a magic pool allowed one item to raise 5 levels for each person who bathed in the well. Not I always liked random treasure.