Leveling and Items

I'm coming a little late to the discussion, but I'm very glad to see it's happening, since this has been on my mind recently.

I agree that we're consistently under-rewarding treasure in L4W. Time XP is part of it, but I have a feeling that it's only part of the story. I think that a lot of DMs -- myself included -- are being cautious, trying not to over-reward players and unbalance them relative to other players.

In 3.5, there was the concept of average wealth by level, laid out in tables in the DMG. As a DM, you could keep an eye on your players' wealth, and try to adjust it so that it was at least within squinting distance of that number. In 4e, the only equivalent concept is the starting equipment from DMG p.143. That information is kind of off for low levels, but I think it's still a useful number. If people were to calculate on their sheets their "expected" wealth by level, as well as their current total wealth, then DMs would have an easy concrete way to tell how poor they were. For example, a new player starting at level 3 would have, in addition to mundane items, 520g, plus magic items at level 2, 3, and 4, for a total on-paper value of 2560g. You'd calculate your actual wealth by level by adding the price of all your non-mundane treasure and coins. E.g., Quagmire's wealth, close to level 3, is... 28g. Er, not a great example. Raiyek, at level 2 and change, looks like 743g. If Quagmire were to suddenly lay his hands on a +2 vicious rapier (level 7), his wealth would go up to 2628.

I imagine we probably wouldn't expect characters' actual wealth to catch up to their expected wealth until level 4 or 5, and maybe not even then, depending on circumstance. On the other hand, we wouldn't panic of it went over their expected wealth, either. But having the numbers somewhere visible might make it easier to nudge things in the right direction. E.g., DMs could calculate that Raiyek's wealth of 743g is 39% of his expected wealth at level 2 of 1920g, and at the end of his next adventure when he's just shy of level 3, aim to have him at 75% of his level 3 expected wealth. 2560*0.75=1920, so he'd try to arrange 1920-743=1177g of treasure for Raiyek in that time. Say, a level 5 magic item and 200g in coins, or something.

More ideas about how to accomplish this, but that's worth a separate post.

About how to actually accomplish giving more treasure, I have two ideas.

First, time gold. Part of the problem with the disparity between XP and treasure awards is that DMs are constantly forgetting to factor in time XP in their treasure plans. Also, time XP isn't easily predictable in advance, and DMs also consistently underestimate how long their game is going to take in calendar time. But DMs are pretty good at calculating treasure packets for the actual encounters in their games. So, if were were to award gold along with XP for calendar time spent adventuring, it would go a long way towards fixing the balance. Time xp is basically 1/12 of a level per calendar month, so we could calculate time gold that way, too. E.g., the difference in expected wealth between level 10 and 11 is 19900g, so each month of play for a level 10 character would earn them 1658.33g. We'd have to adjust a bit at low levels, since the curve gets strange there, but it's doable.

Thematically, the idea is that, contrary to appearances, adventurers don't spend their downtime between adventures just sitting on their butts drinking, they do odd jobs. Cleaning rats out of the cellar, cleaning skeletons out of old tombs, cleaning excess gold out of unwary merchants' purses, threatening small children for their lunch money; that sort of thing. For this, they get a steady trickle of xp -- and gold. Time XP is an imperfect model of this sort of thing, but... *shrug*.


Second idea is just double treasure packets. It seems like for most adventures, time XP turns out to be about half the total xp reward, give or take. If we just told DMs to plan on giving double the recommended treasure packets for their encounters, we'd probably come out with something reasonable.

Some good ideas there, cov. If we do gold rewards with time XP (which is an idea that I like), we should give gold rewards when DM credits are spent as well, because there's basically no opportunity for DM credit XP to get the equivalent treasure rewards until after they're spent anyways.

However, I think I'd go for a different approach for calculating expected wealth. If you take the total of the "new starting character" wealth and compare it to what the character could have expected to bring in by adventuring to that level, low level new characters are significantly ahead and high level characters end up behind. (Does that make sense?)

What I'd do if it were just me running things would be to take the value of the monetary treasure for a level and divide by 5, and then keep a running sum. That's approximately how much gold your character should have received (not counting magic items, and not counting what they've spent) during their adventures to get to whatever level they're at. We could add up the magic item values and divvy that up, too, but I'm more inclined to just let the magic item loot be handled by DMs to keep characters roughly even.

Anyway, some numbers. If we were to do my method without counting magic item loot:
2nd level should have received a total of 144 gp
3rd - 352 gp
4th - 623 gp
5th - 959 gp
...
Note this is purely income - it doesn't count players spending gold on potions or a new axe or whatever, or even on a new magic item.

With magic item loot, here's the numbers:
2nd level should have received a total of 752 gp (including magic items value)
3rd - 1824 gp
4th - 3343 gp
5th - 5439 gp
...
What I don't like about including the magic loot is that the character who is at the average number will be rare. Whoever gets the highest level item for a given level's loot will be significantly ahead of whoever didn't get an item that level. It will probably take until level 5 or so for the numbers to balance out, but there will still be spikes and dips if you follow the parcel rules.

I like the gold with time xp idea, and would assume that it would apply to DM credits as well since DM credits are traded in for time xp.

LS brings up something I was thinking about regarding parcels and shifting parties.

since people won't stay in the same party or with the same DM the whole evening out of different level items seems that it would be a problem

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to ditch the parcel system for a living game. Perhaps, instead of a level 1 adventure rewarding a lvl5, lvl4, lvl3, and lvl2 items, what if the adventure just dropped 5 lvl3 items wouldn't that kinda even things out?

Well ... I suppose it could work better if the items were all the same level, but I'm not sure we need to do that. It also eliminates a lot of the variety in magic items, which is something I want to keep.

I still think that DMs can even up the score. Even if they end up handing out more or less items than the parcels dictate, as long as the characters end up where they should I think that's fine.

If you think about it, to even the score up as much as possible, you could think of magic items in either gold values or level values. Over a given level, the 'typical' party should get X amount of magic items, so each character should get X/5 amount of items.

Probably the easiest way to balance it would be to just ignore the actual levels of magic items given out and look at them based on the character's level at the time they got it. Over 5 levels, each character should get, lets say, one N+1 item, one N+2 item, one N+3 item, and one N+4 item, where N is the character's level when they received the item. Done. If a DM gets a party that all have all four of their items for whatever level span they're in, then he doesn't hand out any items. If they all happened to be the 'man out' beforehand, then he hands out an extra item to compensate. Or is that too complicated?

The parcel system is designed for a PC staying with the same party/DM over a period of time. But looking at the Living FR campaign guide, it appears they use pretty much the same system there. So, it might just be advantageous to have DMs submitting adventures discuss their rough parcels so we can insure they are at least thinking about the issue initially.

GP with time (and DM credits) is good. I might take the monetary treasure and the gp value of one level n+1 or n+2 item to account for item discrepancy especially in the case of DM credits. This discussion, after all, is something I'm thinking about for LEB as well.

I like the Time GP idea as well. Good idea, cov.

DarwinofMind said:

I like the gold with time xp idea, and would assume that it would apply to DM credits as well since DM credits are traded in for time xp.

LS brings up something I was thinking about regarding parcels and shifting parties.

since people won't stay in the same party or with the same DM the whole evening out of different level items seems that it would be a problem

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to ditch the parcel system for a living game. Perhaps, instead of a level 1 adventure rewarding a lvl5, lvl4, lvl3, and lvl2 items, what if the adventure just dropped 5 lvl3 items wouldn't that kinda even things out?

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In the one game I DM'ed from the start, I awarded each of the five characters a level 2 or 3 item. I was going to give them all level 2 items, but this was before AV was approved, and I just didn't have enough variety from just the PHB magic items to keep it all to level 2. So yeah, I agree, giving all PC's the same level (or within one level of each other) of loot works better than the n+1 / n+2 / n+3 / etc. system in a Living World with shifting parties.

Atanatotatos said:

Yeah...
*glances at Phoenix*

joking. Sorta.

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Yes, I know I've been stingy with the magic items. But I knew ahead of time that there was going to be a dragon at the end and therefore I wanted a decent horde to reward you all with. Most of the treasure from this whole adventure is soon going to be found in one lump sum... Of course, Kartharath may be back someday to try and take it back from you all...

IF she manages to get away, you mean...

I too am a fan of the gold/time award exp. I think DMs should get the gold as well. As far as magic items go, if DMs were to look at the CSs of the PCs for the adventure, with judge approval treasure parcels can be to who needs it.