DM only thread: In game use of Items (obviously Spoilers)

Hi,

Before I start I want to be clear. I will be talking spoilers here and this thread is only for dms.

Ive run a lot of games of AL now and given out a lot of Expeditions/AL scenario items. I have 2 rogues for example that use a certain +1 Drow origined Rapier in my 5-10 tables. I have recently had a Barbarian/Druid on one of my tables who took the Staff of Swarming Insects as the perm item in a previous game. (Occupation of Szith Morcane)

So I ran Herald of the Moon for the second time recently. This character has the item and started during the adventure declaring he was picking up and storing random insects found in the forest of Cormanthor. I had no issue with that. A Giant insect was used in the ... issue with the Drow (no harpers!). It was actually very useful.

The scenarios results however were not achieved due to some poor dice rolling in the final battle with Meira (the party fled having delivered the coin but not defeating her).

Have any of the other dms out there had an issues with Wondrous/magic items in their games unbalancing things or other? It would be great to know

Matthew

Magic items can certainly tip the balance of the game in the players' favor, and lack of them can do the opposite (mostly when players don't have magical weapons against resistant enemies). Most of the time, minor magic items (+1 weapons and such) won't affect balance a great amount, but certain ones can drastically affect the game. I ran Herald of the Moon with two Dawnbringers in the party, and there are more than a few enemies in there that aren't fond of sunlight, turning those fights into cakewalks. Similarly, I played through Quest for Sporedome with my sorcerer who has a Shield Guardian, and that thing carried the team more than some of the PCs.

My advice is simply to adjust encounters with magic items in mind. The DM in the Quest for Sporedome, for example, ended up counting the Shield Guardian as an extra character for the purpose of determining party strength. If you see magic items making the adventure too easy (e.g. Dawnbringer vs an adventure full of sunlight sensitivity), make encounters a little harder to compensate. Similarly, if lack of magic weapons makes certain enemies too hard (e.g. Scarecrows in Quelling the Horde), reduce enemy strength or replace resistant enemies with extra copies of weaker ones to compensate.

The Wand of God Slaying(viscid globs) is one of the worst offenders IMO.

My AL polearm fighter has Dwarven Plate, a Ring of Free Action, and Gloves of Swimming and Climbing. terrain-based encounters are pretty common. He is very hard to slow down.

The point of magic items in 5th Edition is to make PCs more powerful than the norm.

In a home game where the main point is to have a fun exciting challenging time, the DM can certainly up the challenge to compensate (since there won't be another, non-magic-item-laden party, to suffer against this harder challenge). The DM could run an adventure designed for more characters and/or characters of high level and/or simply add more monsters.

But in AL I suppose the point becomes: if you have powerful magic items, the adventures for your level are supposed to become cake-walks. That is what a magic item does. A regular magic item makes your life easier. A extraordinarily powerful item (such as a Sun Blade at low level) makes your life extraordinarly easy.

You can't both have the cake and eat it too. If you have super-powerful items, don't use them if you want a challenge.

CapnZapp said:

... You can't both have the cake and eat it too. If you have super-powerful items, don't use them if you want a challenge.

Click to expand...

I agree. One of my characters has the Wand of Viscid Globs and it can outright break most encounters. So I choose to only use it in dire circumstances to keep my DM from pulling his hair out. Since it's a drow item I play it as my character (a gnome) is reluctant to use such magic unless absolutely necessary.

I've mentioned before the GenCon adventure where a dude playing a gnome conjuror basically trolled the entire party until one of my buddies actually threatened his character unless he played as a team player again, while convincing another buddy that he'd rather suicide his character than play out the full adventure. This would have been a lot harder to do without the benefit of the Staff of Defense from an AL-legal, but not AL-produced, adventure.

NeverLucky said:

The DM in the Quest for Sporedome, for example, ended up counting the Shield Guardian as an extra character for the purpose of determining party strength.

Click to expand...

This is a brilliant and elegant solution to this problem -- kudos to the DM. The practical effect will be to raise the total XP for the party (since the shield guardian doesn't get XP), but that works out well for everyone, as the group is simply more likely to reach the XP cap, which is good.

Similarly, if lack of magic weapons makes certain enemies too hard (e.g. Scarecrows in Quelling the Horde), reduce enemy strength or replace resistant enemies with extra copies of weaker ones to compensate.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, AL doesn't give DMs the authority to 'swap out' one monster for another in an adventure (which you'd have to do in the encounter being discussed, as there are no weaker monsters in the encounter to transition to). However, there are other things you can do even in this situation (spoiler alert, despite the entire thread basically already having a spoiler tag):

- If you've prepped the mod beforehand, you can place temporary items to aid the party's tactics. For instance, describe a guttering torch with the Continual Flame spell on it in the intact shed, and have the scarecrows refuse to attack a character who carries it (both because they are afraid of the fire, and because of its connection to the rituals it had been used with). Once the scarecrows are destroyed, the magic of the torch expires and it becomes a valueless item, preserving the rule that a DM not add treasure to an AL module.

- Don't have the monsters use optimal tactics. Just because a scarecrow has Multiattack doesn't mean it ever has to use it unless you decide it would. Also, give the scarecrows the ultimate case of OCD, attacking mainly at random and provoking lots of opportunity attacks -- dealing half damage is less of a problem when the party is making twice their normal number of attacks.

- Make an ad-hoc ruling. The AL explicitly allows DMs to make rulings on situations the rules don't cover. Is there a penalty to a scarecrow's attack and damage rolls following a rainstorm? The rules are silent, so it's up to you to decide. (Edit: use this with caution -- if you make such an ad-hoc ruling, your regular players may expect the same ruling to be available in later modules where the reason -- helping balance an encounter for a weak party -- isn't applicable. Be prepared to explain why the ad-hoc ruling you make today might not apply in later modules.)

- Guide the party away from encounters that would overwhelm them. If, after your best efforts, you just can't see the party overcoming even the weaker challenge you want to put in front of them, give them something more interesting to pursue. The scarecrows in Quelling the Horde, for instance, are in the wheat fields behind the farm buildings -- if the party never goes there, because they're more interested in following the path the ranger found that leads farther up the road, then they won't get wiped out by the powerful encounter they never had to face. Be cautious when using this approach, as it does cost XP for the party to 'skip' encounters in this way and leads to a greater likelihood of the party gaining minimum XP for the adventure, but some parties may not mind (a party of all 1st level characters, for instance, will all make 3rd level at the end of Quelling the Horde, even if they only earn minimum XP; most groups will be pretty happy about that, even if they might have liked to earn more).

--
Pauper