3rd Edition too quick? too powerful?

[Piratecat]

This will put you roughly in 1st edition territory.

Heh - in my opinion, this was a major weakness of 1e. The lack of consistent advancement throttles any interest in higher-level play. I personally think a DM would be far better to simply divide xp by 2, or 4, or whatever in order to slow advancement down to the appropriate level.

Let's say you play every week and want your players to level up 4 times a year. Roughly 50 games a year = 4 levels, so assign xp in such a way that they gain a level every 12 sessions. This works really well for me.

 

[Breakdaddy]

Re: Re: 3rd Edition too quick? too powerful?

They've got between 1000 and 2000 in gold & equipment each. At this point, they all have masterwork weapons, and the tank has masterwork armor. They haven't seen a single magic weapon in use or for sale, nor have they seen a magic shop, though there are plenty of apothocaries and a few alchemists.

Damn, I though *I* was a stingy DM with magic items. By level 4 my guys had a +1 magic dagger and even some +1 arrows! I salute you for your restraint and especially for being able to pull that off without having your players start a minor revolution against you!

 

[Arnwyn]

I have found that reducing all XP (and treasure, if you insist on going by the 3eDMG treasure tables) by a comfortable (for you) percentage has worked very well.

I, too, was very unhappy with the ridiculously-fast level advancement of 3e. However, I discovered simply reducing XP rewards by 50% put the character advancement at a much more tolerable level. This has worked wonders.

As for magic items, I require PCs to buy and build a lab/altar (using the rules from the 2e book "Spells & Magic"). This forces PCs to be of higher level (to accumulate the necessary wealth) before they can start creating magic items. This has also worked very well for me in controlling the appropriate levels of magic for my campaign. (There were also side benefits, such as building a base of operations and getting ties to the community - something they wouldn't have done otherwise.)

As to your players complaining about "equal CR/EL encounters"... Not sure if I can help there. My players don't know the MM and certainly aren't competent enough to memorize and calculate the EL of a particular encounter in their heads, so I guess I'm lucky. And players, being players, sometimes complain. I just tell my own players they're all "sucky-whineys" (they're my buddies and grown adults) and we all laugh and continue on. As Psion noted, the DMG doesn't call for all encounters being equal to party EL, so I'd tell them that if they insist on opening their pie-holes.

 

[Victim]

Sure, advancement may be a little fast. However, that doesn't mean fast advancement is bad. Wizards' research indicated that most campaigns last around a year or so. So the rules were designed so that people could play through all the levels in that time.

For example, I'm going to college right now. Because I can only play at home when on vacation, playing time with my brother is his group is very limited.

In my group at school, multiple people want to DM. So time is split between their campaigns. The varying workloads by semester lead to a high turnover rate for players. Also, since one of the DMs is a grad student, his campaigns also have a high turnover rate since they often get interrupted and never resumed.

The only advancement that I'll notice is fast advancement.

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At low to mid levels, character wealth seems about on par, or even less than previous editions.

At high levels, everyone just accepted that magic users would rule. Since 3e is supposed to be more balanced, they roughly figured out how much stuff was needed to balance the 2. As it turns out, that's quite a bit of magic stuff, because a fighter's benefit at level 16 is pretty much the same as at level 4 while the wizard is tossing around more spells and more powerful spells. Without a radical class redesign, large numbers of powerful magic toys are needed to give classes without magic ability enough abilities to make them worthwhile at high levels.

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People who want fights where CR = party level are big babies. Not only are really tough battles more worthy tests of ability, more heroic and more noteworthy in the campaign world, they also provide more XP and treasure.

 

[Gothmog]

Wow navriin, you have hit the 4 major things I disliked about D&D and changed. I should say my group doesn't match the core demographic in any way, shape or form- the game we are playing now started in 2E 11 years ago, and is still going strong (PCs about 10-11th level).

Experience: As has been said before, don't use the DMG values for XP per CR. Yes, 3E characters level WAY too quickly for my tastes, so reduce XP gains from the table by 1/2 or 2/3. Or, do what I do and don't give XP for killing things, but for solving story objectives and accomplishing goals. It does help- there isn't as much incentive to go hack-n-slashing about on the PCs part. I give about 1/3 the normal XP the DMG says to, so it takes about 3-5 adventures to level up.

Wealth & magic: I use a silver standard, and I don't use the suggested wealth by level info in the DMG. I run a low-magic game, and having hordes of wealth in the pocket of ever kobold is just silly. 3E assumes an untra-high magic setting, but there is nothing wrong with scaling the wealth down. I give about 1/3 to 1/4 the suggested wealth. True, PCs won't have as many magical goodies this way, but its not much harder on the DM at all- he just needs to take into account that he won't be using too many iron golems or high powered critters in a game with lower magic levels. I think a lot of people feel magic is mundane in 3E, which IMO is a change for the worse. Restrict item creation feats, require very rare components to make an item (not just x gold and XP), and you solve a lot of the problem. Also, don't let players read through the magic item lists in the DMG or you are going to end up with no end of twinkery- the "but I want a +2 holy flaming burst greataxe of speed, and it says in the DMG that it only costs 200,000 gp- no problem!!" Bah.

Suggestions for a lower magic game that I have found work well. 1) Require a spellcraft check for every spell cast equal to 10 + 2(spell level +1). If the check fails, no spell goes off- and only lost the slot on a natural 1, or if the check fails by 10 or more.
2) In order to cast spells, the character MUST take a feat called positive magical aptitude. In addition, it is a feat that can only be taken at 1st level, or after EXTREMELY unusual circumstances might infuse a character with arcane/divine energy.

CR: I had some players complain about the same thing at one point- and I told them CR is a guideline for the DM to determine the power level of an encounter, not a hard and fast rule of what the players should face. As the DM, if I want to give the 8th level PCs 15 orcs because it makes sense for the story, I will. On the other hand, if I put in 6 mind flayers against the same PCs, they had better not try hack-n-slash. The game world exists apart from the game stats- use whatever makes sense for the situation and not what would always be the most appropriate for the PCs to kill.

 

[francisca]

Oh, and a word of warning over making the game "low-magic". It actually makes the spellcasters more powerful, not less. Think about it. In a high magic world, Greater Magic Weapon is more or less useless, since all decent fighters have magic weapons. However, in a low magic world, it's very powerful, since no fighters have magic weapons and it makes a greater difference.

With you all the way. The way I'm handling it is that there just aren't many high level arcane spellcasters. Alot of the high level spells just don't exist. The characters get to do some research, and I plan on using that aspect as a possible campaign hook.

There are no artifacts, either. Basically, this is a world that is just "waking up" magic-wise, and the dieties haven't been too generous in the past either.

So, there are a couple of cabals of arcane casters who are working on research, several churches finding ways to appease the gods to up their power, and all of them will come into play in many ways in the campaign.

I got tired of campaigns where the magic/power in the world was ancient and omnipotent. I was plain sick of the "in the old days, people were *real* powerful, and now we mere mortals quest to find their ancient secrets!" gameplan. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I just needed a change.

So, the PCs in my game are the ones who could say, poke out Vecna's eye and hack his hand off. Or be Vecna, and face the consequnces.

So far it has been fun. The wheels may fall off at some point, I dunno.

 

[Arnwyn]

However, that doesn't mean fast advancement is bad.

Yes it does, if people don't "fit" WotC's nice little demographic (as shown by people uncomfortable with the fast advancement). Not everyone can be shoe-horned into WotC's research results, y'know.

 

[DonAdam]

Let's say you play every week and want your players to level up 4 times a year. Roughly 50 games a year = 4 levels, so assign xp in such a way that they gain a level every 12 sessions. This works really well for me.

Like I said, that's largely the way I do it.

In fact, you almost nailed my numbers exactly, except that I'm a college boy so we do 3-4 levels per school year rather than year.

However, I like having the first edition chart available for several reasons:
1) It's impossible to run 1st edition modules otherwise. If you tried to run, say, Desert of Desolation using the 3e advancement chart, your players would be ridiculously high level by the end of it.
Corollary to 1) 1st edition adventure are way better than 3rd edition ones (no offense PC, Of Sound Mind was quite good, I am speaking generally, or specifically of WOTC modules)
2) I like milking every experience level for all its worth (as in the players getting to use almost all of their abilities in that time), which means increased time between levels when you hit those hardcore exponential power curves
3) Related to 2, because of exponential power curves players have many more options to explore at higher levels, and so I find that they don't get bored at all
4) Also related to 2, any campaign I run builds more and more potential tie-ins as it goes on, constantly growing. This means that plotwise, I have alot more stuff to exploit by the time they reach higher level, so it gives the campaign a better sense of completeness to allow those elements to show up multiple times.

 

[Piratecat]

Yes it does, if people don't "fit" WotC's nice little demographic (as shown by people uncomfortable with the fast advancement). Not everyone can be shoe-horned into WotC's research results, y'know.

There are guidelines in the core rules for adjusting the speed of level gain. You sound offended that you're being "ignored," when this simply isn't the case.

 

[francisca]

Yes it does, if people don't "fit" WotC's nice little demographic (as shown by people uncomfortable with the fast advancement). Not everyone can be shoe-horned into WotC's research results, y'know.

Isn't it nice that we have a sounding board to bounce ideas off and see what sticks? Sure, wizards didn't write 3E to fit Francisca's view of fantasy role playing. Neither did Gygax, Steve Jackson, ICE, FBI, Avalon Hill or anyone else (those bastards!!! ) . I've never had a game that I didn't eventually want to tweak at least a little.

Rule 0: Modify as you see fit.
Francisca's Rule 0.1: Check around ENWorld to see if the wheel you have on the drawing board has already been invented.