D&D 4E 4e's Inorganic Loot System: Yay or Nay?

[Psychic Robot]

Give a knife to a child and the child is more dangerous. Give a knife to THINGU, THE MOUNTAIN THAT WALKS and TTMTW is not substantially more dangerous.

See, now that makes sense to me. Excellent. Actual discussion producing actual results.

Interesting. Interesting.

 

[Dave Turner]

The reason I like the 3e treasure system is because it makes sense for players to pick up the loot that monsters drop. There's no reason a monster wielding a +5 longsword of doom should not actually drop that but instead give a +4 rod of pew-pewing.

You're still stuck in blinkered 3.x/computer gaming ways of thinking. In 4e, there's no need to give a monster a +5 Longsword of Doom. Monsters and PCs don't use the same rules. You don't need to give a monster, even a monster that's an NPC, a +5 Longsword of Doom in order for the monster to be an effective challenge.

So the only reason to give a monster (NPC or otherwise) a +5 Longsword of Doom to wield if there's already an important story reason for the monster to have it. The Longsword is probably a quest item of some kind. In other words, you've already guaranteed that the Longsword is going to be loot, obviating the need to contrive the Longsword's disappearance.

Of course, if the Longsword isn't important to the story, then there's no reason to even describe it to the players. It's not a +5 Longsword of Doom, it's just the sword that Lord Darkness, the vile death knight, uses to slice foes in half. This is 4e; a monster's abilities are inherent in the creature, not the items it wields.

If anyone's throwing around strawmen, it's you.

 

[JDillard]

See, now that makes sense to me. Excellent. Actual discussion producing actual results.

Interesting. Interesting.

And it's great reasoning. However, it's also after-the-fact reasoning added on.

The "real" reason, as far as there is a real reason, is simply a game construction. The numbers they've worked out for monsters and pc's are very specific. The expected range is tiny.

Forget about threshold for a moment. You take a demon who's entry lists a normal sword and then put a +5 one (perhaps an appropriate piece of treasure for the PC's he's fighting) in his hands and that screws up the math. Suddenly he's hitting far more often then he should and doing far more damage then he should.

Conversely, put a +5 sword in the hands of a level 23 fighter and he's doing exactly what he should... hitting just as often and doing just as much damage as the math expects him to.

There's room for a little swingy... but not so much. Threshold makes that happen. It makes it so that you can allow the monsters to use the weapons that the PC's are earning, without making the monsters so much more powerful that it messes up their fairly well-designed challenge system. Without it you can either say: "monsters can't use treasure, otherwise they unbalance the challenge math and screw up everything" or allow something fairly obvious and expected (why wouldn't the goblin leader use that flaming sword +2 in his pile of loot?) to mess up your numbers and make assigning challenge difficulties all that much harder.

 

[Ahrimon]

It might help if you think of them as typed bonuses. Creature X has a natural "enhancement bonus" of +1 and creature Y has a natural "enhancement bonus" of +3. They both pick up a +4 item. Now, because the bonuses don't stack, creature X's numbers increase by 3 while creature Y's numbers only increase by 1.

 

[Terwox]

That doesn't make any sense. Why would a level 1 kobold receive more a benefit from a +4 weapon than a demon lord? Is it because the demon lord is so powerful that the magic weapon doesn't affect its abilities nearly as much as it would a kobold's? Because I could see the reasoning behind that.

That isn't how the magic threshold system works.

The trident isn't magical, the sahaugin wielding it is magical. It is so magical that if it did pick up a +2 (or whatever) trident, it wouldn't be of any benefit. If it picked up a +3 (again, or whatever,) it would be sufficient enough to give an additional +1.

It's not a perfect solution, however, the DM doesn't need verisimilitude, the DM needs a set of numbers that will work that don't become broken when the monster is wielding the parcel as they are supposed to. If you'd like to make those parcels line up with the monsters, cool, it just isn't necessary.

Anyway, the MM also lists the standard equipment the monster has. The parcel system just isn't part of the loot.

More importantly -- how does 3E compare any better at all?? "Recommended wealth guidelines" are a bit lacking. And if you give monsters magic items and have them wield them, it throws off the CR much worse than the 4E magic threshold does. And 2E and 1E... heh.

I spose mine is a bit more TLDR than "a kid can use a magic knife, but THE MOUNTAIN THAT WALKS needs no knife at all." But still... anyway, that's the assumption.

 

[Henry]

Glad to see people are trying to get along. Let's try to keep discussion on topic.

As for me, I like the parcel system because the "wealth by level" charts in 3E was a BEAR for me and my players to keep track of. I don't think a single DM in my group has ever gotten it right, and we've always, ALWAYS overshot the target significantly. At least by the parcel, we might overshoot by a small amount, but not by a huge margin.

Those who don't want to use "parcels" can just treat the top number on the chart as a master value chart, adding in the magic weapons they decide and just divvying up the money across the characters' level as they see fit. Me, I can take one simple parcel, and break it apart a hundred different ways in a single encounter to make it look like there's never been a "parcel" at all. Only the astute DM's could track it back and say "that was parcel number 7, wasn't it?"

 

[eleran]

I completely forgot to answer the question in the title of the OP....



YAY!!

 

[Runestar]

No, really, the default assumption is that the monsters are not using any magic equipment at all. Because of that assumption, they get hidden built-in bonuses to compensate. In the unusual cases where a monster actually is using magic equipment (which indeed is lootable by the PCs), we don't want the magic equipment's explicit bonuses to stack with the hidden built-in bonuses. The magic threshold stuff is just a mechanism to prevent that unintended stacking.

Ordinarily, the staff a monster is using with its "thunderstaff" power is really just a staff. The thunder part comes from the monster and his power. It's no different then if you took a staff from a 1st level wizard who was using it as an implement to cast magic missile. The staff won't let you cast magic missile, it's just a staff.

Actually, I think it is more that any magic items an npc may be using is considered to already have been factored into his stats, rather than you not using them altogether. For example, if you want to give the drow fighter a +2 weapon to make him more effective in combat, simply improve his attack and damage figures by 2 instead. But you still won't get the +2 weapon after defeating him if you don't want the PCs to get it (possibly because all of them are already using +3 weapons or greater and would have no use for it).

You can no longer strip monsters of their gear unless the DM wants you to get those items. Now, you may find that for some reason, you can't loot that thunderstaff from the wizard you just killed. The whole idea is that your party now no longer gets weighed down by lugging around 10+ sets of +1 mithral chainshirts, +1 large shields and +1 rapiers from thoroughly looting the bodies of all the guards they defeated. Now, they just get treasure appropriate for the level, which they can use properly. It is as though all the aforementioned minor eq had somehow consolidated themselves into more expensive magic gear. Nor do you have to keep coming up with reasons why you don't want your party to get that powerful item. They just can't.

 

[ryryguy]

Forget about threshold for a moment. You take a demon who's entry lists a normal sword and then put a +5 one (perhaps an appropriate piece of treasure for the PC's he's fighting) in his hands and that screws up the math. Suddenly he's hitting far more often then he should and doing far more damage then he should.

Conversely, put a +5 sword in the hands of a level 23 fighter and he's doing exactly what he should... hitting just as often and doing just as much damage as the math expects him to.

Reverse engineering things a bit farther... (and this is supported by various designer comments, but I won't be able to link to specifics, sorry):

A problem in the 3e loot system stemmed from the "build NPCs the same as PCs" philosophy. One aspect of that system was that since PCs needed level-appropriate equipment to be effective, an NPC also needed level-appropriate equipment to be effective. A smaller amount, true, but still a significant amount.

This was a definite drawback when it came to controlling loot. That NPC equipment could easily bust the wealth-per-level guidelines. I forget the exact ratio now but I have seen calculations where, if you assume that all the foes for a level's worth of XP were NPCs equipped according to the NPC-wealth-per-level guidelines, the value of all that equipment of loot was far higher than how much the PCs should get for a level according to the PC-wealth-per-level guidelines. Something like three or four times as much.

In short, the need to give NPCs equipment was in conflict with the need to control treasure and PC wealth.

4e's breaking of the "NPCs are built as PCs" paradigm cuts out that problem. Even a 23rd level fighter NPC doesn't need a +5 sword to work now. "NPCs are built as PCs" did have some nice aspects, but this was one of the bad ones. (And of course there were ways for the DM to work around or counteract this problem, but they required extra, not particularly fun effort... the new system just sidesteps it all.)

 

[amysrevenge]

How about this:

In 4E, the onus is on the DM who wants more verisimilitude. The formulae are there so that you can deconstruct NPCs/monsters (ie. that whole magic threshold thing), then give them gear and re-add the numbers to get back to where you started. Now they have gear! Lots of gear. Oodles and oodles of extra gear. How it affects the economy is up to you.

Meanwhile, the DM for whom verisimilitude takes a distant back seat to simplicity is considered the default case - this fellow gets to use the rules as written. PCs and monsters are balanced against each other more-or-less as intended, without needing to tinker very much. Also, the economy works out as intended as well. (Whether that is good or not is moot, it is "as intended").