Factoring items into balance flawed?

Ruin Explorer said:
I'm specifically asking for guidelines to tell me when, if ever, 20 Ogres will be the equivalent challenge for 5 level X PCs, to 20 Goblins for 5 level 1 PCs. Do you see what I'm asking for here? I want guidelines that suggest the transition of monster from "elite" to "normal" to "minion", and I want to be able to build a challenge with a fight that is mostly minions. If it's not a challenge, then that's not what I'm asking for.
There's mechanical problems with the transition from "elite" to "minion" status, and it has to do with how they were designed. From what we've heard, since elite monsters take up the space of two monsters, they have roughly twice as many HP, they have more actions, but yet the still have about the normal ACs and chance to hit for monsters of their level. Minions don't have a lot of HP, probably don't have more than one attack, may not do a lot of damage individually, but probably also have a fairly normal chance to hit, so that they're not totally irrelevant.

Look at the Pit Fiend. He's got two auras, spends his turn usually attacking twice and then doing one other thing, and can summon 2-8 other monsters. If you finally got to the point where you could fight 20 Pit Fiends, there'd be like 40 auras, 40-160 summoned monsters, and the players would have to wait for up to 60 attack rolls for just the pit fiends' attacks. Most of which would miss, since the Pit Fiend's attack bonuses never increased, even though the party got higher level and probably has better AC. Even 4 or 6 Pit Fiends is probably too many in an encounter.

The reason why you mostly don't fight a boss monster at level 5 and then a dozen of those monsters at level 15 is that the same qualities that make a monster a good boss do not make it good in groups.
 

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Maybe I've seen them and maybe I haven't. Whether or not I've seen fourth edition items, however, I think that historical and an argument from general principle is sufficient to demonstrate that non numerical bonus items will have an impact on power. Consider the following principles:

Magic items are either useful or not.

If the items are useful, then they increase PCs' power.

If the items are not useful, then PCs will sell them and buy items that are useful.

If 4th edition DMG non-bonus magic items are all of the kind that you suggest--you can keep (or buy or create--remember that item creation is supposedly ritual based in 4e, not removed entirely) a magic item in order to do 2d6 damage instead of 3d6 damage with your eldritch blast, then nobody will buy them, nobody will make them, and those who find them will sell them in order to buy better flat-bonus magic items. And within a year, WotC will put out a book with magic items that are actually useful and that people might actually want.

However, history suggests several things:
1. There will be a mixture of power increasing, power reducing, and combat irrelevant magic items in 4e.
2. People will buy, create, and keep the power increasing magic items.
3. People will sell or not bother with the power decreasing magic items.
4. People may decide to splurge from time to time on combat irrelevant items--as long as they're cheap or have clear uses.

That is how it was in 3rd edition. If you did a survey of any decent sized group of gamers, I suspect that you would find plenty of 3rd edition fighter type characters who had +1 flaming, +1 frost, +1 shock, +1 wounding, and most especially +1 holy weapons. You will find very few who bothered with brilliant energy weapons. Likewise, you will find that a very few characters bothered to aquire rods of wonder, but all sorts of characters gravitated to strands of prayer beads, metamagic rods of quicken, empower, maximize, and extend spell. The same with shields. Any survey of mid to level armored characters would find all sorts of animated shields. It would find very very few blinding shields. What's the common denominator in all this? Players gravitated towards the power increasing items and largely ignored the power decreasing items (like the blinding shield).

For that matter, that's the way it worked in 1st and 2nd editions as well. You saw all sorts of longsword wielding characters, dual wielding characters, and bladesingers because those were the most powerful options. In first edition most fighters ended up wearing plate mail--or maybe field plate if it was available--because that was the best armor out there.

Now, as for the 4th edition items article. Two things. First, I wouldn't believe everything the designers write in those articles. That's marketing material from people whose future income depends upon generating buzz and excitement about the new product while simultaneously degrading and diminishing the old product. I'm sure they're mostly decent people, but the need to put food on the table has a big influence on most people.

Second, I don't think you read the same article that I did. Yes, one of their goals is to make characters abilities more a function of their class than their items, but they also said criticized items that "weren't as exciting as magic items should be." How exciting is a ring that does 2d6 fire damage for a character who can do 3d6 eldritch blasts without it? But that's marketing fluff. (Complete with criticizing 3rd edition--if you don't have something bad to say about 3rd edition, don't bother writing seems to be the rule for these preview articles, much like if you don't have something good to say about 4th edition, don't say it is their rule for playtesters). Where they give us a real preview of what we can expect from 4th edition magic items is in the description of items slots: Arm slot items give special defensive effects (shields) or are more offensive. Feet are focused on mobility and special movement modes. Hands help out your attacks or your manual dexterity. Head items increase your mental skills or senses. Waist items are usually about protection, healing, or temporarily increasing your strength. If you ask me, "helping your attacks", "special defensive effects", "increasing your senses", giving special movement modes, and "increasing your strength temporarily" all sound like they would be designed to be useful in combat.

What may be even more relevant to the discussion: The list of items for the 11th level gnome warlock:
Bracers of the perfect shot. Sounds pretty combative to me. Belt of Battle. (Hmm. Maybe WotC actually thinks it's balanced).

Now, comparing the list of magic items is also interesting from if you think that 3rd edition characters positively drip with magic items but 4th edition characters won't. The character is 11th level, which probably is equivalent to something between 7th and 10th level in 3.x. 7th is where it would be if you evaluate the percentage of levels left to go in the base ruleset. And, 7th is right around where the first real transition happens in 3rd edition D&D (as evidenced by the epic 6 movement). So, +3 rod of dark reward, +3 leather armor, +2 cloak of survival, bracers of the perfect shot, wavestrider boots, shadowfell gloves, diadem of acuity, belt of battle, and a bag of holding is 4th edition magic. Curiously, my 7th level paladin who died in age of worms had: +1 returning trident, +1 fullplate, +2 cloak of charism, +1 vest of resistance, boots of striding and springing when he died. So the 4th edition character has nearly double the number of magic items that my (not too unusual) 3rd edition character had. How about the 8th level fighter/scout who replaced him? +2 gloves of dex, +1 frost greatsword, +1 mithral chain shirt, +2 vest of resistance. About the same ratio. Now, in 3.x, that amount of magic seems to take off around 11th-13th level, but at the only data point we have, the 4th edition character seems to have twice as much magic as the 3rd edition character at the equivalent point on the progression.



Hella_Tellah said:
He says without ever seeing 4th edition magic items. Consider this: a hypothetical warlock can use an eldritch blast at will and deal 3d6 damage at the cost of a standard action. He then gets a magic item that allows him to produce a blast of fire that deals 2d6 damage as a standard action. Now, if that 2d6 fire damage item's level is the same as the level at which the warlock's eldritch blast improves to 3d6, he's exactly as powerful as he was before, numerically. He just has the option of using fire instead, and it's not even optimal in most situations. He's a little more effective against white dragons, but not so much that you'll need to completely scrap the CR system.

It's really easy to dream up magic items that don't have a strong net effect on character power; they just need a suitable drawback. Luckily, having an item cost an action is a perfectly scaled drawback, because the item has opportunity cost built in. The character can either use a standard-action power, or she can use the item, and if the item is a little bit weaker than a standard-action power, it won't have a strong impact on balance.

The items you referenced above weren't designed to be power neutral; they were designed to compete with other magic items commonly used in those slots at those prices. They were designed for 3rd edition, a game in which all magic items are expected to increase character power, and in which all characters are expected to absolutely drip with magic items. We have no reason to think 4th edition magic items will be anything like that. In fact, the preview article we saw suggests the opposite.
 

Elder-Basilisk said:
If the items are not useful, then PCs will sell them and buy items that are useful.
This assumes that 4E will continue 3E's default assumption of a magic shop in every village. I'm hoping they won't do that, but we'll see.
 

Look at it this way:

You can balance a game using one of the following assumptions:

1. The PCs will never get better equipment (not even Weapons of Legacy style items that gain power as the wielder gains levels) and will more or less be using the same gear they had at first level.

2. The PCs will gain access to increasingly better equipment at some assumed rate.

Which do you suppose will be closer to how most games play out?
 

Grog said:
This assumes that 4E will continue 3E's default assumption of a magic shop in every village. I'm hoping they won't do that, but we'll see.

This "default" assumption never was explicitly stated. It arose due to the sheer number of items characters acquired over the course of their adventuring career that they had to get rid of.

A large contributor of this phenomenon was the 3e system of advancing NPCs according to the same rules as PCs. As such NPCs were virtually required to be dripping with magic items to be a suitable challenge. PCs killed them, got a bunch of +1 things they don't need and want to sell and POOF, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe is born and magic becomes a commodity.

Ironically, fixing this (by divorcing NPC stats from the same advancement system that PCs use) is decried by the same 4e skeptics that also demand an end to the "Magic Shop Problem". WotC just can't win.
 

Elder-Basilisk said:
Consider the following principles:

Magic items are either useful or not.
Here's where I start having problems. Often, it's not a case of useful or not. It's normally a case of more (or less) useful than another similarly-priced item, or useful at 4th level, but not so useful at 8th level, or extremely useful, but only in a very rarely encountered situation.

If the items are useful, then they increase PCs' power.
While technically correct, this does not present the entire picture. The more critical question is how much of a PC's effectiveness relies on his magic items. If the game is designed so that magic items can increase a PC's effectiveness by at most 20% (due to body slot or activation requirements that impose limitations on how many magic items can function together, metagame guidelines such as wealth levels or magic item levels that limit how many magic items of what power a character is expected to possess, etc.), then a character with optimal magic items still will not be overwhemingly better off than one with no magic items at all. This to me is what is meant by a reduction (note: not elimination) of magic item dependency.

If the items are not useful, then PCs will sell them and buy items that are useful.
Again, the key issue is the difference in power you get by trading one item for another. If the difference is a 1% increase in effectiveness, well, the dedicated min-maxers might still be determined to make the switch, but others might be willing to keep the original item because it suits their character concept or play style better, or because it has better flavor.
 

frankthedm said:
Agreed. I'm earning XP to make myself stronger, not to level up every foe i fight. It's fine and dandy to have leveled humanoids as officers, elites and commanders, but the bulk of their forces should be in low level grunts.
Hopefully this will be handled well in 4th edition. From what I've read, it seems that lower level monsters can still appropriately provide a challenge to players, at the same time giving the players a relative sense of power fighting them.

In other words, you might be able to throw a group of lower level orc grunts at a warrior, and he'll be able to dispatch them with some challenge while still feeling heroic.
 

Benimoto said:
There's mechanical problems with the transition from "elite" to "minion" status, and it has to do with how they were designed. From what we've heard, since elite monsters take up the space of two monsters, they have roughly twice as many HP, they have more actions, but yet the still have about the normal ACs and chance to hit for monsters of their level. Minions don't have a lot of HP, probably don't have more than one attack, may not do a lot of damage individually, but probably also have a fairly normal chance to hit, so that they're not totally irrelevant.

Look at the Pit Fiend. He's got two auras, spends his turn usually attacking twice and then doing one other thing, and can summon 2-8 other monsters. If you finally got to the point where you could fight 20 Pit Fiends, there'd be like 40 auras, 40-160 summoned monsters, and the players would have to wait for up to 60 attack rolls for just the pit fiends' attacks. Most of which would miss, since the Pit Fiend's attack bonuses never increased, even though the party got higher level and probably has better AC. Even 4 or 6 Pit Fiends is probably too many in an encounter.

The reason why you mostly don't fight a boss monster at level 5 and then a dozen of those monsters at level 15 is that the same qualities that make a monster a good boss do not make it good in groups.
I think Solo monsters will be the hardest to use in this case, at least if all are as complex as the Dragon example.

We have had two examples of Elite monsters so far, the Bullette (without stats, just an example combat) and the Pit Fiend (with stats). I think the Pit Fiend might become a little harder to handle due to the amount of allies he summons, but the Bulettes seemed to work even in higher numbers.

In 3E, one of the biggest problem of using monsters of lower level was that AC and attack bonus scaled pretty fast, which meant that lower level monsters hardly had a chance to hit anymore. The 4E progression seems slower (with the +1 per 2 levels), which should result in lower level monsters being useful for a longer time. (That's also what the designers said).

It might be question on how you mix the various monsters in an encounter. Fighting against 4 lower level Solo Dragons will probably not work well, but using one lower level Solo Dragon and a few equal or higher level Elites, Regulars and Minions should work out okay.
 

Kzach said:
I was disappointed to read in one of the design and development articles that magical items of a certain power are 'expected' and that encounters and monsters are balanced accordingly.

In my opinion this is flawed design. For one thing, it means they're no longer a bonus. Having +2 armour isn't, "Oh cool! I am indestructible... ish!", it's now, "Ok, I've got my standard gear for this level that I require, let's move on..."

For another thing, it puts the players and the DM in the situation where those items are now required for a balanced encounter. I had thought they'd done away with this thinking in their claims that they were reducing item dependence.

I've always loved throwing players in prison and watching them try to escape. It's practically a sacred-cow. First thing they always do is try to find their gear. And of course, in previous editions it was pretty much required that you give 'em a good shot at getting it fairly soon after escaping. After all, they needed it.

I had hoped I could run an encounter where all that lovely loot was sent off to His Most Puissant Uberness and the PC's be left to contend with whatever they could pick off the bodies of their captors (at least until they got revenge on HMPU and got their orginal gear back).

Doesn't look like that will be the case...


When the writers make a monster, they have to give it an AC and a hit bonus. That means they have to pick numbers that they expect for PCs of that monsters level.

Example: Let's say they want to make sure the monster has a 50% chance to strike a fighter. If they assume zero magic, the fighter will have AC 22-24 from whatever. Thus, the monster must have +13 to hit. If they assume +3 armor, the monster needs +16 to hit. These numbers are pretty different- if the DM is too generous an extra +3 to AC makes it only 35%. If the DM is too stingy, you might get hit 65% of the time.

Treasure guidelines allow those who change the rules a little to better predict what will happen and how to compensate. Assuming zero treasure is only reasonable for a few levels. After that, you should assume that most DMs will have given out something. Otherwise, encounters will be too easy for those who did get treasure. Hiding assumptions in design makes unbalanced games more likely.
 

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