Fewer magic items, stronger PCs.

[comrade raoul]

I'm considering dramatically increasing the rate at which characters get feats and ability increases as they gain levels, while reducing their access to magical items. The advantage of this is that characters become more defined through their intrinsic characteristics and the decisions made by their players, and less by their stuff. Further, level advancement is more fun: every time you gain a level, you get to improve your character in an interesting way, regardless of your class advancement. Specifically:

- Characters gain a feat every at odd level, starting at 1st. They'll have exactly one more feat than a character under the standard rules by 9th level, two more by 15th, and three more by 19th.
- Characters gain an ability increase at every even level, starting at 2nd. In order to prevent a favorite ability score from getting very high, characters who improve a particular ability must wait four levels before improving it again (that is, you can't improve a given ability over two consecutive increases). Thus by 20th level, character have increased their ability scores by 10, but haven't increased a particular score by more than 5.

So the question is -- roughly, how much less gp worth in magic items should characters have to for encounters of appropriate CR to still be challenging?

 

[AeroDm]

Something to consider is that giving stat raises and feats more frequently allows characters to gain access to certain types of feats earlier than they should because of feat chains.

An alternate would be to do something similar to the Midnight campaign setting and introduce Heroic Paths in some variant. In essence, Heroic Paths are a series of abilities keyed to a certain premise that scale in power. They replace magic items in Midnight and do a pretty good job about it.

 

[Tonguez]

The Talent Trees of D20 Modern are pretty good character upgrades sans magic stuff.
Create some new Talent trees and have fun

as to gp trade off I have no idea what does it say in the treasure tables about awarding magic items?...

 

[FireLance]

Here's a quick and dirty method:

By 20th level, a character by your method will have an extra +5 to ability scores and 3 extra feats.

The standard cost of an ability enhancing item is the bonus squared times 1,000 gp. Let's ignore that the PC may spread the bonus among several scores and that ability enhancing items tend to have even numbers. Since it doesn't take up any extra space, double the price. The cost would thus be 50,000 gp.

The recommended standard cost for a feat granting magic item is 10,000 gp plus 5,000 gp per prerequisite. For simplicity, assume the first feat taken by the PC is the equivalent of an item costing 10,000 gp, the next 15,000 gp and the third 20,000 gp. Doubling for items that do not take up extra space, the cost would be 90,000 gp.

So, by 20th level, your PCs would have the equivalent of about 140,000 gp in extra enhancements. 140,000 gp is about 18.4% of the 760,000 gp a 20th-level character is supposed to have. Rounding off to 20%, you should give your PCs about 20% less wealth than a standard PC.

This is not an exact calculation. There are levels where your PCs will be better off than non-enhanced PC of standard wealth (at 5th level, for example, when they get their 6th-level feat one level early), but is is less complicated than plotting the exact wealth relationship level by level.

 

[tmaaas]

The standard cost of an ability enhancing item is the bonus squared times 1,000 gp. Let's ignore that the PC may spread the bonus among several scores and that ability enhancing items tend to have even numbers. Since it doesn't take up any extra space, double the price. The cost would thus be 50,000 gp.

I've considered (the next time I DM; I 'only' a player right now) giving inherent abilities to players in addition to items and more items. Depending on their nature, these can have two more advantages which I think you should also factor into their "price."

1) If not "supernatural" or "spell-like", the abililty is not subject to dispels, disjunctions, or anti-magic fields.

2) The 'item' cannot be lost, stolen, destroyed, etc.

 

[AeroDm]

Forgot this earlier- in Midnight players are only supposed to have 25% as much wealth for their level, so evidently the heroic paths (along with more powerful races) account for 75% of a given level's suggested wealth.

I really like the d20M feat talent path idea. Quality.

 

[nharwell]

I suggest that you take a look at the "Four Color to Fantasy" pdf. Although I prefer Mutants & Masterminds as a supers system, FCtF is a great resource for adding abilities to characters. In fact, it addresses this very idea on p.39-40; there's even a chart to judge the gp "treasure value" of hero points (the mechanism characters use to purchase abilities). It's also completely compatible with D&D, so minimal work would be required to integrate it into a game...

 

[Terath Ninir]

This is not an exact calculation. There are levels where your PCs will be better off than non-enhanced PC of standard wealth (at 5th level, for example, when they get their 6th-level feat one level early), but is is less complicated than plotting the exact wealth relationship level by level.

But that isn't complicated, if you have Excel or any other spreadsheet program. And I have yet to see a computer that doesn't.

Plot out all 20 levels. Put in a column for the gp value a character is supposed to have at each level. Put in four columns for feats and four for ability scores. In column 1 for each, put in the standard number of feats/abilities you get. Column 2 has the new amounts. Column 3 is c2 minus c1. Column 4 takes the result from c3 and multiplies it by the appropriate formula to get a gp value.

Finally, you have a column where you subtract the feat column 4 and ability score column 4 from the gp value in a standard game. That gives you the gp value that you want for your game. You can then fiddle with the feats and ability scores you give your characters until you get the results you want. If you decide you want to give them more power and further reduce the gp value, just add more columns to the spreadsheet.

Couldn't be easier. You'll spend more time setting things up and getting the columns the right width than you will doing the calculations.

 

[Altalazar]

Why not keep it real simple and just give players more EXP so they level faster and get all of that stuff faster without any special hocus pocus.

 

[aurance]

Why not keep it real simple and just give players more EXP so they level faster and get all of that stuff faster without any special hocus pocus.

For this to work, you would have to adjust the CR and EL of creatures upwards a bit. What would be the equivalent level of a character with much less equipment?

But then I suppose adjusting the CR would work anyway without changing the rate XP is given out.

For what it's worth, we give out feats at every odd levels in our campaigns. Magic item creation costs 5x as much in XP and gold. Classes themselves were also beefed up. (Some more than others... some classes suffer less with fewer items.)