Magic Item Levels

[UngeheuerLich]

I also believe it can´t be such a big problem... the difference between a +3 weapon and a +6 weapon by level 25 is just one feat... a powerful feat for sure, but the game appeared to be playable before...

And I am really sick of the "it's not the spirit of the game"-answer...

A game is a tool and has neither soul nor spirit on its own... a group has to decide what is fun. Not the game system you use. Of course some systems fit a groups need better, but when i compare my experience with 3.x with most people here I have to recognize that I played it wrong, all the time... and i wondered why I had fun with it...

And when I look at pathfinder (a sound ruleset, but exactly the opposite direction of what i had wished for a 3.75) I am reinforced in my opinion that you can have fun with a game while playing it "wrong".

 

[UngeheuerLich]

That DOES mean 30% less chance to accomplish anything in this game.

No: a magic weapon DOES mean you CAN accomplish everything easier by beeing successful 30% more often...

Looking at magic this way, it is no magic at all. Beeing more restrictive in handing out magic items will INCREASE the sense of level advancement, as you can use the same monsters for a wider level range.

The idea of having everything level appropriate is just there to let the DM know what a fair encounter is. It is like the CR system but a bit easier to use.

But this "I need magic items" has its origin in the late 2nd edition era... I noticed when i "recruited" people who played BALDURS GATE that they were so used to buy magic items in shops that magic was reduced to a tool.
And the rules for creating magic items (which i considered very good in the beginning) reinforced magic beeing handily available because every wizard apprentice could create a scroll...

It is the same with stat bonuses: right now the stat bonuses are used to always increase the main stat. In this system, and here i blame 4e, the attack attribute is so important that you need to increase it nearly everytime... but this is only important if you use too high level foes on a regular basis. However the MONSTER LEVELS by default take into account that you increase it all the time, because every player with a little bit of optimization in mind would not increase attributes which are irrelevant to the class...

 

[DarkLord Of DForce]

Just to give -one- example, in one encounter at level 9 for our party, we fought these Guardians that couldn't be pushed, pulled, slid, teleported or knocked prone. Their At-will power also dazed. They had +20 to hit, and 3 of our party had to roll +16 to hit, with 5 having to crit to hit them. (btw, this was not an end of campaign or segment encounter and they were not considered "bosses" or "elites" by our DMs).

Still think our group doesn't need all the +magic items we can get? (or are you just going to say we need new DMs)...

PS To be fair to our DMs, since that encounter and the inevitable comments that came from it, they have balanced the encounters better.

 

[DracoSuave]

No: a magic weapon DOES mean you CAN accomplish everything easier by beeing successful 30% more often...

Which assuming a a 50% chance to succeed (which is not founded on anything but blind assumption), means the difference between 20% success or 50% success.

That means that with the bonus is 2.5 times more useful than the lower success, conservatively not counting the loss of the extra damage.

That's NOT a small amount.

If players were at autohit, you'd have a strong point. But... they aren't.

Not to mention, you transform combat from

hit, miss, hit, hit, miss, miss, hit, miss

to

miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, miss, miss.

If you want to make things more challenging, that's fine and I encourage that if that's what's good for the group, however -missing- isn't challenge, that's douchebaggery.

Challenges require player interaction, skill, and ingenuity to overcome. Missfests can only be overcome by loaded dice. The players are not the ones who are overcoming the 'challenges' there.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

did you read the entire post?

I will try to explain:

My default assumption is that players can stand on their own without a magic weapon. You don´t fall behind when you advance, because monsters youfight don´t get stronger at all... why should they? Orcs are still orcs and goblins are still goblins.

If you are level 5, you have more encounter powers and more dailies, a bit more strength and you increased your hit chance by 2 points. So what may have been a hard fight against orcs is now an encounter of moderate difficulty.

If you got a +2 weapon this fight becomes easy for you. But it was perfectly balanced without this weapon.


The default assumption of the designers is (and rightly so) that the average player these days will want magic items by level 3. with magic items the orc would be only a moderate encounter on level 3, so it has monster level 3, not 5. And in the rules you are told to give level appropriate items to have monsters be level appropriate.

What is the advantage of not giving out level appropriate magic items?
You can use the same encounters for a wider level range. Your players really feel advancement, because they can compare those encounters and now know they can kill orcs more easily. But they still are a challenge because they can hit you and you don´t autohit them.

Now got it?

But to be sure you really understand it:

if you have an encounter that is:

hit, miss, miss, hit, miss, hit, hit miss

for nearly all members of the party.

One player has a +3 sword.

So his fight will be:

hit, hit, miss, hit, hit, miss, miss, hit

So for him the fight is a bit easier, but not too much.

Another one has a +3 armor, so he will be hit one time less in 8 rounds on average, his fight will also be easier, but not too much...


And here is my question:
why do you assume a 50% hit chance with magic weapons when no player has one? You even state that you don´t found this assumtion on anything. Why not assume something more reasonable, like hitting 50% without magic weapon.

Even the +6 weapon will not make the wielder autohit everything... and the +6 armor won´t make the carrier unhittable... which IMHO is a robust system. Of course if everyone has those weapons, you should use appropriate leveled monsters...
but this is just a wrong assumption.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

If you want to make things more challenging, that's fine and I encourage that if that's what's good for the group, however -missing- isn't challenge, that's douchebaggery.

oh, and this one is nothing related to my post you quoted... so i don´t consider it offensive... just inappropriate...

 

[DarkLord Of DForce]

"My default assumption is that players can stand on their own without a magic weapon. You don´t fall behind when you advance, because monsters you fight don´t get stronger at all... why should they? Orcs are still orcs and goblins are still goblins."

I'm confused by this - according to everything I've seen - the monsters *do* advance in 4e as the levels go up. So going by that, assuming they do, if your party doesn't acquire better items, the monsters will increasingly gain an advantage.

What am I missing?

Thanks.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

You miss that a certain monster doesn´t get suddenly stronger when you advance a level. Maybe you go into a different area where tougher monsters live...

The Orc you fought at level one is as tough as the orc you fight at level 2 and as tough as the orc you fight at level 3... maybe at some point you are better served making them minions as a DM but before it doesn´t suddenly scale up.
Maybe you meet a tougher tribe of orcs who are leveled up versions of regular orcs, but the orcs in Orkhome are still the same.

If you don´t give out magic items, your Orchome can be used as an adventure site for a much wider level range, since your attacks and defenses don´t increase slower as with magic items or inherent bonuses.

If you somehow increase the attack and defense of all orcs in Orchome exactly when players level up (which ii would call scale with level) then how do your players ever feel an advancment in power?

If you do, your players actually lose power when leveling up and need magic items to catch up which IMHO is counter intuitive.

So lets go back to the default assumption of 4e:
The monster levels and item level and guidlines create a balanced system. Kill monsters, take items, move to a new place kill tougher monsters...

Go back to my default assumption:
You create some places which don´t differ too much in an area (e.g.: chaos scar) Your players can decide freely which place to go first. So now you can use those preplaced encounters for a longer time...

of course you can as well scale those encounters up using the DMG guidelines... but having +1 to hit and damage due to a magic weapon, and 1 AC and defenses due to magic armor and neckthing and increasing monster levels by 1 cancel each other out...

so why bother?
Maybe because magic items are fun.

But IMHO having only level appropriate items in all slots will make magic too mundane... having magic items of various power levels will make you feel powerful if you assume no magic items and powerless if you assume the highest magic items bonus...

So using lower level monsters and some magic items will be much more fun for the players... as long as they don´t look into the MM and see they only kill lower level foes... but a good player keeps his nose out of the MM and if he looks into it, he should also look into the DMG because he apparently is also DMing...

What is so difficult to understand about this concept?
Let me guess: it is not in the spirit of 4e... IMHO it is... the system is robust enough to play a little different playstyle and stiill have fun... Actually i guess the designers considered PC`s using attacks which key off secondary stats perfectly viable... only this way the paladin design can be understood...

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It is against the 4e concept, but that's because the 4e concept is based in math.

The formula that considers difficulty between the PCs and monsters has a couple of facets:

1. Total HP of PCs
2. HPs of individual PCs
3. Defenses of PCs
4. Attack bonuses of PCs
5. Which defenses the PCs target
6. Damage dealt by PCs
7. Effects dealt by PCs
8. Total HPs of enemies in an encounter
9. Individual HPs of enemies
10. Enemies attack bonuses
11. Enemies defenses
12. Damage dealt by monsters
13. Effects dealt by monsters

When PCs go up levels, 1-7 increases. This means that both the chance to hit and the amount of damage dealt on the hit increase. Also, the chance that the PCs will BE hit goes down and the amount of hits they can take before they lose goes up.

Assuming the 4e baseline of both sides having a 50% chance to hit, this means that after 8 levels, PCs will have gained +6 to hit, +6 to damage, +6 to all defenses, and 40 hp(these are acquired through a combination of feats, gaining new powers that do more damage, increase of stats, and the +1 per 2 levels to most things).

This means that PCs now have an 80% chance to hit with their abilities while the monsters have a 20% chance to hit with theirs. Also, the average PC goes from 8 damage a round to 14 damage a round. Essentially this means that a 5 person party does 56 damage per round on average. The enemies still do an average of 8 damage each, so due to their low attack bonuses they do 8 damage total to the PCs each round on average.

The average 1st level monster has 24 hitpoints. The average 1st level PC has 24 as well. So a group of 5 level 1 monsters has 120 hitpoints total. So does a group of 1st level PCs. A group of 9th level PCs has 320 hps.

Given the numbers above, it means that a 9th level party against a group of 1st level monsters will take 14 damage total before defeating the enemies with a nearly 0 percent chance of being defeated themselves or even having one of their group be in danger. The party can also face nearly 23 of these encounters in a day without even using a single heal.

But now, you are saying "Level 9 is a little high to still be fighting 1st level monsters, I was thinking more like level 5." Fair Enough. Let's half all those bonuses. To make a long story short: 7.5 encounters before they need to use a single heal. With healing surges this generally means at least 15 or 20 encounters before the PCs have to rest and no one encounter does enough damage to lower a single PCs to 0 hitpoints, even if all the enemies gang up on one PC.

In other words, the math says that a group of level 5 PCs cannot possibly lose to a group of level 1 enemies assuming the odds hold out. And that's without any magic items at all.

So that's why you scale monsters as the PCs scale, to at least keep some possibility of losing. Generally you keep monsters within +/- 3 levels to keep the chances of winning about the same. Since 4e already has a bunch of things stacked in the PCs favor(action points, teamwork, more choice in abilities, etc), I generally give that a +1 level bump so -2 level to +4 levels from the PCs is where the math holds out. Beyond that, the scaling causes either an instant win or an instant loss for the party.

And if you use monsters from the group but don't give magic items to the PCs then the scale slides down about 1 every 4 levels. This means that by level 20, PCs with no magic items can only have a worthwhile fight against level 13 to level 19 enemies. By 30 the group can only fight level 21 to level 27 enemies.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

If you somehow increase the attack and defense of all orcs in Orchome exactly when players level up (which ii would call scale with level) then how do your players ever feel an advancment in power?

I felt I should address this point in particular. In 4e, players feel an advancement through a couple different factors:

1. More powers
2. Bigger numbers
3. More powerful enemies
4. Roleplaying benefits in the world

When you have 9 different powers and they each get +25 to hit for 1d8+20, it feels a lot different than when you have 4 powers that get +8 to hit for 1d8+4.

But also, you go from fighting kobolds, which just about any farmer with a pitchfork can defeat to defeating gods. Sure, the gods are hard to defeat, just like those kobolds were when you first started out. But they aren't any harder. How can you not feel advancement when gods are as hard for you to beat as kobolds are for farmers?

Plus, there's the roleplaying advancement. You are close to becoming a god yourself and living forever. You are saving the entire world instead of saving the farmer's daughter who was kidnapped.

Advancement doesn't come from seeing everything you fight suddenly get easier. In fact, it's often rather boring to even pull out your dice when you know that it's a foregone conclusion that you're going to win.

If you do, your players actually lose power when leveling up and need magic items to catch up which IMHO is counter intuitive.

I'd suggest not scaling enemies on the fly as the PCs gain levels. Instead you plan adventures around the natural progression. You use level 1 goblins at the beginning of the adventure and as you get deeper and deeper into the cavern towards the chieftain of the goblins, you fight higher and higher level goblins until you reach the 4th and 5th level ones along with their chieftain. Then, having defeated the goblins, you move on to bigger and better enemies elsewhere.