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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4238322" data-attributes="member: 58197">Of course, Golden Wyvern has been excised from the 4E Player's Handbook... thank God.Except for one thing: In 3.X, what level are you supposed to get a +3 weapon?There's no answer, because 3.X doesn't have fixed expectations of "this is how much of a weapon bonus you're supposed to have at this level."  It just has a flat "this is how many gold pieces' worth of Magic Stuff you're supposed to have."  Depending on the character and build, you might have nearly all of that wealth sunk into your weapon, or some of it, or none.Now, you can put together some reasonable assumptions.  My experience, for example, has been that most weapon-using characters put from 1/4 to 1/2 of their total net worth toward having a kick-ass weapon.  So you could take the wealth-by-level guidelines, determine an "appropriate fraction" to put toward your weapon, and adjust accordingly.But that still leaves a lot of questions.  For one thing, a lot of the money people spend on their weapons goes toward getting cool special powers like Wounding, rather than on getting flat bonuses.   Should you consider that element?  Then, too, some parties have a caster who is willing and able to buff everyone's gear with greater magic weapon, which means investment in flat bonuses goes way down.  Other parties lack such a caster.And then there are the casters themselves, who generally don't use weapons at all.  Are you going to give casters a higher WBL than non-casters, in order to compensate for the fact that the non-casters no longer have to pay for their weapons?  If so, how do you plan to enforce treasure distribution to reflect this?  Or will you just let weapon-users get an effective WBL boost and call it partial compensation for the overall superiority of caster classes in 3.X?Decisions, decisions... all these issues can be addressed if you're willing to take the time, but it's far from trivial.I didn't have minions in 3.X.  You know why?  I just never thought of it.  I was always vaguely annoyed by the amount of time it took to run big fights with lots of mooks, and tended to avoid such scenarios for that reason, but it never occurred to me to sit down and really address the issue.  Now the 4E designers have come up with the idea, it looks absolutely frickin' brilliant to me, and I'm champing at the bit to run encounters with big heaps o' minions.And as others have pointed out, minionizing 3.X monsters is a kludge at best, with a number of problems (like AoE spells that don't have an attack roll or a saving throw involved).  I'd probably still do it if I were sticking with 3.X, but 4E is being built with minions in mind, which means they should be much better integrated into the system.On the contrary.  Many of the things 4E is fixing, like casters ruling the roost at high levels, characters being unreasonably fragile at low levels, excessive save-or-lose effects, and so forth, are things that a lot of people have been complaining about for a long time.Now, I agree that there has not been a general outcry for minions.  That doesn't make it a bad idea.  It's a new concept rather than a fix for an old one; it's showing people something cool they can do with their game that they just might never have thought of before.  If you don't like minions, you don't have to use 'em, but the system and the support are there for those of us who like the concept.</blockquote>

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