D&D 4E Points of Light, Dawn War, and Magic Item Economy (4e)

[Garthanos]

so if say, a 3rd level encounter, say, was a little OP, it just crowded out the other 3rd level encounters, not everything else you might want to do with a 'slot' that day.

it does make balancing more razor sensitive.

 

[Garthanos]

Skill challenge benefits can be fueled by healing surges we are looking at a super versatile and adventure progressing application ... so 4e does have it pretty much available for everyone universally.

 

[Garthanos]

The healing surges are the CAP on healing gives them this uber singular use you are comparing every other application to in a sense.
Though it wasnt super formalized or player facing or... or

 

[Garthanos]

The following was an adjustment I came up with haven't really done anything with but it was sort of in response to the rarity rules (I found them arbitrary and restrictive ick)

Item generates residuum or karma (or sales price) based on its relative level - the sales rule presumes you get better contacts who are better able to estimate a real value and better able to find distribution and so on. Similarly the better you are at disenchanting the more efficient it is.

if the item is four or more less than the one sacreficing/destroying it - the return value is 100 percent value
if 3 then 50 percent value
if 2 then 33 percent value
if 1 less 25 percent value
if at or better then 20 percent.

Someone might have gained superior contacts or superior disenchanting etc and be considered higher level wrt return value - adjust a few feats accordingly

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Before 4e arguably D&D really didnt support the idea, that said in 1e, I used the concept of the powers of this relic that he learns as he goes along are really his.

Well, magic in AD&D was sort of like that. You could certainly flavor spells as "personal power" and psionics of course were explicitly that, though they were never a major part of the system. Anyway, conceptually AD&D was all over the place, and sadly the way flavor dictated substance didn't make it easy to pull stuff off like in 4e (and I just doubled down on that concept in my game).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One issue that comes up when you have one resource fueling different things, is that those different things have to be more & more carefully balanced against eachother, or the resource is just used to spam the best (broken) ones.

1e memorization, for instance, partially avoided that, since you couldn't swap spells around during the day, you still might memorize the 'best' spell of a given level more than once, but you couldn't just cast nothing else all day - 'mana point' variants, OTOH, let you do just that. Spamming was the 3.5 Sorcerer's strength, and, of course, in 5e, neo-Vancian casters get the best of both worlds. 4e AEDU didn't just put resources on different schedules, it made it very hard to set up swapping among them, so if say, a 3rd level encounter, say, was a little OP, it just crowded out the other 3rd level encounters, not everything else you might want to do with a 'slot' that day.

So as much as I like the concept of expanding healing surges or action points into some heroic surge able to heal or power dailies or whatever else, it'd run into that issue.

There is SOME truth to this, but as long as most options are fairly situational, then it is quite OK. This is how AD&D wizard spells worked. Sure, Fireball was a pretty good spell, but it really paid to also have Fly, Haste, Hold Person, Suggestion, Phantasmal Force, Water Breathing, etc. That isn't because they are 'balanced' really, it is just because, in a largely narrative game, it pays to have a lot of ways to skin any given cat so you can pick one with real impact. You could always just fireball the ogre, and MAYBE kill it, or you could hit it with Suggestion and maybe a reaction check, plus some rations and coppers, and get it to go help you kill some bugbears instead!

Now, with HoML, which is pretty 4e-like, things might seem different, but a lot of the play is focused on using niche effects. A 'daily' in HoML costs a VP, but it really will only be a great choice in a few situations, when it will really shine. OTOH an 'encounter' power costs nothing the first time you use it, and probably will work pretty well in most situations. You CAN pay a VP to use it again, but you probably won't do that too often, an at-will power will probably do well enough most of the time (and then the trade-off is whether you expend more points to heal yourself vs upping your damage output and you then have choices like extra action, etc. to choose from).

The point is, it seems to be a complex enough set of choices that there aren't any really super generic "this is always at least a good option" picks that become a 'no brainer'. Anyway, like 4e, you can always retrain, so things won't generally be your go-to forever. At worst you might optimize some certain power and use it a lot in a specific level range.

 

[Garthanos]

There are powers that feel so characteristic that I do not really want to retrain them I would prefer just upgrading. I want come and get it to feel more legendary at level 16 but I still want it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, well, I made powers really scale, so you CAN, if you want...

 

[S'mon]

In 4e items are weak but very easy to make. That's just how it works. You can always convert an item to residuum and make new ones. Heck you can even per RAW Transfer Enchantment to a different item. You don't need a big functioning economy to do this, far less an industrial base. It's like if you could take a Hind helicopter and convert it to a couple RPG-7s and a stack of AK-47s.

 

[S'mon]

I can see how that'd have a glut of magic items floating (buried/whatever) around the world. But not so much a ready market where you could buy a specific item you wanted (or even know about a specific item you'd want).

Any level 10 character with Enchant Item Ritual and some arcane reagants or residuum can make any item up to level 10 in an hour. So items are crafted to order (at a 10-40% markup). There aren't big inventories of already existing items.