Xeviat
Hero
Hi all. I've been converting a 3.5E game to 5E and was initially running into issues with the higher magic item distribution. But, I went with it because it's fun, whatever. My party ended up being rather defensible, and I've been dialing up the challenges to find the sweet spot to threaten them and get exciting encounters.
While building some custom monsters and auditing the PC magic items to see if I needed to add anything for anyone in particular (so no one was getting left behind), I stumbled upon an idea to help gauge the difference in strength between a high magic and a low magic party.
So, when calculating CR, a +2 AC and +2 Attack bonus will raise a monster's CR by 1. A -2 to both AC and Attack will reduce a monster's CR by 1 (doing this actually makes for some interesting encounters, with high hp and damage but low AC and accuracy). So, I got to thinking, that +2 attack and AC on the players was, in effect, a -1 reduction of the opponent CR. Or, more simply put, a +2 attack and AC bonus on a player raises their effective level by 1.
Looking at the items, roughly, I came up with a point scale. Major items are 1 for uncommon, 2 for rare, 3 for very rare, and 4 for legendary. Minor items are half this. Minor consumables are one quarter the points.
Add up the points on a character and then divide by 4. This is how much to effectively increase the PC's level by for determining challenges.
Right now, my level 8 PCs have about 4 points each in this, so I'm designing the encounters assuming they're level 9. I'm trying it out this weekend (actually have the party of 4 in groups of 2 this session), and I'll be reporting on how it ends up feeling.
As an aside, I've also been using a loose conversion rule for 3E items. For enhanced weapons and armor, I'm dividing enhancement bonus by 2 and rounding down if the weapon has another effect (+1 frost sword becomes frost sword), or round up if it has no effect (+1 sword remains +1 sword). It served me well until I had to decide to not put +1 plate armor into a treasure pile and give the fighter a +2 AC bonus.
While building some custom monsters and auditing the PC magic items to see if I needed to add anything for anyone in particular (so no one was getting left behind), I stumbled upon an idea to help gauge the difference in strength between a high magic and a low magic party.
So, when calculating CR, a +2 AC and +2 Attack bonus will raise a monster's CR by 1. A -2 to both AC and Attack will reduce a monster's CR by 1 (doing this actually makes for some interesting encounters, with high hp and damage but low AC and accuracy). So, I got to thinking, that +2 attack and AC on the players was, in effect, a -1 reduction of the opponent CR. Or, more simply put, a +2 attack and AC bonus on a player raises their effective level by 1.
Looking at the items, roughly, I came up with a point scale. Major items are 1 for uncommon, 2 for rare, 3 for very rare, and 4 for legendary. Minor items are half this. Minor consumables are one quarter the points.
Add up the points on a character and then divide by 4. This is how much to effectively increase the PC's level by for determining challenges.
Right now, my level 8 PCs have about 4 points each in this, so I'm designing the encounters assuming they're level 9. I'm trying it out this weekend (actually have the party of 4 in groups of 2 this session), and I'll be reporting on how it ends up feeling.
As an aside, I've also been using a loose conversion rule for 3E items. For enhanced weapons and armor, I'm dividing enhancement bonus by 2 and rounding down if the weapon has another effect (+1 frost sword becomes frost sword), or round up if it has no effect (+1 sword remains +1 sword). It served me well until I had to decide to not put +1 plate armor into a treasure pile and give the fighter a +2 AC bonus.
