Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5127745" data-attributes="member: 82106">There are a couple of points to make:1) You can certainly have monsters use items. The DMG has a chart for 'magic item threshold' that shows what the effects are. Basically an on-level item won't add anything to the monster in terms of to-hit/damage. A really good item will usually give them a +1. The upshot of this is that monsters don't really need items and if you give one a fairly appropriate item it will either do nothing for the monster or give it a very slight edge. Some item properties might help more and some item powers could be handy but the vast majority of powers only work once a day anyhow, so the difference is still small.2) Using NPCs and ESPECIALLY using full PCs as monsters is sub-par in 4e. The battles are very swingy. Because PCs have high damage output and fairly low hit points you can easily run into a situation where one side gets the initiative and pretty much wins the battle on round 1 or 2. Beyond that NPCs have no need to hold back anything for later in the day, so they can just nova all over the party with complete abandon. A few good init rolls by the NPCs coupled with dropping 5 daily powers in round 1 is ugly. Sure the NPCs have LESS powers overall, but they have an AP and certainly have a daily and an encounter power, all of which they can burn in the first round. The players can reciprocate in kind, IF they still have all their powers, but often even if they get good init rolls they won't drop their best powers right off and may well be toast by round 2 when they realize they need to unload the big guns.The moral of the story is use monster stat blocks for opponents. If you look at Fallcrest and KotS for example you'll see that all the NPCs that have combat stats are done using the monster guidelines. In fact I don't know of a single instance where WotC ever used the NPC rules at all. In DMG2 they introduced a hacked version called Companion Characters for friendly allied NPCs that fight with the party. They have never published NPC class templates for any classes beyond PHB1 either, which indicates to me that they consider that subsystem essentially dead at this point. Instead they have monster style class templates for all the new classes, indicating that would be the supported method for making an NPC that is portraying something similar to a classed PC.As a general point 4e does not presuppose that classes actually exist as a concept in the game world. Unlike earlier editions of D&D where the default assumption seemed to be that every NPC was just a PC that was run by the DM and used the same rules 4e jettisoned that whole idea. Classes are just the rules by which the heroes are defined. Everything else in the world is its own thing and has no exact rules. Most NPCs will have abilities SIMILAR to what a PC has, but they aren't a 'level 7 fighter', they're just some guy that is good at melee combat and wears heavy armor. From the in-game perspective they may be considered equivalent to the PC fighter but mechanically they're just whatever the DM needs them to be.So my advice would be to use monster stat blocks. Then you don't NEED to give the monsters lootable magic items. You CAN, but its optional and you can decide it more on the basis of what loot you want to drop and less on the necessity to make the battle challenging. Also remember that if items are lower level than that the party has already they'll just disenchant/sell them for 20% of face value. You can then consider their loot value at 20% to start with, which means it may be a good treasure drop, but it won't blow the parcel system out of the water. Also if I were creating a really special group of opponents like a rival party or something I'd consider the story concept of giving out an artifact or something. This group should be pretty memorable and a fairly major plot point, so that could be a way to create a treasure that is exciting but not part of the parcel system (artifacts aren't loot in 4e, they are more like an NPC which is also a magic item and the DM should take them away at a later point in the adventure). Anyway, just some thoughts. Don't let the rules get in the way of having fun!</blockquote>

Verification