Why average wealth by level is a good thing.

[Votan]

My 1E experience of fighters is that they were very much differentiated rules-wise by the magic items they had. Things like Gauntlets of Ogre Power had an extreme effect on your character, and once everyone had such things very little of the characters attributes mattered any longer. The main difference between two characters was that one wielded a Flaming Sword and the other a Nine Lives Stealer.

This is actually kind of cool if you are modeling Elric (with Stormbringer). Much less cool if you are thinking of Conan!

In my experience this depended greatly on the availability of magic items. If they were quite rare than other factors began to matter a lot. If they were commonly found then they really made a big difference.

 

[nightwyrm]

WBL is coupled in large part to the CR/Monster level system to allow the DM to predict with some degree of accuracy of the outcome of a fight. If you want a HD Y monster and a lv X PC to have a good fight, you need to have some expectation of how much gear the lv X PC has.

You can give less stuff to the PCs. You just have to expect a more difficult (or impossible) fight. Or you could just use less difficult monsters.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

In 3.5 I eventually got rid of all the stat enhancing magic items and went to an inherent system, and was much happier for it. (That this was around the time the Magic Item Compendium came out, which made it easier).

Can you describe this in brief? I did the same thing, and I'm always interested in others' perceptions of what bonuses PCs are 'supposed' to have.

Trailblazer's analysis of 3e's "Spine" showed that the "Big Six" is really not that important to a character keeping up with monsters' difficulty. Excluding the Big Six completely results in the PCs still being acceptably effective by most measures.

This is not my experience at all. Well, if I've got a great DM and I'm in the mood for rocket tag combat, I suppose I might feel effective going without the Big Six. But that's not "most measures."

 

[Ainamacar]

Excellent post, but I wonder if we could come up with a simpler rule than in your follow up.

Ideally simply "every 3 levels of wealth difference adjusts ECL by 1". (For accurate numbers of 3 and 1 instead of my made up ones.) That way I could look at a 5th level character, see his wealth is close to that of an 8th level one in the tables and consider him a 6th level one in total.

Note, this is 3.5, since that's what I'm familiar with.

Thanks. The idea of wealth as a level modifier is probably the right first approach in 3.5. Trying to completely untangle items from the WbL table would be a pretty big undertaking, especially since the expectations are a bit looser than in 4e. I think for that method to work well the party must still be getting the expected variety of equipment whatever its wealth level is. If a wizard has an expensive staff but neglected to get a good Cloak of Resistance, even the normal WbL rules are pretty misleading. That good and bad saves usually tended toward the extremes of very good and very bad doesn't help either, although I consider that one of 3.5's inherent weaknesses. In any case, that suggests the rules might work worst in a low magic world (say one or two powerful but non-mathy items per character) which is unfortunate since that sort of setting is one of frequent interest.

An additional complication is that different classes are affected by losing their equipment quite differently. Compare a 12th level caster to a 12th level fighter, both with 1st level gear. A fighter is probably hurting for AC quite a bit, as might a wizard, but the wizard is relying on Improved Invisibility for defense regardless of its wealth. Druids are probably the worst offender here, although my charop-fu is not what it used to be. Hopefully such things would average out at the party level.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

This is not my experience at all. Well, if I've got a great DM and I'm in the mood for rocket tag combat, I suppose I might feel effective going without the Big Six. But that's not "most measures."

Maybe the crux is Trailblazer's statistical analysis looked at monsters in the SRD. A lot of 3e play over the later years brought in MMII, III, IV, and other monsters that got tougher.

I'd recommend a look at Trailblazer's analysis at the least. It challenged my experiences as well.

 

[Ainamacar]

Can you describe this in brief? I did the same thing, and I'm always interested in others' perceptions of what bonuses PCs are 'supposed' to have.

Sure thing! Overall, I hewed very closely to what ability score items would give. I simply let them increase two different ability scores at 4, 8, 12, etc. as well as a single one at 2, 6, 10, etc. This replaced the original rules for improving ability scores. Items that improved ability scores were removed, with a few minor exceptions (e.g. a high-level relic might grant a +2 to something). For a character's main stat this is like getting a +2 item at 6th, +4 at 14th, and +6 at 22nd. The ability to develop decent secondary ability scores was also helpful, especially for very MAD classes like the monk and anyone with odd Con.

Now, since these weren't enhancement bonuses but actual increases to the ability scores, in the end I think it was actually a slight increase in power. Buffs like Bull's Strength became very potent (potentially raising scores well over the game's usual limit), but since these actually required some forethought or spending an action in combat I kept them in. And I liked that it was smart to cast Bull's Strength on a fighter again, not pointless because he had some belt on. Though it never came up in play, in my mind I had removed any effect that made ability score buffs last hours. Similarly, some of the more unusual bonus types (luck, sacred, profane, etc.) would have been bumped back to enhancement bonuses if necessary. Fortunately, my players were good about enjoying their more interesting magic items rather than making me perform a thousand mindless nerfs.

The other effect this had on my game was that my NPCs were a bit sturdier without needing expensive and boring treasure. That by itself was worth it, especially since the party fought NPCs with class levels very frequently. Overall, the extra sturdiness for all NPCs ended up outweighing the slight boost to potential power for the PCs, although clearly this result is group dependent.

When I was first working on this change I considered removing some or all of the other Big Six as well. After a lot of tables (Trailblazer style), I decided that removing them would take more work than I wanted to put into it, especially since this change occurred in the middle of an ongoing campaign. The main thing I wanted was for PCs to experience more interesting magic items, and on that count it was a tremendous success.

I am also curious what tweaks you made. If I were to start a 3.5 campaign I would probably revisit the topic.

 

[haus48]

WbL is somewhat of a misnomer I think. It is really magic items by level. How many characters really use their wealth for anything else?

In D&D (1st-3.5, never read 4th ed) magic items really make up a big power chunk of your character and his abilities. When you are playing in a home campaign the DM can adjust the adventure to match the party, in a more general group campaign (like for pathfinder society play) or for published modules the guidelines are necessary to make sure everyone is (roughly) playing on the same playing field. If I still had time to create and play in home games I would probably not be such a fan, but as published adventures and pathfinder society play have become my only play options WbL has kind of become a necessary and mandatory evil.

Here is a question, have people found that WbL helps for published adventure and PFS play? If you do not like WbL how would you balance published adventure and PFS play a different way?

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Maybe the crux is Trailblazer's statistical analysis looked at monsters in the SRD. A lot of 3e play over the later years brought in MMII, III, IV, and other monsters that got tougher.

Later monsters are generally tougher than earlier ones, but monsters are only part of the equation. Without the Big Six, combat just doesn't work "right." The best example of this is AC: monsters and PCs with the usual AC boosters (magic armor, magic shield, ring of prot, amulet of nat AC) increase in AC as CR/level goes up. But PCs without the Big Six are essentially stuck with whatever AC they started with at 1st level.

This turns combat into a "win initiative and kill it before its turn comes up" competition rather quickly. For example, a hill giant attacking a paladin without the Big Six can freely pump all of its +9 BAB into power attack to deal an average 37 damage with one attack. Even if the paladin's wearing full plate, the giant has a 50% chance to knock him down to 1/4 HP. If it gets lucky and hits with both of its attacks, there won't be enough of that paladin left to laugh at.

I'd recommend a look at Trailblazer's analysis at the least. It challenged my experiences as well.

I've heard good things about Trailblazer, but honestly, I'm comfortable with my own set of house rules. Anyone who's spent [or wasted ] as much time as I have analyzing and discussing D&D's nuts and bolts can do better than TB or PF or whatever, because I don't have to worry about pleasing customers.

I am also curious what tweaks you made. If I were to start a 3.5 campaign I would probably revisit the topic.

I'm much more generous than your current rule is.

My assumption is that, by 20th level, PCs are supposed to have a slew of +5 items, plus a couple stat boosters and have read a couple tomes/manuals. So I wrote a chart kinda like the VoP chart, to give those enhancement bonuses directly to the characters. Except, of course, that you don't have to spend a feat or be Good to benefit. Like you say, it has the added benefit of making NPCs formidable without weighing them down with magical trinkets.

 

[Dausuul]

On the 4E front, I spent a while last night banging around with test characters (thank you, Essentials, for making it sooooo much easier to create test characters and calculate their damage output) and a big ol' spreadsheet, and worked out what I think is a tolerable system to estimate "magic item power" as distinct from "character power." Here are a few of the things I came up with:

• Weapon that deals 1d6 bonus damage on a hit, once per round (2d6 at epic): +0.5 level
• Arcane implement that adds 2 bonus damage to all damage rolls (3 at paragon, 4 at epic): +0.5 level
• Increase the user's max hit points by 8 (14 at paragon, 20 at epic): +0.5 level
• Grant resist 4 all damage (6 at paragon, 8 at epic): +1 level
• 1/round when you hit a bloodied foe, deal 1d8 bonus damage and heal yourself the same amount (2d6 at paragon, 3d6 at epic): +1 level

So, for instance, if you're an 8th-level fighter wielding a flame tongue sword which deals 1d6 bonus fire damage, and wearing a periapt of endurance which gives you 8 extra hit points, you're effectively a 9th-level fighter for purposes of encounter difficulty. Obviously, I haven't had a chance to playtest any of this, but it looks in the right ballpark, at least*.

The approach I used was to create a set of "baseline characters"--a knight, a thief, a mage, and a warpriest, which are the Essentials versions of fighter, rogue, wizard, and cleric respectively. I then worked out estimates of how their hit points, defenses, damage output**, and attack bonuses would scale over the course of 30 levels. That enabled me to compare "level X character with item" to "level X+1 character without" and see how they stacked up... or, rather, to make the spreadsheet do it for me, since I don't feel like crunching those numbers for 30 levels across 4 classes.

That takes care of simple bonuses like damage add-ons or boosts to your hit points. For more interesting stuff, I had to get more creative. With the armor that grants damage resistance, I used standard monster damage to estimate how many hit points it would save the wearer over the course of getting beaten down to zero, and treated it as granting that many extra hit points. With the life-draining weapon, I treated it as a combination of increased hit points and bonus damage, then chopped the numbers in half since it only works on bloodied targets.

In principle, this same approach could be used in 3.5. The hardest part would be hammering out what the "baseline characters" ought to look like. After that, it would work the same way... could probably even use the same spreadsheet, with modifications.

[size=-2]*Well, as long as you don't pile on too many "magic item levels." I wouldn't go past 2 levels' worth of items, tops.

**This got tricky with the warpriest. Knight and thief are straightforward, and I built the mage as a pyromancer to keep her simple, but a large part of a warpriest's value to the party comes in the form of healing, which doesn't slot in neatly. I ended up folding healing magic into the warpriest's damage output, at 5/8 value since PCs have about 5/8 the hit points of monsters, and allowing for the fact that healing spells always "hit." I suspect I'm going to have to go back and do those numbers over, though... they scale very unevenly, due to certain spells adding a monster boost when they come online.[/size]

 

[Hassassin]

Here are a few of the things I came up with:

How would I be supposed to use those in comparison to normal level dependent items? For example, a 6th level Wizard with none of the items you mention would supposedly be weaker than the "assumed" 6th level wizard in the tables.