Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ainamacar" data-source="post: 5555632" data-attributes="member: 70709">Glad to see it got your neurons firing! In 4e the fact that items already have levels should help a lot. Big 3 items clearly have the strongest impact. For argument's sake let's say they are weighted equally. Other items should only count if they are actually worn or otherwise consistently useful. Consumables might need special consideration, so let's ignore them for now. I only played 4e for about a year, and never broke out of heroic tier, so bear with me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />With all the various math fixes (i.e. expertise feats) my understanding is that character attacks and defenses now go up about 1/character level, roughly matching what is happening with monsters.  Without the big 3 items, these values are about 75% of their usual values for an otherwise fully equipped character of that level.  As a rough guess, let's say that a naked character is 2/3 as strong as a character of their same level with a standard WbL load-out. So although naked 30th level characters have attack bonuses in the neighborhood of their 24th level counterparts, without any magic items they fall behind the curve a bit more, even considering the additional class powers.  (This may be a poor assumption.)  In the case at hand this would indicate magic items make up about 10 levels worth of power.  The simplest estimate of the value of the big 3 is 6 levels, which would suggest valuing each big-3 item as level item/15 in the general case.This leaves 4 levels for all other items. The character may very well have many items, but for simplicity's sake assume that their best 4 remaining items (that are not secondary big 3 items, consumables, etc.) make up the bulk of this additional power. So then 4 level 30 items divided by 30 is 4, which suggests valuing such items as level/30 in the general case.  Although the average level of these 4 items probably lags behind the character's level, it also doesn't include the potentially many lower level items they have.  Counting only the best 4 items will hopefully tend to select items worn in the remaining body slots, or other items that the player finds consistently useful.  Furthermore, at low levels or in low-magic settings, dividing by much more than 30 means other magic items would almost never contribute to effective character level.To summarize this crude system:Naked character level = 2/3*CLLevel increase due to big-3 items = item level/15Level increase due to other items = item level/30 (best 4 items only)Add these up, including fractions, and round at the end. If all 7 items counted above are of the character's level this method gives a naked character level plus magic item level equal to the character's level.So, let's see here. Consider a level 10 character in a lower magic setting with the following items:Magic weapon +2 (level 6)Black Iron +1 armor (level 4)Bracers of Mighty Striking (level 2)Horned Helm (level 6)Belt of Vigor (level 2)The rules above would calculate its effective character level as 7.66. For those with better 4e experience than I, does that seem reasonable?  Better yet, I'd be curious to see what it computes for PCs people are actually playing by the standard rules (does it work when using the usual WbL guidelines?) as well as in low-magic settings (does it give effective levels around the encounter levels that seem to be working for that campaign?)</blockquote>

Verification