Should characters gain HD every level?

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Tue May 03, 2011 8:19 am

Swordslinger wrote:
DSMatticus wrote: This isn't about 'player entitlement.' It's not 'boo-fucking-hoo, he has a +3 sword, why can't I have a +3 sword?' It's...

DM: "Everyone else can kill a manticore, so the party is fighting manticores today."
PC: "But I can only fight goblins."
DM: "Well, then you'd better just hang back this session and let everybody else do the work. After the loot, you'll have the stuff you need and you can really start playing next session."
Nice strawman. I never said they'd start with no magic items, I just said less.

However, they're playing characters that are in equal power to the other characters. Right?

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Tue May 03, 2011 9:46 am

While it does depend on the system, you don't in principle need to be exactly as powerful as every person in the party to be able to have a fun time - just powerful enough that you can actually contribute meaningfully. If that can happen at 75% power, and that's only going to be a temporary limitation, then fine; if the cap is 90%, drop them to that and no less; only if you literally need to have every scrap of WBL does it become dickish to the max to make a new character have less magic items.

A bit dickish? Yeah. But going by my own (admittedly limited) experiences, hardly dickish enough to ruin the game unless the details are such that you really can't contribute at all.

Niles · Post by **Niles** » Tue May 03, 2011 6:50 pm

Kaelik wrote:If you are playing in a non WBL system, then sure, complain about how in 2e your character earned his stuff, and incoming characters didn't.

Wrong. 2e was also a WBL system, it's just that no-one designers included had a good idea what the intended WBL was.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Tue May 03, 2011 7:04 pm

well, and 2nd Edition had different exp/level requirements for different classes. So a level 10 rogue and a level 10 wizard were /seriously/ not equal.

(putting aside the magic)

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Tue May 03, 2011 7:41 pm

Judging__Eagle wrote: However, they're playing characters that are in equal power to the other characters. Right?

No, with gear nobody is playing an "equal" character, because gear is disparate and unpredictable. After one adventure, the best magic item may well go to the wizard and he's got an advantage. The next adventure the fighter finds a badass magic sword or suit of armor. The adventure after that, the rogue gets a ring of invisibility.

The very nature of gear and how it's distributed creates natural inequalities. If you're upset by that fact, then you just need to eliminate treasure entirely.

icyshadowlord · Post by **icyshadowlord** » Wed May 04, 2011 11:02 am

Do remember that it's a DM's job to distribute gear, not the player's. Some DMs will want to give specific stuff to specific characters (no sane man would give a Magical Staff to the party's Fighter, for example) while others just sit back, throw random stuff and look on as the players fight over who gets to equip what. Either way, I'd usually go for the former due to how some items are class-exclusive (Holy Avenger, anyone?) but I prefer a mix of the two options just to keep things interesting.

PoliteNewb · Post by **PoliteNewb** » Wed May 04, 2011 8:39 pm

Niles wrote:
Kaelik wrote:If you are playing in a non WBL system, then sure, complain about how in 2e your character earned his stuff, and incoming characters didn't.
Wrong. 2e was also a WBL system, it's just that no-one designers included had a good idea what the intended WBL was.

The fuck it was. A WBL system, by definition, means there is an expected amount of wealth you are supposed to have at a given level. If you cannot tell me what that is (from a game book), then it did not have a WBL system.

There wasn't even an unwritten "practical" WBL system...you could totally play a 9th level fighter with no magic items and fight dragons and shit, and do okay. If you were a 16th level fighter with a +2 sword and no other magic items, you could fight just about anything in the game and have some chance of winning. And that includes fighting Dispater.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Wed May 04, 2011 9:51 pm

2e does not have a WBL system; however, it does make assumptions that a given character will have a certain piece of gear when fighting enemies (werewolves, shadows, ghosts, liches, and plants and oozes), i.e: unless you had could improvise a +2 or more weapon of a certain damage type or had good spell selection you would be brutally murdered no matter what you did.

Ironically, 1e did[/i] have WBL: each gold piece was worth 1xp.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Wed May 04, 2011 11:33 pm

Hicks wrote:Ironically, 1e did[/i] have WBL: each gold piece was worth 1xp.

That's the opposite of what you think it means. It means that finding treasure granted experiene.

Basically 1E didn't have a wealth by level per se. Gygax worked in the first order derivative, through the distribution of treasure. More importantly, total numbers wasn't always that important; Gygax loved to make the players WORK to take it home.

Here is an example, "A pair of exceedingly large, powerful and ferocious ogres has taken up abode in a chamber at the base of a shaft whcih gives to the land above. From there they can raid both the upper lands and the dungeons roundabout. These creatures have accumulated over 2,00 g.p. in wealth, but it is obviously not as a pair of 1,000 g.p. gems. Rather they have gathered an assortment of goods whose combined value is well in excess of two thousand nobles (the coin of the realm). Rather than stocking a treasure which the victorious player characters can easily gather and carry to the surface, you maximize the challenge by making it one which ogres would naturally accrue in the process of raiding..."

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu May 05, 2011 1:12 am

tzor wrote:
Hicks wrote:Ironically, 1e did[/i] have WBL: each gold piece was worth 1xp.

That's the opposite of what you think it means. It means that finding treasure granted experience.

It doesn't matter if gold gives xp or if xp gives gold -- it means that one is tied to the other, i.e. mega-rich characters are high level by definition. Or it would mean that, if it weren't for the inability to gain more than 1.99 levels' worth of experience at a time in 1E.

PoliteNewb · Post by **PoliteNewb** » Thu May 05, 2011 2:46 am

hogarth wrote:
tzor wrote:
Hicks wrote:Ironically, 1e did[/i] have WBL: each gold piece was worth 1xp.

That's the opposite of what you think it means. It means that finding treasure granted experience.

It doesn't matter if gold gives xp or if xp gives gold -- it means that one is tied to the other, i.e. mega-rich characters are high level by definition. Or it would mean that, if it weren't for the inability to gain more than 1.99 levels' worth of experience at a time in 1E.

But that rule is there. Further, that applies only to treasure gained at some sort of substantial risk. So you can in fact have incredibly wealthy people who are only 3rd level.

More importantly, you can have the reverse...high-level people who are barely have 2 coppers to rub together. And there was not a real correlation between wealth and magical equipment.

There was no expectation that "at such and such a level, you have so much money and/or magical gear". And there was no expectation that this amount of wealth was meant to continue to grow at a steady and equivalent rate, including replacements for gear lost/used. Yes, you expected to get richer and acquire magic loot as you increased in level, but there were next to no guidelines as to how much you should have or how fast you should get it.

So you can have rich low-level people with no magic items, rich high-level people with no magic items, poor high-level people with plenty of magic items, or poor high-level people with no magic items. Any and all of these are possible in 1E AD&D. That pretty much disproves any concept of "wealth by level".

tenuki · Post by **tenuki** » Fri May 06, 2011 1:15 am

I think that the whole idea of WBL is stupid beyond comparison and has nothing to do with what I think of when I think of TTRPGs.

That said, if you want to balance a new character with the existing ones, why don't you let him roll up that 100k worth of items on a random assortment of those asinine tables and then trade the loot at McAlchemy's in The Town like all the other World of Warcraft Analog Edition droids out there?

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Fri May 06, 2011 1:53 am

tenuki wrote: That said, if you want to balance a new character with the existing ones, why don't you let him roll up that 100k worth of items on a random assortment of those asinine tables and then trade the loot at McAlchemy's in The Town like all the other World of Warcraft Analog Edition droids out there?

For the same reason you don't roll for stats, because you get some guy who is dead set on getting a certain magic item and will keep remaking characters till he does.

You never want to make it advantageous to make a new character. If you ever have to make things unequal (and starting gear is one of those areas), then the new character should always get the short end of the stick.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Fri May 06, 2011 2:12 am

Swordslinger - that's just an argument against random elements in char creation (and it's a fairly good one).

Also, tenuki, randomly rolling items up to a certain value of being the problem that in reality, a party of 4 players had 400k worth of that they got to split. And concessions were made that player A could get this if player B could get this. And etc, etc.

It's very hard to simulate naturally gaining equipment during character creation. But you can just flat-out give players the essential items. If the rest of the party has +3 weapons, the new fighter gets his +3 weapon. Same for armor, shield, etc, etc. Then let him cherry-pick some items at below level so he has the magic trinkets the rest of the party has. It should be deterministic, but the new characters' core equipments (the bonuses characters need to be effective, attack, defense, etc, etc) has to be on par with the rest of the party.