The Latest Edition War

[Username17]

Giving out magic items that break is a non-solution. Thirty years of charged items and we have very good data on this. The vast majority of players hoard charged items for a rainy day, which is a lot like not having them at all. Periodically they decide that something is big enough that it warrants their use, and then they flip out and rain charges like mad. The end result is that the DM basically has to treat them like they don't have any charged items, because for all the difference it usually makes they don't.

But every so often, someone is going to run the numbers and see how many charges they have and how many encounters they expect to see before more charges come into their hands, and then they go hog wild with the charges and eclipse all the other players. Just like in video games, where players conserve Full Ethers and they get to the end of the game and have a giant warchest full of the things and the final battles are actually pretty fucking easy.

In short: giving out limited use items is basically exactly the same as only giving out massive magical artifacts to one player and none to the others - except that the one player is always the player who thinks hard enough about the metagame to realize that there are a finite number of encounters with a finite number of combat rounds before a bigger item is found or the game ends. In short: someone who has thought enough about the game to realize that there is no functional difference between a "permanent" and a "temporary" magic item (something the actual D&D writers of 3rd and 4th edition never wrapped their minds around).

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you're going to make temporary magical items work you need to put them on a double-breakage schedule. They have a finite number of charges and will decay at a future point in time anyway--you can make said point pegged to some internal time limit (7 game days) or at some metagame time limit (6 encounters), whatever.

As far as the 'I don't want my ancestral sword to decay away!' you could solve this problem by making magical items more like materia from FF7. Quick summary:

1.) Magical currents ebb and flow around the world and sometimes crystalize at random spots though statistically appear more often where a powerful critter has died or powerful magical effects regularly take place. Unfortunately while very powerful the crystals are unstable and decay away both from overuse and just a limited amount of time.

2.) These crystals can both be directly shaped into a magical item or they can be inserted onto equipment made especially to use these properties.

3.) The vast majority of magical item effects we envisioned in 3E/4E operate from these crystals. Minor magical effects can be forged directly by the inhabitants of the campaign setting like +1 flaming swords, .

4.) The game also has artifacts for crap like Holy Avengers and Vecna's Eye. They operate like the old artifact rules. Meaning that they're powerful, permanent, and unforgable/unbuyable.

[Swordslinger]

But every so often, someone is going to run the numbers and see how many charges they have and how many encounters they expect to see before more charges come into their hands, and then they go hog wild with the charges and eclipse all the other players. Just like in video games, where players conserve Full Ethers and they get to the end of the game and have a giant warchest full of the things and the final battles are actually pretty fucking easy.

How do you figure that. If you hoard lesser magic items until the end of the campaign, they become less and less valuable. Saving basic healing potions until the final battle seems like a big waste of time. By then the benefit you get is trivial.

[Seerow]

But every so often, someone is going to run the numbers and see how many charges they have and how many encounters they expect to see before more charges come into their hands, and then they go hog wild with the charges and eclipse all the other players. Just like in video games, where players conserve Full Ethers and they get to the end of the game and have a giant warchest full of the things and the final battles are actually pretty fucking easy.

How do you figure that. If you hoard lesser magic items until the end of the campaign, they become less and less valuable. Saving basic healing potions until the final battle seems like a big waste of time. By then the benefit you get is trivial.

What you just said was pretty much the point of Frank's overall post. There's a mindset that says "Save all expendables cause you don't want to run out when you ACTUALLY need them", not realizing that you most likely won't actually run out because you'll just get more due to how the game works. So you have most people sitting on all these expendables that are totally useless because they're not being used, and someone else actually using the expendables and is way more effective than everyone else as a result.

Incidentally I think that mindset is what 3e was playtested under. It certainly explains a lot about how magic came to be.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You can see this mentality with the magical item creation system in 3E D&D. They actually gave you a discount on charged magical items (and a pretty huge one, too) even though most magical items won't be used often enough to burn through 20 charges, let alone 50.

If nothing else magical items need to have their value calculated in such a way that people will ditch them at some point in the future if/when something better comes along. Of course this means throwing out the entire treasure system (of BOTH editions) because the wealth-by-level assumptions both undervalue and overvalue certain magical items and effects.

[Hieronymous Rex]

You can't increase the difficulty if someone rolls a Hackmaster +12, because it encourages people to steal Dave's sword and throw it down the ditch so they personally aren't fucked over as much.

...who do you play with? Dave having a Hackmaster +12 does fuck over anyone: they aren't required to go on higher level adventures, they just have the option to. When a party starts mowing through opposition, they are typically pleased; they don't kill the golden goose.

*You don't bore Dave when he rolls up future treasure. 'Oh, joy, a Hackmaster +4? Meh.'

This applies to all treasure. " As soon as you get something, anything less is not as interesting. Payouts are supposed to vary.

* Curbstomping encounters because you have the One Ring is fun, but assured victory becomes boring after awhile. People love Super Stars, but if it lasted the whole game people would stop playing Super Mario.

If this were so, leveling up should be removed because it lets you curbstomp encounters. In practice, people just take on more difficult challenges.[/i]

[RadiantPhoenix]

If this were so, leveling up should be removed because it lets you curbstomp encounters. In practice, people just take on more difficult challenges.[/i]

Which, if done right, results in you not curbstomping encounters.

[Psychic Robot]

charged items are shit.

[Lago PARANOIA]

...who do you play with? Dave having a Hackmaster +12 does fuck over anyone: they aren't required to go on higher level adventures, they just have the option to. When a party starts mowing through opposition, they are typically pleased; they don't kill the golden goose.

Yes, and that's why I say that the encounter should not automatically increase in difficulty to account for Dave's good fortune.

On the other hand you still need to take away Dave's Hackmaster +12 at some point because it gets boring having him being the MVP every time.

This applies to all treasure. " As soon as you get something, anything less is not as interesting. Payouts are supposed to vary.

Which is why it's a good idea to reset the baseline if you're in the mood of handing out big payouts. If Dave gets a Hackmaster +12 not only will he be bored at future weapons the team gets but he'll probably also be excluded from participating in future payouts. Which while fair precludes Dave from participating in one of the more exciting parts of D&D; treasure acquisition. It's not the having, it's the getting.

You can also make random treasure work out for you if you carefully control the average bonuses of randomly drops and make them continually scale like in a MMORPG. This has the same overall effect of rotating the MVP seat slot.

But this means that you can't randomly drop things like The One Ring and Hackmaster +12s until late in the campaign because the player will just hold onto it. And unless someone else rolls something of equal or greater value (which is unlikely) Dave is just going to spend the next 30 combats as MVP and nothing anyone gets will knock him out of the spot. And because things like sundering and ninja looting seem too vindictive and arbitrary it's just best to state up front that the Hackmaster +12 isn't going to stay in Dave's hands forever and he should enjoy it while he can.

While I do like the idea of campaigns being defined because someone got The One Ring at level 2 probably a frequent but random schedule of small bonuses would engage the players more. People are risk-adverse and are highly subject to a phenomenon known as Naive Optimization, so even if they'll never actually use the +2 Flaming Longsword that served them for so well once they got the +4 Vicious Scimitar they'll still get upset if you take it away. And of course looking at MMORPGs the small marginal utility you get from rolling random crap at higher levels of play doesn't actually stop people from spending several hours grinding for a tiny amount of game. I'm almost tempted to think that pound-for-pound human beings will fight harder for (and thus be more motivated by) a tiny bonus than a large bonus.

You'll still need a mechanic that forces people to burn through traditional consumables however, otherwise you'll have hoarding. You just don't need to do it for nominally permanent items because the treasure acquisition and power scaling system renders permanent items non-permanent.

If this were so, leveling up should be removed because it lets you curbstomp encounters. In practice, people just take on more difficult challenges.

Or maybe not. A table might actually want to play at around Conan-level for the next few campaigns and while they might appreciative a temporary adjunct into them effortlessly slaying ogre armies they don't actually appreciate the campaign being derailed that much for that long. There's a reason why Batman or Captain America do not hold onto artifacts or super gear or superpowers for very long and that's because it would necessitate a genre shift.

[RobbyPants]

On the other hand you still need to take away Dave's Hackmaster +12 at some point because it gets boring having him being the MVP every time.

Couldn't you just give everyone an awesome item and have them each do entirely different things so they get to swap being the MVP (think the old D&D cartoon show)?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Couldn't you just give everyone an awesome item and have them each do entirely different things so they get to swap being the MVP (think the old D&D cartoon show)?

For the 'winner' of the lottery, no contest. It motivates them more to be uncomparably better than their peers than it is to have a rising tide lift all boats. People compare their circumstances to what's around them rather than some absolute outside standard. A kid who gets a Super Nintendo in 1991 is going to feel happier with the initial reward than someone who got one in 1996 (when a lot more kids got them).

Now as far as the 'losers' go, the answer depends on whether you believe people will be more eager and motivated by going 'that will be me soon, just you wait' or 'I got something just as powerful, too!' when someone shows off their +12 Hackmaster. I personally think it's the former.

Why? Well, even though you think that watching people arbitrarily get huge rewards that you don't have is demotivating that's not necessarily so. Hearing stories about how someone seemingly at random got a huge reward is motivating when you believe that there's a good chance you'll get it too but demotivating when you don't think it will be. This is why people who regularly play the lottery aren't actually turned off by hearing interviews and seeing news clip of someone who actually got the 12 million dollars but people who don't play get angered by it.

That said, because people are motivated by other peoples' good fortunes if they think it can happen to them, the reward has to be believable for it to happen to them. Handing out Hackmaster +12s at low level probably would demotivate people because people would think that they'd never be able to match or exceed that payout. But handing out Hackmaster +6s would get their fellow teammates drooling and fantasizing. This holds true even if the probability of getting Hackmaster +12s and Hackmaster +6s remains the same.

[Lago PARANOIA]

All that said, even if people don't like my idea (it's more of a broad outline than an idea raelly) for a fantasy setting I'm open to hearing others. I think that a successful new campaign setting will have the following things going for it:

1.) Be able to be grokked by new players to the table. This is a tricky balancing act because you want to have a fantasy setting that is familiar and even cliched but not something they've seen a million times.
2.) The campaign setting either needs to be noblebright or grimdark (not WH40K grimdark, more WoD or Exalted). Do not go in between--a grey campaign setting or one that waffles disengages people looking for high adventure and is too cozy for people looking for dark and danger.
3.) The campaign setting needs to have a metagoal of some kind. Not every group needs to be forced to achieve this metagoal like in Mouseguard, but if three people are giving the game a spin for the first time they need a motivation more compelling than 'wait at the train station for the next plot hook'.
4.) The game needs villain iconics. Villains make the story. They should represent a wide continuum of personalities, goals, and powers. They don't need to be connected to each other Legion of Doom style (though you do want a Legion of Doom or three) but you want to make it so that for broad PC goals you need to be able to throw at least two villain iconics into the works.

[Blasted]

charged items are shit.

I may go so far as to say:

Remove all ammunition.
Counting arrows is not fun.
Assume that you buy a quiver at the start and beg/steal/recycle as you go.
Of course, magic arrows necessarily go the way of the dodo.

[shadzar]

I may go so far as to say:

Remove all ammunition.
Counting arrows is not fun.

Remove all counting, cause counting isnt fun.

assume money is always had and dont bother earning it, spending it, or counting it.
[/sarcasm]

[Desdan_Mervolam]

You're joking, but I am definitely in favor of abstract wealth systems. Forcing people to count their pennies is bullshit, and forces an "Every penny counts" mentality where people worth more than the gross domestic product of the nation they're in sleep in barns and eat hardtack for every meal because they think that money could be better spent elsewhere.

[shadzar]

you do know that D&D was built on medieval concepts, of which the caste system and feudalism that you speak of is ingrained into it, and there ARE people that still like that?

one of the reasons having that system as default, but then not having special mechanics that force economy based on those mechanics (wealth by level, treasure parcels) is a failure because it doesnt allow for OTHER economies to be invented by DMs for the worlds they create.

you need some sort of default system for those who dont want to create their own completely, but have room for people to adapt or even create their own.

[Blasted]

The issue with ammunition is that you're using it constantly in combat. With wealth you're generally making one or two purchases and getting a pay-day at the end of the dungeon.
Unless you're keeping tabs of everything bought. But people have stopped doing that since Gygax put the rules in.
So yes, we have stopped counting money because it's not fun. It can be done for ammunition too.

[MfA]

I think that 3E and 4E D&D are so poorly built and the flaws are so well-known this is pretty much impossible. For example, take hit points. People might like the current double-to-triple digit system or at least don't complain about, but can you more-or-less preserve it and still make it into something that actually works?

I think by tying hitpoints into saves, yes you can.

But fixing the complaints would require making the system look totally different--4E Paragon Paths are what we got when we actually fixed Prestige Classes. If you can't and have to leave it in the game, then why can't you make that argument for everything?

I think if you combined 3e multiclassing with 4e paths you could make most people happy.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Shadzar: I'm okay with people playing misers, it's a valid character trait. But I want characters to do that because it's a character trait they have for their character and not because they're afraid if they let their characters have the lifestyle they've earned they're going to fall behind in some arms race between PCs and their enemies.

[shadzar]

Shadzar: I'm okay with people playing misers, it's a valid character trait. But I want characters to do that because it's a character trait they have for their character and not because they're afraid if they let their characters have the lifestyle they've earned they're going to fall behind in some arms race between PCs and their enemies.

where does that happen? where is this "arms race" you speak of? i can see it in 3rd and 4th...but not before to my knowledge.

and the enemies NEVER were meant to follow the exact rules of the PCs either... the enemies fought are the ones treasure you are stealing for the most part...so in order for the PCs to get better things, the enemies have to have them to begin with.

it isnt about being some rich miser, but a coherent world. if everyone is poor, the PCs have no way of transforming items into coins because nobody can afford them. if everyone is rich, then the PCs have nobody to sell items too because they already have enough.

where are you seeing this "arms race" from before the idiocy of "wealth by level" and "treasure parcels/player wishlists"?

[Desdan_Mervolam]

*Slow clap* Bravo. When I posted that, I did actually think to myself "Now, if I were going to argue against that, it'd have to be on the angle that in 2e, magic weapons couldn't be bought for love or money and magic item creation rules were intentionally vague and shitty, and so the only way to get magic was to find a guy holding the item, or a monster standing in front of the item and kill it. This leaves you with what is a different problem, and therefore doesn't fix the base problem where measuring out wealth as an exact number of real coins is stupid, but it solves the magical arms race".

The big point I'm trying to make by advocating an abstract money system is that I don't want to play Ledgers and Logistics. Money management, and hell, inventory management in general, makes the game less fun. I don't make people buy mundane arrows, or hell even Masterwork arrows really. They cost a pittance and can be found literally everywhere in civilization. If someone goes to the trouble of buying their character a bow, it can pretty damned well be assumed they got arrows for it too. Magic arrows are different, I do make sure those get tracked.

By that same token, I don't worry about tracking food and water either. I assume adventurers are smart and canny enough to pack enough that they don't die in the wilderness, and if they're not smart enough that someone else in the party is smart enough to get their back. And here's what will probably shock you the most: I don't track encumbrance either, unless the party is trying something patently stupid like trying to carry a big stone statue back to town on their own without some sort of mechanical assistance.

The reason for my attitude in this is because the game is about having adventures. The fun part of adventures is kicking down doors, disabling traps, killing monsters and solving puzzles. It's not estimating how long an adventure will last, calculating out how much equipment you need and figuring out how to move that equipment to the adventure site. That's the boring part. Oh, it could be fun sometimes, adding an external countdown that the party has to mind, but that shouldn't be every adventure, and the DM that contrives to make the party deal with that every time is being a dick. We're here to have fun, and the number of hoops that stand between us and the fun to be jumped through should be kept to a bare minimum.

[shadzar]

*Slow clap* Bravo. When I posted that, I did actually think to myself "Now, if I were going to argue against that, it'd have to be on the angle that in 2e, magic weapons couldn't be bought for love or money and magic item creation rules were intentionally vague and shitty, and so the only way to get magic was to find a guy holding the item, or a monster standing in front of the item and kill it. This leaves you with what is a different problem, and therefore doesn't fix the base problem where measuring out wealth as an exact number of real coins is stupid, but it solves the magical arms race".

The big point I'm trying to make by advocating an abstract money system is that I don't want to play Ledgers and Logistics.

WOAH!

last thing first.. the name of the game, if you are going to mention it then say the name properly; is Papers and Paychecks, check your 1st edition DMG.

now first thing last....

what the hell could you not do with the magic item creation system in 2nd or even 1st?

they are in no way vague. well vague in WHAT you can create, because it doesnt limit you to some placement on your christmas tree where the item will hang in 3rd.

get the needed materials
prepare them
enchant them

viola magic item...

same steps for 3rd edition.

get materials
prepare masterwork item
enchant item

3 steps is too confusing cause it is to klunky! RUN AWAY!

[Guyr Adamantine]

4: Lose constitution.. woops!

[shadzar]

4: Lose constitution.. woops!

hey... do that in the bathroom please!

[rasmuswagner]

what the hell could you not do with the magic item creation system in 2nd or even 1st?

they are in no way vague. well vague in WHAT you can create, because it doesnt limit you to some placement on your christmas tree where the item will hang in 3rd.

get the needed materials
prepare them
enchant them

viola magic item...

same steps for 3rd edition.

get materials
prepare masterwork item
enchant item

3 steps is too confusing cause it is to klunky! RUN AWAY!

That's not even close to what those systems actually were.

1. Decide magic item you want to create
2. Wait for GM to make up requirements. Better bribe him with beer and pizza first, because he's got like ZERO guidelines.
3. Pay whatever amount of gold, and jump through whatever hoops.
4. Lose a point of Constitution.
5. Done!