DenizenKane wrote:As for encounters a day, is there any advantage to 3e's "4 encounters a day" thing or would it be better to make it 1 encounter per day? So those on daily schedules don't have to have lots of spell slots.
3e never says you should have 4 encounters per day, and the idea that it does has led to lots of bad encounter- and adventure-building advice over the years.Foxwarrior wrote:Assaulting a castle I actually kinda prefer as a "running battle" as it were. There are a lot of enemies, and you don't want to fight them all at once, but they do want to fight you all at once. Specifically declaring that the castle is four encounters long is throwing away the castle's main strategic advantage before the game's begun.
It says that, on average, a party should be able to handle 4 "challenging" encounters (those that should seriously threaten at least one PC, but not necessarily be lethal) in one adventuring day (i.e. time between rests) without running out of resources, that that's equivalent to 2 Very Difficult, 1 Overpowering, 8 Easy, etc. encounters, and that Challenging encounters should be roughly 50% of those that the party faces.
So 4 Challenging encounters, 1 Very Difficult encounter, 1 Difficult + 2 Challenging encounters, or any other combo is perfectly fine (as is 5 Challenging, 1 Difficult + 3 Challenging, etc. if you want a chance of a party wipe), and in fact you should be varying things so not every adventuring day has the same structure. The whole point of having daily resources in the first place is that the players have to balance out a finite set of known resources over an unknown number of encounters that each pose an unknown challenge; if you're going to balance around exactly N encounters of roughly the same difficulty per rest, whether N=4 or N=1, then you might as well scale resources down to 1/N normal and make everything per-encounter because at that point the extra resource management minigame isn't adding anything.
One would never (or at least should never) declare that a castle assault is four encounters long and force PCs into that scenario. Rather, a castle is going to have a bunch of defenders in various locations, and encounters will shake out based on how the PCs approach it: if they sneak in they might be able to quietly take out a bunch of guards room-by-room and have 10 or more EL-4 to EL-2 encounters, if they go charging blindly right at the gate they might end up fighting a ton of defenders at once in one big EL+4 encounter, or something in between. This is exactly what early dungeons looked like, where "per day" really meant "per venture into the dungeon 'cause finding a safe place to rest is hard and risky" and while monsters were placed in certain rooms for ease of map-keying the monsters from various different rooms could move around and gang up on the party if they made too much noise or the like.
If the PCs charge into the castle gate or charge into a big dungeon room, attracts all the defenders or monsters into a big ball of enemies they can't defeat, and die, that's their fault for doing something suicidally stupid. If the PCs do some legwork, figure out a clever plan to divide and conquer the defenders, and take the castle with no casualties and minimal resource expenditure, they should be rewarded for their planning and tactics. Having small groups of nicely-balanced enemies politely wait their turn so that PCs can engage them piecemeal in tastefully-arranged setpiece battles leads to poor tactics in and out of combat and boring adventures on the whole.
As with the encounter guideline stuff above, the Wealth by Level table has gained memetic status as some sort of strict "thou shalt get this much treasure at these levels and thou shalt not deviate more than a smidgen from this value" sort of thing, but it was intended solely as a handy shortcut for adventure-building and doesn't need to be followed all that strictly in practice.Prak wrote:One thing I've been sorta mulling over for a D&D hack to address wealth by level is ditching that chart from DMG for, at least, anything that isn't a combat effect and just saying "as the effect produced by going and paying a spellcaster to do it" with maybe a modest premium for reusable.
But I haven't actually analyzed that at all. So a "bag of holding 9cu'" would be, like, 450gp. And, honestly, that's probably plenty of space?
It lists average treasure values so a DM or adventure writer will know not to require a "you must be this high to proceed" item or set of items that cost more than the average PC will have...but it's just that, an average, and doesn't represent what a party "must" have any more than the fact that adventures generally assume a low-optimization fighter/wizard/rogue/cleric party means that all parties "must" have 4 PCs that cover exactly those party roles. And it assumes an arbitrary amount of consumable use (roughly 15%), so that's an average guideline on top of an average guideline. Being outside that range (even far outside that range) is totally fine as long as the DM is aware of that and adjusts encounters appropriate.
As an example, the Wealth by Level for level 10 is 49,000 gp, so a 10th-level character can reasonably be expected to end up around that much wealth. But if that character never buys potions, never scribes spells, never gets resurrected, etc., then going by the average treasure values they should actually have closer to 57,650 gp. If the DM happened to roll maximum values on the Coins treasure table for each of the ~14 expected equal-EL encounters at 10th level, that would earn that character just 10,500 gp (5d6×10 pp -> 3,000 gp × 14 encounters / 4 PCs), noticeably less than the 17,000 gp that the WBL table expects when going from 10th to 11th level, and if the DM instead rolled maximum on the Art Objects table they'd end up with a whopping 252,000 gp (1d6 objects × 2d6×1000 gp apiece × 14 encounters / 4 PCs)!
The art objects value is obviously a ridiculous edge case (unless the party is robbing an art museum, I suppose), but in the other cases simply never buying consumables (a very common thing) or finding mostly big heaps of coinage (common in campaigns involving lots of dragons, lots of heists, etc.) can swing earned wealth at that level by a non-trivial ~8K gp per PC in either direction, and it can theoretically tolerate much more dramatic divergences than that, and that's totally fine because WBL isn't meant to be a straitjacket.
The point of all that is to say that one shouldn't feel at all constrained by WBL in a normal 3e game, and that goes doubly so for a 3e heartbreaker. It's totally fine if a fighter can end up packing two dozen different +5 weapons at level 10--once you've got one of them, or maybe two if you're using weapon style feats, the rest are mostly there for exotic DRs and bragging rights--or the whole party having easy flight and teleportation at mid levels, or the price of potions being high and the price of permanent magic items being obscene, or any other setting on the wealth dial, so long as the math and the DM properly account for it.