Hacking 3e DnD

[Emerald]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

[Prak]

Wealth by Level is being used as a sort of metonomy for "3.X's economic system" here. The "here is a table of how much gold a character of X level should have" is only a very small part of it, but it's sort of the icon of the overall issue because 3.X predicated a lot of character power and capability on having roughly that amount of wealth.

I mean, the larger issue is more that characters are essentially given this expectation that they can walk into town and buy, say, a +5 vorpal sword if they have enough money.

That expectation, in isolation, isn't really even the issue. It's a part of the larger issue. The wealth by level table is a part. Magic item prices is a part. Hell, even gold weight is a part.

All these parts lock together to create this system where a lot of players will say "Oh, a big painting that depicts IDONTCARE in this vampire dungeon? Cool, I'll stick it in the bag of holding, sell it, and convert it into MAGICSWORDIUM so I can kill dudes better." And GMs will put that giant painting in there, as a plot point, so the players can learn THE DARK TERRIBLE SECRET, and then just... watch this thing get treated like vendor junk. And the plan goes off the rails and then the game shortly thereafter, because your players are prying gemstones out of murals to buy a Werebear Gi so their monk can punch dudes as a bear, rather than paying any fucking attention to the story you're trying to provide them.

[Foxwarrior]

Disassembling an ancient artwork for spare parts is a great way to get really close to it and trigger the most detailed exposition

[maglag]

All these parts lock together to create this system where a lot of players will say "Oh, a big painting that depicts IDONTCARE in this vampire dungeon? Cool, I'll stick it in the bag of holding, sell it, and convert it into MAGICSWORDIUM so I can kill dudes better." And GMs will put that giant painting in there, as a plot point, so the players can learn THE DARK TERRIBLE SECRET, and then just... watch this thing get treated like vendor junk. And the plan goes off the rails and then the game shortly thereafter, because your players are prying gemstones out of murals to buy a Werebear Gi so their monk can punch dudes as a bear, rather than paying any fucking attention to the story you're trying to provide them.

In that case what the DM should do is have the shopkeeper go "Oh, that's the legendary cursed painting of vampire X! I can't buy it, nobody sane will, but there's rumors of the TERRIBLE SECRET behind it, you should go research that shit more carefully instead of pawning it!"

[Foxwarrior]

Nobody sane huh... but there are plenty of rich insane people in D&D land...

[maglag]

Nobody sane huh... but there are plenty of rich insane people in D&D land...

"Oh yes, I'll buy that cursed painting with the DARK TERRIBLE SECRET, right after you do this quest for me that'll uncover said DARK TERRIBLE SECRET! I'll be waiting inside my personal dungeon filled with exotic guardian monsters BTW."

Precisely, rich insane people are one of the best things to set up quests and/or drop plot.

[Trill]

"Oh, that's too bad. Where's the next dungeon?"

[Foxwarrior]

If the players are determined to avoid learning about the DARK TERRIBLE SECRET when it's worth money, they probably wouldn't pay much attention to it if it was unsellable scenery.

[Trill]

Less determined to avoid the plot, and more unwilling to work for the price.
If you found a signed check for $100 on the ground it would be worth it.
If you found out that to check it in you had to work for a whole day you'd reconsider.

[maglag]

"Oh, that's too bad. Where's the next dungeon?"

Of course the players are also free to just ignore the DARK TERRIBLE SECRET plot and go after another plot, otherwise the game is a railoroad.

Less determined to avoid the plot, and more unwilling to work for the price.
If you found a signed check for $100 on the ground it would be worth it.
If you found out that to check it in you had to work for a whole day you'd reconsider.

What if it's a 1000$ signed check?

What if it's a million dollar check?

At some value it'll be worth it the bit of extra work to cash in.

[Emerald]

Wealth by Level is being used as a sort of metonomy for "3.X's economic system" here. The "here is a table of how much gold a character of X level should have" is only a very small part of it, but it's sort of the icon of the overall issue because 3.X predicated a lot of character power and capability on having roughly that amount of wealth.

That's fair. Though in most 3e hacks I've seen, people either muck with the amount of wealth PCs get or reduce/remove the ability to freely buy items while leaving everything else the same (cf. Pathfinder and other "build in all the Big Six bonuses and reduce wealth to compensate, instead of simply redoing the math differently" systems for the first one, and every terrible DM's "'low magic' just means NPCs have all the magic" setting for the second), and since he mentioned leaving combat magic items alone I assumed that the former was the case here.

I mean, the larger issue is more that characters are essentially given this expectation that they can walk into town and buy, say, a +5 vorpal sword if they have enough money.

Pedantic nitpick: A +5 vorpal sword (or any other +10 equivalent weapon) costs 200,000 gp and the gold limit of a Metropolis is 100,000 gp, so there is actually a limit on what you can buy vs. have to loot or craft.

But as to your actual point, I don't think that the ability to turn paintings and murals into +5 swords is the huge problem people tend to make it out to be.

The term "Greyhawking" for stripping every last decorative bit to sell for gold was invented back in AD&D, in the days when even published adventures would shower parties with magic items to the point that the party fighter would equip hirelings with magic armor and weapons because he already had a +5 greatsword and had +1 longswords coming out his ears, and long before standard magic item prices or assumed magic item availability was a thing.

Yes, bonuses were rarer and lower in AD&D, and yes, big numbers may be more of a balance concern than flying carpets and crystal balls and such in theory, but constant flight and easy scrying are two of the big things separating mid- and high-level parties from low-level ones so those aren't just something that's "safe" to hand out in lieu of number-boosting items.

If there's any way at all to turn gold into power, PCs are going to try to turn the evil portrait into things they can use to kill people better and/or improve their ability to get and store more gold. If you can't buy +5 weapons, it'll be +1 weapons. If you can't buy +1 weapons, it'll be utility items. If you can't buy utility items, it'll be alchemical items. If you can't buy alchemical items, it'll be NPC hirelings. If you can't hire NPCs, it'll be adventuring gear or enchanted castles or the like. If you can't buy adventuring gear or enchanted castles, then why is gold a motivation at all? Scrooge McDucking your way through huge piles of coins is cool and all, but there should be more things to do with a dragon's hoard than "And then my character retires to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle off his earnings for the rest of his life, the end."


Conversely, pretty much every attempt to decouple gold from power that I've seen has dealt a serious hit to verisimilitude, either economically (e.g. "Magic items are too valuable for anyone to sell them to you, but apparently no one wants to buy any items recovered from dungeons and trading for items or favors isn't a thing") or by making the PCs artificially distinct from NPCs 4e-style (e.g. "PCs trying to craft magic items is long, expensive, and dangerous to the point that it's not profitable at all, yet magic item merchants exist and somehow make a profit").

You can really only do that by getting rid of magic items entirely and going the "intrinsic magic because you're awesome" or "magic perks are entirely metagame" routes, but removing 99% of the reason to go dungeon-delving is a pretty huge departure for a D&D hack.


It seems to me that the only workable approach is to thread the needle somewhere in between, where gold can still be traded for non-trivial amounts of power so players still find it fun and useful to get monetary rewards, but getting a million gp from a dragon's hoard and buying a ton of items with it won't break the game because there are other limitations on magic item accumulation or usage.

Maybe a Tome-like approach (where you can buy all sorts of crazy magic items as normal, but everything scales to your level and you can only equip so many active at once), or a tiered magic item approach (where you have "minor" items that can be bought easily and you don't care if the PCs have a bazillion of them any more than you care if they have a bazillion tanglefoot bags at 10th level, and "major" items that are artifact-like, possibly unique, and unpurchaseable), or a drawbacks approach (where items come with a certain amount of randomness, mandatory sacrifices like Weapons of Legacy, penalties like cursed items, or whatever so every added item is a tradeoff and not a strict increase in power), or some other approach, I dunno what the best option would be.

[Omegonthesane]

When I ran a Tome campaign, rather than have magic item marts with their stock lying around like how it works in the 20th century, there were magic item craftspeople who would make you a magic item on commission if you provided them the raw materials and compensated their labour. The raw materials generally being "a different magic item of the same tier" in practice for the purposes of the game, with an explicit surcharge for e.g. reforging a magic sword into a magic cloak instead of a slightly different magic sword, although they could just pay the up front costs for gold economy items.

Without the Tome economy of course, that's just Magic Item Marts but slower and with fewer verisimilitude problems.

(couldn't stop myself going on an off topic tangent; spoilered)

...in theory there was also a magic item flea market, but it was very much meant to be in the vein of a shifty person in an alleyway selling you stolen goods with no proper safety procedures.

There was also a campaign-long objective in which the party had to gather a certain amount of post-Wish materials to sacrifice, in what I believe is called a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power round these parts, that would prevent other planes from bleeding into their local Prime Material for the foreseeable future. They seemed spectacularly uninterested in finding out that the plane was almost due for routine maintenance and its aboleth master simply hadn't got round to it yet.