The trouble is that I don’t have time at the moment, and may not have time today, partially because I’ll be playing D&D this evening. (We’re all level 7 now!) Tomorrow I will revise & post.

What brought this to mind? Well, let me tell you about a little skirmish game I ran on Sunday.

See, in 4th Edition, supposedly the difference between level 1 and level 3 isn’t so much that, say, the wizard now has Scorching Ray, which is a huge acquisition in terms of power level. Instead, the math is slightly different: enemies hit slightly harder and are more difficult to hit in turn.

I wanted to see how that played out in practice. Is it obvious to the players that they are overmatched? or does the fight degenerate into a frustrating slog as the PCs are killed off slowly? I wanted to get a little bit of data on that and also have some fun on a boring Sunday afternoon.

The players used the five level 1 PCs from Keep on the Shadowfell. The encounter was on a road through light woods (i.e. some trees were around) with five level 3 hobgoblins: two Soldiers, two Archers, and a Warcaster, with the stats from Monsters & More (4th Edition). (EN World is down at the moment, so no link yet.) My goal? See how easy it is to kill the PCs when playing ruthlessly with monsters above their level.

The fight had some interesting highlights. The archers were very effective, dropping at least one character. I believe the warcaster got in his close blast 5 ability, which dropped someone else and was pretty devastating overall. The rogue was very effective in dishing out ridiculous amounts of damage.

But I was talking about how I pulled punches. The archers did not, in fact, keep the wizard and rogue down as they might have if I were playing as ruthlessly as I intended. Arguably, this made the biggest difference. The paladin and fighter were doing respectable damage, but the rogue was ultimately the finisher.

The soldiers did not stick together in order to form a unit with better AC, and I kept forgetting that they slowed their target on hit, although I am not sure it would’ve mattered. The former allowed the soldiers to survive longer. AC 22 is a nice advantage when the rogue has +10 to hit when flanking.

The warcaster, well, I actually didn’t pull any punches with him. He used his abilities pretty effectively and consistently. I probably should’ve used his melee ability to daze a target rather than trying to withdraw him from combat.

So, if I sat down with the intent to kill PCs, why did I pull my punches?

I hate killing PCs. I don’t feeling like an asshole. This is a problem because we’re all adults, which means we should all be good sports, and it’s the possibility of losing big that makes winning so much fun.

I’ve been pretty keen on trying to nurture the Asshole DM, who can perhaps best be summarized as a DM who loves his PCs but has a really screwed up way of showing it. Trouble is, I’m not sure I actually have the stomach for it. It may be that I have to explicitly declare that I am running a “Death happens” game and isolate the part of me that wants to nudge things in favor of the PCs from the part of me that’s running the horrible monsters bent on murdering the PCs.

There is one data point that I took away from this. Monsters do not appear to be designed to pull punches. They’re designed to be played the way they are, and the PCs can almost certainly take it when it comes to equivalent level monsters. For higher level monsters, the math does turn out to be slightly nastier, but it’s not insurmountable.

To some extent, I have more questions than before. How much does this depend on the monster? Are there some monsters that turn out to have a glass jaw if the PCs know how to hit it? What about solo monsters? Do they turn out to be a slog? How about a group of mixed-level monsters?

Once again, these questions have to wait until the game comes out. 13 goddamn days! Does anyone have any suggestions? Do you think cocaine or possibly heroin would help?

What brought this to mind? Well, let me tell you about a little skirmish game I ran on Sunday.

See, in 4th Edition, supposedly the difference between level 1 and level 3 isn’t so much that, say, the wizard now has Scorching Ray, which is a huge acquisition in terms of power level. Instead, the math is slightly different: enemies hit slightly harder and are more difficult to hit in turn.

I wanted to see how that played out in practice. Is it obvious to the players that they are overmatched? or does the fight degenerate into a frustrating slog as the PCs are killed off slowly? I wanted to get a little bit of data on that and also have some fun on a boring Sunday afternoon.

The players used the five level 1 PCs from Keep on the Shadowfell. The encounter was on a road through light woods (i.e. some trees were around) with five level 3 hobgoblins: two Soldiers, two Archers, and a Warcaster, with the stats from Monsters & More (4th Edition). (EN World is down at the moment, so no link yet.) My goal? See how easy it is to kill the PCs when playing ruthlessly with monsters above their level.

The fight had some interesting highlights. The archers were very effective, dropping at least one character. I believe the warcaster got in his close blast 5 ability, which dropped someone else and was pretty devastating overall. The rogue was very effective in dishing out ridiculous amounts of damage.

But I was talking about how I pulled punches. The archers did not, in fact, keep the wizard and rogue down as they might have if I were playing as ruthlessly as I intended. Arguably, this made the biggest difference. The paladin and fighter were doing respectable damage, but the rogue was ultimately the finisher.

The soldiers did not stick together in order to form a unit with better AC, and I kept forgetting that they slowed their target on hit, although I am not sure it would’ve mattered. The former allowed the soldiers to survive longer. AC 22 is a nice advantage when the rogue has +10 to hit when flanking.

The warcaster, well, I actually didn’t pull any punches with him. He used his abilities pretty effectively and consistently. I probably should’ve used his melee ability to daze a target rather than trying to withdraw him from combat.

So, if I sat down with the intent to kill PCs, why did I pull my punches?

I hate killing PCs. I don’t feeling like an asshole. This is a problem because we’re all adults, which means we should all be good sports, and it’s the possibility of losing big that makes winning so much fun.

I’ve been pretty keen on trying to nurture the Asshole DM, who can perhaps best be summarized as a DM who loves his PCs but has a really screwed up way of showing it. Trouble is, I’m not sure I actually have the stomach for it. It may be that I have to explicitly declare that I am running a “Death happens” game and isolate the part of me that wants to nudge things in favor of the PCs from the part of me that’s running the horrible monsters bent on murdering the PCs.

There is one data point that I took away from this. Monsters do not appear to be designed to pull punches. They’re designed to be played the way they are, and the PCs can almost certainly take it when it comes to equivalent level monsters. For higher level monsters, the math does turn out to be slightly nastier, but it’s not insurmountable.

To some extent, I have more questions than before. How much does this depend on the monster? Are there some monsters that turn out to have a glass jaw if the PCs know how to hit it? What about solo monsters? Do they turn out to be a slog? How about a group of mixed-level monsters?

Once again, these questions have to wait until the game comes out. 13 goddamn days! Does anyone have any suggestions? Do you think cocaine or possibly heroin would help?

Death happens

PCs die. The world of D&D, especially what we’ve seen of the Points of Light so far, is a dangerous place. People die. Even heroes die. It’s impossible to save everyone when there are ravening hordes of undead out there that will not, for example, spare PCs so they may extract concessions.

D&D is as much about game as it is roleplaying, and in games, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Losing a character isn’t the end of the world because there’s theoretically an infinite number of fun characters you can play.

And when a character dies, it’s a potential jumping off point for roleplaying. A dead character is an opportunity for everyone to react, and for the plot to take an unexpected turn. Or, alternately, it’s an opportunity for someone to play a different character, one that they might actually enjoy more or might have a novel effect on the game.

If, god forbid, the whole party dies, it’s still a big deal. You have an obligation to make it their death as epic and dramatic as possible. But it’s also an opportunity to do something special. Did the PCs die trying to save the world? Now the next plot arc is 1,000 years later, most of the world is enslaved by demons, and epic-level PCs have to fix it.

In practical terms, this means you don’t fudge the dice. The dice exist to make things random and interesting and fiddling with the dice to keep the PCs from dying risks making the game too easy. You can’t possibly anticipate all of their strategies or remember all of the resources they have. It may be that what you thought was a telling blow actually gives the cleric his chance to shine. Maybe it would increase group cohesion as the party realizes that they damn near lost a companion.

And while this isn’t true of most people I play with, there are plenty of people that take a strong dislike fudging. Some might also characterize this as babying the players and resent it.

Death requires consent

Don’t kill a PC without player consent. A person created that character because that’s what they want to play. Killing their character in a random and possibly senseless fashion is not dissimilar to telling someone to stop having fun and to play something else.

Most importantly, if you’re running a character-driven game, the death of a character in the middle of a plot arc can collapse the entire line. A total party kill is worse! Although it can serve as jumping off point, you essentially have to start from scratch in terms of characterization and history. For a group that has a great dynamic going, this is a tragic shame, not unlike a TV show canceled in the middle of a season.

As a DM, you will almost certainly have to fudge the dice. Chiefly, you can hide your to-hit and damage rolls. If you’re aware of how much health the PCs have left, then you can fudge monster damage to prevent someone from dying or dropping at a really bad time. You can fudge saves. Finally, you can fudge monster HP, something players have no real way of knowing.

Players that play well thought-out characters will typically appreciate this method. They know that if they’re going to die, they’ll get some input and it will be meaningful.

I mentioned above that this approach has drawbacks. There are some situations where, if a PC does something stupid, they should by all rights die. What do you do? You could of course run a glorious death scene, but that’s not always appropriate. There are some alternatives, like restating the obvious, which can prevent you from getting into this situation to begin with. A little bit of prep beforehand could leave you with an escape hatch (e.g. the cavalry shows up; the villain wants a bargain; another, scarier monster disinterested in the PCs scares off the other monsters). But in the end you can’t anticipate everything. Eventually, I think you will run into scenarios that will test your improvisational skills.

Resurrection

Whoops! I nearly forgot about resurrection. This is probably because I haven’t played all that many games of D&D until semi-recently. When a single PC dies, resurrection is pretty much the answer, giving the player a chance to rejoin or not.

I’m not sure I actually like resurrection. At least as it’s executed in 3.5, it’s hard to rationalize anyone with a decent chunk of money dying. When you want someone to die, you have to add some kind of qualifier whenever anyone dies and doesn’t come back (“There was no body left”) that explains why the Great King Jorund died and nobody could find a cleric.

It also makes death very weird. Adventurers can still permanently die, if you engage those mechanics as a DM, you’re back to the default scenario “Death happens,” where somebody loses a character and you’ve got a bit less plausible deniability. If you’re careful not to have monsters that render people unrevivifiable, adventurers’ deaths become less dramatic.

Ultimately, in the context of PC death, I’m going to have to go ahead and say that I’m a fan of resurrection. As a player, I like that it’s there. I think it’s absolutely necessary if you’re going to go with the “Death happens” approach.

4th Edition, unpredictability, and resurrection

Once again, 4th Edition is to some extent taking aim at unpredictability in combat. Crits are less random. Although PCs get mechanics to add dice to their crits, monsters seem to follow the pattern of simply having a flat damage bonus on a crit, meaning their damage is more predictable.

Monsters in 4th Edition are supposed to be more well-balanced, as well. The CR system was basically inadequate, and you could pretty easily end up killing somebody if you weren’t careful.

There are also some changes to resurrection. According to pre-release information, resurrection in general will be more rare except for at the paragon and epic tier. Supposedly a character has had to gain a few levels before resurrection is available, which (depending on how this is written) is an interesting way to limit resurrection to characters that have been played and possibly also NPCs.

In theory, all of this means it’s less ridiculously easy to kill PCs and resurrection is available when it makes sense. Based on a little playtest I ran, it does seem like it’s harder to kill PCs. Starting at level 1, PCs are much more resilient, and between fights they can fairly easily shore up hit points.

Furthermore, monster damage appears somewhat less ridiculous even at the epic tier if you look at the likes of the ice archons and swordwings. These guys don’t hit you with massive damage all at once; they’re designed to hurt you over and over and over.

I’m still conflicted

Of course, vis a vis 4th Edition, there’s another tiny little detail here: we don’t have it yet! So most of this has to go into the bin marked “Follow up.”

That aside, in general I am much more sympathetic to the “Death requires consent” view. This is chiefly because when I am not playing D&D, I typically do not enjoy crunchy types of games. I prefer plot or character driven games, where random death doesn’t work quite as well. Consequently my default inclination is to run D&D similarly.

Outside of that context, I’d really like to run a “Death happens” game in 4th Edition. I would not want PCs to be replaceable; I can’t run a game without some degree of drama. I would have a lighter touch with regard to character-driven plots so that the death of one PC doesn’t ruin everything.

Death happens

PCs die. The world of D&D, especially what we’ve seen of the Points of Light so far, is a dangerous place. People die. Even heroes die. It’s impossible to save everyone when there are ravening hordes of undead out there that will not, for example, spare PCs so they may extract concessions.

D&D is as much about game as it is roleplaying, and in games, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Losing a character isn’t the end of the world because there’s theoretically an infinite number of fun characters you can play.

And when a character dies, it’s a potential jumping off point for roleplaying. A dead character is an opportunity for everyone to react, and for the plot to take an unexpected turn. Or, alternately, it’s an opportunity for someone to play a different character, one that they might actually enjoy more or might have a novel effect on the game.

If, god forbid, the whole party dies, it’s still a big deal. You have an obligation to make it their death as epic and dramatic as possible. But it’s also an opportunity to do something special. Did the PCs die trying to save the world? Now the next plot arc is 1,000 years later, most of the world is enslaved by demons, and epic-level PCs have to fix it.

In practical terms, this means you don’t fudge the dice. The dice exist to make things random and interesting and fiddling with the dice to keep the PCs from dying risks making the game too easy. You can’t possibly anticipate all of their strategies or remember all of the resources they have. It may be that what you thought was a telling blow actually gives the cleric his chance to shine. Maybe it would increase group cohesion as the party realizes that they damn near lost a companion.

And while this isn’t true of most people I play with, there are plenty of people that take a strong dislike fudging. Some might also characterize this as babying the players and resent it.

Death requires consent

Don’t kill a PC without player consent. A person created that character because that’s what they want to play. Killing their character in a random and possibly senseless fashion is not dissimilar to telling someone to stop having fun and to play something else.

Most importantly, if you’re running a character-driven game, the death of a character in the middle of a plot arc can collapse the entire line. A total party kill is worse! Although it can serve as jumping off point, you essentially have to start from scratch in terms of characterization and history. For a group that has a great dynamic going, this is a tragic shame, not unlike a TV show canceled in the middle of a season.

As a DM, you will almost certainly have to fudge the dice. Chiefly, you can hide your to-hit and damage rolls. If you’re aware of how much health the PCs have left, then you can fudge monster damage to prevent someone from dying or dropping at a really bad time. You can fudge saves. Finally, you can fudge monster HP, something players have no real way of knowing.

Players that play well thought-out characters will typically appreciate this method. They know that if they’re going to die, they’ll get some input and it will be meaningful.

I mentioned above that this approach has drawbacks. There are some situations where, if a PC does something stupid, they should by all rights die. What do you do? You could of course run a glorious death scene, but that’s not always appropriate. There are some alternatives, like restating the obvious, which can prevent you from getting into this situation to begin with. A little bit of prep beforehand could leave you with an escape hatch (e.g. the cavalry shows up; the villain wants a bargain; another, scarier monster disinterested in the PCs scares off the other monsters). But in the end you can’t anticipate everything. Eventually, I think you will run into scenarios that will test your improvisational skills.

Resurrection

Whoops! I nearly forgot about resurrection. This is probably because I haven’t played all that many games of D&D until semi-recently. When a single PC dies, resurrection is pretty much the answer, giving the player a chance to rejoin or not.

I’m not sure I actually like resurrection. At least as it’s executed in 3.5, it’s hard to rationalize anyone with a decent chunk of money dying. When you want someone to die, you have to add some kind of qualifier whenever anyone dies and doesn’t come back (“There was no body left”) that explains why the Great King Jorund died and nobody could find a cleric.

It also makes death very weird. Adventurers can still permanently die, if you engage those mechanics as a DM, you’re back to the default scenario “Death happens,” where somebody loses a character and you’ve got a bit less plausible deniability. If you’re careful not to have monsters that render people unrevivifiable, adventurers’ deaths become less dramatic.

Ultimately, in the context of PC death, I’m going to have to go ahead and say that I’m a fan of resurrection. As a player, I like that it’s there. I think it’s absolutely necessary if you’re going to go with the “Death happens” approach.

4th Edition, unpredictability, and resurrection

Once again, 4th Edition is to some extent taking aim at unpredictability in combat. Crits are less random. Although PCs get mechanics to add dice to their crits, monsters seem to follow the pattern of simply having a flat damage bonus on a crit, meaning their damage is more predictable.

Monsters in 4th Edition are supposed to be more well-balanced, as well. The CR system was basically inadequate, and you could pretty easily end up killing somebody if you weren’t careful.

There are also some changes to resurrection. According to pre-release information, resurrection in general will be more rare except for at the paragon and epic tier. Supposedly a character has had to gain a few levels before resurrection is available, which (depending on how this is written) is an interesting way to limit resurrection to characters that have been played and possibly also NPCs.

In theory, all of this means it’s less ridiculously easy to kill PCs and resurrection is available when it makes sense. Based on a little playtest I ran, it does seem like it’s harder to kill PCs. Starting at level 1, PCs are much more resilient, and between fights they can fairly easily shore up hit points.

Furthermore, monster damage appears somewhat less ridiculous even at the epic tier if you look at the likes of the ice archons and swordwings. These guys don’t hit you with massive damage all at once; they’re designed to hurt you over and over and over.

I’m still conflicted

Of course, vis a vis 4th Edition, there’s another tiny little detail here: we don’t have it yet! So most of this has to go into the bin marked “Follow up.”

That aside, in general I am much more sympathetic to the “Death requires consent” view. This is chiefly because when I am not playing D&D, I typically do not enjoy crunchy types of games. I prefer plot or character driven games, where random death doesn’t work quite as well. Consequently my default inclination is to run D&D similarly.

Outside of that context, I’d really like to run a “Death happens” game in 4th Edition. I would not want PCs to be replaceable; I can’t run a game without some degree of drama. I would have a lighter touch with regard to character-driven plots so that the death of one PC doesn’t ruin everything.

Of course I went straight for the Sorcerer and the Barbarian.

Not much is different for the Barbarian. His rage powers cost multiples of two. Since Beth (the aforementioned girlfriend) hasn’t used her rage powers much, I’m not sure what this’ll actually do. She already has what appears to be a large number of rage points (44, I think), and I suspect that maybe she’ll be a bit less hesitant to use them when, provided she or I remembers that she has them.

Oh, and since she hit level 6, I guess we have to pick out a new one. There were a couple that seemed pretty good. None of them jumped out at me. I’ll have to do that tomorrow before game.

For the Sorcerer, we of course have the ability to cast 0th level spells at-will. Excellent! They also changed the way bloodline feats work; looks like I won’t be getting one until 7th, which means I need to rejigger things. Most of the feat choices still aren’t that compelling in and of themselves, but it’s hard to complain about a free feat, especially in the cases where you can pick up Mobility for free.

As well, I noticed that many bloodlines have ranged attacks now. I think this is also a pretty solid change; as I mentioned before, it seems strange to me to give a caster an at-will ability, presumably what they default to if when they run out of spells, that requires the caster to be in melee range.

Finally, Sorcerers get bonus spells. If I am reading this correctly, these are known spells, not spells per day. That’s a pretty big boost– picking a path expands your repertoire of spells. Although it’s consistent with your bloodline’s theme, there are some nice choices there.

With the changes to the Sorcerer, I’m going to have to look all of this over again to re-choose a bloodline, given how drastic the changes are. This will be interesting.

Lest you think me completely selfish, I did skim some of the other entries.

I couldn’t bear to read the Bard. I’m sorry. And this isn’t a dig against Pathfinder. I just don’t like the class, and I think it needs a rewrite basically from scratch.

Looking purely at the early levels for the Ranger, the changes aren’t quite as drastic as for some other classes. He gets a selection of feats for each style instead of pre-defined feats. I haven’t had time to delve too much into those particular feats. Choice is good, in general, assuming it’s not fake (i.e. that one route is clearly better than all the others). The favored terrain seems new, and kind of a neat idea, as is the choice between animal companions or granting people a portion of your favored enemy bonus.

The Monk is an odd bird. It’s another class I don’t particularly care for. He gets a weird grab-bag of abilities and it’s not really clear what his role is supposed to be in your average fight. That said, there are some neat changes. Monks can spend ki points to activate various abilities. They already had a flurry, so the addition of more things to do is probably good.

That’s it for now. I’ve got a couple more posts in the hopper, but those will have to wait. Right now, it’s bed time!

His blog is called Use Your Lightning Bolt!, and you should check it out. He has written things for you to read. What more could anyone ask for?

I thought some of the runners up (not mine!) would’ve been better choices for the winners of Funniest Entry or Best Concept. This is probably because I am really not up on D&D lore these days, and thus didn’t really get either of them.

Anyway, these Funniest Entry runners up ones made me laugh out loud:

• “Why is everything on fire? I hate PCs so much.”
• “Necromancer steals the king’s crown jewels. No, the other ones.”

There’s a PDF with all of the entries compiled. I perused it and there’s a lot in there. I’ll definitely keep that on hand when it comes time to pull an adventure out of my butt for a one shot.

There’ve been a few excerpts from 4th Edition up lately: Economy and Reward and You and Your Magic Items.

It turns out that I have a lot of thoughts about this stuff that I haven’t written down anywhere. This may turn out to be a series of posts that is mostly for my own benefit. And judging from how 4e handles a lot of this, it may end up being moot. Still, I will press on!

In 3.5, monsters dictate the treasure. Based on that, the DM rolls on the appropriate table to determine what treasure the monsters have. The tables are balanced in some way so that your party will get, on average, X magic weapons, Y wondrous items, Z consumables, and so on. This can be upset depending on what monsters you send after the PCs, but let’s set that aside.

Random treasure: advantages

A big advantage of randomly generating treasure from a table as opposed to flipping through the book and picking items yourself is, first, that it’s pretty easy. When rolling on a treasure table, the reward isn’t based on your level of creativity times however many monsters or encounters the players defeat. Sure, you can come up with a unique item a couple of times. But every single time?

There’s also a lot of entertainment that arises from the unexpected. Put another way, you, as the DM, might not think to give them a certain item for any number of reasons. But there’s something about magic items that flips a switch in players’ minds. They think of all kinds of clever ways to use it, defying your expectations over and over. I love it when an item like that becomes iconic for a given campaign. As a corollary, sometimes an item that you would think is overpowered ends up not being all that ridiculous, and your campaign is the better for it or perhaps hardly affected at all.

There are some pretty compelling down sides, too.

Random treasure: disadvantages

One of them is useless magic items, which can come in many forms. Example: scrolls or potions for second or third tier spells that are easily forgotten or that no one would use anyway. Another type of useless item is a plague of low level items that aren’t worth a whole lot individually, but add up quickly if you have many of them (e.g. a collection of +1 items when everyone’s already got +1 or +2 items).

A separate issue but worth mentioning here is the inevitable proliferation of usable items. You can end up with a bunch of items in the form of consumables, wands, and wondrous items. Many of them are pretty good, but will you ever use them? The amount of complexity this can add to a character is also non-trivial.

The worst kind of useless item are the ones that are cool but the wrong weapon or armor type. It’s not quite fair to call them useless, because they might actually be useful. It’s just that you have to do a bunch of math to figure out if it’s actually worthwhile, such as when a good weapon drops and the fighter’s specialized for another weapon. This a little sad to me because I think using a magic item should be a no-brainer most of the time. Magic items should be awesome!

And then of course there’s another issue: random magic items. I may’ve mentioned this before, but on some level I want D&D to be a more serious and less game-y. When push comes to shove, I prefer White Wolf’s way of handling things, with a higher fluff-to-crunch ratio. Magic items should be unique and flavorful, right? At their best, magic items in fiction have a story or some amount of mystery. And if you look at books like World of Darkness: Reliquary, there are a lot of those.

There’s nothing stopping you from doing this in D&D. However, as the game goes on the probability approaches one that the player will replace his grandfather’s breastplate with something better. And to some extent, D&D is a game. You might be inclined to say that generic magical items are more like video games than roleplaying games, but you’d have it backwards: random magic item drops came from D&D, not the other way around.

I’m also pretty sure this is true of the dynamic where items you find in the wild are better than items you make on your own. Let’s set that aside for another time, though.

Alternatives

There are a lot of potential solutions!

One solution for dealing with the “grandfather’s sword” problem is Weapons of Legacy. As you level, the item gets better, and you can also do things to unlock other powers inherent to the weapon by undertaking quests. I really like this idea. I don’t own the book, but given that it’s ~20 days before 4e hits, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to go out and buy it.

I heard a number of solutions mentioned on one of the D&D podcasts, too. One is to hand out only gold. Players can buy or make what they want. Another is to request a list of desired magic items from players. Now you have some guidelines for what they want, and you can give those out and be fairly sure they’ll want them. As pointed out by Dave Noonan, these are both like handing out custom treasure, in that you lose the serendipity of random wondrous items.

My own untested method is something of a hybrid. I’d figure out what a player wanted, assume a magic weapon of similar type drops, and roll its properties randomly. If it’s a crappy property like Vicious, re-roll. Wondrous items are random. If they’re really dumb, I re-roll. I suspect Evan (the DM for our Pathfinder game) does this at least in part, and so far it has worked pretty well.

Still, this has a number of at least theoretical problems in 3.5, mainly because I’m not sure how I’d balance this. How do you determine how many items to give out and how often? Some monsters have ridiculous treasure and some have none. Since the system is random, the main guideline that I can see is the NPC table, which more or less explicitly says that by level N, you should have items +X. That will at least tell you if your players are even in the right ballpark in terms of basic gear.

Also, with the exception of the “all gold” method, none of these address the problem with consumables and wands. I’m still not sure what to do about that, but it’s not that huge of an issue in the couple of 3.5 games I’ve been in and run.

Rhymes with “Boar Tea”

Of course, while I think about this, there is 4th Edition lurking in the background. 4e seems to take aim at many of these problems. The rewards excerpt in particular seems designed to solve many of these problems. It may render this discussion moot! That’s a topic for another post.

There’ve been a few excerpts from 4th Edition up lately: Economy and Reward and You and Your Magic Items.

It turns out that I have a lot of thoughts about this stuff that I haven’t written down anywhere. This may turn out to be a series of posts that is mostly for my own benefit. And judging from how 4e handles a lot of this, it may end up being moot. Still, I will press on!

In 3.5, monsters dictate the treasure. Based on that, the DM rolls on the appropriate table to determine what treasure the monsters have. The tables are balanced in some way so that your party will get, on average, X magic weapons, Y wondrous items, Z consumables, and so on. This can be upset depending on what monsters you send after the PCs, but let’s set that aside.

Random treasure: advantages

A big advantage of randomly generating treasure from a table as opposed to flipping through the book and picking items yourself is, first, that it’s pretty easy. When rolling on a treasure table, the reward isn’t based on your level of creativity times however many monsters or encounters the players defeat. Sure, you can come up with a unique item a couple of times. But every single time?

There’s also a lot of entertainment that arises from the unexpected. Put another way, you, as the DM, might not think to give them a certain item for any number of reasons. But there’s something about magic items that flips a switch in players’ minds. They think of all kinds of clever ways to use it, defying your expectations over and over. I love it when an item like that becomes iconic for a given campaign. As a corollary, sometimes an item that you would think is overpowered ends up not being all that ridiculous, and your campaign is the better for it or perhaps hardly affected at all.

There are some pretty compelling down sides, too.

Random treasure: disadvantages

One of them is useless magic items, which can come in many forms. Example: scrolls or potions for second or third tier spells that are easily forgotten or that no one would use anyway. Another type of useless item is a plague of low level items that aren’t worth a whole lot individually, but add up quickly if you have many of them (e.g. a collection of +1 items when everyone’s already got +1 or +2 items).

A separate issue but worth mentioning here is the inevitable proliferation of usable items. You can end up with a bunch of items in the form of consumables, wands, and wondrous items. Many of them are pretty good, but will you ever use them? The amount of complexity this can add to a character is also non-trivial.

The worst kind of useless item are the ones that are cool but the wrong weapon or armor type. It’s not quite fair to call them useless, because they might actually be useful. It’s just that you have to do a bunch of math to figure out if it’s actually worthwhile, such as when a good weapon drops and the fighter’s specialized for another weapon. This a little sad to me because I think using a magic item should be a no-brainer most of the time. Magic items should be awesome!

And then of course there’s another issue: random magic items. I may’ve mentioned this before, but on some level I want D&D to be a more serious and less game-y. When push comes to shove, I prefer White Wolf’s way of handling things, with a higher fluff-to-crunch ratio. Magic items should be unique and flavorful, right? At their best, magic items in fiction have a story or some amount of mystery. And if you look at books like World of Darkness: Reliquary, there are a lot of those.

There’s nothing stopping you from doing this in D&D. However, as the game goes on the probability approaches one that the player will replace his grandfather’s breastplate with something better. And to some extent, D&D is a game. You might be inclined to say that generic magical items are more like video games than roleplaying games, but you’d have it backwards: random magic item drops came from D&D, not the other way around.

I’m also pretty sure this is true of the dynamic where items you find in the wild are better than items you make on your own. Let’s set that aside for another time, though.

Alternatives

There are a lot of potential solutions!

One solution for dealing with the “grandfather’s sword” problem is Weapons of Legacy. As you level, the item gets better, and you can also do things to unlock other powers inherent to the weapon by undertaking quests. I really like this idea. I don’t own the book, but given that it’s ~20 days before 4e hits, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to go out and buy it.

I heard a number of solutions mentioned on one of the D&D podcasts, too. One is to hand out only gold. Players can buy or make what they want. Another is to request a list of desired magic items from players. Now you have some guidelines for what they want, and you can give those out and be fairly sure they’ll want them. As pointed out by Dave Noonan, these are both like handing out custom treasure, in that you lose the serendipity of random wondrous items.

My own untested method is something of a hybrid. I’d figure out what a player wanted, assume a magic weapon of similar type drops, and roll its properties randomly. If it’s a crappy property like Vicious, re-roll. Wondrous items are random. If they’re really dumb, I re-roll. I suspect Evan (the DM for our Pathfinder game) does this at least in part, and so far it has worked pretty well.

Still, this has a number of at least theoretical problems in 3.5, mainly because I’m not sure how I’d balance this. How do you determine how many items to give out and how often? Some monsters have ridiculous treasure and some have none. Since the system is random, the main guideline that I can see is the NPC table, which more or less explicitly says that by level N, you should have items +X. That will at least tell you if your players are even in the right ballpark in terms of basic gear.

Also, with the exception of the “all gold” method, none of these address the problem with consumables and wands. I’m still not sure what to do about that, but it’s not that huge of an issue in the couple of 3.5 games I’ve been in and run.

Rhymes with “Boar Tea”

Of course, while I think about this, there is 4th Edition lurking in the background. 4e seems to take aim at many of these problems. The rewards excerpt in particular seems designed to solve many of these problems. It may render this discussion moot! That’s a topic for another post.