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Posts Tagged ‘uncanned’

alchemy makes you go bankrupt

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

In this post, I set out to

propose that the 4e alchemy system is overpriced for its power;

Alchemy is not used

I remember that in earlier editions, my D&D groups relished tossing holy water, and, even better, dousing enemies with oil and lighting them on fire. However, in my current group, no one seems very excited about the alchemy rules.

Furthermore, I don’t think there have been a lot of message board posts, Dragon articles, or gamebook support of alchemy after its introduction in Adventurer’s Vault in 2008. People don’t seem very interested in the 4e alchemy implementation.

My first intuition is that alchemy is overpriced: the cost for making a one-shot level 1 alchemical item is 20 gp! That’s a big chunk of change for a level 1 character, comparing unfavorably with “free” for at-will, encounter, and daily powers, so they’d better deliver. I decided to crunch the numbers and compare alchemical items against at-will attacks.

CRUNCHING NUMBERS

STEP 1: How much damage do alchemical items do?

I’ll look at 3 representative items: holy water, alchemical acid, and alchemical fire. I’ll assume level 1 characters using level 1 alchemical items vs level 1 monsters. All these items attack Reflex with a +4 bonus, which is comparable to level 1 characters’ other attacks, and hits the average level 1 monster’s Reflex defense around 60% of the time. Damage expectation will be based on 60% of the damage scored on a hit plus 40% of the damage scored on a miss.
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Tags:equipment, uncanned
Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, game design, RPG Hub | 10 Comments »

How much for a pitcher of ale?

Monday, February 28th, 2011

It occasionally becomes necessary to determine the price of daily goods. How much for a pitcher of ale? How much do you pay laborers to excavate a dungeon entrance? Whenever this comes up, it’s best not to think about it too hard, because D&D economy has never made sense. The best thing to do is to hand-wave the economy and move to the killing as quickly as possible.

Ever since 1e, there has been a tension between “realistic”, Earth-modelled prices for goods and the need to give players vast hoards of gold. No one wants to kill a dragon and get nothing but a bag of silver, but in medieval Europe, a dragon-sized bed of gold (even split five ways) would make all the PCs rich to the point where money was never an object again.

First edition gave us the huge piles of gold we wanted, and comparably high consumer prices. A longsword cost 15 GP. That’s one and a half pounds of gold! (A longsword weighs 6 pounds, so it’s 1/4 as valuable as gold.) The reasoning was that the campaign area was assumed to be suffering massive inflation due to new gold unearthed by dungeoneering adventurers. What’s more, many pages of the DMG was devoted to giving the DM advice on how to steal money from the PCs so they’d be hungry for adventure again.

3rd edition tried to introduce a little realism, while keeping adventurer’s gear expensive. This led to some economic absurdities if you tried to use d&d to model peasant life – forgivable in a game that’s meant to model awesome-hero life. A laborer earned 1 sp per day, which is not actually unreasonable for medieval England if you assume 1gp = 1 pound. However, “poor meal (per day)” costs 1sp, leaving nothing left for other expenses. Just a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese cost 12 cp. Every day, a plowman would spend more than he made, just on his plowman’s lunch.

The fact is, prices for adventurers don’t work for peasants. But this need not break our game. We don’t even have to hand-wave it.
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Tags:equipment, uncanned
Posted in fluff/inspiration, game design, RPG Hub | 7 Comments »

hit point lessons from mm3 on a business card

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

It seems to me that 4e monster Hit Points don’t scale properly.

From examining the MM3 on a business card, we see that every level, monsters get +1 to hit, defenses, and damage. At level 1, they have about 32 HP, and they get 8 HP per level.

(From what I’ve seen, PCs tend to have comparable to-hit, defenses, and at-will damage. Of course, over the course of a fight, PCs are better than monsters, due to encounter and daily powers, feats, and other complications. In the simplest cases, though, PCs and monsters can stand in for each other.)

So what’s the problem? As far as I can see, the monster math above suggests that at higher levels, fights will drag on longer as monsters gain proportionally more HP. And indeed, in practice, I see this happening. I recently ran a level 30 adventure, and the fights took forever. Here’s why:

Take a level 1 monster. He has 32 HP. He (and his opponents) do an average of 9 points of damage per hit. That’s great! That means it will take about 4 hits to kill a monster. A highly damaging hit (a crit or encounter power) might bloody the monster in one hit. That feels exactly right to me. In fact, according to this excerpt from Player’s Strategy Guide, 4 hits per monster is the design intention: “Assume that your heroes can kill a typical monster with four successful attacks.”

At level 1, we are exactly on target. However, monsters gain 8 HP per level! That means, in order to keep up, the PCs (who should be able to kill a monster in 4 hits) need to increase their average damage by 2, every level. In order to stay on par, all level-30 PCs (leaders and controllers as well as strikers) would need to be doing about 70 damage per hit. There’s no way they can do that! The result? Monster HP outstrips PC damage.
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