The only consensus seems to be that everyone does it differently...personally I like to let the dice do the choosing. Random item tables all the way!
WBL = Wealth By Level
Guideline for the amount of wealth/magic/gear each PC (and one table for NPCs) should have at a given level.
Ah, thank you. The only time I ever pay attention to that is when someone is rolling up a new character.
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I give the bad guys weapons/items that they would find useful. If the PCs can also use it, great. If not, well, at least there's a logical reason why a barbarian is carrying a magical greataxe. It's much less logical if he's carrying around a staff of wizardry just because it's the wizards "turn" to get good loot.
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I pretty much agree with this, but it depends on the group.
There's one group I play with sometimes where, when WBL isn't used, fighting over treasure pretty much consumes the game because a few of the players are pathologically greedy -- like on the level where, you're the party's only wizard and they want to sell the ring of wizardry to buy more stuff for them rather than letting you have it, to say nothing of treasure you both might be able to use.
I'm an experienced and crafty enough gamer to go up against the super greedasauruses and come out on top, but frankly... that's not fun for me. That's not what I want to spend half my gaming time doing. With those groups I push pretty hard for WBL. With other groups it isn't a big deal whether we use it or not.
Ugh. What a bunch.
But I don't see how using WBL alleviates this.
If they're going to hog stuff they can't even use, or sell items intended for others, to pay for their own gear, they'll do this whatever the system, surely? Then the other PCs die from lack of proper gear, and they use this as justification for their greed. "See? We have to look out for ourselves, because you're a Killer GM!"
Unless Player A and Player B steal off Player C, then abuse the WBL to say to the GM "Hey! Jim has no gear! And according to this chart in the GM's book, he should have 10,000gp! What you going to do about it?", and demand the GM gives out 10K more to Jim (which they rob, then demand be replaced, which they then steal, then...ad nauseum).
Wealth by level?
But I don't see how using WBL alleviates this.
Basically, in that game, the DM essentially doesn't give out treasure at all and every level you reset to what you should have by the WBL table.
In terms of "game realism" it makes no sense, but since the DM isn't willing to eject the super greedmongers from the group or letting things degenerate into player on player murder, it seemed to be the least of all evils. Previous to that, half of the group were designing characters that could be playable with little or no magic items because rolling that way was more fun than either spending half the session arguing about treasure or spending half the session listening to the couple greedy guys b~%~$ about the other players stepping up to them.
I never really worried with this in 3.0, but when the players hit the 8-9 range, one of the front-line players complimented me on adhering to the recommended guidelines and wanted to know how I did it so effortlessly. I pointed out that he had failed to add in all the consumables used over the course of the game and that I had no idea what he was talking about.
That said, the WBL was thrust into my face by a GM that 'allowed' the party fighter to have a +1 sword and +2 scale by level 6 while a wizard ran about with a trio of high end wands (over 22k in value). I walked in on the rest of the group grinding on the Wiz for hogging the loot (He won it faily in a system I do not care for.) and had to adjudicate the allocation of a +1 dagger amongst the rest. I tried to talk to the GM, but he was miffed that everyone wasargueing and escalated with another Wizard item of unrealistic value the next week. The Wizard 'graciuosly' insisted that the party sell the item and share it's wealth, only to have the GM drop the resll market from 100% to 50%.
My suggestion is the establishment of any of the suggested 'loot contracts' that are out there and a hard resell % for the game. I find that it is less the WBL than the inequities that cause the problems.
Stuff about 2E's thief skills system being better.
I'm sorry, but I respectfully really really really disagree with this.
Exhibit A: Find/remove traps, which tops out at 95%, with magical traps always being disarmed at half skill. The find roll may also have been made at half skill, I can't remember offhand.
In other words, the greatest thief in the entire world will usually fail to disarm a magical trap that he already knows is there, no matter how simple of a magical trap it is.
I just don't know how you could get excited about playing the prototypical dungeon-crawling thief with that being the case. Pretty much everyone I played 2E with loved the idea and tried to make that character -- once.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that the 2nd Edition thief skills system was better. Actually there are things I like about both systems, and room for improvement in both, in my opinion.
However, your greatest thief in the world example hit a nerve with me, and relates to my greatest complaint about 3.X/PF, the power inflation. You're totally correct in that in 2nd Edition, the greatest thief in the world was occasionally challenged by exceptionally difficult or magical traps. There was challenge and risk in his life. This made me happy. Now, by mid-levels, with a well-optimized character and a few magic items, traps need never bother you again, as you will automatically detect and disarm pretty much any trap. No challenge. No risk to life and limb. Dull. This makes me sad.
As a consequence, combined with the fact most traps have been made less deadly, traps have been almost completely deemphasized in the game, and play a very minor role in most published APs and adventures. Instead, combat, always important, is becoming the undisputed king, and many rogue characters are built more to emphasize their combat capability than their traditional thiefly skills.
This, in my opinion, is a shame.
However, your greatest thief in the world example hit a nerve with me, and relates to my greatest complaint about 3.X/PF, the power inflation. You're totally correct in that in 2nd Edition, the greatest thief in the world was occasionally challenged by exceptionally difficult or magical traps. There was challenge and risk in his life. This made me happy. Now, by mid-levels, with a well-optimized character and a few magic items, traps need never bother you again, as you will automatically detect and disarm pretty much any trap. No challenge. No risk to life and limb. Dull. This makes me sad.
I have to disagree with this to an extent. While I don't include a huge number of traps, I still use them from time to time. I ran a game in 3.0/3.5 right up into epic and traps were present and threatening right up through the end.
It comes down to two things. First setting a DC that matters even to that optimized character. This is of course if you going to go with the whole "roll search, now roll disable device, okay we are done". Which I don't think is interesting and probably one of the reasons traps are being used less and less.
The second thing is how creative a trap is. A creative or interesting trap or device can take some creativity to solve. As long as you take into account the party's abilities and present them with an interesting puzzle it can be fun regardless of the level.
You do have a point about traps being used less and less in APs. Although I think the change is the skill is not the main reason for it.
However, your greatest thief in the world example hit a nerve with me, and relates to my greatest complaint about 3.X/PF, the power inflation. You're totally correct in that in 2nd Edition, the greatest thief in the world was occasionally challenged by exceptionally difficult or magical traps. There was challenge and risk in his life.
My problem with the 2E system is, there never really is a sweet spot. At the very low levels, you're not very good at F/R Traps, and so mechanical traps tend to beat you more than you beat them. At higher levels, you almost never see non-magical traps, and no matter how good you are, they will always (by rules as written) trigger on you more than you disarm them.
The problem with too high of a failure chance is: if you're probably going to set the trap off, the smart thing as a party is not to let the thief try to disarm the trap, but to let the fighter with lots of HP or the cleric with good saves set the trap off. You've made this character where one of your few big special things is not disintegrating your enemies or raising the dead, but disarming traps, and you shouldn't even be doing that. It's not a big leap to get from realizing that to playing a cleric who just walks into traps instead. (Of course, if you really were excited about the trapfinding thing, you'd play that cleric and prep find traps. Problem solved.)
I had, believe it or not, a pretty similar experience in 3.0/3.5 -- it wasn't that hard to build a rogue with a really cranked out search skill to find the traps, but when it came to disabling them? You were smarter doing it in some way that did not involve disable device. Get the fighter to do it, run a horse from your back of tricks down the trapped hallway, whatever, anything but DD -- its failure chance was still too high.
To me, for trapfinding/disarming, a dedicated character who's expending resources to be good at it needs to be successful around 90-95% of the time -- otherwise it becomes too smart to be the party herding mundane sheep into potentially dangerous areas and have an extra useful PC along instead of a rogue.
If it's not clear, I conceptually really like the adventuring rogue, and every edition I try again to play at least one, but I always, always struggle with "Other class X could do everything this character can, PLUS its real/intentional functions."
The advantages to disarming traps with F/RT in 1e/2e (and to a lesser extent 3.x) were that presumably doing so was quiet and you could bypass a feature.
The common low level traps in old school play often tended to be the pit trap (normal and spiked), the lowering portcullis, the arrow/spear throwing trap, poison gas trap, and the damned poison needle in the lock trap.
Triggering a pit trap could presumably attract wandering monsters and even if you trigger it you might actually have to cross it (if it's a 10' pit in the middle of 10' corridor). Blocking the triggering mechanism means that you can walk across it without having to set up any sort of ropes to help out. In addition when you inevitably had to flee a superior foe it was nice being able to flee past a pit.
Portcullis traps generally forced the party to go to their strong guys to escape the trap. Combined with a flooding room or something like that it generally was better to avoid triggering the portcullis. It could also be nice as a way of discouraging pursuit.
Arrow/Spear often seemed to have infinite supply of projectiles to triggering often didn't actually remove the trap from play.
Poison gas traps often had brutal ranges (like the entire corridor) with a triggering point part way along the corridor. Even with a 10' pole this typically meant the whole team was in the area of effect of a nasty poison gas attack.
Poison Needle was generally guarding a door or more commonly a chest. While the fighter could in theory break either open with brute force and trusty weapon that tended to attract wandering monsters and possibly trigger secondary traps. There was more than one chest that I encountered that had a poison needle on the lock and a poison gas trigger if the chest was opened by force.
The result was that even though the fighter or a summoned creature could in theory tank a trap, it was often undesirable for them to do so if the thief had even a marginally optimistic chance of success. The worst case scenario was that you had to cart his body back to town to get the village priest to cast a raise dead on him ;)
However, your greatest thief in the world example hit a nerve with me, and relates to my greatest complaint about 3.X/PF, the power inflation. You're totally correct in that in 2nd Edition, the greatest thief in the world was occasionally challenged by exceptionally difficult or magical traps. There was challenge and risk in his life. This made me happy. Now, by mid-levels, with a well-optimized character and a few magic items, traps need never bother you again, as you will automatically detect and disarm pretty much any trap. No challenge. No risk to life and limb. Dull. This makes me sad.
I have to disagree with this to an extent. While I don't include a huge number of traps, I still use them from time to time. I ran a game in 3.0/3.5 right up into epic and traps were present and threatening right up through the end.
It comes down to two things. First setting a DC that matters even to that optimized character. This is of course if you going to go with the whole "roll search, now roll disable device, okay we are done". Which I don't think is interesting and probably one of the reasons traps are being used less and less.
The second thing is how creative a trap is. A creative or interesting trap or device can take some creativity to solve. As long as you take into account the party's abilities and present them with an interesting puzzle it can be fun regardless of the level.
You do have a point about traps being used less and less in APs. Although I think the change is the skill is not the main reason for it.
Of course, you're right. When you're creating your own or heavily modifying written adventures, you can put in as many challenging and interesting traps as you want. I tend to do that when I'm writing my own. My comment was more in reference to the published adventures and APs from Paizo, and what seems to be the "default" assumptions of PF, which IMHO have deemphasized trapfinding and other non-combat actions.
The advantages to disarming traps with F/RT in 1e/2e (and to a lesser extent 3.x) were that presumably doing so was quiet and you could bypass a feature.
The common low level traps in old school play often tended to be the pit trap (normal and spiked), the lowering portcullis, the arrow/spear throwing trap, poison gas trap, and the damned poison needle in the lock trap.
Triggering a pit trap could presumably attract wandering monsters and even if you trigger it you might actually have to cross it (if it's a 10' pit in the middle of 10' corridor). Blocking the triggering mechanism means that you can walk across it without having to set up any sort of ropes to help out. In addition when you inevitably had to flee a superior foe it was nice being able to flee past a pit.
Portcullis traps generally forced the party to go to their strong guys to escape the trap. Combined with a flooding room or something like that it generally was better to avoid triggering the portcullis. It could also be nice as a way of discouraging pursuit.
Arrow/Spear often seemed to have infinite supply of projectiles to triggering often didn't actually remove the trap from play.
Poison gas traps often had brutal ranges (like the entire corridor) with a triggering point part way along the corridor. Even with a 10' pole this typically meant the whole team was in the area of effect of a nasty poison gas attack.
Poison Needle was generally guarding a door or more commonly a chest. While the fighter could in theory break either open with brute force and trusty weapon that tended to attract wandering monsters and possibly trigger secondary traps. There was more than one chest that I encountered that had a poison needle on the lock and a poison gas trigger if the chest was opened by force.
The result was that even though the fighter or a summoned creature could in theory tank a trap, it was often undesirable for them to do so if the thief had even a marginally optimistic chance of success. The worst case scenario was that you had...
The advantages to disarming traps with F/RT in 1e/2e (and to a lesser extent 3.x) were that presumably doing so was quiet
Silence 15' Radius fixed that. :)
Not to beat the "Everything a 2E thief could do, a 1st or 2nd level spell could do better" trope to death, but, there it is again.
The advantages to disarming traps with F/RT in 1e/2e (and to a lesser extent 3.x) were that presumably doing so was quietSilence 15' Radius fixed that. :)
Not to beat the "Everything a 2E thief could do, a 1st or 2nd level spell could do better" trope to death, but, there it is again.
Yes, but that's yet another use of a limited resource (clerical spell) in the day in age when the Cleric was still stuck in the mode of perpetual healbot. They didn't buff the Cleric to god level in 3.0 for no reason, they did it as a bribe to play the "support character".
So yes raising a cone of silence meant that now your dwarven fighter could take an axe to the trapped door in silence, that really only postponed the reckoning. The next door might have the same issue. Further silence 15' radius was the designated gank the mage spell. Using it on a trap often meant that you didn't have it when the evil magic user ambushed you.
Now granted by the late 2e era, old school dungeon crawls in the style of 1e modules had fallen somewhat out of favor but conserving your resources was very much still a part of the gameplay. Being able to use an always available resource like F/RT was a nice addition to the party. Yes you generally wanted a few utility spells to back up the thief but if you've used all your limited use resources (spells, henchmen, etc) in the first few rooms of a dungeon one of those mega dungeons is going to take weeks if not months to clear out.
I understand that alot of people felt that the thief was a weak character and in many ways he was, but in our experience he had a brutal mortality rate at low level (traps and scouting ahead are very problematic in low level play) but once you got to a certain level of experience (IME generally 4th) the percentages started getting better for you and you could reliably do your schtick (scout, flank, trap detect). The problem was when someone decided to focus on a lower utility skill (pickpocket, read languages) because it fit their character concept. Dungeon crawls with a pickpocket focused halfling or god forbid a kender (damn you Hickman and Weis for introducing them) were not fun at all. Especially if you had players who felt that other PC's pockets were fair game ;)
But a lot of this come down to playstyle. If you made traps common an unlimited use method of dealing with them is very nice. If they are rare then yeah why not just use the spell methods for avoiding them.
Lots of stuff about traps and 2nd edition thieves.
You obviously don't much like traps and puzzles. I'm sure there are others who agree with you. I suspect that it is in response to that sentiment that traps have been de-emphasized in PF/3.X. I don't agree. I think traps and puzzles add a different dimension to a game that can be easily dominated by combat, and brought enjoyment to a whole different type of player that may be left cold by combat. For example I loved the old Test of Champions series from Dungeon magazine to use as an occasional one-off break from a regular campaign. I've used it to introduce people to the game who never thought they would enjoy D&D.
You also obviously think a 20-30% chance of succeeding at something at first level is unreasonably low, and it is by the power-inflated standards of PF/3.X. I disagree again, and think that is entirely appropriate for first level. I mean it is first level. These are the guys just getting started as adventurers. They're like rookie cops or brand-new Army recruits, or newly-minted second lieutenants. They don't know jack yet, and you expect them to screw up pretty regularly. Makes it more satisfying when your character eventually does become truly competent and then eventually powerful.
Anyway, this has gotten to be quite a threadjack, considering this thread was about magic items distribution, so I'll stop now.
Yes, but that's yet another use of a limited resource (clerical spell) in the day in age when the Cleric was still stuck in the mode of perpetual healbot. They didn't buff the Cleric to god level in 3.0 for no reason, they did it as a bribe to play the "support character".
FWIW, by the time my groups were done playing 2E, most of the characters were at least part cleric. (We thought it was good in 2E and were a little shocked to see it jacked up so much in 3.0.) It turned out that once that most of the party were "good" characters and not (for example) the rogue who keeps setting off explosive runes in his face, the clerics didn't spend a whole lot of time being healbots.
It also meant that cleric spells weren't as much seen as important resources to conserve for healing, which really changes the landscape of when it's reasonable to burn one.
You also obviously think a 20-30% chance of succeeding at something at first level is unreasonably low, and it is by the power-inflated standards of PF/3.X. I disagree again, and think that is entirely appropriate for first level. I mean it is first level.
The problem is, the thief's skill as a thief doesn't exist in a vacuum -- the thief player could be playing lots of other things. At some point, you have to weigh the guy with an 80% chance of setting off the trap against a guy with a 100% chance of setting off the trap, but who is more likely to survive setting off the trap and is also good at other things.
You're right, this is a colossal threadjack, but at least it's been an interesting and overall polite one?
Lots and lots of stuff, most of which I disagree with.
But... D'oh, I promised I was done with the threadjack. I will surrender last word to you and Dire Mongoose, for what it is worth. My opinions are already out there.