Right way to roll armor special abilties?

[Excelsias]

Hi all,

I need assistance in understanding how to roll for magic items randomly using the GameMastery tables in chapter 5. I understand all of this can be up to the GM anyways, and that the tables aren't written in stone, but I am interested in knowing how these tables were intended to be used.

Question is about table 5-8. The last result on the table is "Special Ability and Roll Again". Special abilities are on tables 5-9 and 5-10, which have the result of "Roll again twice/ roll two special abilities". My question is - for table 5-8, is the assumption that when it says "roll again" - you're ONLY rolling to determine the base + enhancement, or for a special armor, and that the second roll is supposed to ignore a second result of "Special Ability and Roll Again?"

Asking because - if you read it that second way, it essentially gives items a 33% chance of getting a special ability on that second reroll on table 5-8. My reading, however, is that the second roll on table 5-8 is ONLY to get a base enhancement mod to work from, and that you'll only ever see TWO SPECIAL abilities on a weapon if you roll a 100 on tables 5-9 or 5-10.

Does that make sense to everyone? Pretty big difference in how many weapon special abilities you're likely to see, based on how you do the above.

[Chemlak]

If you want to strictly follow it, do exactly what the table suggests. It doesn't say "ignoring any roll of 64 to 100", so it is possible to stack special abilities up the wazoo.

My personal take on it is that if I roll a "specific armour or shield" result, ignore the special abilities you generated and just go for the specific one you get, which cuts down on the number of "+3 Light Fortification, Spell Resistance (13), Ghost Touch Chain Shirt" items you hand out.

[Excelsias]

That's my thought too - technically, the fine print reads for 64-100 (Special Ability, and reroll again ^4):

"Footnote 4: Reroll specific armor, specific shield, or special ability. Consult Table 5–9: Magic Armor Special Abilities or Table 5–10: Magic Shield Special Abilities, as appropriate."

Which to me means, if you get "Special Ability, roll again" on your first roll - you roll again on that table (5-8), BUT if you get a special armor, special shield, or special ability, you REROLL THAT so that you only get +1 - +5, THEN roll on the Special Ability table. Meaning, it's designed not to lead to those crazy + + + + Special Ability items, but just worded poorly. Instead of saying "Reroll specific armor, special shield..." it should read something like:

"Roll on table 5-9 / 5-10 to determine special abilities. Additionally, roll on table 5-8 once more to determine base enhancement amount, AND IGNORE AND REROLL any result of special ability, special armor, or special shield - these are not allowed."

I think that's the intent... after all, the random item lists in section 5 of the GM guide are designed (I believe) so that rolling on Minor results averages out to 1000gp, medium to 10000gp, and major to 40000gp. If you don't read this that way - major items work out to an average value of WAY more than 40k?

[Chemlak]

Let me work through a couple of examples of what I mean:

Item 1 - Medium Magic Armour.

Roll 1 - 72. Special and roll again.
Special roll - 36.
Roll 2 - 84. Special and roll again.
Special roll - 00 Roll twice.
Special roll 1 - 64
Special roll 2 - 08
Roll 3 - 14

I am now the proud GM of a +2 Shield of Light Fortification, Energy Resistance, Arrow Catching, worth 32,000 gp.

Item 2 - Major Magic Armour.

Roll 1 - 96. Special and roll again.
Special roll - 84
Roll 2 - 77. Special and roll again.
Special roll - 15
Roll 3 - 64. Special and roll again.
Special roll - 35
Roll 4 - 59. Specific armour.
Specific armour roll - 16

End result: a non-magical suit of dwarven plate, worth 16,500 gp.

Yes, it fairly easy to get Medium and Major weapons and armour worth far more than the average value for those types of magic items. That gets balanced out by the insane number of 375 gp scrolls you roll.

[Excelsias]

Yep, that's what I read it as at first, but on closer examination, I'm not so sure, for the reasons I gave above.

Another thing to consider - if you look at table 5-9 for special abilities, result 100-100 is: Roll again twice.

If the intent is to allow multiple special abilities on weapons, and to accomplish that through the rerolls on table 5-8, why put a "roll again twice" result on the special abilities table (5-9)?

Seems like an odd way to do things.

None of this is end of the world stuff of course. I can just do whatever option I want :) But, I'm trying to program some TableSmith tables to do all of this automatically and I'd like to incorporate the "expected" results from using the GM Guide tables.

[Zilvar2k11]

Funny someone should post a question on rolling against the tables. I was just contemplating that. My question is how does one determine whether to roll against the core or apg tables? Just GM fiat? Hard to automate something like GM fiat ;)

[Chemlak]

GM fiat.

My general personal rule is "use the newest", so I tend to use the APG tables as they're more comprehensive.

[Zilvar2k11]

Chemlak wrote:

GM fiat.

My general personal rule is "use the newest", so I tend to use the APG tables as they're more comprehensive.

Except they aren't, unless I'm missing something really obvious. Looking at the armor special ability table in the apg, it only has special abilities from the APG on it. I haven't been able to find a single published consolidated list. Maybe there is one and it's in a book I don't have, or maybe I'm just blind...but I'm not seeing what you're suggesting.

[Chemlak]

Rule Minus-1: Never give rules advice at dinner time for your 18-month-old boy.

When I need to randomly generate magic items, I use the APG tables to generate the type of item. When it comes to specific armour and weapons where there is no consolidated list, I either alternate between CRB and APG, or toss a coin to choose between them, or (if I'm being particularly lazy) I only bother with CRB options.

[Zilvar2k11]

That's the answers I kinda expected to hear. I suspected the following:

I pick a table (alternating falls under this)
I pick an item
I flip a coin

The first two really don't help much when you're trying to automate anything (like getting the list of available items for a settlement quickly), and the latter feels unbalanced in favor of the APG choices. Consider the minor table: 50% chance to pick APG, 40% chance to pick 'Champion', or about a 20% chance that any given roll will be a +1 Champion...something, versus 50% chance to roll Core, 20% chance to roll +1 armor, or around a 10% chance to get +1 armor. Pretty soon, your shops will be littered with +1 Champion (somethings).

Flipping a coin, IMO, really doesn't work well. I don't imagine you really do it very often...at least for armor :)

[Stazamos]

I began writing a program to do the rolling automatically for cities mainly, but random loot will be in there as well (I'll be making it public on GitHub hopefully soon; took a small break from it). Deciding between CRB and APG is still an issue I'm working out. 50/50 just doesn't work. So, here's what I'm thinking:

Analyze each item/bonus type. Determine whether there is a correlation between item price and rarity. If it is not described using a clear function, make up a value (and for the program, make it customizable), and use that. Then, calculate the rarity for each item by cost using the previously determined function, applied uniformly among CRB and APG items, and sum up the results. For example, because the CRB has more armor properties than the APG, the CRB sum will be larger than the APG sum. Then, use those sums to determine a d100 roll threshold for choosing between CRB and APG. So if the CRB sum is 40 and the APG sum is 10 (for easy math), the d100 threshold is 1-80 CRB, 81-100 APG.

If anyone has a simpler idea that is still fair, I'm alllll ears!

Edit: I'll do the regression analysis for rarity versus price using the CRB, because if there even IS a simple function, it will vary between the two, which is the whole crux of the issue. But ultimately, determining a set of d100 thresholds, for each item type, to decide between the CRB or APG, is the goal. It may end up just being a rough guess. Hell, some APG wondrous items should just be rarer, so regression analysis might be too "even". But eh, can't be too perfectionist, or this thing will never get finished!

[Excelsias]

I appreciate all the discussion on this - but I'm still trying to figure out, just looking at Table 5-8 from the GM Guide - is the intent on a result of "Special Ability, and Roll Again^4"

"Footnote 4: Reroll specific armor, specific shield, or special ability. Consult Table 5–9: Magic Armor Special Abilities or Table 5–10: Magic Shield Special Abilities, as appropriate."

Is the intent on the reroll on Table 5-8 to allow for a second special ability result, or just an armor/shield?

[Happler]

There is also this out there.

http://pathfinder.zonegamma.com/

Which works pretty well and has a good smart phone interface. Not sure how up to date it is on new gear from the Ultimate X books.

[Chemlak]

Excelsias, I'm not entirely sure what the problem is, here.

Using the tables it is entirely possible to get a suit of armour with 5 different special abilities, worth 100,000 gp and only a +1 enhancement bonus.

If you get a special ability, you roll the ability, the reroll. If the reroll is another special ability, roll it, then roll again. Keep rolling until you get either a specific armour or a +X armour or shield result.

[Excelsias]

Chem - For some reason the fact that there is a 100-100 "Roll twice" option on the ability tables makes me think that the intent for multiple special abilities is really only on when rerolling on the ability tables - not the enhancement tables.

It really doesn't matter one way or the other. Both ways work - one gives "more magic", one "lesser" - totally up to the group / GM :) I'm just curious what Paizo intended.

I built it out your way and tested it out last night though. You're right - even on the major roll column, items with more than 2-3 special abilities were really exceptional. When I used it my way, they were almost non-existant (about .33%-.5% percent chance - 1 in 300 - of an item with multiple special abilities). That sounds low, right?

[Chemlak]

I'll have to grab my books to really do some number crunching, but yes, that sounds low.

The thing is that the average value for minor, medium and major magic items accounts for (theoretically, I've not actually crunched the numbers) all magic items that can possibly be rolled on that column of the table. Potions and scrolls drag those averages down quite a lot. So while Armour (and even worse, weapons) tend to have values that are quite high compared to the stated averages, those lower value items bring the numbers down quite handily.

Edit:

Right, just grabbed my CRB and did a VERY simplistic averaging, accounting for the % probability of a particular item type (as per table 15-2), assuming every roll was a 50, and for Potions, Scrolls and Wands using the average cost for the various crafter types, I make the "average" value of a Major magic item 42,138.53 gp.

Not sure I can be bothered to do the complete calculation, since it would require me to effectively recreate all of the tables from the CRB, but the chances are the results will be roughly comparable.

Just repeated the calculation assuming "roll of 1" and "roll of 100" (cheating with weapons and armour, just assumed +10 total enhancement for them), and got 14,929.38 and 155,753.10. This doesn't tell anywhere near the whole story, though, since for weapons the bottom 49% of the table results in an average value of 30,326.53, which is more than 8,000 less than the "50 roll".

[Excelsias]

That makes me feel better. My concern all along, as I noted, was really the GP values that were going to pop out of the table - I might even code in BOTH options in case I'm feeling stingy, but we'll see :p Once I get the tables done I'll post them along with some results.