Milambus’s Game Codex

In an upcoming Dungeons & Dragons Forth Edition campaign, I have decided that I don’t want to be bothered with giving out standard magical items.  Items like +1 longswords and +2 suits of platemail.   I want the magic items that I award to be special, not just an expected result of the leveling up process.  I want Excalibur, not +1 longsword.

The problem with this is that the mechanics of 4e expect the players to regularly receive magical items.  Every five levels the player is expected to receive the next tier in magical items.  +1 around level 5, +2 around level 10 … +6 around level 30.  This type of equipment grind works in a computer game, but doesn’t really work in the episodic, fast-leveling campaign that I am planning.

In order to remove these “mundane” magical items, and still allow the player a fighting chance at surviving at higher levels, changes will have to be made.  Making these changes will first require an understanding of just what exactly these magical items do for the player.  I plan on dividing this subject up into two or three posts, this first one will discuss magical weapons.

There are two mechanical benefits from “mundane” magical items.  First, they increase the characters chance to hit.  Magical weapons do this by giving a bonus to the character’s Attack Bonus equal to the enhancement bonus of the weapon.  The second benefit that magical weapons offer is an increase in the damage dealt. 

Magical weapons provide bonus damage in two forms.  Magical weapons add their enhancement bonus to any attacks made with the weapon.  Additionally, when the character scores a critical hit the attack deals extra damage based upon the weapon.  Most magical weapons have a critical hit die associated with them.  Most commonly this is a d6.  When the character make a critical attack they roll X dice of the specified type, where X is equal to the weapons enhancement bonus. 

For example, a +5 longsword deals 5 extra damage on every attack made with the sword.  When that sword lands a critical blow, it deals 5d6 extra damage.

Now that we understand how magical weapons benefit the character, what changes do we make to the system to balance out the removal of those magical weapons?  I believe that balancing out the damage will be pretty easy, so I will be focusing on balancing out the attack bonus first. 

Before we can make any changes I think we need to explore the interaction between player character Attack Bonuses and monster AC.

Monster AC increases each level.  From a post on Enworld , we know that average monster AC is level + 14.  This average should give us a good baseline to compare against, even though AC will fluctuate depending upon the monsters race, role and other factors.

Player character attack bonuses are a bit more complicated.  There are many factors that go into determining a characters attack bonus.  Each weapon has is proficiency bonus, along with any enhancement bonus that is may grant due to its magical nature.  Player characters ability scores directly affect their attack bonus, and abilities increase as the character’s level increases.  Additionally, one half the character’s level is added to the attack bonus.  Finally, there are feats that can increase the character’s attack bonus.  The most common feat to do so is likely to be the new Weapon Expertise from Player’s Handbook 2.  This feat gives +1 to the character’s attack bonus; it then scales up at levels 15 and 25.

To see how all of these factors work together see the chart below.  For this chart I am using a player character that starts with an 18 in their primary attack ability.  The character will be taking the Weapon Expertise feat, and will be following an epic destiny that increases their stats at level 21.  Magic Weapons are being awarded at levels 3, 7, 13, 17, 23, 27 to help even out the chart.

As we can see from the chart, the player characters attack bonus increases at pretty much every level.  This balances out well with the increase in the monsters average AC. 

Note that before the addition of the Weapon Expertise feat with PHB2 the character’s attack bonus would have fallen behind by 3 points at level 30.   To me this indicates that the feat is just a band-aid on the system.  A band-aid that works well, but one that I think we can do without.  So in addition to removing “mundane” magical weapons from my campaign, I also intend to remove Weapon Expertise.

Now if I take the total attack bonus that magical weapons can grant (+6) and add the attack bonus from Weapon Expertise at level 30 (+3), I determine that any changes to the system will need to balance out a total of +9 to attack bonus across 30 levels.

To make this easy on the players, allowing them to use the Character Builder without modification, I have decided to handle the alterations on the DM side.  This means that I will be decreasing the AC of the monsters as the players level up. 

Dividing the 30 levels by the +9 attack bonus, we get 3.33.  To make the math easier, I’ll just use 3.  So every 3 levels, I will decrease the AC of the monsters by 1.

So for a level 10 monster, I will be decreasing its AC by 3.  In fact, I will be decreasing all of its defenses by this amount.  While I have not included a detailed study of non-AC defenses they follow the same pattern.

Returning to the topic of damage, I plan to mostly ignore the bonus damage that magic weapons add to each swing with a weapon.  I will likely end up doing something in regards to hit points or damage to speed up combat, but that would be a future post.

Bonus damage on critical hits is a different matter.  I have a harder time just throwing this damage out the window.  There is a fairly simple solution for this however.  I’ll simple give all weapons the ability to deal bonus damage on a critical hit determined by the level of the character.  Bonus damage will be in the form of the default d6.  Critical hits will deal 1d6 bonus damage for every 5 character levels.  (Level / 5 rounded down)

The magical weapons that I do hand out, Artifact type items, may increase the size of the critical hit die.  For example, Excalibur may deal Xd12 damage when a critical hit lands.

To achieve my goal of removing “mundane” magical items from Dungeons & Dragons Forth Edition I will be making two changes to the game.  First, I will subtract 1 from every creatures AC for each 3 levels.  (Level / 3 rounded down)  Secondly, I will make all weapons deal bonus damage on a critical hit, 1d6 damage for every 5 levels.  (Level / 5 rounded down)