Project Delicate Rebalancement: Tales of the Wild Coast

If there is an imbalance issue, it would seem to be quite heavily influenced by treasure values and also this aspect was present BEFORE the mods. Whether XP is also an issue I can't yet say.

I have yet to test the new areas to see whether they make this worse because I have just come back to the game after a long hiatus and I want to finish my cof8 4.01 game first. However, I have noticed that the encounters on Thrommel's level of the dungeon have been quite easy. I have a party of 8 PCs and they have had a good crafting session before I went back into the Temple. They are all about 8th level. No extra areas have been played.

So, I thought I would be a good DM giggle: ) and do a wealth check on the party. According to the DMG p135, 8th lvl PCs should have 27k-36k each (including the market value of their gear). My party have over 74k each......(more than what an 11th level party should have). Now some of this is because I have been crafting, of course, so I have increased my wealth level that way, but even so the treasure is generous to say the least. (And I don't go around picking up every cruddy bit of armour from defeated foes, either!)

I suspect that the abundance of treasure (if used to acquire bespoke items of use to the party) will be more imbalancing than a couple of extra levels of experience, although in 3.5 that's debatable. Holy enchantments all round, boys!

I would hate to see crafting go (and it doesn't sound like that's on the agenda) but what about increasing the costs to craft? Its not RAW but then by the RAW you should spend a lot of time on extensive crafting, and time doesn't penalise you in the CRPG like it would in a PNP game. Otherwise I think you need to reduce the treasure that's available if you are serious about increasing the challenge, as XP doesn't seem to be enough according to some of the posts here.

On the other hand, you could just leave it up to the player to adjust their own difficulty. If you want to make it harder, don't craft much (or at all?), don't rest as much, don't take as many PCs, swap out party members periodically to prevent them getting a share of ALL the rewards on offer, don't buff just because you know from last time that there's a hard scrap coming etc etc etc. (I don't mean this last paragraph to in any way decry the efforts of those who want to provide a correct challenge, but maybe there are so many variables that its an impossible task unless some self-management is performed. Just a devils advocate position to think about, maybe?)

 

A question - do your PC's have all that gear because they were crafting it or because they were finding it? Reducing experience was chosen as a testing method for re-balancement because it was the simplest way to influence the game balance without a lot of re-modding (removing treasure included). To this day, players in my PnP game sorely dislike paying what I charge them for gear they wish to acquire. They can't make much, if any, of it themselves, and they have to find it or have it made for them at 100% markup; sometimes even more. Those prices in the DMG are what you get if you sell the item, not if you make it or wish to buy it. If I want to reward them, I give them a break on price if it's simple gear they're going to need. Many people here will not DM themselves as you've done, let alone as you've suggested. Experience points are tied to everything else that is in abundance, and make the best tool for testing.

 

I would say that (after the last crafting session) a large proportion of my gear is at least partially crafted. For example, the Paladin has had the "Holy" enchantment added to her flaming sword found in the Temple. The Dwarf fighter has +2 war axe, +3 full plate & +3 shield crafted entirely by the party cleric. The wizard has 3 wands and umpteen scrolls crafted by herself. My fairly crappy bard dishes out some decent damage with his holy bow and rapid shot. We wouldn't have half this stuff without crafting. This is why I wonder whether increasing crafting costs might be a quick(?) and dirty way to reduce PC power. Without so many bespoke items I have made to cater to the party's strengths, I am sure that it wouldn't be as easy.

Oh, don't get me wrong, reducing XP is necessary if you really want to keep the endgame challenging after adding more areas to adventure and gain XP. I just wanted to draw attention to the high wealth levels ALREADY existing (pre additional areas, even!) and that combining this with unfettered crafting increases PC power enormously. Adjusting crafting costs wouldn't penalise the treasure of those who don't craft and (whilst not RAW) might counterbalance the lack of time penalties for crafting which, by the RAW, should apply. (The original adventure module in my cupboard upstairs even has reinforcement schedules for the Temple forces if the party takes its time-which I guess would be harder to implement than an increase to crafting costs).

Actually, the magic item prices in the 3.5 DMG (as opposed to the 1st ed DMG) ARE the price you pay to buy them. If you sell them, you get half price. If you craft them, as a general rule, you pay half the market price in materials, and 1/25 the market price in XP. The default D&D setting now assumes that magic items are readily available for sale (as long as the settlement is big enough) a bit like going to Ah Fong's. Of course, individual DMs are free to run their games as they wish, so all power to you for making the buggers sweat :twisted: . In my PNP Shackled City game, the temple which can make the best magic items is covertly against the PCs, which led to some great situations....Crafting is very difficult in my game, too- mainly because the party don't have unlimited down time. A crafted item is the exception rather than the rule, but because its specifically what you want, its pretty potent (rather like in this great CRPG we are discussing

 

Ah, interesting! As usual these things don't work quite as I would have expected-clearly adjusting crafting costs is not the way to go, then.

From memory I would agree with you that the loot levels are low at first (as is XP :giggle: ). To be honest (again from memory) I don't really remember feeling "over-treasured" until this last return to town to sell my loot and craft new stuff. Of course, I don't loot non-magical items as a rule, so that would keep the wealth down a bit. On the other hand, the big crafting session would increase my wealth levels (which are based on market price to buy the gear) but the party would still be too wealthy even without crafting (though not as much).

If you try to keep a tab on wealth by level as you go through, that would be interesting. I will keep an eye on this where I am in the game. You never know, it might be a temporary spike in loot levels.

 

Here in lies the problem, especially for 5.0.x. Everything has been upgraded and the monsters are much more powerful. It takes power weapons, good AC to deal with them. It takes money and xp to craft/buy the stuff needed. You can't fight the 200hp ogrechief with a +1 longsword at AC20. Crafting has to stay. I always have a problem when the crafter has max xp available, which is near levelup. Now, do I craft or move on to the next level, assuming you have gp to go with it it. To craft to +3 or buy +6 items is very expensive. It takes a lot xp and gp to get to the levels you need, like for temple level 4. Tough situation.

 

I agree with that completely. I usually don't start crafting until I'm over level 10, a decent portion of the way through the Temple. Then the experience isn't such a huge problem. A small sacrifice for good gear. But then, no matter how many battles I fight, my item crafter is still at least a level behind the rest of my party. Usually two...

 

Update to wealth levels on ORIGINAL game (without extra areas). My party are now 9th level and have 89k worth of gear/money each. According to the DMG, they should have 36k-49k each, and since they are only just 9th level, it should be nearer 36k than 49k.

On another topic, if you were able to get more monsters joining in when their buddies were attacked (as someone has talked about already, I believe) that would certainly increase the challenge. I tried deliberately opening other doors off a room when joining combat, so as to trigger the extra monsters to join in. This made the bugbears near Falrinth somewhat more challenging, for example, as I had to think about protecting my casters from more than 1 direction. Just another observation for you.

 

Is 50%xp automatically included in 5.0.3? I was looking at the logbook and it said the encounter gave 5056xp and for 6 players that's about 850 apiece. But the individual xp only went up 400+. Went to Nulb at level3, aprox 5200xp.

 

The 50% xp reduction was not included in 5.0.3. The original games method of only awarding 70% xp should still be in effect with 5.0.3.

 

I rarely post here, having limited skills with things like modding, but I have been following this discussion with interest. One possibility I think should be considered more is powering up the opposition in the Temple itself. In my recollection, the denizens of the Temple in the original module were more numerous (and seemingly more capable, although that may be a function of the AI in the game). Could restoring the original module population of the Temple and Nodes (from the PnP module) serve to mitigate some of the "easiness" of the mid game? (This has been suggested before, I know, but the option seems to me to have been discarded to some extent). That seems to me like it would be an easier task than reconfiguring elements like spell components and so on.

 

More enemies are just cannon fodder for more XP. Give the characters more XP (and, in effect, more levels) in the temple, and they'll be able to take down Zuggtmoy or Hedrack or whoever else that much easier.

That's most likely why the idea was discarded, though I haven't read this entire thread, so I don't really know for sure. But, it seems like a pretty obvious reason.

 

Bah humbug, let the exp flow like a river and also have Allyx's UberZuggtmoy with over 800 HPs be in the final showdown... j/k

 

Hmm... Strange... I thought my Zuggy had a round 1000 HP...