[3.5] Creating a new WBL table for a non-magical campaign world (14th century Europe)

[meto30]

Hello, I'm a DM who is elated to have completed his first long-term campaign! I'm in the process of starting up the second one for our group (the group has voted me to be the DM again), and we've chosen to play in a rather historical setting, one set in 14th century Europe, in the beginning stages of the Hundred Years' War, on the eve of the arrival of the Black Death. The central premise of the campaign is that in this world, the Black Death was not a natural phenomenon, but a result of a plot (and unforeseen consequences of a series of accidents) regarding Elder Evils. As you can see, magic isn't entirely absent from our campaign, but I want magic to be something so rare, so unknown, that all magic items are basically regarded as unique artifacts and magic-users as being uberpowered but short-sighted fools toying with powers they cannot possibly fully comprehend. Basically, all magic (and magic items) are out of reach of both PCs and NPCs unless they gain infinitesimal access via plot, or in the case of more mundane stuff such as spell ingredients, very expensive and also dangerous and time-consuming to obtain.

So, the task I've set up myself with is that I want to create a WBL for a world that is, for the narrow purposes of building said table, devoid of magic. This WBL will first be used to determine the starting wealth of the PCs, and later be used to see if I've given my players enough loot. Of course, one could argue that, since the PCs will eventually have to gain some magic to fight enemies who have access to magic (albeit to a much lesser degree that in a typical campaign), I could just use the original WBL or just scale it down a bit using a coefficient. It is not that I've entirely abandoned that train of thought, it is that I want to see if there is some other way of thinking, some inkling of wisdom that I could learn from DMs more experienced than I, especially regarding low-magic or non-magic worlds.

The players are all starting in 5th level, and the campaign will probably progress until they're all in level 12 or so. There is a spellcaster in the party, but due to magical ingredients being so scarce as to be counted separately, he has decided (after a discussion with me and the other players) to multi-class so he has something to do outside of magic. All spells which don't have a listed magical ingredient will have a rare one added to make sure it is never constantly accessible. PCs do have higher-than-normal access to all sorts of rare goods, being part of a secret order with lots of influence (and named Knights Templar XD). Trade networks are well-established and merchant guilds flourishing across Europe, setting the stage for the rapid spread of the Black Death.

[Seerow]

The real question is why are you playing 3.5 rather than a game that isn't intrinsically high magic to the point where the DM will be rewriting 3/4ths of the game to make it work without?


Edit: but to answer your question?

Level 1: 200gp
Level 2: 900gp
Level 3: 2700gp
Level 4+: Nobody cares, because you don't have anything to spend money on that will meaningfully impact gameplay without magic. And if the DM is making a bunch of substitutes for higher end items, we have no way of judging their value, cost, or expected amounts of it without knowing that information. And so we go back to point 1, why do this when the DM is rewriting so much we have no realistic frame of reference?

[meto30]

Well, there are several reasons we are playing D&D 3.5e.


We voted to do so. We had a discussion on what game system we'd like to play, and two of the players were quite adamant on not wanting to learn a whole new system, and we decided to honour their wishes.
We have a bunch of sourcebooks we could use already in our shelves, and had several years of experience regarding them. I the DM have one and a half decade worth of experience on the matter, and practically zero on everything else.
We hate 4e with quite a passion. Please do not discuss the 4e in this thread. We have discussed playing 5e a bit, but we decided paying all those dollars and waiting for the books to ship for a month or longer was not worth it. We live in Korea, and we're probably not getting gaming material unless we use international shipping.
We're used to rewriting whole sections of 3.5e to suit our needs. One of the changes we made in the previous campaign was the switch to the metric (SI) system for the units of measurement. My players tell me they'd really like to stick to units they are used to, so we kept the "codex" of our changes.


Regarding your point, as far as my players and I have experienced, magic constitutes only roughly 40% of all spending made by PCs. The more involved the players are in political matters, the smaller the ratio becomes. A sample pot of silver coins will do so much more if used as bribes, mercenary payments, infrastructure purchases, or anything regarding their power and standing, than if used to simply buy magic items, which at best can only make the purchasing person, as a lone person, more powerful, which, in the grand scheme of things, is useless without social influence. Unless the person's interest was only wreaking havoc, in which case magic items will simply do much more, same in the sense of a gun being more destructive than a book of the same price if the method of comparison is simply to attempt to kill as many people as possible, physically. No matter how powerful a person is, the combined weight of the world is always far greater. The only real option one has is to play along, to 'play the game', so that said combined weight is not used to crush the one. By becoming more powerful than the world combined, by whatever the means be to make such a feat possible, the only other option that comes up is to upset the game, to destroy the world, and destroy oneself with it.

If you do not agree with the above analysis, then I respect your opinion, but I'd kindly ask you to respect mine by leaving this thread, because unless we can agree on the above, I don't think we'll be reaching any conclusions that will be of use to either of us.

[Firechanter]

What you really need is an inherent Defense progression, similar to BAB but applicable to AC instead. Since in D&D, AC only ever improves through magic items, so if you have no way to keep AC up to par, the game will definitely, absolutely and unavoidably crash and burn.

Conan D20 solved it in a playable way. It would probably be smarter if you abandoned D&D 3.5 entirely and picked a system that was made for low magic.

[Seerow]

Well, there are several reasons we are playing D&D 3.5e.


We voted to do so. We had a discussion on what game system we'd like to play, and two of the players were quite adamant on not wanting to learn a whole new system, and we decided to honour their wishes.
We have a bunch of sourcebooks we could use already in our shelves, and had several years of experience regarding them. I the DM have one and a half decade worth of experience on the matter, and practically zero on everything else.
We hate 4e with quite a passion. Please do not discuss the 4e in this thread. We have discussed playing 5e a bit, but we decided paying all those dollars and waiting for the books to ship for a month or longer was not worth it. We live in Korea, and we're probably not getting gaming material unless we use international shipping.
We're used to rewriting whole sections of 3.5e to suit our needs. One of the changes we made in the previous campaign was the switch to the metric (SI) system for the units of measurement. My players tell me they'd really like to stick to units they are used to, so we kept the "codex" of our changes.


4e or 5e would be just as bad for what you want. I would highly recommend something like Call of Cthulu, or even Dread for you. Y'know, games actually designed to fit the entire aesthetic you are going for.

The level of redesign you are talking about here isn't just changing out from Imperial to Metric, you're talking about needing to literally rewrite every spell, most classes, every monster, the Challenge Rating rules, and figuring out new ways to reward players that does not involve treasure/magic items since those no longer exist.

That is a massive overhaul. It might be more manageable if you were looking for a level 1-4 game, where magic isn't so prominent yet. But you're looking at levels 5-12. At those levels player characters in D&D 3.5 are literally super heroes. You are majorly underestimating how hard it is to beat the system into anything remotely resembling what you are trying to do.

[Ephemeral_Being]

We're used to rewriting whole sections of 3.5e to suit our needs. One of the changes we made in the previous campaign was the switch to the metric (SI) system for the units of measurement. My players tell me they'd really like to stick to units they are used to, so we kept the "codex" of our changes.


Ha ha ha. Wait. You seriously converted the botched version of US Standard they used in DnD to Metric?

Can I have a copy of that? I'd love to see how it turned out.

[meto30]

Ha ha ha. Wait. You seriously converted the botched version of US Standard they used in DnD to Metric?

Can I have a copy of that? I'd love to see how it turned out.

Sure, but that would be quite outside the purpose of this thread, so I'm PM you. Do note that some changes might not make sense to you, because we made that change halfway through the campaign and had to consider the ease with which to convert all the existing stuff.


4e or 5e would be just as bad for what you want. I would highly recommend something like Call of Cthulu, or even Dread for you. Y'know, games actually designed to fit the entire aesthetic you are going for.

The level of redesign you are talking about here isn't just changing out from Imperial to Metric, you're talking about needing to literally rewrite every spell, most classes, every monster, the Challenge Rating rules, and figuring out new ways to reward players that does not involve treasure/magic items since those no longer exist.

That is a massive overhaul. It might be more manageable if you were looking for a level 1-4 game, where magic isn't so prominent yet. But you're looking at levels 5-12. At those levels player characters in D&D 3.5 are literally super heroes. You are majorly underestimating how hard it is to beat the system into anything remotely resembling what you are trying to do.

I have made the mistake of editing my previous post too late, and so I will quote myself:

Regarding your point, as far as my players and I have experienced, magic constitutes only roughly 40% of all spending made by PCs. The more involved the players are in political matters, the smaller the ratio becomes. A sample pot of silver coins will do so much more if used as bribes, mercenary payments, infrastructure purchases, or anything regarding their power and standing, than if used to simply buy magic items, which at best can only make the purchasing person, as a lone person, more powerful, which, in the grand scheme of things, is useless without social influence. Unless the person's interest was only wreaking havoc, in which case magic items will simply do much more, same in the sense of a gun being more destructive than a book of the same price if the method of comparison is simply to attempt to kill as many people as possible, physically. No matter how powerful a person is, the combined weight of the world is always far greater. The only real option one has is to play along, to 'play the game', so that said combined weight is not used to crush the one. By becoming more powerful than the world combined, by whatever the means be to make such a feat possible, the only other option that comes up is to upset the game, to destroy the world, and destroy oneself with it.

[Seerow]

Regarding that point, money your players spend on politics, base building, kingdom building, and other such things is ultimately irrelevant. If that's what you want all of your players' money to be spent on, you can give them literally billions of gold pieces and never unbalance anything.

The wealth by level in 3.5 is intended to be used for player gear, to help the characters maintain pace with their expected capabilities against level appropriate enemies. This isn't to say that players shouldn't spend money on those other things, but in general those things don't count against WBL. Heck in my group it's pretty standard practice that past a certain level we start investing in something along those lines and dump all excess money above WBL into it. It makes it easier on the DM, so they don't have to worry about unbalancing things by throwing too much gold at us, and makes us feel better for creating something lasting within the game world.



Anyway, the point is that WBL is supposed to be used for player power. The things you are talking about them spending their money on are unrelated to that, so you don't need a WBL, just give however much gold you feel is appropriate at any given time. However if your expectation going into the game is that all gold gets spent on other things, and no other compensation is given, you will be forced to rewrite huge chunks of the monster manual and CR guidelines. Especially without having any reliable spellcasting to help close that gap.


BTW: If you do insist on going through with this, I will recommend a few things:
1) Don't track spell components for every spell independently. At most group by spell school. So instead of "Magically Enhanced Bat Guano" to cast Fireball and "spool of statically charged kite string" to cast Lightning Bolt, just have "evocation component" (possibly fluffed to whatever you want). That will still end up being 9 separate material components to track, but it is more manageable than thousands. You could, if you want, choose to have higher level spells require more of the component, to further discourage high level magic.

2) Every numerical boost normally gained through magic items? Stat boosts, AC boosts, Attack/Damage boosts, Save Boosts, etc should all be granted automatically via level up. Without these and without reliable magic, by the time you are looking at level 10-12 you will run into encounters where the player characters simply can't hit the enemy at all and get hit on a 2 by enemies power attacking for their full BAB.

3) Even with #2 you will need to pick your enemies carefully. Any enemy that can fly or burrow is going to be a huge potential problem for players who are not focused heavily on range. Any enemy that uses improved grab can become a death sentence when you don't have Freedom of Movement/Teleport/etc to break out. Any enemy spellcaster is a major issue with hundreds of possible actions that the party has no means to deal with. And note by level 7-10, what I just described includes the majority of monsters in your CR (presuming you count SLAs as casting). This isn't a case of numbers, it's a case of severely hamstringing player options, and monsters in 3.5 are designed with the expectation that the player options are there and being used actively.

4) Healing will be an issue. Expect 1 encounter work weeks. Especially any time ability damage, level drain, diseases, curses, etc show up. But even barring that regular hit point damage from an encounter or two will take days to heal up, the higher level you are the longer it will end up taking to recover to full health. This will be a big departure from standard D&D where a couple magic sticks can keep the party going through a dozen encounters a day easily, and everyone is ready to do a dozen more the next day. This means adventure planning has to be based around set piece encounters that happen independently of any other encounters. Any sort of adventure design that includes a gauntlet of weak-moderate encounters at any point is basically dooming the party to a TPK.

[With a box]

I think your campaign will be a free form one and you won't open DMG for few sessions.

[JyP]

On D&D 3.5 with metric system : it is converted in French editions (main figure being 5' = 1.5m for squares). You can check 3.0 french SRD there : http://www.regles-donjons-dragons.com/

As you seem to focus on bribes, contacts, guilds and so on... do you allow Leadership for it, or would you cover it through WBL instead ? Or hirelings ?

From my point of view : you should cover old magic items system, which is the reason for WBL, through Vow of Poverty instead. So PCs scale up to monsters. Or if there are no monsters, everyone use masterwork tools if they can afford it, so no need for WBL.

As about wealth, well a guild leader will always be rich, and a mercenary, unless he becomes a captain leader under Jeanne d'Arc, will always be more or less broke, whatever his level :smalltongue: Use the hirelings salary as guidelines ?

[meto30]

While I expect your opinion, dear sir, regarding the WBL intended solely for player gear, an opinion which I partially agree with, it seems we have quite severe differences on what we define as 'fair' or 'balanced'. I can never settle for eyeballing loot, prizes, and compensation, and I suspect neither will my players. For everything there must be a clearly defined, well understood and agreed-upon standard. The WBL represents that standard - the accumulated wealth expected of a successful career of an adventurer up to said level. Without a standard, there is no sub-standard, standard-par, or over-standard. There is no 'varying degrees of success'. There is no quantifiable measurement. There is no inherent order, which will severely break the verisimilitude for many of us here.

So basically, I do contend that, even if you believe (and again, I respect you for believing so, we simply have different opinions, and different focuses in gaming) that in our particular case the WBL has become moot, I want to and will do create a WBL for the campaign. Thus, again, I ask you to respect my insistence. If you believe I should not use a WBL of any sort, well I think it is fantastic that you disagree, the world is beautiful simply because it is diverse, but still, since my question here assumes the use of a WBL, your opinion does not answer the question, and thus I can make little use of that particular opinion. We can get nowhere by continuing this. If you were one of my players, of course I'd take your opinion into serious consideration and open discussions on whether I was wrong or not, a D&D is a party game, but you are not one of my players, and so I have little reason to consider changing my stance on the matter. So, basically, I ask you to agree to disagree.

That said, I do thank you for providing more opinions on other related matters. I also did learn a few things from them, so I thank you even more.


BTW: If you do insist on going through with this, I will recommend a few things:
1) Don't track spell components for every spell independently. At most group by spell school. So instead of "Magically Enhanced Bat Guano" to cast Fireball and "spool of statically charged kite string" to cast Lightning Bolt, just have "evocation component" (possibly fluffed to whatever you want). That will still end up being 9 separate material components to track, but it is more manageable than thousands. You could, if you want, choose to have higher level spells require more of the component, to further discourage high level magic.

While tracking spell components independently was something we are already doing for the last six years, that is, for the entire duration of our previous campaign that spanned from level 1 to level 29, I believe it would be good to simplify the system for this new campaign, as it is almost entirely devoid of magic. Besides, the entire rational for making magic as hideously complex and difficult to manage and understand as I could humanely make it in the previous campaign was that, as a balancing mechanism, magic should be more difficult to use, not less powerful or less versatile. The utility of magic is a prize for navigating through that mess. This held for PCs and NPCs alike. Not entirely dissimilar to how mastery of the law entitles one to enormous payments for legal advice.

I'm rather certain any spells above level 4 is going to be so extremely rare to the point a simple scroll of teleport is going to be regarded as a major artifact worthy of going to war over, I feel I am justified in not providing different rules for higher level spells.


2) Every numerical boost normally gained through magic items? Stat boosts, AC boosts, Attack/Damage boosts, Save Boosts, etc should all be granted automatically via level up. Without these and without reliable magic, by the time you are looking at level 10-12 you will run into encounters where the player characters simply can't hit the enemy at all and get hit on a 2 by enemies power attacking for their full BAB.

3) Even with #2 you will need to pick your enemies carefully. Any enemy that can fly or burrow is going to be a huge potential problem for players who are not focused heavily on range. Any enemy that uses improved grab can become a death sentence when you don't have Freedom of Movement/Teleport/etc to break out. Any enemy spellcaster is a major issue with hundreds of possible actions that the party has no means to deal with. And note by level 7-10, what I just described includes the majority of monsters in your CR (presuming you count SLAs as casting). This isn't a case of numbers, it's a case of severely hamstringing player options, and monsters in 3.5 are designed with the expectation that the player options are there and being used actively.

I honestly hadn't given that deep a thought to the issue of numerical boosts, seeing as we're already dealing with armour pieces with larger differences in AC value (not linear, but quadratic increase), but you are right that there should be something that replaces magical boosts for PCs, seeing as I'm robbing a significant portion of their leveling gains from them. I will look into giving them as either armour upgrades (in the line of Monster Hunter series) or class features.

Regarding monsters with CRs in that range, honestly, I don't see the problem in they becoming so difficult to defeat. Magic, and anything magical, is rare in this world - almost all combat will occur between humanoids of varying levels with practically zero magical gear. High CR monsters will feature as bosses and mini-bosses (especially since most of them will only occur through the "Black Death plot"), and their being so powerful is part of our campaign's premise, of a non-magical world desperately trying to cope with magical foes. Besides, this isn't anything the players hadn't done already - an entire chapter of our previous campaign went on with no divine magic on the players' side only, due to them not realizing about a plot soon enough.


Any enemy spellcaster is a major issue with hundreds of possible actions that the party has no means to deal with.
Dear sir, that's the point of this campaign.

You are entirely right in regards to healing - a campaign without on-the-road healing is bound to become painfully slow in game-time, and that does not bode well for this campaign. To remedy this, I'll be introducing methods of magical healing (mostly holy relics) that perhaps can be treated with alchemy to produce potions of various kinds, expensive, but still readily obtainable. As a side note, most such items in this campaign world is in the possession of the major churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church. Healing the schism between the Templars and the Holy See is already planned to be a major plot line, so I'd say let less expensive healing be a boon for successfully befriending the Papacy. That will give them even more motivation to involve themselves with Rome.

[meto30]

On D&D 3.5 with metric system : it is converted in French editions (main figure being 5' = 1.5m for squares). You can check 3.0 french SRD there : http://www.regles-donjons-dragons.com/

As you seem to focus on bribes, contacts, guilds and so on... do you allow Leadership for it, or would you cover it through WBL instead ? Or hirelings ?

From my point of view : you should cover old magic items system, which is the reason for WBL, through Vow of Poverty instead. So PCs scale up to monsters. Or if there are no monsters, everyone use masterwork tools if they can afford it, so no need for WBL.

As about wealth, well a guild leader will always be rich, and a mercenary, unless he becomes a captain leader under Jeanne d'Arc, will always be more or less broke, whatever his level :smalltongue: Use the hirelings salary as guidelines ?

Thank you, but as I've said we already have our own metric system and we're already decided on using it for this campaign.

Both, and much more. Basically I'll be utilizing all the tools we've used and developed for the previous campaign, to make a most complex and multi-nuanced system for simulating social structures to the best of our abilities to make and manage it. The WBL is the standard against which all achievements can be compared, to check our system remains within what we define as realistic, or at the very least, acceptably believable.

I think Vow of Poverty should be used for ascetics, of which there already are a few in this world. The PCs are not ascetics, and thus should not qualify. I am aware that real-life Templars swore an oath of poverty, but then again, that did not prevent them from building one of the first banking networks in Europe. The world is full of hypocrites - the PCs are ones too.

I'd like to ask everyone to, in the case their opinion can be summed up into "I don't think Meto should use a WBL in the first place", kindly respect my opinion here and remain silent on the matter? If that is the only opinion I'll ever get from this forum, and so be it, I'll respect that conclusion, but please, that particular opinion does not help me answer this question. We're having a WBL, whether you think that's fitting or not; with or without help, I am building a WBL within the next few days, as the first session is in next Sunday.

[With a box]

As npcs get less WBL due to they spent their money on other then their gear, how about (PC WBL-NPC WBL)

that would be

2nd -1100
3rd 200
4th 2100
5th 4700
6th 7400
7th 11800
8th 17600
9th 24000
10th 33000
11th 45000
12th 61000
13th 75000
14th 105000
15th 141000
16th 183000
17th 240000
18th 310000
19th 410000
20th 540000
We need to adjust it (at least 2nd to 3rd..) but would it be decent start point?

[meto30]

as npcs get less WBL due to they spent their money on other then their gear, who about (PC WBL-NPC WBL)

what would be

2nd -1100
3rd 200
4th 2100
5th 4700
6th 7400
7th 11800
8th 17600
9th 24000
10th 33000
11th 45000
12th 61000
13th 75000
14th 105000
15th 141000
16th 183000
17th 240000
18th 310000
19th 410000
20th 540000
we need to adjust it (at least 2nd to 3rd..) but would it be decent start point?

What a splendid idea! And it scales in some yet unclear but still recognizable way! I'll look into researching ways into adapting that into a formula right away. I've some discussions to do with my players. Thank you, it indeed is a very decent starting point.

Any more such wonderful insight?

PS: I simply cannot thank you enough. I'm feeling like a dunce here for not thinking of that solution XD I feel like I should honour your help by naming the current pope in our campaign after you or something, it is simply marvelous. Such a wealth of ideas springing from this foundation... my players are having a field day. It is indeed a decent, no, magnificent starting point.

[Crake]

Why not play E6? You can use feats to replicate some of the necessary magical abilities, like a feat that allows you to overcome DR magic or something, there already exist feats in e6 for ability bonuses (+2 per 2 feats, to a maximum of +2 per ability score iirc), plus capstone feats, all while not needing to delve into the realm of magical items (because they can just be replicated via feats).

[JyP]

Both, and much more. Basically I'll be utilizing all the tools we've used and developed for the previous campaign, to make a most complex and multi-nuanced system for simulating social structures to the best of our abilities to make and manage it. The WBL is the standard against which all achievements can be compared, to check our system remains within what we define as realistic, or at the very least, acceptably believable.
ok. My feeling is that Leadership system is a quick way to assess a mercenary troop functionning correctly through it's leader abilities - so players don't have to handle day to day hurdles like living and housing costs, etc. A mercenary troop "war treasure" is only ok until the next battle... I would even forward to Heroes of Battle as a way to supplement a mercenary company highlights.

So another way to do it would be to assess monthly or yearly costs of mercenary hirelings, and multiply by number of followers per level (according to Leadership) to have a total cost per Leader level => you would obtain a kind of WBL for PC mercenary leaders there.