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Aug 28, 2011 -- 7:08AM, Cassan wrote:

Aug 28, 2011 -- 5:06AM, Saibrock wrote:

Aug 28, 2011 -- 4:56AM, Cassan wrote:

In 2e you couldn't buy potions off the shelf in vast quantities...  and so potions actually meant something.  I think putting up prices and creating unlimited magic shops in 4e was a dubious decision.

Hmm I found 625,000 on a dragon, one sec as I run over to the village a pick up a +5 holy avenger :-)

4E doesn't actually say anything about how, exactly a party might acquire magic items beyond what they find as treasure. In my setting, for example, there are no magic item shops, so anything the party wants they'll have to enchant themselves. This is a change from my last campaign, because in the intervening 150 years, one of the PCs from my last campaign ruined the magic item economy by buying them all up and melting them down for parts, so you can no longer just buy magic items in the open market.

And experienced DM's will always make good decisions.  But I think for new DMs, especially younger DMs more experienced with video games who have players that are looking for an Auction House, when you put prices of magic items into the Players Handbook (I would have put into DMG with restrictions) the players will naturally assume they can buy all that stuff.

Yeah there definitely seems to be a sense of entitlement among a lot of players that they should be able to pretty much buy whatever magical items they want if they have the cash. The magical item rarity system fixed this a little. However, if a player loses a character during play and builds a new one, they tend to use the magic item collection in the builder to pimp out their new characters just so ("got to make sure I start with that frost weapon, so that I can use it with my frost cheese feat combo").


 

Aug 28, 2011 -- 2:10AM, Mithrus wrote:

Our gaming group recently decided to houserule that potions of healing  no longer use healing surges. The primary reasoning is that they were so  rarely worth using past level 3, as characters HS values were noticably  better. We typically have 4-7 encounters per "work day" (we are  approaching late-heroic, almost level 8), so HSs are used sparingly.  Granted, we aren't expecting to be toting around dozens of potions,  probably at most 1-2 per character each adventure (which typically takes  about 4 game sessions, and about 12-15 encounters). We don't even use other potions (tragic, really), but I think we would rule similarly for those as well.

Anyone else use a similar houserule?

You can obviously do as you please but I think your messing with a reasonably important element in 4E that should actually be left alone.

Pretty much it breaks down like this:
Traditionally in D&D the game started in 'hard mode' with few hps and few ways to die players where in for a world of hurt.  However if you lived long enough you became a big damn hero and it actually became a lot easier to keep living.  This makes sense in a kind of simulation-y sword and sorcery type of way where we presume that the little people are all actually red shirts and they die in droves.

However 4E is more gamist then this and reversed the things.  In 4E you actually start in easy mode and things ramp up in difficulty as you level.  To break this down roughly at 1-2 level your 2nd winds and other healing powers are so potent in terms of hps gained versus most monster damage that you should be generally doing pretty good just through this manner.  From 3-5 your rich enough to get lots of healing potions and usually have plenty of surges so while the monster damage is now scaling up you can get by on just chugging healing potions but from 6th on things start to get grimmer.  The gloves are now coming off.  With each passing level the difference between your base surge value and the amount of hps gained through potions is just getting worse and worse and its becoming a positive mistake to use potions for anything but the most dire last ditch emergencies.

In reality your supposed to handle this through good tactics at the party level, access to more potent healing from the leaders and generally just better play to insure that your group can tackle the more difficult challanges they face.

I'll note that while I advocate for 3 encounter days (but harder more heavily designed encounters that involve lots of DM prep to include interesting features to make each encounter unique) the default mode of play remains an average of 5 encounters with some adventures being a little below this and some being a little above this number.