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The foundry and controlling the influx of overpowered gear
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Is there anything in place that will prevent user made content from flooding the game with an abundance of overpowered equipment? One of my biggest problems with DDO is how silly the magic item overload is. I understand that Forgotten Realms is high magic, but not every level 5 fighter should run around with a +5 Blade of Dancing.
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Over time - well if this is an online game then still pretty darned unlikely. As you mention here there will be people who make an exploit mod just to get uber gear. Cryptic is not likely to smile on mod makers creating content which specifically trivializes core game content or challenge levels.
I recommend checking out how the foundry rewards people in STO. I haven't kept up with things there, but last I had seen mission rewards were hard-coded from a reward table and not something the creator had control over.
Correct. You get the same loot in the Foundry as you would in the normal game world for killing that type and level of NPC.
4E has pretty specific guidelines on the level of magical equipment a character is expected to have in terms of +1 per five levels, wouldn't be surprised if the NW Foundry has it coded in that modules won't be allowed to give rewards that exceed that.
With that said, most of the magic items in 4E are balanced pretty close to the expected class powers/spells/exploits/prayers you'd have at those character levels so they are less about 'Awe-Inspiring Cosmic Power!' and more about your character simply having more choices during combat about what they are going to do.
Just remains to be seen how much variety they manage to get in the game in terms of the items from AV1/AV2 and the other books and how they implement things like the 'Daily' magic item power usage limit.
In online game terms typically encounter or daily type powers would be throttled by long cooldowns.
Yeah, I meant more specifically the limit of 1-10 characters only being able to use 1 daily magic item power across all of their magic items in a day but having said that and reading your reply it does make sense that they could simply share a global cooldown.
That'd be a little trickier when they got to higher levels and you could use 2 or 3 magic item daily-use powers in a day but not really terribly so.
Edit: Deth corrected me further down in this thread by pointing out a rules change I had missed somewhere along the way (really need to pay more attention to the Essentials updates) that makes this possibly not an issue at all.
There are a couple of options there. You can have the cooldowns reduced at higher levels, or you can have the code at changed at X level and then again at Y to allow for the use of more powers before the cooldown kicks in.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what they decide as it'll affect the way you use them in the big fights you would save those power usages for.
Either way, really not that worried about twinked characters in broken over-powered gear from the Foundry as the guidelines are pretty straight-forward in 4E and with Cryptic playing 4E in their offices I have to assume they are aware of them and will make the effort to try to get it right.
That is probably why they putting the cap at 10 at launch.
But thats the great thing about crafting your own content without restrictions - you can decide the level of loot that is appropriate for your group/friends/guild/clan whatever. If you want to play low magic, then you could create all the content you want that is low magic and play it with your group.
They removed the daily use limited with essentials, or should say with the rule compendium they removed it. There are no daily items that are that powerful that I see the limit in the first place was a good thing. All it did was make look for items that had encounter powers and just ignore items that had daily powers.
A bit aside from the subject (apologizes) but I think it would be interesting to see how well daily powers would work if they are translated to "once per instance" model. It would actually make them rather rare as is the purpose I believe.
Encounter based ones probably should have timers - either that or then be tied to duration of the "combat mode". I.e. they reset only when combat mode switches off. Generally this would happen only when there are no enemies/hazards left, so in a way this is timer anyways.
Yeah that could be the way to go, a short cooldown start as soon as the combat is over. It would be great that the daily is one time use during the adventure but I'm pretty sure it will end up as a cooldown simply because we are most likely going to kill a lot more monsters than we do on PnP.
Imagine that when you give everything a value, except base item of course, much like the new crafting system in DDO where you get a total enchantment number placed on the base item that reflects all the bonuses and procs etc... As my algebra instructor used to insist, 'keep both sides of the equation equal you damned noob!' It's math, keep it clean... Every enhancement should obviously have a value associated with it, based on how much power it adds to the item. Every monster/pack of monsters you add to a dungeon effects it's average difficulty. Say ever monster was set to Hard, and you were looking at a total of say 50 encounters to get to the end loot, of those encounters you have an average of 4-5 trash mobs per at x difficulty, plus 4 mini-bosses of x difficulty, and 1 primary boss of x difficulty. Once you add them up you have average dungeon difficulty. So the encounter loot table will be eligible for items of x strength.
I mean a big part of being a DM (and that's basically what we are talking about here) is making sure that risk = reward. There are mathematical ways to control exploiters without depriving the DM of the ability to reward the player with something useful and customized. I imagine that this will become more and more important in the higher level content.
Alas those days went the way of the dodo when the designers decided that a character's gear is most of what made up his level advancement. In a lot of ways it is impossible to limit gear since the game design relies on a fighter having certain specs when encountering creatures of their level. No magic armor and you are too east to hit, no magic weapons and you can't attack effectively, etc. A character's level is so tightly associated with equipment that any changes really foul things up.
In a home game the DM can make adjustments and will after a while get pretty good at it, but in an online environment things go horribly wrong when one aspect of the design is changed and nothing else is.
I actually hate the way equipment dictates how effective your character is. One of the hardest parts of 3e was the idea that every magic item in existence was available for sale and even necessary for your character to perform his role. Every monster is designed to be a challenge only if you have magic designed to counter their attacks or reduce their attacks effectiveness.
How many creatures require a specific weapon type to do full damage, How many creatures are immune to your basic attacks? It just got silly.
Until D&D returns to a more realistic(?) way of increasing challenges, the magic arms race will continue to frustrate those of us who prefer a world where your magic gear isn't what defines you.
I don't like the idea that I'll be needing to devote half my available inventory to carrying bane or specialty DT weapons or armor... I mean I've done that in DDO, and it's so silly... Can you just imagine my rogue, sneaking around with a dozen different swords stuffed into his bags? Or in my Acrobat rogue/monk's case, two dozen quarterstaves... Ridiculous...
I agree though... Gear is meant to augment your already amazing skills, not be the +5 that stands between you and an early grave...
They did away with a lot of that, imho, in 4E in how they went back and talked about how much treasure is to be awarded and expected.
The general guidelines for treasure in 4E from DMG1 are that over the course of earning a level (8-10 encounters) a party of 5 heroes would find 4 magic items ranging from 1-4 levels above them (so a 1st level party would find a 2nd,3rd,4th & 5th level magic item) as well as gold equal to the value of two magic items of their level. There are some rules on how to handle parcels for larger or smaller parties but the game is really written for a lot less of the 'Monty Haul' style campaign play that 3E always felt like it played as.
(Edit: The "Rules Compendium" with D&D Essentials uses a more random way of awarding treasure, rather then the DMG1s guidelines, which results in a party of 5 on average still getting 4 magic items of the same level+1d4 range over the course of 10 encounters/earning a level and roughly the possibly more gold to allow them to buy magic items of their level or lower.)
They also did away with the zillion types of DR and just dropped it back to an Immune (conditions like Stun or damage type) and a Resist/Vulnerability mechanic based upon the damage types (Acid, Cold, Fire, Force, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant, Thunder). The most complicated resistances in the game are the small handful of monsters who have something like "Resist 20 Variable (2/encounter)" which means that as a free action twice during the encounter they can change the damage type they have a resistance to over to a different type.
So you never again need to figure out how exactly you are supposed to find a Cold Iron Silver Wooden Blessed Crossbow Bolt to shoot a Fiendish-Were-Vampiric-Rakhasha through the heart.
There are still some Bane'ish weapons, such as the Dragonslayer Weapon, but the bonuses on it are less of a 'must have to win' sort of thing than they used to be.
The 4E system as a whole is pretty well balanced around concepts like a character should have bonuses of +1 per roughly five levels from their gear, or the equivalent if you instead choose items that have useful properties.
As far as I'm concerned this leads to a few problems. You can't reward players for finding clever ways to bypass enemies, you can't place hidden treasures, and you can't reward exploration and general problem solving.
Exploration, problem solving and hidden treasures can be partially solved by giving instance specific rewards (i.e. the boons that I mentioned before in the Foundry Wishlist thread). They are not something you can carry out. Bypassing enemies is actually more difficult to solve because the model where you only earn rewards from actually defeating enemies punishes players for being smart.
This seems to mean that I couldn't design a module where there is little to no combat and reward the party with the odd item or other treasures for their ingenuity and resourcefulness.
Then the question is can we actually build modules that even have non combat related interactions other than npc conversations?
Wouldn't there be chests or bags or boxes that contain loot that a player or group could eventually reach after a mighty struggle against some traps or an illusion designed to mislead? Who knows if we could even create illusions.
Here's an old arguement
The heavily nerved rogues, monks and Fighters are beaten on their OWN GAME by these "melee mage" builds, or plain silly Clerics that solo everything in your module. While the fighters/rogues can't do anything but sit in the Inn, because the very first encounter would wipe them out.
I dislike "low magic servers" because of that. There's so many Melee casters running around, it isnt funny anymore.
No class should beat another class at their own game. Ever.
In Low magic servers there's more soloing going on, more magic (spellcasting) going around than any other, normal server.
Despite my tons, and tons of reservations about This MMO-goes NWN concept, I actually like that content creators cannot wreck the lootsystem/gearsystem for specific classes. It's really not funny to be a low level monk in a low magic server. (That's why Monk/Clerics exist, no?)
So what if i made a room of 4 treasure chests and ran it over and over and over
I would say 400 but that is easily stoppable via the system
I made exactly what you described in NWN1, and we ended up with exactly the problems you saw.
At first we tried to make it so that the wizard/cleric/melee-mages had to rest in pre-designed 'safe zones. That just made them figure out where those zones were and not travel far from them unless in groups.
Then we tried a timer where they could only rest so often... so they logged on when the timer was up or just hung about the inn with the pure fighters till their timer was up.
Basically it turned it into a game where everyone was waiting for timers and got bored and eventually left the persistent world.
NWN2 we put back in magic items at a reasonable rate.... what happened? It balanced the game as it should be and we all had a much happier time.
Fortunately 4th edition isn't as gear centric and basically everyone has 'spells' (some are powers, some are abilities, exploits, etc) so it is balanced as the classes rather than relying on the gear to do it. Its a much better system in my view for this, even though it gets a lot of hate from those folks that only see the 'generic wand'.