Player: Okay, now that we’re back at town, I sell the four chainmail and seventeen…
DM: Hold on, I need to figure out a Streetwise DC before you sell those.
Player: DC for what?
DM: For you actually finding a buyer for four badly damaged chain shirts, covered in hobgoblin blood, and the crude tunics of uncured hide that seventeen kobolds died in, in a town of 25,000 people. I’m trying to decide if it would be more fair to set it at Ludicrous or Insane.
Player: Why are they badly damaged?
DM: Because they got between the hobgoblins and your swords.

I said before that the assumption that 4E is supposed to emulate an MMO leads to people making some bizarre assumptions about how the mechanics work and how they should be represented within the game world.

I’ve seen someone say that it was his understanding that in 4E, slain monsters only “sometimes dropped loot, like in WoW”. I’ve seen another person claiming that according to the rules, bodies fade away into nothing and that it’s impossible to kill an NPC and find coins in their pockets and that if the DM is allowing it, it’s a ridiculous handwave since according to the rules the body doesn’t exist and you can’t get treasure from slain foes.

None of this is true according to the rules as they are written.

Where the confusion comes in is a change of baseline assumptions from earlier editions, as illustrated by the dialogue snippet at the top of this post.

In previous editions of D&D, it was assumed that the world economy was powered by a combination of magic and stupid. It was also assumed that the contents of adventurers’ garbage bags were somehow in high demand… that you could walk into any town anywhere with a bag full of stuff… “stuff” being the polite word here… that you had pulled out of a hole in the ground or pried off the corpses of things you beat to death with a pointy stick, and you would be paid a good price for these things.

That’s no longer the baseline assumption. The baseline assumption is now that being touched by an adventurer does not convert trash into a fungible commodity.

I like this, as a DM and as a player. “Stripmining the dungeon” for every last thing—right down to the filthy robes the blood-crazed cultists were wearing when you ran them through—is seen as part of being “the D&D experience” to some, but it’s hardly a trope that exists in the wider realm of fantasy fiction and it always made the world seem more like a video game to me.

It also slowed down play at what would often otherwise be a crucial moment: sometimes the end of battle means you killed the random beasty, but sometimes it means you just won a conflict, and there should be stuff happening as a result. The story should be progressing. But, no. We just killed the kobolds and so now we have to satisfy the apparently thriving collector’s market for tiny little spears.

It isn’t that kobolds with spears don’t “drop spears” when they die, although really I would be able to take this conversation more seriously if the people who were objecting to 4E’s model didn’t insist on framing everything in video game terms. The monsters in the Monster Manual all come with a full equipment list.

It also isn’t that Player Characters are “forbidden” from interacting with the bodies and the equipment that are on and near them, as some folks have interpreted the rules*.

It’s just that the default assumption now is that you can’t casually unload a bag of holding full of hill giant britches in any town. Oh, you’ll find a buyer for the bag of holding, but you’ll have to pay sanitation to take the britches away on trash day.

So that’s how loot doesn’t work in 4E.

How does it work?

For each level, there’s an amount of treasure a party’s expected to find. This isn’t an entirely new idea. 3E had it as “Wealth By Level” guidelines. 4E does it as treasure parcels. It divides the wealth a party’s expected to find into ten blocks, and then leaves it to the DM to “spend” this. The rough idea is that it takes about ten encounters to go up a level, so having ten divisions is useful to people who are doing stuff up on the fly.

So, PCs kill monsters and then a “Treasure Parcel” magically appears? Sure it does. Right after the body fades away. No. It’s the DM’s job to insert the treasure into the adventure. If the monsters are humanoids, or are something that hoards shiny things, that’s easily done:

“Each of the five thugs had twenty gold coins in their pockets, shiny and new. Roguey McStreetwise, this only reinforces your suspicion that they were hired to waylay you. The leader had thirty gold in assorted currency, and was wearing a gold ring set bearing a blue stone and a guild insignia.”

Ooh, look at that. It’s a level three treasure parcel. I threw some plothooks in there because I like to do that. I’ll come back to that later.

There are other ways to account for the treasure than paying off the hired help: bandits or highwaymen might have a strongbox near by. Poisonous beasts might have the skeleton of another adventurer lying around with a purse full of gold and/or a magical item that was of no use in staving off death by poison.

Depending on the organizational structure of your baddies, it can be perfectly appropriate to say that the minions and soldiers had no money on them at all but the battlechief had a big bag of gold hanging from his belt.

And sometimes there’s just no way to fit a treasure parcel realistically into an encounter. The cave bear who had moved into the tunnel entrance you really needed to get through hadn’t happened to kill any wealthy spelunkers. No biggie! You’ll want to save a few parcels to make the big reward at the end of the quest arc.

None of that above requires a DM handwave or a houserule. It’s all using the rules as written, even the combining parcels. Actually, the rules recommend splitting them if needed, as well… that’s a good way to handle the question of what J. Random NPC had in his pockets (”String or nothing.”) when he got killed, if the PCs are in a particularly deadly urban environment where they’re going to be fighting random street thieves and such.

Of course, feeding the players information based on the treasure they find is an act of pure DMery, but inserting plothooks into an adventure wherever they fit is hardly exceeding the limits of the material. The main point of that is to show just how far you can take weaving the monetary rewards in organically: even beyond putting the treasure where it makes some kind of sense (like the body of the monster’s last victim), you can put in treasure that’s there as part of the story or because of the PCs.

Reward offered for rescued hostage? Treasure parcel, possibly two. Scholar requires armed escorts to the Vanishing Tower in the Weeping Woods? Treasure parcel time. Again, this is all using the rules as written: treasure parcels as quest rewards is in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. I’m just showing what you can do with a little inventiveness. I’ll make another post some time about other inventiveness with treasure parcels, that stretch the boundaries of the system a little further but still stay within the rules as they are broadly written.

I also plan on taking the time at some point to adding up the monetary value of all the parcels at each level, and treating that as a budget to spend. I understand why they have premade chunks and I understand why they’re all ready-made amounts of coins, gems, potions, and magic items. But I’d rather have more flexibility while conserving wealth.

Oh, and those magic items? They’re expected to be fitted organically into the world, too. If that means the bandit leader has a magic longsword, it means the bandit leader has a magic longsword. Contrary to the impression some people have, there isn’t a rule that says monsters can’t use magic equipment. It might have seemed like that was the case in earlier editions, but this one specifically addresses it. There is a rule for downgrading the effective enhancement bonuses, since NPCs’ attacks and defenses are on a different track to begin with, but they still have access to any property and power their magic gear has.

And of course, if players are really attached to the “experience” of autoloot-all, and DMs feel like accommodating them, it would be a simple… if tedious… matter to subtract the value of the equipment that monsters are carrying from the “budget” of other treasure. It’s not cheating players out of anything because the parcel sizes were based on how much wealth PCs would be expected to attain per level.

Some people will look at the artifice involved in “money per level” and conclude that it all by itself is too big a break from reality for them to keep suspending disbelief, no matter how organically the loot fits into the story/world… but it’s no bigger an abstraction or an act of meta-management than the idea of breaking down experience and power into levels is in the first place.

*On the subject of interacting with bodies: I wish I could say I’ve run a session where a body wasn’t desecrated in some fashion, for some reason. Some of it was at least for a higher purpose of a sort: the Barbarian’s kobold skull kinetic sculpture was good for a situational modifier on diplomacy with the orcs. Of course, any PC/corpse interaction is not going to be covered by any specific rules and thus it happens in the roleplaying sphere… “Magical Tea Party”… but I’m not sure I want to see the sourcebook or roleplaying game that has rules for corpse desecration that’s more than an abstract component of a necromantic ritual.

Tabletop RPGs have always had an incestuously close relationship with computer and video game versions, as the earliest exemplars of both were made primarily by the same sorts of hobbyists working in their spare time. Ultima, the ur-example of a tile-based computer game with character classes and HPs, grew out of an attempt to recreate a Dungeons and Dragons-like experience on the computer… and it in turn gave the world one of the first truly massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, Ultima Online.

While the experience of playing a computer roleplaying game… interacting remotely with strangers and with scripted computer characters and following mostly static plotlines… and the experience of playing tabletop roleplaying games with a small group of people and with much greater flexibility… are very different from each other, MMOs can provide the equivalent of millions of ongoing playtest results. It isn’t really surprising that designers of tabletop games would look to what MMOs are doing to see what might work for their products, in much the same way that computer game developers looked to tabletop games for their initial bases.

And so, it shouldn’t be so surprising that the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons to be released in the age of World of Warcraft shows clear influence from MMOs. This resemblance was a turn-off to a lot of people… myself included, initially… even people who enjoy playing computer games online, because of the understanding that the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons and the experience of playing World of Warcraft should be different.

The good news is that they still are. The differences are considerable, even in the area where there are the most similarities: combat.

In the real-time combat of a computer game with a primarily over-the-shoulder camera style, “tactics” in combat are primarily restricted to a question of “what power do I use on which target”, and the answer frequently ends up being: “your best power that’s available on the worst enemy that’s handy”, because you don’t have time for anything fancy and it’s not like the computer can react realistically to original tactics you come up with. For big battles with large groups, sure, there’s a little more planning about who’s going to lock down what, but it’s very easily reduced to numbers, and once you’ve done that it’s hard to break out of them. There’s no reward for roleplaying in combat, and very little time for it.

Combat in D&D4E takes several cues from MMOs, including giving you a diversity of subtypes for common monsters with different ones occupying a separate combat role, having groups of monsters that span a series of experience levels, and replacing the old spell system used by casters with a power system that gives everybody a selection of moves they can use… some at will, some once an encounter, and some once a day.

But it breaks away from MMOs by being turn-based instead of realtime, using a tactical grid map instead of a presenting you with a wedge view of a freeform environment, and putting all those “mobs” you’re fighting under the control of a living, breathing, thinking, human who is capable (one hopes) of actually projecting into the scene and coming up with realistic and believable reactions, instead of simply obeying programmed responses that usually amount to “move to optimal distance and initiate attack subroutine”.

It’s possible to play out combat exactly like it’s an MMO… to have the players fight like they’ve got a hotkey bound to “spam” their favorite attack, have the DM send random assortments of monsters in to mindlessly beat on them, etc. It is possible. I don’t know why you’d want to. The people I know of who do it don’t seem to have much fun with it. In fact, they do it and then they complain that the game plays like an MMO and that combat is boring and that the game mechanics don’t work right.

I happen to agree with them that all those things are true, if you treat combat like an MMO simulator.

So, my short advice on the subject would be “don’t”.

But while the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual are both written to gently discourage this and to give some guidelines in keeping things moving in a different direction, some people might appreciate a few tips. Especially as it’s so easy to fall into the mindset of “this is a game, move the pieces to win the game” mindset, especially for inexperienced DMs or ones who are not big on roleplaying immersion.

For DMs:

• Read the Tactics section of the Monster Manual entries you’re using, and on the encounters for any prepackaged adventures you’re using. Don’t view these as absolute requirements or programming directives you have to fulfill… after all, part of the point of sitting down around a game table instead of signing on to a computer game is that your players get to interact with enemies who are actually being directed by an intelligent mind. But the Tactics sections can give you an idea of how a typical battle with a monster might start, or how the monster would behave in combat. Even read the ones you’re not using, for ideas if nothing else.
• Think about what each monster is, its reason for fighting, and how that’s going to affect what it does. If it’s a beast, is it attacking because it’s just belligerent or because the PCs are in its territory? Or is it under someone’s control? If you’ve got a cave bear being led around by an orc beastmaster, for instance, maybe it’s just barely trained… maybe the orc gives it a little more distance than he does his attack dog and his hunting falcon. Maybe it’s a little slow to respond to his commands… that can come through in simple descriptive flavor, or in a reluctance to close in on the PCs in the first round (with something like a cave bear, you can make it up in the round after PCs hit it and it’s pissed).

  Kobolds move around a lot, even in close quarters. They have a power that lets them shift as a minor action, but it won’t do anything if you don’t use it… and how you use it can make big difference. If some of the kobolds aren’t disciplined soldiers, maybe they run around and switch between opponents every turn. That makes for a very different fight than against a bunch of staid men-at-arms.

  Goblins are sneaky, traditionally. Maybe they’re keeping something in reserve… like, one of them’s got a magic item they’ll use when they’re losing… or maybe they’ve got some flankers that are just waiting until the fight’s joined to jump in and ambush.

  Hobgoblins are supposed to be more disciplined than other monstrous humanoids. This can be represented with less extraneous movement and more of a focus on identifying and eliminating the largest threats.

  Orcs.. orcs have a bonus to charging speed and abilities with “rage” in the title. It’s pretty easy to figure out how orcs would ask.

  Mindless undead and constructs will pretty much move implacably forward towards the nearest target… or the target their master designated. If someone is controlling them on the scene, you can either make them act smarter to represent this, or make them move in a more unified fashion, or both.

  Flying opponents or opponents with a lot of mobility are probably going to use it… not just for the sheer tactical advantage of flight or mobility but because they are mobile creatures/beings. This is especially true if they have abilities that let them attack on the move. The fact that combat is turn-based can obscure the fast pace of the “real” action inside the game. Keeping the bats (or harpies, or whatever) circling can help keep that in perspective.

• Think about terrain, and how it’s going to effect things. A fight in a narrow hallway with a low ceiling is quite a bit different from a fight on an open plain, or in a canyon, or among a stand of trees, or in a swamp. This is going to intersect quite a bit with your choice of monsters to shape the way the combat unfolds. The Dungeon Master’s Guide has some rather good advice on this subject, so I won’t repeat it… just say that it’s there, ready to be used by anyone who’s having trouble making combats feel fresh and different from each other.

• Make each combat encounter a story. It doesn’t have to be a novel. It can be “Oh, shit, we disturbed a nest of poisonous snakes.” Every encounter’s happening for a reason. If it’s bandits waylaying travelers, roleplay that out at the beginning of combat… and throw in their reaction as combat commences and they realize that the PCs aren’t just any travelers but highly skilled [whatevers]. How do they react? Fear? Defiance? Anger at the first time one of their men goes down (maybe it’s a bandit family, after all). Joy at having a challenge? If you’re doing a multi-stage encounter (see next bullet point), any of these reactions can be a great reason to have someone shout “Crossbows!“… or to have the real bandit leader step up.

• Don’t put everything on the board at once. Nothing keeps players on their toes like surprise guest appearances mid-combat. That’s the reason there’s a Lurker role defined for monsters, though it doesn’t have to be a Lurker. It could be the enemy’s reserves, or an ambush force of archers, or the guards in the next room who hear the commotion. In the “Oh shit, snakes!”, have an extra snake under a rock that the PCs can disturb if they’re not careful.

  This can be a good technique when you’re dealing with inexperienced players or ones who are playing a new style of character for the first time, as you can use your judgment on the rate at which you feed new monsters into the encounter so that they don’t get swamped before they know how to get unswamped.

For Players:

• Don’t become overly reliant on a single tactic, be it your “best” at-will power, or always opening with the same daily or encouner power, or using a technique like using the mounted combat roles. This has three problems: one, it will make you feel more like you’re playing a game than immersing yourself in a fantasy world. Two, it does make combat boring. Three, it’s actually not all that helpful, unless the DM’s putting up the exact same scenarios over and over again.
• Don’t be overly concerned about statistical/mechanical advantages that you forget to make a character you like. No matter how many people come up with what they think of as gamebreaking uberbuilds, no matter how often someone insists that the clear numerical superiority of playing one way makes all other ways superfluous, Wizards of the Coast has made a game where it’s very easy to make a character of truly heroic proportions and very hard to make one who is objectively useless and doomed to failure.
• Do get into the scene. Get into the spirit of it. Get into the swing of things. The difference between a tabletop game and an MMORPG is not the mechanics, it’s the fact that in the former actual people are interacting with each other to bring stuff to life with their imaginations. Some of the coolest things that will happen to your character in a game of D&D are going to happen in combat. Some of the coolest things you will do in a game of D&D are going to happen in combat. If you turn off your imagination when combat starts and engage only with the random numbers and probabilities, you’re going to be missing out.

  Big time.

For both players and DMs:

• Remember your brains. That might sound like a weird piece of advice, but seriously, the DM’s brain is the reason the players aren’t off playing a video game and the players’ brains are the reason the DM isn’t off running a sim or writing a story for private amusement.

  If the people around the table aren’t engaging with their imaginations and with each other, then any roleplaying game system is going to play like a boring computer game, and it’s only a question of whether it’s going to be like an old school “Attack Item Magic Flee” one where every turn is spent going “I attack. I hit. I attack. I miss.”, or something new and flashier.

Most of what I’ve said above is pretty basic. None of it is very revolutionary. I think it needs to be said, though, if only because there are people who get blinded by the mechanical similarities between D&D 4E and MMORPGs and that’s all they can see… they try to play it that way and it doesn’t make sense and it isn’t any fun. The best case scenario in that case is that they give up and go play something else.

For the next post in this series, I’m going to be addressing the subject of “loot”: how it works in 4E vs. MMOs, how the “4E is just like an MMO” mindset leads people to make some rather bizarre and unsupported assumptions about what must be happening in the game’s world, and some tips for incorporating gold and magical item rewards into your game in an intelligent and organic fashion.