Telonius
2012-02-19, 06:33 PM
The NPC's paying you 100gp per quest isn't necessarily a problem. Expert treasure hunters know that it's the salvage rights, not the labor, where the real money is. :smallamused: In other words, as long as the PCs are getting a decent amount of valuable loot during the course of the adventure, the actual quest rewards don't matter much towards balance. As long as it's enough to actually entice the characters to take the job and further the plot, it's fine.
WBL is a guideline, really. As long as the players have approximately that much wealth, it should be fine. Don't count every copper, but notice whether or not a 3rd-level character is walking around with a Vorpal Holy Avenger. Too much loot, and the players blow through the encounters by emulating a higher-level wizard (scrolls etc). Too little loot, and they get eviscerated by monsters the game assumes they should be able to beat. There are ways to work around this. If he really wants to, a very savvy DM can gauge the power of the foes he's sending up against the party to compensate for a lower amount of resources; but this is much more effort than most people want to put into it.
Black_Zawisza
2012-02-19, 06:40 PM
The NPC's paying you 100gp per quest isn't necessarily a problem. Expert treasure hunters know that it's the salvage rights, not the labor, where the real money is. :smallamused: In other words, as long as the PCs are getting a decent amount of valuable loot during the course of the adventure, the actual quest rewards don't matter much towards balance. As long as it's enough to actually entice the characters to take the job and further the plot, it's fine.
WBL is a guideline, really. As long as the players have approximately that much wealth, it should be fine. Don't count every copper, but notice whether or not a 3rd-level character is walking around with a Vorpal Holy Avenger. Too much loot, and the players blow through the encounters by emulating a higher-level wizard (scrolls etc). Too little loot, and they get eviscerated by monsters the game assumes they should be able to beat. There are ways to work around this. If he really wants to, a very savvy DM can gauge the power of the foes he's sending up against the party to compensate for a lower amount of resources; but this is much more effort than most people want to put into it.
My problem isn't so much that we don't have the loot to defeat enemies (they're generally pathetic enough that mid-op characters will blow them out of the water no matter what), but simply that magic items are an important part of what D&D is about. A Decanter of Endless Water is interesting. Boots that let you walk on walls are interesting. I'd like to have the resources to acquire those things.
Gavinfoxx
2012-02-19, 06:41 PM
Yea. If you aren't getting any wealth, make your own! There are PLENTY of ways to make wealth in the game...
Here are a few infinite wealth / infinite work / ways of bringing about a post scarcity society!
First, ways to get spells into items to cast several spells:
1.) Eternal Wands, from Magic Item Compendium. They have a little bit of an extra surcharge on them from the DMG formula, but gives 2/day casting of spells levels 1-3, for anyone who has access to arcane spells.
2.) Magical traps using the DMG rules for automatic recharge and stuff. Note that if you want precedent for magical traps that are beneficial, look at the Boon traps in Dungeonscape.
3.) Drow House Insignia sorts of items, explained in the book Races of Faerun, pg 175. They were updated to be more pricey in Drow of the Underdark. This gives a specific form, 1/day limitation, and certain spell levels, I think 1-3.
4.) Minor Schema, from the book Magic of Eberron (A way to cast spells lvl 1-6, once a day. Further, these work better for Artificers, who can apply their class features to this. If An Artificer makes a Schema of Wall of Iron, and he has a Rod of Invisible Spell, he could -- for example -- make Invisible Iron...)
5.) Generic wondrous items that cast spells, per the DMG rules for custom magic items. ESPECIALLY go for infinite use, use activated ones once you have the money (and you will have the money!)
6.) Spell Turrets, from Dungeon Master's Guide II
7.) Spell clocks, from here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cw/20070312a&dcmp=ILC-RSSDND
Of course use as many of the Cost Reduction techniques as is viable, especially from the Cost Reduction Technique Handbook (online).
An Artificer could, of course, use techniques to get spells more cheaply, perhaps using the Bargain bin list (online), perhaps.
Of course, a traditional Wizard or Cleric or Archivist could simply use scrying techniques to seek these sorts of people out, and pay them to help cast their cheaper spells into the devices (or the prayerbook, for the Archivist). Remember, people can work together to craft!
Here are some of the spells you use to put in things, or to just cast yourself, depending on how you use it. Several of these can create infinite amounts of work or help with skills or infinite raw materials of the appropriate type or infinite finished goods:
Wall of Iron
Wall of Stone
Wall of Salt
Stone Metamorphosis
Greater Stone Metamorphosis
Clearstone (this works with Permanency!)
Permanency
Plant Growth
Ironwood
Transmute Rock to Mud
Transmute Mud to Rock
Transmute Metal to Wood
Transmute Stone to Sand
Transmute Sand to Stone
Transmute Sand to Glass
Transmute Metal to Wood
Soften Earth and Stone
Move Earth
Unseen Servant
Hardening
Unseen Crafter
Shape Metal
Metal Melt
Stone Shape
Greater Stone Shape
Fabricate
Nature's Rampart
Magecraft
Planar Ally
Planar Binding
Lesser Planar Ally
Lesser Planar Binding
Also use Decanter of Endless Water, Decanter of Endless Sand, Lyre of Building, planar bind or planar ally things all the way from Lantern Archons for infinite continual flame to Djinn for infinite of ANY plant based items (soarwood, serrenwood, darkwood, densewood, fey cherry wood, duskwood, livewood, bronzewood, other plant based things things like (plant based) lacquer, deisel (it comes from a tree, you know), rubber, resin, glue, paper, cardboard, cumin, silphium, coffee, saffron, tobacco, pepper, oil, chilies, paprika, cacao, anise, poppy, marijuana, etc. etc.), to efreeti or noble djinn for full Wishes (which get 25k worth of mundane stuff or 15k worth of magic stuff a pop, check the 3.0 rules for those numbers if you want). Of course you will want to Simulacrum some of them, especially the 'Ha ha you're screwed' Efreetis and Noble Djinn's.
Of course if you don't want to do the full Wish Economy, then you might want to research custom spells to do work, using the rules in the DMG to do so. Unseen Laborer (a Profession variant of Unseen Crafter; give access to profession: Miner, perhaps? Profession: Lumberjack?) would be useful. Also a few more 'Transmute' spells perhaps, to get better metal than low quality Iron. I would suggest trying to research a Transmute Iron to Greensteel (fiendish codex 2), the closest thing D&D has to a very high quality modern steel that is actually functionally different than Iron. This is something that could conceivably be used on, say, breech loading cannon and firearms (it's strong enough for it).. And once you get your truly modern machine shop (see later parts of this post) set up, it would be FANTASTICALLY easy to make firearms that are at least as good as the Winchester Rifle. Remember that lots of spells can be stacked to improve knowledge checks, should you need an epic knowledge check in order to bypass several hundred years of real world firearms design in a few days worth of design and writing down ideas with alchemy, mechanics, etc. Remember that if you need ideas for summoning different materials or transmuting metals to different metals, the spells that the transmute and wall of X spells were based off of ARE in 2nd edition, and there ARE rules for getting more obscure sorts of 'walls of x' and transmuting from that. Also spend some time inventing other useful things, like batteries, capacitors, generators, elevators, electric cars (those were actually invented really early on), the diesel engine, etc. Talk to your DM!
Remember, D&D material science is potentially better than the material science in our real life world, so take advantage of that fact (check out the Crafting Handbook online for lots of ideas for mundane crafting, and the weapon and armor handbook for lots of ideas for materials!).
Create several perpetual motion machines, make advanced machine shops (I have a design for one that uses a simple repeating trap of a blockade spell, a LEVEL 1 SPELL, that looks like a Ferris wheel, and is about as powerful as a V6 engine at high RPM; use that for mechanical force, for flywheels, or to generate electricity. Whatever!). Get repeating traps of things that help quality of life and productivity, like:
Endure Elements
Prestidigitation
Create Food and Water
Purify Food and Drink
Good Hope
Make Whole
Lesser Restoration
Panacea
Low Light Vision
Superior Darkvision
Mount
Also for cheap and easy birth control, set up a trap device of 'Bestow Curse - Infertility' and one of 'Remove Curse', if your population boom from all the free food and items threatens to overwhelm your infrastructure creation.
Use an Elation / Good Hope / Distilled Joy (make sure to get someone like a Factotum or some kobold with that draconic rite of passage, or a dwoermerkeeper, or whatever to cast the Distilled Joy into the trap as a SLA, negating the long casting time) to extract infinite amounts of Ambrosia (Book of Exalted Deeds) for crafting. Alternately, an Artificer who gets access to a 1/day item of Ironwood or a Boon trap of Ironwood could simply create magical Ironwood breastplates and drain those for crafting XP. Or you could just get the Wood Shape / Wall of Iron / Transmute Metal to Wood / Ironwood combo going for unlimited +1 Ironwood weapons and armor for your entire civilization -- that's always nice and useful.
Of course if you are gong to be doing the crafting YOURSELF, you will need Craft Construct or Craft Homunculus to make hosts and hosts and hosts of mass Dedicated Wrights to do all of this work,what with your unlimited wealth and supplies and infinite XP. This opens up constructs to be a large part of the area you are uplifting as well. Use the ideas from the Mechonomocon handbook (online) to figure out how to do construct crafting most effectively!
Generally, Effigies work really well, even if you don't go insane with the Mr. Roboto trick. Also, Homunculus can have customized skills, so you could make one which, with the right feats, could perpetually play your Lyre of Building and just get huge massive amounts of labor done wherever that creature goes. Of course, there are several ways of giving constructs intelligence; my favorite is simply to embed an intelligent item into the construct, and tell the construct to do what the item says.
There is also another trick, with the spell 'Fabricate' and magical traps. When you build a repeating magic device trap, you put in 100 * the cost of the material component of the spell... after that, the trap can cast the spell. This would work fantastically well with Fabricate traps made to make only one specific standard item, over and over and over again.
Thus, a Auto Reset trap of Fabricate designed to make a diamond worth 30 gp costs raw diamonds requiring 100 * 1/3rd of 30 gp, or 1,000 gp of diamonds. Then, it spits out a 30 gp diamond every time it it works... and it works 14,000 times a day, forever... As a 5th level spell at caster level 9, the other bits of this trap costs 22,500 gp and 180 xp and 47 days of time to craft. In one day, it will make 14,400 30 gp diamonds, or 432,000 gp worth of diamonds.
A version with 3,000 gp diamonds costs raw diamonds requiring 100 * 1/3rd of 3,000 gp, or 100,000 gp in materials. Then, it spits out a 3,000 gp cut diamond every time it goes off. This one takes 245, 122,500 gp and 180 xp, to give you a 3,000 gp diamond every round forever. After one day (14,400 rounds), you have 14,400 3,000 gp diamonds, or 43,200,000 gp worth of diamonds. I would generally set these up for raw materials, and have the unseen crafters actually make the raw materials into finished goods. If you need the basic materials, consider planar binding elementals to go mine for you in the elemental plane of earth, or go scrying for them, or do a visit to the elemental plane of earth.
Now, with regards to getting things moving everywhere, You can nest bags of holding. This means that with Ring Gates, you can get near any amount of item you can put in a bag of holding to the other end of the Ring Gate (you can nest bags of holding, remember that). Also, Teleportation Circles, which can move a ridiculous amount of supply (or soldiers, or whatever) fantastically far, so that very very dense urban centers start to become the only viable means of guarding against attack... because it is very, very, very hard (even with these sorts of things available) to guard against attacks via teleport or Teleportation Circle, especially when an enemy empire can dump their entire army on your doorstep at a moment's notice via a single Teleportation Circle... Even if a version of the Lair Wards from Draconomicon is developed that prevents or shunts a teleport somewhere, that still only reduces, not eliminates the issue..
Here's a similar sort of setting that talks about the issue Teleportation brings into a setting... it's perhaps more intense than the repeating traps!
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=222007
Basically, what you have with all of this set up is the ingredients for basically no one to ever need to do manual labor, and an economy where no actual 'things' are scarce, except for things that are unique and hand made by hand the old fashioned way, and everyone has lots of built things and magic items and stuff, and there is no disease or illness and no one needs to sleep if they don't want to, etc. etc. AND people can materialize in the streets from far away, and as long as they don't start shooting, no one bats an eye.. -- you know, a civilization that has more in common with Star Trek than the Middle Ages...
Gavinfoxx
2012-02-19, 08:11 PM
I think he's complaining cause everyone else has had treasure since the start, and they are all ecl 12, like him, so they are at roughly level 12 wbl. He, on the other hand, came in at ecl 12, and wants to start at l 12 wbl, like everyone else is at...
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