Divorcing Wealth from Mechanics, Marrying Wealth to Plot

[FreakyCheeseMan]

So, one of the ideas I've had lately is that Money makes kind of a cool thing for plots, for a mundane/relate-able experience. Having a dearth of money leaving your characters scrambling to earn/scam/steal enough for food and lodgings; having an excess of money and using it to bribe public officials or set up public institutions; just seeing how players react to a sudden windfall of profits, when they aren't spending it on their own gear.

The problem with all of that is, of course, that in 3.5 a character's money is pretty much a class feature (albeit of every class) - if you suddenly take it away it makes them angry, they will be loathe to use it for anything plot-related cause it will put them behind the curve mechanically, and if they have a lot of it it will unbalance the game and make it hard to come up with CR appropriate encounters.

It also seems like this current systems limits role-play choices in a bad way; you cannot play a 1st level character who comes from a wealthy family, without having some contrivance by which you've lost access to that money; nor can you play a high-level character who happens to be broke, because high-level characters are always walking around with the GDP of a medium-sized country on their back.

The more I look at it, the more I think it would be better to somehow have "Money" be a plot-relevant concept, not a mechanics-relevant concept. So, somehow have all of that cool stuff that comes from items - spells, attack bonuses, saves, everything - not only no longer require money, but no long even benefit *from* money. The trick, of course, is doing so in such a way that doesn't completely break or ruin the game.

Does anyone out there agree with me, and if so, has anyone seen a good system to make this work?

[Greenish]

Legend pretty much separates wealth from mechanics through abstraction and a different way of handling magic items.

FATE (or at least Spirit of the Century) makes wealth basically a stat, as does D20 Modern.


I'm not that familiar with the wealth of RPGs out there, but those spring to mind.

[DeltaEmil]

It works well in D&D 4th edition Dark Sun, because of the inherent enhancement rules.

Give every character an inherent enhancement bonus to base attack bonus and AC, the typically expected resistance bonus to saving throws, and perhaps doll out free additional inherent bonuses to ability scores so that players don't have need for belts of giant strength, amulet of health, flaming burst longswords of speed +3, mithral fullplate of medium fortification +2, cloak of resistance +2 and other important ability and stat boosters, and won't need to use money for that stuff in the first place. That way, money can then be used for plot advancement, food, drinks, clean rooms, prostitutes and stylish cloths, and the occasional more-fun-than-useful magic item, and you can actually give less money that way.

[NotScaryBats]

Might not be quite what you are looking for, but I am in a game IC (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=14005012#post14005012) and he 'solved' this issue by giving everyone this Vow of Poverty Fix (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140428) for free and without the whole "Vow" or "Poverty" bit. It is a low magic world, so we started with like masterwork weapons and some adventuring gear and that's it.

So, in other words, this fix that is designed to help a character with no material goods keep up with normal characters is built into all the characters in the game.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

My best (note that "best" is a very, very relative term) idea so far has been to get rid of the notion of a magic-mart, and introduce the notion of a wish-list; every time players get the hankering for an item, they mention it to the DM, he makes a note, and it soon shows up in loot drops.

Mind, this would be for "Special" items - simple stat bonuses and enhancements I'd be inclined to just give as part of level up. (So, no cloaks of resistance, belts of giant strength, etc.)

[NichG]

I think the way to do it is:

- Magic items are rare and sometimes are picky about their owners. If you buy something there's no guarantee it won't just refuse to work for you, and there isn't always a way to detect it before-hand

- Therefore, while sometimes people will spend a lot to acquire magic items, its not a sure thing.

- Since this screws up the balance of power, everyone gets something like free Ancestral Weapon feats that gives them one or two items that are both directly tied to them (e.g. if they sell them the items won't work for the buyer) and which grow with the character's (expected WBL).

- Consumable magic items might just have to go away or become part of a character's class ability (e.g. maybe each caster with Brew Potion gets to make 1 spell level worth of potions per character level every week for free, but the potions last only 24 hours)

Anyhow, once you've done that, you can make money powerful in other ways that make it desirable, but more of a plot device. Have strongholds, businesses, auctions, and the like feature as important things to the plot of the game. Thus if the players want that ship, they need to come up with the gold, but they're not going to be weaker in combat because they did.

[bigstipidfighte]

My honest, trying-to-be-helpful advice is play a different system.

D&D is balanced on the assumption that PCs have a certain amount of wealth. In addition to becoming unbalanced compared to monsters, lacking magic items to give abilities like flight and freedom of movement will dramatically increase the power gap between casters and mundanes.

Giving free access to stat buffs will only encourage spending wealth on items like metamagic rods and boots of speed. Taking away ready access to those items has the aforementioned consequence of hurting mundanes more than it does casters.

If you like the D20 system but want to treat wealth differently;
*D20 Modern treats wealth as an abstract. Players lose wealth only when making big purchases, but you could introduce other ways of losing it, i.e. stock market crash, "toll bridge" in the adventure etc.

* Star Wars treats wealth similar to 3.5, but PCs have less need to get increasingly better personal gear. Credits are used for things like buying ships or droids, and PCs could easily be running around broke under the right circumstances (i.e. Han Solo in New Hope)

*D20 Apocolypse pretty much assumes getting access to the right resources is hard, with rules for scavenging and the expectation that things like food and fuel are #1 priority purchases.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

I think the way to do it is:

- Magic items are rare and sometimes are picky about their owners. If you buy something there's no guarantee it won't just refuse to work for you, and there isn't always a way to detect it before-hand

...that just seems annoying. It doesn't divorce wealth from mechanics, it just adds in a chance of either the dice or your DM screwing you over. As a general rule, when it comes to game design, I say that telling people "No," is okay, but telling them "Sure, you can do that, but I've designed the rules to punish you" isn't.


- Since this screws up the balance of power, everyone gets something like free Ancestral Weapon feats that gives them one or two items that are both directly tied to them (e.g. if they sell them the items won't work for the buyer) and which grow with the character's (expected WBL).

Unless it's a highly specific Ancestral Weapon that they can adapt as they level based on what they need... that doesn't begin to cover half of it. Wizards want their scrolls and their blessed books and their metamagic rods, fighters want their winged boots and death ward armours... trying to say "Okay, lump everything you get from magic items into one thing" isn't a good solution, especially given the complexity of designing a system that will make that versatile enough, without making it overpowered.


- Consumable magic items might just have to go away or become part of a character's class ability (e.g. maybe each caster with Brew Potion gets to make 1 spell level worth of potions per character level every week for free, but the potions last only 24 hours)

Again, this adds a glut of complexity to the game (you'd have to come up with pages upon pages of house rules for that, and it certainly wouldn't work with anywhere near every build).


Anyhow, once you've done that, you can make money powerful in other ways that make it desirable, but more of a plot device. Have strongholds, businesses, auctions, and the like feature as important things to the plot of the game. Thus if the players want that ship, they need to come up with the gold, but they're not going to be weaker in combat because they did.

Ehh... you still have money tied to mechanics, just in a kind of not-very-functional way. To accomplish what I'm describing, it's really not necessary to re-do the entire magic item system - that's such a huge part of the game, it's not something you want to mess with (unless you're doing a very specific type of game to begin with.) All that's needed is to break the connection between "Wealth" and "Items", not the connection between "Items" and "Power" - so, you get rid of the Magic Mart, and come up with some other mechanism by which players can get their swag.

[Amnestic]

Mind, this would be for "Special" items - simple stat bonuses and enhancements I'd be inclined to just give as part of level up. (So, no cloaks of resistance, belts of giant strength, etc.)

I'm a fan of getting rid of the generic "+ to X" bonus items (stats, saves, AC, attack rolls/damage, etc) since I find them boring. In one game I'm in, the DM got rid of them and replaced it by giving everyone +1 to all stats at each level up.

There are, I'm sure, other fixes/options to be had instead of that, but it's a good plan to be rid of them in my eyes.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

My honest, trying-to-be-helpful advice is play a different system.

D&D is balanced on the assumption that PCs have a certain amount of wealth. In addition to becoming unbalanced compared to monsters, lacking magic items to give abilities like flight and freedom of movement will dramatically increase the power gap between casters and mundanes.

Giving free access to stat buffs will only encourage spending wealth on items like metamagic rods and boots of speed. Taking away ready access to those items has the aforementioned consequence of hurting mundanes more than it does casters.

If you like the D20 system but want to treat wealth differently;
*D20 Modern treats wealth as an abstract. Players lose wealth only when making big purchases, but you could introduce other ways of losing it, i.e. stock market crash, "toll bridge" in the adventure etc.

* Star Wars treats wealth similar to 3.5, but PCs have less need to get increasingly better personal gear. Credits are used for things like buying ships or droids, and PCs could easily be running around broke under the right circumstances (i.e. Han Solo in New Hope)

*D20 Apocolypse pretty much assumes getting access to the right resources is hard, with rules for scavenging and the expectation that things like food and fuel are #1 priority purchases.

I agree that taking away items entirely breaks 3.5 (Though broken 3.5 can be fun. I hope. If not, my Warriors & Wuxia game is in trouble.)

However, again, that's not what I'm trying to do - I'm not trying to deny players access to their items, just break the connection between those items and wealth.

Here's a very lazy, setting-specific example of how you could go about such. (This example has all kinds of problems, but does fit the specific bill quite smoothly.)

Quarbleflitz

At the start of the campaign, the players are given a lamp; rubbing the lamp summons a merchant genie from another, almost entirely unreachable plane. The genie sells every magical item known to man, but doesn't take any of your filthy common money, thank you so very much. No, he takes Quarbleflitz. You've never seen Quarbleflitz? That's cause it's invisible, here, take this monocle (Free of Charge!) that lets you see it; it tends to accumulate around powerful monsters, mages and dungeons, so why don't you go find some of those? Once you get some Quarbleflitz, he can sell you whatever you need.

Bad news, though - because he doesn't want to glut the market, the items he sells you aren't really transferable; if they pass out of your possession, they lose all potency within six hours, and (to avoid lawsuits) they all have an added property that anyone who touches them knows this.

So, to recap: Player power isn't tied to wealth, it's tied to Quarbleflitz; Quarbleflitz fulfils every mechanical function of wealth, but none of the plot related ones; there is no exchange rate between Quarbleflitz and Gold, because no one else knows what Quarbleflitz is, or has any use for it. You can't even sell your magic items for gold, because they're useless to anyone but you.

You are now free to have your players function mechanically exactly the same as they always have, but in terms of the plot, they can be arbitrarily rich or poor without impacting their power level.

[bigstipidfighte]

All that's needed is to break the connection between "Wealth" and "Items", not the connection between "Items" and "Power" - so, you get rid of the Magic Mart, and come up with some other mechanism by which players can get their swag.

What if magic items just aren't so valuable? +2 stat items are worth 50gp now. PCs strapped for cash can trade one for a couple of ponies if they like, but not for a team of thoroughbred chargers. Under this system, even mid-level PCs are walking around with quite a bit of wealth on their backs, but not to the degree where normal expenditures mean nothing to them. At least, not until high levels, and imho high level D&D characters shouldn't be broke- they're just too dang powerful to be concerned with money troubles.

Building off your genie idea, but to make it a little more generic; the local kingdoms use bottlecaps for currency but monsters use pixie dust. Adventurers have started using Pixie Dust to trade amongst themselves and occasionally with monsters.

This leaves you with the trouble of how to buy new magic items- my suggestion is to say that some monsters make thematically appropriate magic items. Various members of the fey court can make most druid items. Zalbor the Vampire Duke can make almost anything from the schools of Illusion, Enchantment and Necromancy. Ermalexia, Herald of the Most High offers Conjuration items, as well as [Good] and [Law] spells.

To keep it simpler, you could just say monsters with casting sometimes take item creation feats, but humanoids can't. There's a nymph with druid crafting, a gold dragon with sorcerer crafting, an Unbodied with Psion crafting, etc.

[nobodez]

Well, in your position I'd divorce wealth from magic items. Perhaps by using a modification of the Craft Points alternate system from Unearthed Arcana, but instead of using it to replace crafting time, use it to replace the entire magical economy. Give the PCs the ability, similar to Artificers, to "extract" magic from items (gaining a "craft reserve" equal to half the normal price of the item) and then "spend" their "craft reserve" to create magic items. If they have the relevant feats and other prerequisites (or use a talisman of transference to transfer the "craft reserve" to someone who does) they can create the item at half price. I'd recommend coupling this with the Pathfinder magic item creation rules (replacing XP cost with a skill check).

You can require this to take time days or perhaps just make it take an hour of focus with the item in question. I'd recommend re-fluffing potions and scrolls into some sort of rechargeable "matrix" that has little value unless imbued with "craft reserve" to make them magical (and lose their magic minutes or hours after leaving the person who imbued them with magic).

[FreakyCheeseMan]

What if magic items just aren't so valuable? +2 stat items are worth 50gp now. PCs strapped for cash can trade one for a couple of ponies if they like, but not for a team of thoroughbred chargers. Under this system, even mid-level PCs are walking around with quite a bit of wealth on their backs, but not to the degree where normal expenditures mean nothing to them. At least, not until high levels, and imho high level D&D characters shouldn't be broke- they're just too dang powerful to be concerned with money troubles.

That only (sort of) works one way - you can have poor mid-level adventurers, but you can't have rich low-level ones, and any adventurer who gets even a modicrum of cash is gonna skyrocket in terms of power. Also, powerful-but-broke heroes are pretty common in fiction - Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, Buffy - all had the equivalent of high-level adventurers who had trouble putting food on the table.


Building off your genie idea, but to make it a little more generic; the local kingdoms use bottlecaps for currency but monsters use pixie dust. Adventurers have started using Pixie Dust to trade amongst themselves and occasionally with monsters.

This leaves you with the trouble of how to buy new magic items- my suggestion is to say that some monsters make thematically appropriate magic items. Various members of the fey court can make most druid items. Zalbor the Vampire Duke can make almost anything from the schools of Illusion, Enchantment and Necromancy. Ermalexia, Herald of the Most High offers Conjuration items, as well as [Good] and [Law] spells.

To keep it simpler, you could just say monsters with casting sometimes take item creation feats, but humanoids can't. There's a nymph with druid crafting, a gold dragon with sorcerer crafting, an Unbodied with Psion crafting, etc.

Eh... it still doesn't follow that there wouldn't be an exchange rate, and it would be frustrating for the players to have to track down monsters every time they wanted to buy items. But, it's certainly less silly that my Quarbleflitz idea.

[NichG]

...that just seems annoying. It doesn't divorce wealth from mechanics, it just adds in a chance of either the dice or your DM screwing you over. As a general rule, when it comes to game design, I say that telling people "No," is okay, but telling them "Sure, you can do that, but I've designed the rules to punish you" isn't.


I think you need to read this as a whole. The point is to create a plausible reason for economics to not apply to magic items. Its not 'you can buy a magic item but you get a random chance of being screwed', its 'no one buys or sells magic items because 95% of the time it won't work for the new owner'.



Unless it's a highly specific Ancestral Weapon that they can adapt as they level based on what they need... that doesn't begin to cover half of it.


Thats exactly what it is. Its a set of customizable magic items bound strictly to each character and which scale exactly to WBL.



Wizards want their scrolls and their blessed books and their metamagic rods, fighters want their winged boots and death ward armours... trying to say "Okay, lump everything you get from magic items into one thing" isn't a good solution, especially given the complexity of designing a system that will make that versatile enough, without making it overpowered.


Thats why I said multiple. Its very easy: Pick stuff you would get from WBL - you have this, however you want to break it down across your gear. Try to sell it? It won't work for the buyer because the power source is you.



Again, this adds a glut of complexity to the game (you'd have to come up with pages upon pages of house rules for that, and it certainly wouldn't work with anywhere near every build).


Well, for one thing not all builds have to be preserved by all changes to the rules for those changes to be workable. Obviously Crafting-based builds that amplify WBL will be made obsolete by this system. I don't think you'd really need to have that many house rules to have a functional system (unlike if you just said, no magic items period); of course you can add more and more to tune things precisely, but again, so what? Better to use 10 pages to do it right than 1 page to make something dysfunctional.



Ehh... you still have money tied to mechanics, just in a kind of not-very-functional way. To accomplish what I'm describing, it's really not necessary to re-do the entire magic item system - that's such a huge part of the game, it's not something you want to mess with (unless you're doing a very specific type of game to begin with.) All that's needed is to break the connection between "Wealth" and "Items", not the connection between "Items" and "Power" - so, you get rid of the Magic Mart, and come up with some other mechanism by which players can get their swag.

The point is that its no longer tied to combat capability. Money is still relevant to the game, its just relevant in a different direction. A poor party and rich party both can perform the same in combat against a particular dragon. They can't both perform the same against, say, an army of 10000 (unless they vastly out-level the army and can just take it on personally).

[Jerthanis]

In the Grandia series of games, they give you at the end of each battle a pile of Gold Coins for buying items and equipment in shops, a pile of Magic coins for buying new spells and levelling up existing spells, and a pile of Special coins for investing in your characters' unique special attacks.

Personally, I think this would be a pretty awesome system to export to D&D, where the concrete abilities of Wealth By Level wealth are ephemeral points that are spent on "Longsword +1" where you as a character picking up any particular Longsword will have a +1 Enhancement bonus to hit and damage, but you aren't carrying a Longsword which could be sold to feed a village for ten years.

The only issue is the balance of item slots, where it becomes harder to justify why using your Special Coins to buy all three abilities of Natural Armor, Constitution Bonus and Resistance to Poison are more expensive because they'd all be necklace items if they were magic items and so you've got to pay the extra for unslotted effects but... I'm sure there's a solution.

If 3.5 makes Gold a Statistic for measuring advancement, then divorcing it completely from the reality of your character's physical wealth only makes sense.

[nobodez]

The only issue is the balance of item slots, where it becomes harder to justify why using your Special Coins to buy all three abilities of Natural Armor, Constitution Bonus and Resistance to Poison are more expensive because they'd all be necklace items if they were magic items and so you've got to pay the extra for unslotted effects but... I'm sure there's a solution.

IIRC, the MIC made certain "default" magic item types not increase in cost if added to an existing item.

Yep, found it, Table 6-11 on page 234 of the MIC lists the cost to add common enhancements to existing items, no extra cost for doubling up as in the DMG.

[Mcdt2]

My minimal work solution? Award a number of "Binding Points" equal to WBL instead of cash. Each particular item requires you to bind it to you with a small ritual and expenditure of a number of bind points equal to the RAW gold cost, with the points being returned when you unbind the item. It works for no one else but the person it is bound to. This can also tie in nicely with Incarnum's fluff, having you bind the items to chakras, and making items not bound to chakras/slots "cost" more binding points. Then proceed to hand out however much gp you like, and have the GP cost of items be a minimal concern.

There are a few things you can do with this. One, if the unbinding refunds the points back fully, it allows players to have a large collection of magic items to switch between adventures. In this case, I suggest making the binding ritual at least 1 day long, if not longer, to prevent abuse such as swapping items for every fight. Two, if you make the items only refund 1/2 the price, then the ritual should be quick, as it has its own drawbacks. If you went this route, I would suggest allowing the "lost" points slowly return, so the character is not overly punished for switching items.

Finally, you could change the ratio of Bind Points : Item cost, to make the numbers a little easier to crunch. I suggest 1 bind point:1,000 gp, but that may make low level awards awkward and full of fractions.

[Flickerdart]

Players should not be behind the curve mechanically for spending money on plot stuff - when they lose that money, they fall under WBL, and the DM needs to raise treasure per encounter in order to gradually get them back on track. Sure, you'll be short a little bit for a while, but you will always catch up if WBL is followed correctly.

[Krobar]

In our games there are no Magic Items 'R Us stores. You can't just go to any old town and buy whatever items you want. You can get spell components and rare goods, and you can SELL items you don't need or want to the adventurer's guilds, but since successful adventurers aren't a dime a dozen there usually isn't very much for sale, particularly in smaller towns. Once you decide your world doesn't have 5,000,000 successful adventuring parties running around buying and selling magic items, magic items suddenly get more rare.

A bigger city like Waterdeep or Greyhawk will have some stuff available, generally, but it won't be game breaking. If you need something specific, the guild will sometimes know where such an item can be found, or who has it, and might point you in the right direction (for a price, of course), but often that's the best they can do. Bard colleges and some temples are good sources of info, too, depending on what you're looking for. And the more powerful you get, and the better items you want/need, the more true this becomes. It's hard to buy good items when the best items on the market are the ones YOU SOLD!

We've run entire mini-campaigns based on obtaining the specific items needed for a particular adventure.

This of course has resulted in our characters hoarding everything they find, and building a very secure stronghold just to keep their stuff safe.

[navar100]

My DM uses wealth in what I call NPC wealth. For example, in a previous campaign our party became the People Of Importance. My cleric was Duke and Founder of a new Church for a new god (long story). The rogue was Godfather (benign). The wizard was Guildmaster. Even before all this we were filthy rich, literally millions of gp worth.

However, it was all roleplay. None of this wealth could be used to purchase magic items or otherwise improve the game mechanics of our characters. It was only used to advance the Story. When our home city was attacked and damaged, it was enough to say we spend 100,000 gp on repairs and it gets done. We save a vulnerable village - we give them 50,000 gp to build defenses and train defenders when that adventure arc is done. We know the money is there. We'll never run out. We are given a benefit in game - we no longer have to track minutiae. When traveling we can stay at an expensive inn and not worry about payment. The rogue can say he bribes the barkeep without having to change gp numbers on his character sheet. We don't have to mark off our gp when we restock supplies. We still get and keep track of normal treasure from adventuring. That treasure can be used for all normal things of adventuring, such as purchasing, trading, and selling magic items. Once in a while it's a big haul like 50 bars of platinum worth 10,000 gp each. (High level play.) That we know is meant for NPC wealth.

This works for us because our adventures are more about The Story. Treasure is important and has its place, but as the levels progress the Plot is more important to us. It becomes a natural occurrence when our adventure wealth is large enough to start using it to further the Plot rather than personal game mechanics use. It's a gradual process as the campaign and levels progress.

I recommend this idea if a party wants to set up a business. The DM should let the business happen. It can be prosperous. It generates a large profit allowing the PCs to roleplay being wealthy businessmen. Players no longer need to account for every gp spent on inns, taverns, bribes, etc. It gets replenished from the profits. The profits cannot be used to buy magic items.
Adventures still give treasure and only that treasure can be use to buy magic items, if PCs can buy magic items that campaign, as is normal for adventuring. You can still use the wealth by level table for adventuring gear. Business wealth is NPC wealth the party uses to facilitate roleplaying.

[Jeff the Green]

Another option I've been toying with is that magic items are only available through favors. So you kill a dragon and take their hoard. Great, you have more gold than exists on Real Earth, but you can't buy anything useful with it. However, you did just do the Wealthy Merchant Prince a favor by eliminating the dragon who was been extorting protection money from his caravans, and he will procure a certain amount of magic items for you.

That way money is nice to have from a role-playing perspective, but also irrelevant from a mechanical perspective.

[AmberVael]

Hm, this all sounds familiar somehow. I wonder if I've said something on the issue to you before... (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=14983433&postcount=231) :smalltongue:


Seriously, the easiest way to deal with it is to do just what you've said in the title. Divorce wealth from mechanics. To do that, you simply separate all magic items, basically all mechanically valuable stuff, to a completely different system. The explanations behind it may change, but the mechanics stay exactly the same.

With the method I suggested to you before, Virtual Wealth, you're essentially doing the least work and least alterations to the system. What you can gain doesn't change, how much you tend to gain doesn't change- the only difference is that Virtual Wealth is not actually wealth, and it is nothing you can gain in game. It's like experience, in that it is only an out of character construct, gained solely to advance the character. Certain benefits might be explained in game, to advance flavor and plot of course, but nothing more than that.

Real gold, meanwhile, can be relegated to a less vital but more interesting role. Its the sort of thing that lets you pretend to be nobility, or build castles, hire servants, or buy a tavern for an evening. And if you kill that dragon and they have a truly massive treasure hoard, well, you'll not unbalance the characters in the process.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

I think you need to read this as a whole. The point is to create a plausible reason for economics to not apply to magic items. Its not 'you can buy a magic item but you get a random chance of being screwed', its 'no one buys or sells magic items because 95% of the time it won't work for the new owner'.

Alright, as a justification for magic marts not existing, that makes more sense.


Thats exactly what it is. Its a set of customizable magic items bound strictly to each character and which scale exactly to WBL.

Thats why I said multiple. Its very easy: Pick stuff you would get from WBL - you have this, however you want to break it down across your gear. Try to sell it? It won't work for the buyer because the power source is you.

That makes sense mechanically, but seems sort of weird in terms of fluff (I have a sword that makes me fly... and see further... and add spells to my spellbook... and lets me detect thoughts... and increases my AC... and lets me breath underwater..."

By that point, it seems like it would be easier to just go with the wish-list idea, and have the loot you need "Randomly" turn up in the loot you find normally.


Well, for one thing not all builds have to be preserved by all changes to the rules for those changes to be workable. Obviously Crafting-based builds that amplify WBL will be made obsolete by this system. I don't think you'd really need to have that many house rules to have a functional system (unlike if you just said, no magic items period); of course you can add more and more to tune things precisely, but again, so what? Better to use 10 pages to do it right than 1 page to make something dysfunctional.

Eh... I don't like denying builds with changes like this for two reasons: First, some people like those builds. I, personally, love Artificers.

Second, it adds a bunch more your players have to keep track of while figuring out what they're gonna play - to me, the best system is gonna be one (Like Quarbleflitz) that has just a few very basic translations, while leaving the core mechanics pretty much untouched.


The point is that its no longer tied to combat capability. Money is still relevant to the game, its just relevant in a different direction. A poor party and rich party both can perform the same in combat against a particular dragon. They can't both perform the same against, say, an army of 10000 (unless they vastly out-level the army and can just take it on personally).


I was still referring to the 90% failure rate thing with the note that was responding to - sorry for the confusion.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

Hm, this all sounds familiar somehow. I wonder if I've said something on the issue to you before... (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=14983433&postcount=231) :smalltongue:

Yeah, that was where the idea got stuck in my head.




With the method I suggested to you before, Virtual Wealth, you're essentially doing the least work and least alterations to the system. What you can gain doesn't change, how much you tend to gain doesn't change- the only difference is that Virtual Wealth is not actually wealth, and it is nothing you can gain in game. It's like experience, in that it is only an out of character construct, gained solely to advance the character. Certain benefits might be explained in game, to advance flavor and plot of course, but nothing more than that.

The only issue I have with that is fluff - to me, there's a distinct flavour distance between "Fighter gets a pair of boots that let him fly" and "Fighter suddenly develops the ability to fly."

For (this issue - it was different for the Warriors and Wuxia Game) your solution actually seems to be going too far - I don't have a problem with magic items as they exist, so to me, it's just a matter of breaking the Wealth-Item connection, not the Item-Mechanics connection.

I may actually go with an un-dumbed-down version of Quarbleflitz, at some point.

[QUOTE}Real gold, meanwhile, can be relegated to a less vital but more interesting role. Its the sort of thing that lets you pretend to be nobility, or build castles, hire servants, or buy a tavern for an evening. And if you kill that dragon and they have a truly massive treasure hoard, well, you'll not unbalance the characters in the process.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that's definitely my goal, I just think we have different ideas as to how to go about it.

[AmberVael]

Spontaneously gaining magic powers was never really what I intended there- each item is supposed to be fluffed in an appropriate way (and hopefully a more interesting way than "so and so the wizard sat down to make another +1 flaming sword, cursing the chain of events that turned him into a one man assembly line"). While in a ToB focused universe it might be quite reasonable to have someone achieve flight by training (learning to balance on the air is something a swordsage can already do, after all), you might also explain it as a rare phenomena, or the product of a difficult ritual, or the product of a strange bloodline. Or any other number of options.

And if you wish to keep magic items involved, you could partially implement your previous idea as well- players can make a request for them, and you'll contrive to have them show up in game when you can. Explain magic items as rarities that few would sell and are largely irreplaceable, or say that they require something innate to a player to keep activated (in Exalted, most people actually can't use artifacts. It takes a certain amount of natural power to evoke their effects. Perhaps something like that could apply?)


Hm...

If you really want to keep everything as magic items though, I did make something quite some time ago that you might either adapt or simply use as inspiration.

In my campaign setting, I refluffed Incarnum users (incidentally, think about incarnum for ideas- forging sort of personal magic items and binding them to chakras could be repurposed for normal magic items). The idea of people running around in wacky blue magic items forged out of soul material just... never appealed to me. So, I explained that soulmelds instead came from another realm of existence. A person would focus themselves and cross between the realm of the living and dead, and petition ancient champions and powers for boons, relics of past lives and ages. When they return to the mortal world, they could bring echoes of those relics and powers back with them. It's not a real item, and it has only been given to the specific character who makes the petition, so they can't actually hand it off or sell it.

A similar idea might well explain other magic items. Perhaps an otherworldly source can pass on something to the characters. Perhaps each character has a sort of personal or ancestral armory that they can access and draw power from. Maybe magic items aren't truly physical things at all, but instead enchantments layered on people, that can be formed into personal armors and armor and enchanted items that work only for the wielder. Or a combination of the above.

You could probably get any of these ideas to work with my system. Or make a unique system for any of these.

[Arbane]

My honest, trying-to-be-helpful advice is play a different system.

D&D is balanced on the assumption that PCs have a certain amount of wealth. In addition to becoming unbalanced compared to monsters, lacking magic items to give abilities like flight and freedom of movement will dramatically increase the power gap between casters and mundanes.


What he said. d20 Conan might be good for this - the starting state for about half of Conan's adventures is having an empty purse, a sword, and a hangover.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

What he said. d20 Conan might be good for this - the starting state for about half of Conan's adventures is having an empty purse, a sword, and a hangover.

Well, like I said - I don't have a problem with PCs having items, that's fine by me; what I'm asking is not so large a change that it requires tossing the entire system and moving to a new one. I'm fine with PCs having exactly the same items and acquiring them at exactly the same rate and levels - I'm just looking for a way they can do so without automatically becoming rich in the process, or a way they could become rich without automatically gaining massive power through items.

[ArcturusV]

Well... might want to consider cribbing a halfway decent idea from 4th edition.

One thing that they did do, that I liked, was gave the rules and idea for making typical items and item bonuses into inherent bonuses to your character. Which is something that shouldn't have taken until 4th edition to come up.

Divine Bonuses, Training Bonuses, and Personal Bonuses. The idea being something like the sword you used to slay a red dragon ends up becoming a +x Flaming, Fiery Burst weapon, for example. Which sounded thematic enough to be a Why Not sort of thing.

And that's pretty much what I'd see you having to do. Have it so instead of getting Anklets of Translocation, your character trains with an ancient, mystical master who teaches you a method for doing the exact same thing 1/day. Instead of having a +6 item of Statness you were given a divine boon which, as long as it's renewed at various points gives you the same effect.

Just have it so you have to constantly renew the effect. So it's not just a permanent bonus/SLA. Something like every 2/3 months you have to go to renew it. Which does mean that as characters advance, they'd seek out new masters, new divine boons, new monsters to draw the essences out of, etc, for better boosts rather than renewing old ones.

It does mean it's harder to destroy/lose their gear if that's your thing. But also means they might naturally not have it if they can't make it back to their mystical master, place of worship, etc, in 2 months.