Fotget about the treasure and pricing system of 5E! [Archive]

lkwpeter

2017-10-23, 02:38 AM

Hey there,

we are currently at the very end of the campaign "Princes of the Apocalypse". Our characters are level 13 and we have dozens of thousands of gold, but we don't know on what to spend our money. The treasure system is broken. Prices are even more broken. Gold is worth nothing, if you can't by anything useful for that. The only way to get rid of gold is, if your DM finds a way to "burn it all for some hypocritical reason" like offering you a Castle for an insane, unplausible amount of gold. If you don't believe me, read Angry GM's article (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/).

In our case, we decided to give gold at least a tiny bit of usage and offer only magic consumables in a very limited amount for purchase. Therefore, the first problem we had to deal with was that there is A LOT of inconsistency between prices. We started using Sane Magic Item Prices (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?usp=sharing) to have more realistic prices that depend on the item's power, not its rarity. Though this system is far away from being perfect, it is much more consistent than RAW. Furthermore, I created Faerûn's Vendors - A flexible vendor system for magic consumables (http://www.dmsguild.com/product/202047/Faerns-Vendors--A-flexible-vendor-system-for-magic-consumables) to provide a transparent ruling system that can easily be adjusted to fit for the DM's purpose.

But that's only one side of the coin. The other problem is that players accumulate hundrets of thousands of gold. During a 20 level campaign they are supposed to earn over 3.2 million(!!) GP. You don't believe me? Have a look at this article about game math (http://dmdavid.com/tag/what-is-the-typical-amout-of-treasure-awarded-in-a-fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-campaign/). So, if you want to make buying items not only available, but also interesting, you need to force players to make decisions on what to spend their money. This is the other side of the coin: preventing characters from swimming within an insane amount of money, that allows them to buy anything they want to - regardless of the price. If you lower their treasure, they will buy items with care. And even if they have less coins, they will be satisfied, because their so hard earned money is worth more than ever before!

The questions is, how to distribute a reasonable amount of money to players. The DMG provides dozens of treasure tables for gems, art, items, consumables and, of course, gold. But as I said, the system is broken and therefore useless, because there is no reasonable relation between the millions of income adventurers are supposed to earn by RAW and those trivial lifestyle costs. Concerning this, I want to quote a passage from the Angry GM's article (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/), I already mentioned:

Where D&D does f$&% up is in presenting money treasure as important. Because that’s an outright f$&%ing lie. And it confuses the hell out of poor GMs. And, worse, it forces GMs to do unnecessary work. The thing is, many GMs crack open that DMG and find the chapter on treasure and they try to hand out treasure according to the rules and keep everything balanced because the game seems to suggest they have to. But that’s wasted work because the treasure itself has no value. It isn’t important. It’s paperwork for the sake of paperwork.

Applying rules for treasure distribution that are obviously broken is even worse than applying no rules at all. @Vonklaude (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?593074-Consistent-gold-amp-price-system&p=7257117&viewfull=1#post7257117) posted a treasure table that estimated the average amount of treasure handed to the players while applying the rules of the DMG. I already mentioned that the amount earmed by a party during their 20 level career is 3.2 million GP by RAW. Within this thread we talked about adjusting this insane amount by applyng lower multiplicators between the differet tier levels. That would allow the DM to lower the outcome to an amount that better fits his idea of treasure distribution (e.g. the default multiplicator is 10. If you lower it to 5 the characters would only earn ~500.000 GP in their career).

It felt good for a moment, but after I thought about it for a while I asked myself: Why on earth should I ever fix a broken system for treasure distribution that is related to a pricing system that is also broken? The answer was: It makes no sense at all. A pricing system that sells Glue for 50.000+ GP, but a Sentinal Shield for only 100-500 GP is ridiculous. So, fixing the treasure distribution won't solve the problem, because it is related to the pricing system that is also broken.

After all that, I agree to Angry GM that the whole treasure distribution system is a lie and not worth the work. Firstly, if I need to spend so much work to adjust a system, only to match my personal idea of treasure ditribution, I can easily give away treasure by my own system. Secondly, if I already know how much I want to give away to my players, there is no reason to start calculating this amount to solely fit into a table of a broken system.

In conclusion: If you also have problems with treasure distribution, I suggest to do the following:

1.) Become aware of how much treasure you want to distribute for each level. This depends on what you want your players to be able to afford. You also want to ask yourself, if there are some elements to "burn money" like building Strongholds, etc. Don't panic, now that you are using your own distribution, you will always be able to adjust the wealth of your group. In my case, I allow my party to buy a very limited amount of magic consumables. I looked up Sane Magic Item Prices and found out an amount that suits my purpose.

2.) Delete all gemstones and art objects from treasure. If you and your group care as less about that as my group does, don't think about it. Just do it. Gemstones and art objects are only useful to be converted into cash (except reviving diamonds). So, I suggest to make your DM life easier and don't care for it. Of course, if your players have fun in collecting art for their home base, you might want to go on with it - otherwise don't.

3.) Divide treasure up to several parcels and determine where you want them to be found in the advanture. Consider that you can always add potions and scrolls to your parcels as you want to. If you are running a official WotC campaign, you could also consider only to replace the amount of gold (including gems and art objects) and leave the rest of the treasure as it is. Just do it, as you wish to.

Doing so is much easier than trying to hand out treasure according to the rules, only because you fear to break the game balance. There is no balance. Accept it. You will see that your DM life will become less complicated, because you can forget about those dozens tables that have made your life so hard.

Kind regards!

Postscript:

If you read this thread, please keep the following in mind:

My intention: My post was some kind of personal summary from another forum, where we discussed the problem of treasure distribution over several pages and there seemed to be a lot of agreement. My aim was to share this with you. I realized that doing so without the background of the previous discussion was negligent, because a lot of people don't seem to understand the problem I am talking about - either because they didn't look up the sources I linked for proving my thesis or because they didn't understand what's exactly the point.

Understanding the problem: I was quite surprised reading replies that stated that there wasn't a problem because "There is no problem of having too much money, because I like wealthy lifestyles" or "there are homebrew systems that could give money a purpose" (buying magic items is not intended by RAW). In both cases, people told me how they dealt with the problem and sold it as if there were no problem. It's like denying that there is a lack of infracstructure for blind people in urban areas with the answer that "blind people could buy themselves a guide dog". The problem is NOT not to have a guide dog. The problem is the lack of infrastructure. Unfortunately, this is something some people don't get.

My thesis was that there is a huge mismatch between the income of adventurers (3.2 million gold) and the possibilities to spend it (trivial costs, etc.). Therefore, it's unnecessary that 5E provides dozens of tables to make the DM believe, he needs to be careful giving away treasure to the adventurers, although there is nothing to spend it on. To point this out: A DM could also reward his party with 10 million gold per encounter without spending a minute on thinking about it. It would have the same effect. The party wouldn't be able to spend most of it (besides those trivial adventuring costs). Of course, a DM can always implement some mechanics for "burning money" like Strongholds, Castles, etc. But this is already intervention and misses the point. And that leads me to the supposition that the system is broken, because it shouldn't rely on such intervention.

To whom I am talking: If you interpret my posting as being unpolite or so, just keep in mind that I am not talking to you personally. I don't intend any offense. I am just blaming the rules for being inconsistent. That's it. Furthermore, English is not my mother language (as you already might have noticed reading my posts). So, this also might be a reason. I will try my best to avoid the rough edge.

Malifice

2017-10-23, 03:08 AM

So your characters only adveture to get money to buy stuff to adventure better?

How implausable.

Why arent they spending money on what real people would?

Wine, women, affluence and so forth?

Does your PC (for some inexplicable reason) not want to be wealthy, with all the perks that brings?

Goosefarble

2017-10-23, 04:40 AM

People in my campaigns seem to like money and having money, and spend a lot of it on things that they need - potions, scrolls, food, drink, etc. Granted they're not as high level as 13, but they seem to be fine with it. And they also like gemstones and art objects and often collect them, including worthless trinkets that don't have any monetary value but seem interesting.

Dudu

2017-10-23, 04:46 AM

My friend DMed a campaign that had a gamble system, diablo style.

500gp you had a shot at an uncommon item.

5000gp for rare, 50000 for very rare. Legendary wasn't on sale.

Basically, you would roll a d100. It was a magical merchant guild and you got membership of it.
Depending on how much you spent on the guild, or if you did quests to it, you would get benefits, like rolling multiple times and choosing which number.

It work, was fun, very fun.

Malifice

2017-10-23, 05:02 AM

Would you want to be a multi millionare in real life? Win the lottery etc?

What would you do with that money?

Now start playing real people with real ambitions, and do that in game.

JellyPooga

2017-10-23, 06:10 AM

As others have mentioned, wealth is security. The whole point is to have enough that you don't care about it any more; the maxim "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" applies here. Having tens of thousands of gold is not in that wealth bracket. Having 3 million gold is not in that bracket either. When your PC's are in the tens or hundreds of millions (i.e. starting to rival the collected wealth of mid-sized towns), then you're hitting the level of "I spent some pocket change on buying a palace" wealthy and have cause for complaint.

Consider; over the course of a 20 level career, an adventurer will be spending thousands on food and lodgings merely for sustenance. Add ten times that for luxuries. Now add, let's say, 5 times that amount for consumables; healing potions, alchemists fire, poison, spell components etc. Now add money spent on various fees, fines and other miscellaneous expenses. Note that consumables aside, we haven't even considered our adventuring gear. Buy a magic sword. Now buy a better one. And again. And again. How many magic weapons do you find/sell/buy over 20 levels again? Now buy a magic bow. Another and another. Now buy a magic dagger or two for good measure. Now buy three or four sets of magic armour. Now buy a whole miscellany of rings, amulets, robes, wands and so forth, from low to high-end. In one big lump 3 million sounds like a lot, but it isn't because that 3 million isn't just being spent on the final product; it's being spent on everything from 1st level all the way through to 20th. If you're super frugal and an expert merchant, you'll be lucky to have a quarter of that value as personal wealth at 20th level. Most adventurers probably won't even have that.

The wealth system isn't broken; it's just that you're either not looking at the bigger picture or you're not playing your characters as if they were actually people who, you know, spend at least 70% of their income on living expenses and luxuries, just because they can.

lkwpeter

2017-10-23, 06:26 AM

mephnick

2017-10-23, 06:31 AM

Would you want to be a multi millionare in real life? Win the lottery etc?

What would you do with that money?

Retire in wealth and be an NPC at level 12. Oops, time to roll a new character.

You're supposed to be an adventurer, not a noble holed up in his keep watching the price of trade goods, so "do what real people do" is a pretty bad idea for a game.

I like to spend my money on things that help me adventure.

pwykersotz

2017-10-23, 06:38 AM

ZorroGames

2017-10-23, 06:48 AM

Would you want to be a multi millionare in real life? Win the lottery etc?

What would you do with that money?

Now start playing real people with real ambitions, and do that in game.

This “Real Person” grew up around old and new money (my madre was a maid) and watching how foolish people could be with windfall money especially is exactly why I do not, never have, and never plan to “play the lottery” or gamble.

ZorroGames

2017-10-23, 06:50 AM

Knaight

2017-10-23, 06:52 AM

My players are under no such illusions, and neither am I. The D&D money system adds depth to the world, and there is no expectation at my tables of its inflated importance for character upgrades. I'm perfectly happy with it. It's way better than being on the eternal upgrade churn.[/FONT][/COLOR][/FONT][/COLOR]

Adding depth to the world doesn't necessitate characters making enormous amounts of money (and is better done with an economic system that isn't a total mess), and is thus tangential to the problem presented.

With that said, what Malifice put forward does have some relevance - dollar to GP conversions are a mess, but a high level character has a good fifty million dollars even by a conservative estimate. Personally, there's no way I could spend fifty million dollars on myself. Even living in what I'd consider pretty lavish conditions would drain that pretty slowly (call it a million a decade, for a yearly income of $100,000), leaving a great deal.

That suggests funneling it into other people, both in the sense of friends and family and charities. The adventurer equivalent would be something along the lines of institutional support of friends and allies, if building up armies and castles personally would get in the way of the adventuring people want to do. A bit more mechanical support for that would be nice given the amount of accounting that D&D has you do, but that's par for the course (the amount of tedious XP calculations that go into a simple leveling system comes to mind).

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 06:57 AM

My players are under no such illusions, and neither am I. The D&D money system adds depth to the world, and there is no expectation at my tables of its inflated importance for character upgrades. I'm perfectly happy with it. It's way better than being on the eternal upgrade churn.

Right. I dislike the upgrade churn in games in general.

My current game (I'm the DM)--

* The PCs (level 15) were already rich and powerful. They just found and defeated (but not destroyed yet) a lich who was a collector of ancient valuable things--artwork, gems, etc. They dumped out a whole bag of holding full of gold and replaced it with 15 paintings. Each one was a priceless masterpiece when it was painted, and that was ~800+ years ago. Now they're almost literally priceless just from historical value. They're still adventuring because their goals don't revolve around money. They'll likely end up using a few of them as bribes in the next areas they're going to, but they have a mission. Stop Far Realms creatures from corrupting a major artifact and using it to end the existence of the world. If they survive that, they'll probably retire. Only one (a high elf rogue) is interested in the money--he wants to found a high elven House the good old-fashioned way--by being filthy rich. The others are a personal-magic-power-obsessed (and a little crazy) warlock, a sensible and not-worldly monk, and a tree-hugging druid.

Before this quest-line began they were already famous--now they're legendary. Their adventure will probably end either with facing a Demon Prince (of mutations and disease) or facing a dragon that's been eating souls and is now the power-equivalent of a Demon Prince. At this point, money is an abstract counter. They can't buy magical items--no one's producing them anymore since that's nearly impossible. They already have a house. But since their goals don't care about cash, it's not important. This, to me, is much better than an upgrade treadmill. High level characters shouldn't be pinching pennies. The valuable currencies shift from gold and platinum to time and attention.

Slipperychicken

2017-10-23, 07:19 AM

Why arent they spending money on what real people would?

Because the game rules of 5th edition D&D offer next to zero support for this idea.

Some game systems are good about providing the players with money-sinks like organizations, minions, caravans, businesses, property, donations, politics, and partying, complete with prices and rules so that they can understand and appreciate their extravagance. Adventurer Conqueror King springs to mind as an example of a game that does this well.

D&D 5e however does not do this. At best you can say "you have a castle of unspecified dimensions now" before screwing off to the next unspecified adventure and forgetting about your castle because it will never come up, and its contents have no rules, prices, game statistics, benefits, or even guidelines to speak of. There's no sense that you're doing anything other than throwing your gold away for a house you will never use. There isn't a comprehensive set of rules for hirelings or even entertainment. If I wanted to waste my character's hard-earned money on women and song, the rules immediately leave me in the cold and I must rely on my GM to improvise prices for such merriment without any kind of guidance or baseline.

Ahm...has anybody that replied until here even read the article I linked (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/)? At least, read the paragraph "Value of Gold" and you will understand what I tralking about.

You have 4 links buried in a multi-page post. Just getting through the post was enough work. I wasn't trying to read three articles just to give myself context for a single forum post.

Malifice

2017-10-23, 07:33 AM

Retire in wealth and be an NPC at level 12. Oops, time to roll a new character.

You're supposed to be an adventurer, not a noble holed up in his keep watching the price of trade goods, so "do what real people do" is a pretty bad idea for a game.

How about purchasing 20 years of a luxurious lifestyle? Or are your PCs still squabbling over inn prices and trail rations at 12th level?

Aristocratic is 10gp per day and up. Pre purchase 10 years worth for 40,000. Live it up and look down on those 1st level plebs, as you kick back in exclusive taverns, with sexy women (or men), nice clothes, hot baths, the finest foods, and servants to cater to your every desire.

Like what a real person would likely do.

Alternatively if you're a good aligned cleric or paladin, donate it to the needy and your church. Priests in the real world are expected to be mendicants in pretty much all religions historically, not owning any personal wealth at all.

In fact, I would want to know why a cleric in my games isn't giving substantial money to his church.

I like to spend my money on things that help me adventure.

Fair enough. Real life adventurers use a chunk of their money to buy stuff to adventure more (better boats, sonar, cameras, support crew etc).

But they also live good lives.

When a PC hoards his wealth, and only cares about 'buying better gear' I cringe. Very few (read: no) real person would do this. I could get on board for a very specific character concept I guess, but those should be few and far between.

We worry about setting up our children, buying property, living comfortably (when not sleeping in filth and fighting monsters) and so forth.

Lawyers dont practice law purely to get enough money to buy better law books. I mean, there is an element of that for sure, but the money actually goes elsewhere as well.

You're not talking about what the character wants here (some combination of wealth, fame, family, comfort, happiness, security, legacy etc). You're talking about what the player wants (better bonuses).

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 07:34 AM

Because the game rules of 5th edition D&D offer next to zero support for this idea.

Some game systems are good about providing the players with money-sinks like organizations, minions, caravans, businesses, property, donations, politics, and partying, complete with prices and rules so that they can understand and appreciate their extravagance. Adventurer Conqueror King springs to mind as an example of a game that does this well.

D&D 5e however does not do this. At best you can say "you have a castle of unspecified dimensions now" before screwing off to the next unspecified adventure and forgetting about your castle because it will never come up, and its contents have no rules, prices, game statistics, benefits, or even guidelines to speak of. There's no sense that you're doing anything other than throwing your gold away for a house you will never use. There isn't a comprehensive set of rules for hirelings or even entertainment. If I wanted to waste my character's hard-earned money on women and song, the rules immediately leave me in the cold and I must rely on my GM to improvise prices for such merriment without any kind of guidance or baseline.

I feel like having a fixed baseline of prices becomes unwieldy very fast. It presumes that all nations (even within the same setting) have fixed and similar prices for things. Thus, it doesn't help those of us who use custom settings--I'd have to house-rule it away completely. It doesn't help those who run adventure paths (because those don't have scope for such things anyway). It doesn't help anyone who doesn't run in one particular area of FR--in fact, it sets expectations that cannot be met. You're always going to have to rely on DM adjustments (at minimum, more likely full-on invention) because there are too many variables even discounting setting differences. And including setting differences blows it way out of the water.

The rules of 5e are built around the idea that you're going on adventures, not sitting at home in a castle. The castles, manors, and other things are supposed to happen off-screen. That's by design and is done at least in part to allow focus. D&D is not, and has never succeeded at being, an economy simulator or stronghold-maintenance game. Even in early editions (where such things were perks of high levels), attaining those levels usually involved retiring the PC--the active, on-screen characters were lower levels with occasional focus shifts to the big boys.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 07:41 AM

Would you want to be a multi millionare in real life? Win the lottery etc?

What would you do with that money?

Now start playing real people with real ambitions, and do that in game.

I'd put a lawyer on retainer as well as a wealth management counselor, as well as people to watch over them.
Lawyers in relation to estate taxes and other money management as well as wealth managers in general don't exist in base D&D.

I would put the maximum FDIC covered amount in 5-10 banks to generate base interest and to have a cushion should disaster falls.
The FDIC, and banks in general don't exist in base D&D.

I would put 20% of the gross amount into government treasury bonds and short-mid term T-Bills.
Government treasury bonds and T-Bills don't exist in base D&D.

I would put another 60% in the stock market, with a diversification that should protect me from being wiped out, based on the advice of my money manager.
The stock market doesn't exist in base D&D.

See the problem with using the real world as an example and "real" ambitions? They don't translate.

And the items in the base DMG and PHB are laughingly cheap for the riches you do get. And getting above those items requires outside intervention. Yes, you could bribe the local noble to give you a title, but if you have several tens of thousands of gp you can do so without taking an appreciable dent in your resources, especially if the group pools together.

I'm hoping Xanathar's expanded downtime and other rules will help with this.

Willie the Duck

2017-10-23, 07:41 AM

Ahm...has anybody that replied until here even read the article I linked (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/)? At least, read the paragraph "Value of Gold" and you will understand what I tralking about.

Lifestyle costs are so trivial compared to the wealth the PCs are expected to gain that they are utterly meaningless after some levels. Of course, you can always say "Hm...I like being rich. But if "there’s really nothing to do with treasure other than pile it up and sleep on it", you aren't rich. Instead, you could also collect stones and tell yourself you would be rich.

Read the article, because it's hardly possible to explain it in a better way than Angry GM does. Read it. It's worth it!

First and foremost, take some time and think about what you can do to make anyone who decides to click on this thread bother with your premise. Angry DM's rantiness is a schtick -- a literary device used for effect. Even he uses it at best middlingly and receives plenty of very valid criticism for being a lot more style than substance. You are starting out of the gate seeming angry at your audience, that's not a good start. Just from the jump, you need to sell why anyone should care. No, you can't defer back to Angry DM and let him do the selling for you, you need to.

Now, to your premise. It is certainly not wrong. There is absolutely not a lot to do with gold between the points of buying plate armor and some healing potions... and grandiose things like merchant ships or castles. That is clearly intentional, and I believe a reaction to the foibles of 3e (or possibly back to oD&D-1e).

oD&D-BECMI had gold which didn't do much once you got it back to town (except for buying that castle and army, which by the rules at least was still a big part of the game), but it was getting the gold out of the dungeon that gave you your primary xp. So that was a single advancement path, simply with a physical representation (gp) of the primary advancement mechanism (xp), which provided an additional logistical challenge (one had to not only liberate the gold from the monsters and traps guarding it, but had to be able to haul it back to the surface). Sure, the gp=xp paradigm creates some challenges (if you wanted to create a shipwrecked-on-island scenario, or recreate LotR instead of the Hobbit, you need to create an alternate reward structure), but that was fine because that wasn't the type of adventure the game was designed for (and if you are changing the premise of the game, then you should be fine with designing your own rewards*).
*The only real flaw in this logic is that they kept that structure going long past the point where the gaming audience had pretty clearly carried the game past the 'enter nameless dungeon and try to get out with the loot' as the exclusive adventure structure

AD&D:1e had a similar premise, but you also had to train to gain your lower levels. This gave you something to do with your gold before you started buying castles. It also created an additional logistics problem -- if you got your xp at the standard rate (approximately 10% from defeating monsters, and 90% from liberating them of their gold), you ended up just slightly cash poor for that training. What do you do: delay leveling up, and lose out on the mechanical benefits thereof, or sell that magic item you found (losing the benefit of that, but getting your level)?

D&D 3e/PF had what I think a lot of people thought they wanted, until they saw the consequences. Gold was just another avenue towards the magic items you wanted to get to make yourself better at going and getting gold to make yourself better at.... (and so on and so forth). So it became a genuine second reward/advancement structure, complementary to (and only indirectly tied to) xp for defeating enemies. The problem with that, however, is that then the game, the challenge rating system, and all your gaming assumptions have to be built around a specific rate of gp accumulation, and what you will expect the PCs to have done with their wealth. Your Xth level wizard will have accumulated Y gold, and thus will have approximately bracers of armor +Z -- but then he better, because the CR X monsters he is up against is designed around that power level. Suddenly, treasure, and the need for it, has become straightjacketed. You must now spend it to keep your head above water, and god forbid you spend it on bribing guards, pleasure barges, or castles full of objects d'arte. Gold, in the process of becoming an alternative advancement path, has stopped functioning like money, because you can't spend it like money.

D&D 5e thoughtfully took the best of both worlds. Xp was not directly tied to money acquisition, allowing all kinds of non-treasure-hunter-style adventures without rewriting the reward structure. GP was not tied to magic item acquisition, allowing you to actually use it for money. This does, of course, create the issue that there isn't a huge number of things that you have to spend money on, and that's the point. You get to spend it on frivolities, RP, or plot coupons because you are not required to spend it on mechanical effects (and, as corollary, the DM gets to alter how much of it you get without downstream consequences on mechanical structures). Gold not being tied to direct mechanical benefit is a feature, not a bug. Now money can be that thing that is used and important in the game, when and only when it makes sense that money would be important. Characters need to worry about having a roof over their heads? They need money. Need to buy their dad out of imprisonment? Money? They are Robin Hood and need to give to the poor? Money. Need to upgrade their sword +1 into a sword +2? Not money.

I understand that TAGM has stated, "Shut Up About Economies, Shut Up About Money Sinks, Just Shut Up." Unfortunately, he seems to think he actually made a good point about them, and he did not. It seems more that he completely misses the point. He states "The things I discussed above, upgrades, utility items, and living expenses? Those things have value in the game. They represent increased abilities or options." That's fine. But we already have those. Magic items and leveling are crystal clear, obvious forms of increased abilities and options. There is no need to turn money into another avenue for doing this, and more to the point, the instant you do so, you stop being able to use money as money.

Obviously you rather like this AngryGM article (enough that you wanted to make a thread about how you agree with it). So I hope you aren't too offended that I'm basically saying that TAGM basically profoundly misses the point of a very deliberate game design decision. But that's where I stand.

Malifice

2017-10-23, 07:44 AM

Because the game rules of 5th edition D&D offer next to zero support for this idea.

Why do you need rules for it? If you really want some kind of mechanical benefit for spending money go nuts.

I just had two PCs just threw 20,000 each trying to outdo each other with the greatest party the town had ever seen (both now have advantage on charisma based checks in town... but disadvantage with them when opposed to the town giard who had to clean up the mess). Ive got another that loves pre-purchasing an aristocratic lifestyle (he's up to just over 10 years now) and living it up. I had several PCs donate large sums to a local orphanage after a dragon attacked the town.

The Swashbuckler in the party refused to help out, and was last seen lugging 20,000 gp and several art objects out of town towards a magic item shop.

When I awarded 1xp for every 10gp spent to the PCs that helped out, he was jelly.

What do mercenaries cost? Buy 100 of them for a few months, and enjoy bounded accuracy, making your party necromancer drool (and with far less RP consequences). Have an assassin on permanent retainer. Hire a bunch of concubines to fan you and rub your feet and back while feeding you grapes when you get back from adventuring. Buy yourself noble titles and make yourself above the law.

Buy a tower for your undead minions, and wait for adventurers to storm it and kill you.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 07:46 AM

Why do you need rules for it? If you really want some kind of mechanical benefit for spending money go nuts.

Because not everyone has 10+ hours a week to theorycraft stuff that could easily have been in the books and reasonably should have been?

Meta

2017-10-23, 07:54 AM

I feel like there are a lot of good reasons to spend gold on better magic items. Even in a story heavier game I play in, PCs make enemies that need dealt with via violence.

It just changes it from "I can better kill this lich and loot his better stuff"

to:

"I'd like my children's safety to no longer be threatened so I need to acquire at least a Fey-Slaughter Longsword to stop the Chimeric Wizard, Mortressus from teleporting around while our Barbarian beats the snot out of him."

Malifice

2017-10-23, 07:55 AM

See the problem with using the real world as an example and "real" ambitions? They don't translate.
.

They do translate. Presuming your DM is running a realistic world.

Buy yourself a Noble title (and land) and live off the rent from the land (or collect taxes). Plus (as a noble) you're now above the law. No longer a masterless vagabond (and thus under the status of a Serf) you're now a Noble. Killing Serfs is a property crime for you now. Go nuts.

Erect a tower on your land. Staff it with men at arms, assassin or two, and a court wizard and cleric. Supplement the tax/ rent income via adventuring to expand rapidly.

Heck its like you people never played AD&D or BECMI. In each of them, once you hit 'name' level you would head out and construct a tower/ keep/ dominion and rule. You went from hobo to king. Most of your money would be tied up in your keep and upkeep. Magic shops didnt exist.

Ever since 3E it's all about adventuring for the sake of adventuring. You only adventure to earn money, and you only earn money so you can buy stuff that helps you adventure better. Its all retch and no vomit.

What are your characters goals? Spend your money achieving them, setting up your family and so forth. Play a real character instead of a 2 dimensional 'orphan with no ties to the world, who wanders from place to place, and only adventures to get money to buy things that make him better at adventuring'.

Malifice

2017-10-23, 07:59 AM

I'd like my children's safety to no longer be threatened so I need to acquire at least a Fey-Slaughter Longsword to stop the Chimeric Wizard, Mortressus from teleporting around while our Barbarian beats the snot out of him."

Yet by the time those PCs reach high level, they've almost certainly spent zero money on said children. Sending them to Wizard college, hiring bodyguards to look after them, investing in land so (when you die - which could happen at any time) they are looked after financially afterwards. Daily upkeep (granting a better standard of health and education).

Etc etc.

Seriously. If I had kids, I would devote a sizeable chunk of my money ensuring they are looked after when I die.

Malifice

2017-10-23, 08:05 AM

Because not everyone has 10+ hours a week to theorycraft stuff that could easily have been in the books and reasonably should have been?

What are you theorycrafting?

Do you need rules for how awesome it is to be wealthy, and how much advantages it brings, and why most people desire it?

Isnt that kind of self evident?

Willie the Duck

2017-10-23, 08:08 AM

Because the game rules of 5th edition D&D offer next to zero support for this idea.

Some game systems are good about providing the players with money-sinks like organizations, minions, caravans, businesses, property, donations, politics, and partying, complete with prices and rules so that they can understand and appreciate their extravagance. Adventurer Conqueror King springs to mind as an example of a game that does this well.

D&D 5e however does not do this. At best you can say "you have a castle of unspecified dimensions now" before screwing off to the next unspecified adventure and forgetting about your castle because it will never come up, and its contents have no rules, prices, game statistics, benefits, or even guidelines to speak of. There's no sense that you're doing anything other than throwing your gold away for a house you will never use. There isn't a comprehensive set of rules for hirelings or even entertainment. If I wanted to waste my character's hard-earned money on women and song, the rules immediately leave me in the cold and I must rely on my GM to improvise prices for such merriment without any kind of guidance or baseline.

Agreed, and my only response is that various TSR edition games did have price lists for luxury goods, commodities, "dancing girls," and so forth, and at least 51% of the gaming audience seemed to have considered it fill material one flipped past to get to the crunch part of the game.

D&D is burdened by having multiple audiences (whom often have directly contradictory expectations), whereas no one picks up Adventurer Conqueror King unless that is specifically the type of gaming they want to play.

I thoroughly hope that eventually there is an official 5e "Castlebuilders Guide" or somesuch. And I hope it includes a bunch of the goodies like rumor tables and woman and song expenditure guides and maybe even some ACKS (or at least BECM Companion dominion rules) level 'what to do as a high-level semi-noble' advice. But it will always be niche audience material compared to new races/feats/archetypes, modules/adventures, or campaign world guides.

Meta

2017-10-23, 08:08 AM

Yet by the time those PCs reach high level, they've almost certainly spent zero money on said children. Sending them to Wizard college, hiring bodyguards to look after them, investing in land so (when you die - which could happen at any time) they are looked after financially afterwards. Daily upkeep (granting a better standard of health and education).

Etc etc.

Seriously. If I had kids, I would devote a sizeable chunk of my money ensuring they are looked after when I die.

Bodyguards, at least not the ones you can buy with some gold, are not a lot of help (nor is land, titles, or much else) against epic level casters. Maybe if I had a couple of Solars or Gold Dragons on retainer, but at level 13, I do not, and don't imagine many that do.

You're making a lot of assumption about people's game worlds and seem to not be addressing the existence of BBEGs. What good is health insurance or concubines if the world is ending?

Dimers

2017-10-23, 08:11 AM

You know what I would do if I were a high-level character with gobs of money and no guarantee of being able to buy utilitarian magic items? I'd fund research into how to make utilitarian magic items. (Mind you, I don't mean dragonslaying swords and such, I mean lights, farming improvements, information preservation, anti-agathics, water supply, that kind of thing. Quality-of-life for millions of people.)

Ahm...has anybody that replied until here even read the article I linked (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/)? At least, read the paragraph "Value of Gold" and you will understand what I tralking about.

Lifestyle costs are so trivial compared to the wealth the PCs are expected to gain that they are utterly meaningless after some levels. Of course, you can always say "Hm...I like being rich. But if "there’s really nothing to do with treasure other than pile it up and sleep on it", you aren't rich. Instead, you could also collect stones and tell yourself you would be rich.

Read the article, because it's hardly possible to explain it in a better way than Angry GM does. Read it. It's worth it!

Your message is somewhat lessened by your repeated 'shouting', your claims that no one has read what you linked, your English-language errors easily avoided with a spell-checker ('fotget', 'tralking'), and your failure to engage opposing ideas as if they were meaningful.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 08:32 AM

They do translate. Presuming your DM is running a realistic world.

Buy yourself a Noble title (and land) and live off the rent from the land (or collect taxes). Plus (as a noble) you're now above the law. No longer a masterless vagabond (and thus under the status of a Serf) you're now a Noble. Killing Serfs is a property crime for you now. Go nuts.

If there is land physically available in the kingdom.
If that land is actually available for purchase if freed.
If you can actually purchase a noble title in the kingdom.
If once all that is done, you can somehow attract people to live in land which has previously been unclaimed for whatever reason.

And if you want to essentially become a npc noble, whose full time is now needed to maintain or break even on that land, since the rules for ownership and businesses are nearly pure money sinks. (invest lots of money just to break even, ignoring the up front costs! Man, that sounds like a smart investment)

Heck its like you people never played AD&D or BECMI. In each of them, once you hit 'name' level you would head out and construct a tower/ keep/ dominion and rule. You went from hobo to king. Most of your money would be tied up in your keep and upkeep. Magic shops didnt exist.

Yeah, you mean AD&D and BECMI, where they had rules and mechanical benefits from doing so, and not just a small set of downtime rules that on average cause you to either break even or lose money, with at best a small profit.

Can I expand on that? Yes? But that's the time I don't really have for theory crafting.

Ever since 3E it's all about adventuring for the sake of adventuring. You only adventure to earn money, and you only earn money so you can buy stuff that helps you adventure better. Its all retch and no vomit.

Actually one of most favorite 3e supplements was Stronghold Builders Guide and the landlord feat. That, plus leadership, plus undead leadership, plus classes that could boost leadership gave me a lot of mechanical support for not only having followers, i.e. an army to lead and people to staff my stuff, but lots of mechanical support for actually building said stronghold, taxing it, etc.

So the whole "lol 3e was magic item mart only" is patently false. Sorry.

What are your characters goals? Spend your money achieving them, setting up your family and so forth. Play a real character instead of a 2 dimensional 'orphan with no ties to the world, who wanders from place to place, and only adventures to get money to buy things that make him better at adventuring'.

The problem is that I want to play a fully fleshed out character, but the rules break down as soon as I want to do so. That's the issue I have with it.

What are you theorycrafting?

Do you need rules for how awesome it is to be wealthy, and how much advantages it brings, and why most people desire it?

Isnt that kind of self evident?

Yes, actually. If I want to actually show both the benefits and drawbacks of it, or I want someone to build a castle with their hard earned cash, or become a noble, etc. I want mechanical support for it, a baseline to work from. Not just blindly reaching into the dark. Right now any such support is extremely anemic, and as a DM or player I don't have time to flesh such a system out further or balance it, and to a degree... I shouldn't have to.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 08:54 AM

Actually one of most favorite 3e supplements was Stronghold Builders Guide and the landlord feat. That, plus leadership, plus undead leadership, plus classes that could boost leadership gave me a lot of mechanical support for not only having followers, i.e. an army to lead and people to staff my stuff, but lots of mechanical support for actually building said stronghold, taxing it, etc.

So the whole "lol 3e was magic item mart only" is patently false. Sorry.

The problem is that I want to play a fully fleshed out character, but the rules break down as soon as I want to do so. That's the issue I have with it.

Yes, actually. If I want to actually show both the benefits and drawbacks of it, or I want someone to build a castle with their hard earned cash, or become a noble, etc. I want mechanical support for it, a baseline to work from. Not just blindly reaching into the dark. Right now any such support is extremely anemic, and as a DM or player I don't have time to flesh such a system out further or balance it, and to a degree... I shouldn't have to.

But those rules (those mechanical benefits) come at a severe cost (at least to me). They either shatter the world's believability or they have to be translated (and thus serve no benefit) to fit different campaigns in the same world, let alone different worlds. 3.5e made the pretense of standardizing things that are not standard. Consistency is a false ideal when applied against things that have strong natural variation.

A Stronghold-builder's Guide would only work for one portion of one world, in one type of campaign. For the rest of the game-playing group it's useless and a distraction from the point of the game. 5e is explicitly not a fantasy world simulator. It's not designed to do that. And that's a good thing. 3.5e tried, and failed miserably. I probably should sig this, but here's the quote from how 5e is sold and marketed (from the back of the PHB):

Dungeons and Dragons immerses you in a world of adventure. Explore ancient ruins and deadly dungeons. Battle monsters while searching for legendary treasures. Gain experience and power as you trek across uncharted lands with your companions.

The world needs heroes. Will you answer the call?

What you're asking is for the system to do something it was expressly designed not to do. You're blaming a shovel for not being a good hammer. There are other games to play if you want to do pseudo-medieval Sims. Don't shove a bunch of unrelated material in that cuts across the design, bloating it and allowing breakage of the rest of the game, just to fill that niche that was never promised.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 09:03 AM

But those rules (those mechanical benefits) come at a severe cost (at least to me). They either shatter the world's believably or they have to be translated (and thus serve no benefit) to fit different campaigns in the same world, let alone different worlds. 3.5e made the pretense of standardizing things that are not standard. Consistency is a false ideal when applied against things that have strong natural variation.

A foundation on which to base something on which you may need to modify is better than no foundation or support at all though.

A Stronghold-builder's Guide would only work for one portion of one world, in one type of campaign. For the rest of the game-playing group it's useless and a distraction from the point of the game. 5e is explicitly not a fantasy world simulator. It's not designed to do that. And that's a good thing. 3.5e tried, and failed miserably. I probably should sig this, but here's the quote from how 5e is sold and marketed (from the back of the PHB):

What you're asking is for the system to do something it was expressly designed not to do. You're blaming a shovel for not being a good hammer. There are other games to play if you want to do pseudo-medieval Sims. Don't shove a bunch of unrelated material in that cuts across the design, bloating it and allowing breakage of the rest of the game, just to fill that niche that was never promised.

And by following this blindly you go back to the OPs issue: That gold is worthless, and this credo actually creates the issue that Malifice stated adventuring for the sake of adventuring, with nothing to do with the spoils. So it sounds more like a 5e issue, not a 3e. So are you saying an ideal 5e campaign for you is nothing but a pack of murder hobos, moving from one slaughter site to another?

And I disagree that Stronghold builders was a distraction from the point of the game. The point of the game is to enjoy yourselves, and some people like building the world they live in, making a lasting contribution to it, not just raiding dungeons, killing stuff, and amassing a horde of coin as if we were dragons and having nothing to do with it. After all, you're seeking "legendary treasure" in 5e... but you have almost nothing you can do with it, unless you can use it to kill or protect yourself from being killed.

gameogre

2017-10-23, 09:08 AM

Mikal

2017-10-23, 09:13 AM

This thread shows how we ended up with Pathfinder and how a large portion of the player base demands more and more details and complexity.

If it takes you longer than 10 minutes to come up with 50 things for players to spend money on (much less 10+hours) go play another game where you can find everything you could possible think up written out for you.

Seriously, coming to the boards with this type of issue with this type of attitude is just taking steps in the wrong direction.

Pathfinder, you mean a game with a large fan base that's been successful for many years, based off a system that itself was successful for many years?

Yeah, that sounds terrible. Horrible.

And sorry, I guess I should have said that if I wanted to, I could take 10 minutes to throw up any sort of bullcrap I wanted to have players spend money on, but I try to run a quality game, which means anything I try to introduce outside of the rules requires more than 10 minutes. Because I think it through since I know doing so ahead of time saves a lot of time and trouble down the road.

Just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks is the type of attitude that takes games in the wrong direction and causes players to not stay interested long term.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-23, 09:21 AM

Bodyguards, at least not the ones you can buy with some gold, are not a lot of help (nor is land, titles, or much else) against epic level casters. Maybe if I had a couple of Solars or Gold Dragons on retainer, but at level 13, I do not, and don't imagine many that do.

You're making a lot of assumption about people's game worlds and seem to not be addressing the existence of BBEGs. What good is health insurance or concubines if the world is ending?

To add to that, all of those things would cost a fraction of the gold of even one legendary artifact.

The truth is 5e half-assed a lot of things and "wealth and magic items" is the greatest offender.

gameogre

2017-10-23, 09:23 AM

Pathfinder, you mean a game with a large fan base that's been successful for many years, based off a system that itself was successful for many years?

Yeah, that sounds terrible. Horrible.

And sorry, I guess I should have said that if I wanted to, I could take 10 minutes to throw up any sort of bullcrap I wanted to have players spend money on, but I try to run a quality game, which means anything I try to introduce outside of the rules requires more than 10 minutes. Because I think it through since I know doing so ahead of time saves a lot of time and trouble down the road.

Just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks is the type of attitude that takes games in the wrong direction and causes players to not stay interested long term.

Yes Pathfinder! The game is perfectly fine. It caters to a fan base that want everything spelled out for them in as much detail as possible. There is nothing wrong with that. It's fine to like rule heavy games.

It's also fine to not like them and be a game more rules lite. That is the direction 5E went! It's great! BUT don't play 5E and demand and get upset that it isnt Pathfinder!

I don't go to the Pathfinder threads and demand they need to cut out all these damn rules!

edited to add.

You know attitude has a lot to do with it. If this had been a thread like "I need more crap for my party to spend gold on,you guys wanna help me flush it out? What do you guys do" the thread would have been filled with all kinds of bits to help out the issue. The fact that it's railing against the type of game 5E is and saying this is crap! I think they should have made it a different game! Is the reason you are getting the response you are.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 09:24 AM

To add to that, all of those things would cost a fraction of the gold of even one legendary artifact.

The truth is 5e half-assed a lot of things and "wealth and magic items" is the greatest offender.

I have to disagree with some of that, from a pedantic point of view.

Mainly the cost difference in people services vs. legendary items. Personally, I have no problems with legendary items being nearly priceless like that. After all, they're supposed to be only a few of them in the world. How much does the Mona Lisa cost vs. the people who guard her?

I do agree on wealth and magic items in general though. When it takes over a year to create certain spell scrolls or potions, and the same cost as a small business, then there's something wrong. Why would anyone ever create a 9th level spell scroll, for example?

Yes Pathfinder! The game is perfectly fine. It caters to a fan base that want everything spelled out for them in as much detail as possible. There is nothing wrong with that. It's fine to like rule heavy games.

It's also fine to not like them and be a game more rules lite. That is the direction 5E went! It's great! BUT don't play 5E and demand and get upset that it isnt Pathfinder!

I don't go to the Pathfinder threads and demand they need to cut out all these damn rules!

Except that it's easier to not use those types of rules if they exist, and hard to create them when they don't.
I thought 5e was the big "player agency" game. How can you have agency in a system that doesn't give you proper support on what to spend your resources on?

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 09:26 AM

A foundation on which to base something on which you may need to modify is better than no foundation or support at all though.

But a foundation built for your world is worse than useless for my world. They're different worlds. More specifically, having this foundation sets expectations for players that may or may not be able to be met. It also takes time and development resources away from the main selling point of the game.

And by following this blindly you go back to the OPs issue: That gold is worthless, and this credo actually creates the issue that Malifice stated adventuring for the sake of adventuring, with nothing to do with the spoils. So it sounds more like a 5e issue, not a 3e. So are you saying an ideal 5e campaign for you is nothing but a pack of murder hobos, moving from one slaughter site to another?

This is a huge straw-man. "Not worrying about the mechanics of owning property" != "a pack of murder hobos, moving from one slaughter site to another." I posted about my party up above. They have tons of money (as in, money is an abstraction at this point), but they have goals that are unrelated to cash or building empires on-screen. They're out preventing forces from the Far Realms from breaking down the walls of reality itself. Why? Because they think they can do something about it,
and would rather not see reality collapse. For one of them, it's personal. That's a proper adventure to me.

I've never actually played with a murder hobo. I've never seen one in game, because they're playing people with goals and the game world responds to their actions.

And I disagree that Stronghold builders was a distraction from the point of the game. The point of the game is to enjoy yourselves, and some people like building the world they live in, making a lasting contribution to it, not just raiding dungeons, killing stuff, and amassing a horde of coin as if we were dragons and having nothing to do with it. After all, you're seeking "legendary treasure" in 5e... but you have almost nothing you can do with it, unless you can use it to kill or protect yourself from being killed.

There is benefit to the journey, to the adventure. Possessing the legendary treasure is no more the point of the game than is being at the top of a tall mountain. It's the adventure along the way that is the entire point.

You want your coin to be a form of alternate mechanical character advancement. Doing so either requires a tightly-enforced WBL table (and all the other mechanics of 3.5 associated with those) or will end up shattering the balance of gameplay. Of course, all those things in 3.5 were a major source of imbalance--WBL-mancy was a thing, after all. It becomes a power treadmill and either a) shatters the assumptions made for challenge balance or b) becomes a minimum threshold required to continue. Both of those are a strong distraction and a negative thing from my perspective. Wealth, status, etc. should have exactly as much effect as you and the DM decide between yourselves makes sense for that situation, at that time.

How much does a stronghold cost? In the Council Lands, it depends strongly on where you build it, but there's no concept of hereditary nobility. The society is guild-oriented with children assigned to trades based on divination. In Bysia, the idea is silly (due to culture)--it's a pastoral setting. In the Stone Throne, noble caste status can't be bought. It's either hereditary or is gifted based on deeds done. In the Dynasty, you have to be part of one of the dragonborn clans to be a noble.

That's why having a baseline sets expectations that may or may not be able to be met. It's so strongly setting (and micro-setting) dependent that it's a waste of time for a published work.

gameogre

2017-10-23, 09:29 AM

I have to disagree with some of that, from a pedantic point of view.

Mainly the cost difference in people services vs. legendary items. Personally, I have no problems with legendary items being nearly priceless like that. After all, they're supposed to be only a few of them in the world. How much does the Mona Lisa cost vs. the people who guard her?

I do agree on wealth and magic items in general though. When it takes over a year to create certain spell scrolls or potions, and the same cost as a small business, then there's something wrong. Why would anyone ever create a 9th level spell scroll, for example?

Except that it's easier to not use those types of rules if they exist, and hard to create them when they don't.
I thought 5e was the big "player agency" game. How can you have agency in a system that doesn't give you proper support on what to spend your resources on?

Because Less is more.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-23, 09:29 AM

Not for me and thousands of players like me it isn't.

gameogre

2017-10-23, 09:31 AM

Not for me and thousands of players like me it isn't.

You are right.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 09:31 AM

Why would anyone ever create a 9th level spell scroll, for example?

Player Characters wouldn't. Remember, in 5e NPCs explicitly don't follow the same rules as PCs do. That's by design. Magic item creation rules are for PCs, not NPCs.

I thought 5e was the big "player agency" game. How can you have agency in a system that doesn't give you proper support on what to spend your resources on?

That is a false dichotomy mixed with argument by definition mixed with straw-man. You could say the same thing about games that have an abstract wealth system. "Player agency" means that your actions have consequences in game. That's true. Having support for building a stronghold is completely unrelated to agency. Agency does not require that any possible action have positive outcomes. It's like you're trying to play Call of Cthulhu as a monster-slaying game and getting mad that you keep going horribly horribly insane and dying without slaying any epic monsters.

Games have specific foci. If you want a system that claims to support certain things, go play one that makes that claim. Don't try to force it into a system that doesn't make that claim (and in fact opposes that claim explicitly).

Slipperychicken

2017-10-23, 09:34 AM

What are you theorycrafting?

Do you need rules for how awesome it is to be wealthy, and how much advantages it brings, and why most people desire it?

Isnt that kind of self evident?

If we don't know what kind of money others make, or the cost of luxuries and services, we have no idea how rich the PCs are or what their wealth allows them to do. In the same way that damage numbers only have meaning when compared to hit points, some economic reference points are needed to contextualize wealth so that players and GMs can determine the players' influence in the world.

And we don't need to simulate a whole economy for this either: Most of this could be solved with two tables: One outlining the typical monthly earnings and savings of people at different levels of society, the other outlining typical expenses for hirelings, bribes, and entertainment services. The lifestyle rules are almost a nod toward this, but do not give all the necessary details.

It's well within scope for a sword and sorcery game about finding treasure to feature a price table so PCs can waste their money on women or other luxuries.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 09:35 AM

But a foundation built for your world is worse than useless for my world. They're different worlds. More specifically, having this foundation sets expectations for players that may or may not be able to be met. It also takes time and development resources away from the main selling point of the game.

So in other words, you don't need it, so no one needs it? And it doesn't have to take time and development resource away from the main selling point of the game. We aren't talking about having an entire book dedicated to it here, even if I personally would love one.

This is a huge straw-man. "Not worrying about the mechanics of owning property" != "a pack of murder hobos, moving from one slaughter site to another." I posted about my party up above. They have tons of money (as in, money is an abstraction at this point), but they have goals that are unrelated to cash or building empires on-screen. They're out preventing forces from the Far Realms from breaking down the walls of reality itself. Why? Because they think they can do something about it,
and would rather not see reality collapse. For one of them, it's personal. That's a proper adventure to me.

You quoted the PHB blurb. The PHB blurb is pure murder hoboism. "Kill stuff! Take treasure! Kill more stuff! Become powerful!" is a nice paraphrase of the blurb I think. Not a strawman.

And I'm glad that you like a game where people don't have downtime to actually pursue goals, only running from one emergency to another to break down the walls of reality. But that's not a campaign, that's like you said, an adventure.

A part of D&D campaigns historically has always been about helping carve your place in the world, and for many that means gaining resources, titles, followers, and lands.

There is benefit to the journey, to the adventure. Possessing the legendary treasure is no more the point of the game than is being at the top of a tall mountain. It's the adventure along the way that is the entire point.

And for some the adventure is to become a power in the land, and to defend it. Your preferred style completely craps on someone whose goals may be to do so. My preferred style allows for that as well as your style. If you prefer to have such a narrowly focused game, that's good for you. There are many however who want more from the game, and you can do so without having 3.x levels of complexity involved.

You want your coin to be a form of alternate mechanical character advancement. Doing so either requires a tightly-enforced WBL table (and all the other mechanics of 3.5 associated with those) or will end up shattering the balance of gameplay. Of course, all those things in 3.5 were a major source of imbalance--WBL-mancy was a thing, after all. It becomes a power treadmill and either a) shatters the assumptions made for challenge balance or b) becomes a minimum threshold required to continue. Both of those are a strong distraction and a negative thing from my perspective. Wealth, status, etc. should have exactly as much effect as you and the DM decide between yourselves makes sense for that situation, at that time.

No, I want basic guidelines and mechanics that support doing something with resources that you receive as a reward for your adventuring instead of having to pull it out of my pants.

How much does a stronghold cost? In the Council Lands, it depends strongly on where you build it, but there's no concept of hereditary nobility. The society is guild-oriented with children assigned to trades based on divination. In Bysia, the idea is silly (due to culture)--it's a pastoral setting. In the Stone Throne, noble caste status can't be bought. It's either hereditary or is gifted based on deeds done. In the Dynasty, you have to be part of one of the dragonborn clans to be a noble.

That's why having a baseline sets expectations that may or may not be able to be met. It's so strongly setting (and micro-setting) dependent that it's a waste of time for a published work.

Except that you can modify your baseline dependent on the different kingdoms.

In the council lands, you would get a modifier to cost based on where you built it, since there's no hereditary nobility, dependent on which guild holds sway. In Bysia, you use the basic costs because no one there really cares since it's a pastoral setting. In the Stone Throne location, once you gain a noble title you can use the basic tables for cost. In the Dynasty, once you marry into the dragonborn clans you can use the base cost.

None of your examples would be negated by the inclusion of basic mechanics being available, and in fact would make the job of creating the strongholds easier once you figure out how to do so legally... or illegally, if your group is so inclined.

Player Characters wouldn't. Remember, in 5e NPCs explicitly don't follow the same rules as PCs do. That's by design. Magic item creation rules are for PCs, not NPCs.

So in other worlds, NPCs get to do awesome stuff while players don't. There goes that whole "player agency" thing people love about 5e. "Sorry Bob, but despite being 20th level and an archmage, you still can't create the scroll with the efficiency of Elminster back when he was only 18th level." Seems like NPCs in that situation are making more of an impact than a PC.

That is a false dichotomy mixed with argument by definition mixed with straw-man.

Where's the Straw Man? People say that Player Agency is huge for 5e. How does the previous item and the magic item creation issue not weaken it?

You could say the same thing about games that have an abstract wealth system. "Player agency" means that your actions have consequences in game. That's true. Having support for building a stronghold is completely unrelated to agency. Agency does not require that any possible action have positive outcomes. It's like you're trying to play Call of Cthulhu as a monster-slaying game and getting mad that you keep going horribly horribly insane and dying without slaying any epic monsters.

A player wants to build a stronghold and/or become a noble in the game world. The DM shoots it down because all he cares about is murder-hoboing.

That's weakening player agency to a degree, in my eyes. Same with making it 10s or 100s of times as difficult and expensive to craft a spell scroll. Again, if you want to play such a narrowly focused game, you can. I prefer a better world myself, one where people can actually play their characters, not just move them through raids or instances. Same reason I don't play AL.

To me, running a game with that kind of narrow focus is essentially like playing an MMO, and frankly MMOs do it better. Especially since successful MMOs actually allow you to do things that the type of game you're focusing on can't do... (such as building houses/vehicles/bases, creating businesses, etc.)

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 09:45 AM

So in other words, you don't need it, so no one needs it? And it doesn't have to take time and development resource away from the main selling point of the game. We aren't talking about having an entire book dedicated to it here, even if I personally would love one.

There are basic rules. DMG chapter 6, page 128. They're not as detailed as you like, but they're still there.

You quoted the PHB blurb. The PHB blurb is pure murder hoboism. "Kill stuff! Take treasure! Kill more stuff! Become powerful!" is a nice paraphrase of the blurb I think. Not a strawman.

And I'm glad that you like a game where people don't have downtime to actually pursue goals, only running from one emergency to another to break down the walls of reality. But that's not a campaign, that's like you said, an adventure.

A part of D&D campaigns historically has always been about helping carve your place in the world, and for many that means gaining resources, titles, followers, and lands.

My party has a place in society. There aren't explicit mechanical details associated with it because it happens off-screen. The amount of rules required to do so would be prohibitive.

Except that you can modify your baseline dependent on the different kingdoms.

In the council lands, you would get a modifier to cost based on where you built it, since there's no hereditary nobility, dependent on which guild holds sway. In Bysia, you use the basic costs because no one there really cares since it's a pastoral setting. In the Stone Throne location, once you gain a noble title you can use the basic tables for cost. In the Dynasty, once you marry into the dragonborn clans you can use the base cost.

None of your examples would be negated by the inclusion of basic mechanics being available, and in fact would make the job of creating the strongholds easier once you figure out how to do so legally... or illegally, if your group is so inclined.

No, you don't understand. No one builds individual strongholds in any land except the Stone Throne, and there the political situation is...dicy. As in, you'd be hounded out of town for trying. It's like telling a medieval peasant that you're building an airplane. A character with the goal "Build a fortress and defend it" would not fit in my world. That's fine. Different worlds for different people. But if there's an expectation that those are available, it makes the job harder for everyone else.

Really. Go read page 131 of the DMG. Specifically the bullet points under "Creating Downtime activities".

If you invent new downtime activities, remember the following:

* An activity should never negate the need or desire for characters to go on adventures.
* Activities that have a monetary cost associated with them provide opportunities for player characters to spend their hard-won treasure.

See that first bullet point--that's the guiding philosophy of the game. The world is there to serve as the stage for adventures. If you don't agree with that philosophy, then play something else that's designed around a different one. Not all games are made for all styles. Find one that fits yours instead of breaking one that fits ours so that it sort-of fits yours.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 09:52 AM

There are basic rules. DMG chapter 6, page 128. They're not as detailed as you like, but they're still there.

Yes. Which I had noted previously were insufficient for even basic world building, and only apply if you want to have a business that, the majority of the time, will never be able to expand because the profit margins are unrealistic. And don't talk about building strongholds, followers, etc.

My party has a place in society. There aren't explicit mechanical details associated with it because it happens off-screen. The amount of rules required to do so would be prohibitive.

Strange how previous editions were able to do so without the rules detailing them becoming prohibitive. Plus the fact that, if they do become a strait jacket for your game, it's much easier for you to remove the rules than it is for myself and thousands like me to spend time creating them from whole cloth.

No, you don't understand. No one builds individual strongholds in any land except the Stone Throne, and there the political situation is...dicy. As in, you'd be hounded out of town for trying. It's like telling a medieval peasant that you're building an airplane. A character with the goal "Build a fortress and defend it" would not fit in my world. That's fine. Different worlds for different people. But if there's an expectation that those are available, it makes the job harder for everyone else.

So rather than allow options, you want murder-hobo MMO style D&D where one goes from adventure to adventure only. I got it. Many of us want more from the game, and D&D has provided it before. There's no reason not to now.

Really. Go read page 131 of the DMG. Specifically the bullet points under "Creating Downtime activities".

Ok. Creating a stronghold doesn't do either of the things mentioned there. If anyone, it opens up pathways for adventures that the PCs may not have had available to them previously. So... thanks for showing why there should be downtime activities and rules which can help breed adventure?

See that first bullet point--that's the guiding philosophy of the game. The world is there to serve as the stage for adventures. If you don't agree with that philosophy, then play something else that's designed around a different one. Not all games are made for all styles. Find one that fits yours instead of breaking one that fits ours so that it sort-of fits yours.

If gaining land and a stronghold can't be used as a stage for adventuring, then you probably aren't trying very hard. And if your campaign doesn't have an opening for strongholds, that doesn't mean that dozens or hundreds of groups out there do have those openings, but can't utilize them because the foundation doesn't exist for them to work off of, and they don't have the time to create it from scratch.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-23, 10:02 AM

That is a false dichotomy mixed with argument by definition mixed with straw-man.

Dude you can't just say logical fallacies and expect to win an argument. It's just obnoxious.

imanidiot

2017-10-23, 10:03 AM

gameogre

2017-10-23, 10:05 AM

Strange how previous editions were able to do so without the rules detailing them becoming prohibitive. Plus the fact that, if they do become a strait jacket for your game, it's much easier for you to remove the rules than it is for myself and thousands like me to spend time creating them from whole cloth.

So rather than allow options, you want murder-hobo MMO style D&D where one goes from adventure to adventure only. I got it. Many of us want more from the game, and D&D has provided it before. There's no reason not to now.

.

What do you want here? What are you trying to do? Is it just complain?

You keep saying"and thousands like me feel the same way" but the truth is the game got MUCH more popular when they chops out these rules you so desperately need and want.

Hundreds of thousands like ME want a rules lite ish game that doesn't have to spell everything out of the DM. For a vast multitude of reasons we don't want the books cluttered with these type things.

Your not convincing anyone here that these rules NEED to be included. Only that YOU are not happy that they were not.

Ok we got that. No we don't agree. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with you wanting that type of information if you need it only that there are plenty of ways to deal with your issue.

I offered the BEST way in my opinion. To sit down and think up your own.

If that doesn't work go grab another older editions rules on the matter, or another game systems.

At some point you are just wailing for the sake of wailing.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-23, 10:08 AM

Fielding an army of 100 soldiers costs a minimum of 6000 gold per month. That's if you provide them with no shelter whatsoever and leave them yo their own devices to forage for food. An effective army of 100 fighting men with food and shelter and an appropriate retinue of skilled and unskilled laborers to support them is going to cost 21, 600 gold per month. A typical 2 year military campaign is going to cost you in the neighborhood of 518, 000 gold.

And that's just 100 men. If you're fighting a war on the borderlands with an army of expansionist hobgoblins, a temporary army of 1000 mercenaries will cost you 216, 000 gold PER MONTH.

For real though do people exist who actually want to try to control 100 soldiers in a combat situation?

As a DM I would absolutely never run that table and as a player I'd go home before I sit through that.

I offered the BEST way in my opinion. To sit down and think up your own.

If that doesn't work go grab another older editions rules on the matter, or another game systems.

At some point you are just wailing for the sake of wailing.

It makes zero sense to not have optional rules for this sort of thing. The only reasons to not do it are either the developers weren't talented enough to figure out a way to make it work or else they ran out of time and budget.

Which, considering the sorry shape the original playtest rules were in, is probably the closest estimate to the truth.

gameogre

2017-10-23, 10:11 AM

For real though do people exist who actually want to try to control 100 soldiers in a combat situation?

As a DM I would absolutely never run that table and as a player I'd go home before I sit through that.

It makes zero sense to not have optional rules for this sort of thing. The only reasons to not do it are either the developers weren't talented enough to figure out a way to make it work or else they ran out of time and budget.

Which, considering the sorry shape the original playtest rules were in, is probably the closest estimate to the truth.

Just because you don't see the sense doesn't mean it's not there.

Edited to add.

but again, How can this thread help you? What are you wanting from us your fellow posters?

UrielAwakened

2017-10-23, 10:12 AM

That's not an argument.

gameogre

2017-10-23, 10:13 AM

That's not an argument.

I'm not trying to argue!

UrielAwakened

2017-10-23, 10:14 AM

Then why are you here?

Like for real your participation in this dialog is not adding anything.

gameogre

2017-10-23, 10:16 AM

Then why are you here?

Like for real your participation in this dialog is not adding anything.

ok check! You guys are just wanting to Wail and scream! got it. I'm happy to ignore it and let you yell into the night!

jas61292

2017-10-23, 10:18 AM

So in other worlds, NPCs get to do awesome stuff while players don't. There goes that whole "player agency" thing people love about 5e. "Sorry Bob, but despite being 20th level and an archmage, you still can't create the scroll with the efficiency of Elminster back when he was only 18th level." Seems like NPCs in that situation are making more of an impact than a PC.

NPCs don't follow PC rules because PC rules are for adventurers. That is a core assumption of 5e. This is not 3.x where the rules try to be physics engine for the entire would. Rather, the rules simply try and facilitate standard play, and standard play assumes PCs are adventurers. If you are an adventurer, you are not a dedicated craftsman, and thus are not going to be able to make things as fast. And if you want to be a craftsman... find another game, because craftsmen are not adventurers, and 5e is about adventurers.

This is not stretching believability. It's not saying that a character who is "you, but an NPC" can craft better than you. It's simply saying that someone built like a PC is focused on adventuring, first and foremost, and any other talents they have will not compare to people as dedicated to their trade as PCs are to adventuring.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 10:19 AM

What do you want here? What are you trying to do? Is it just complain?

You keep saying"and thousands like me feel the same way" but the truth is the game got MUCH more popular when they chops out these rules you so desperately need and want.

Which changes the fact that many still want these rules how...?

EDIT: Also, I'm curious to see what the actual total sales of 3.x books (not just the PHB, whose content was OGL and thus available for everyone) is compared to 5e books. Both with and without Pathfinder included.

Hundreds of thousands like ME want a rules lite ish game that doesn't have to spell everything out of the DM. For a vast multitude of reasons we don't want the books cluttered with these type things.

Your not convincing anyone here that these rules NEED to be included. Only that YOU are not happy that they were not.

Just me? Strange, since this entire thread started because someone else wanted these rules included. Which is it? Thousands of people like me? Or just me?

At some point you are just wailing for the sake of wailing.

I'm not the one taking personal offense because someone is talking about wanting options on what to do with a common reward in a game system with very little to nothing to spend it on.

I'm not trying to argue!

No. You seem to be trying to force everyone to play your way, instead of allowing for the fact that added rule complexity, or even something basic to spend tens of thousands of gold pieces on may make for a better game.

Mister_Squinty

2017-10-23, 10:22 AM

Mikal

2017-10-23, 10:22 AM

NPCs don't follow PC rules because PC rules are for adventurers. That is a core assumption of 5e. This is not 3.x where the rules try to be physics engine for the entire would. Rather, the rules simply try and facilitate standard play, and standard play assumes PCs are adventurers. If you are an adventurer, you are not a dedicated craftsman, and thus are not going to be able to make things as fast. And if you want to be a craftsman... find another game, because craftsmen are not adventurers, and 5e is about adventurers.

This is not stretching believability. It's not saying that a character who is "you, but an NPC" can craft better than you. It's simply saying that someone built like a PC is focused on adventuring, first and foremost, and any other talents they have will not compare to people as dedicated to their trade as PCs are to adventuring.

Except that your argument is invalid when an adventuring NPC wizard is able to make the 9th level spell scroll just as easily as the dedicated craftsman... who is also capable of casting 9th level spells somehow.

I'm not saying it needs to be at the level of 3.x rulesets, but yes, I would expect that a game where X occurs, X is achievable by both PC and NPCs.

gameogre

2017-10-23, 10:24 AM

I don't have a clue if this holds ANY interest for you or helps in any way. I just thought of it while about 2 seconds after I left the thread. It doesn't fit every Dm's ideas about what to spend money on but I thought if you had never seen it it might help you out some. Maybe not!
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?424243-Sane-Magic-Item-Prices

Slipperychicken

2017-10-23, 10:26 AM

For real though do people exist who actually want to try to control 100 soldiers in a combat situation?

As a DM I would absolutely never run that table and as a player I'd go home before I sit through that.

Mass combat rules are a thing in games that try to include it. I imagine 5e will get its own half-hearted attempt someday, though there are proven approaches one could borrow from other games, like treating units on a high level sort of like individual monsters.

Most of the "perks" of having money would involve no longer adventuring.... At least, that's what most real people would do.

Most real people wouldn't hurl themselves into the claws of a dragon, either :smalltongue:

EvilAnagram

2017-10-23, 10:30 AM

What's wrong with the current pricing of magic items?

I enjoy seeing my players scrape together every scrap of wealth they have acquired to buy an Oathbow for the Ranger after the merchant agrees to sell it at half price for a favor. Why, my players just walked away with one rare and two uncommon magic items, plus a healing potion. It only cost them everything they had and some solid rolls, and now they feel much better going into the last leg of the campaign, where told riches await (told riches are much more reliable than untold riches).

I like how difficult it is to acquire a decent magic item. It makes them much more rewarding when the players get them.

jas61292

2017-10-23, 10:35 AM

Except that your argument is invalid when an adventuring NPC wizard is able to make the 9th level spell scroll just as easily as the dedicated craftsman... who is also capable of casting 9th level spells somehow.

I'm not saying it needs to be at the level of 3.x rulesets, but yes, I would expect that a game where X occurs, X is achievable by both PC and NPCs.

Who says the adventuring NPC wizard can make the scroll? That goes right back to what I said. Them simply being NPCs doesn't grant them that capability. Rather, they have that ability only if the DM deems it appropriate for them. And if your DM gives that ability to "you but an NPC," but doesn't let you have it, that's a DM problem, not a rules problem.

The point of NPCs not following PC rules is that they are not assumed to be adventurers. NPC Wizard Bob is not able to create 9th level scrolls because he is equivalent to a 17th level caster. No, NPC Wizard Bob can create 9th level scrolls because he retired from adventuring decades ago and has been honing his scroll creation ability ever since. He's just as useless as the PC when it comes to brewing complex potions or crafting magical hats, because those are not the NPCs area of expertise.

But yes, an NPC the DM creates that is a master magical craftsman will be... a master magical craftsman. And that is not a skill an adventurer can get by adventuring.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 10:40 AM

Who says the adventuring NPC wizard can make the scroll? That goes right back to what I said. Them simply being NPCs doesn't grant them that capability. Rather, they have that ability only if the DM deems it appropriate for them. And if your DM gives that ability to "you but an NPC," but doesn't let you have it, that's a DM problem, not a rules problem.

If one type of caster is using rules X to make item Y, all casters of that type should use rule X to make item Y. Why should a PC get a "tax" of tens or hundreds of thousands of gold pieces to make a single 9th level spell scroll that an NPC doesn't?

The point of NPCs not following PC rules is that they are not assumed to be adventurers. NPC Wizard Bob is not able to create 9th level scrolls because he is equivalent to a 17th level caster. No, NPC Wizard Bob can create 9th level scrolls because he retired from adventuring decades ago and has been honing his scroll creation ability ever since. He's just as useless as the PC when it comes to brewing complex potions or crafting magical hats, because those are not the NPCs area of expertise.

Or, instead of creating a bunch of mental gymnastics into how that retirement somehow lets the craftsmen avoid paying tens to hundreds of thousands of gold pieces to make a single spell scroll, we have a ruleset that allows both NPCs and PCs equal footing in creation of said spell scrolls?

But yes, an NPC the DM creates that is a master magical craftsman will be... a master magical craftsman. And that is not a skill an adventurer can get by adventuring.

I'd still love to hear how being a craftsman automagically saves you several dragon horde's worth of treasure whenever you make a single spell scroll though.

Willie the Duck

2017-10-23, 10:41 AM

Except that your argument is invalid when an adventuring NPC wizard is able to make the 9th level spell scroll just as easily as the dedicated craftsman... who is also capable of casting 9th level spells somehow.

Why? What about that scenario makes the argument invalid?

I'm not saying it needs to be at the level of 3.x rulesets, but yes, I would expect that a game where X occurs, X is achievable by both PC and NPCs.

Yes, that is a preference that you have. In which case a very deliberate design conceit, that was only not the case in D&D for 1-2 editions (I don't remember how it works in 4e), does not fit your preferences.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 10:43 AM

Why? What about that scenario makes the argument invalid?

Because he was saying in one part that it's a difference in NPCs vs. PCs, and used an example of a dedicated craftsman... despite that an adventuring NPC by default would also be able to make the items as easily as the craftsman.

Specifically

NPCs don't follow PC rules because PC rules are for adventurers.

Yes, that is a preference that you have. In which case a very deliberate design conceit, that was only not the case in D&D for 1-2 editions (I don't remember how it works in 4e), does not fit your preferences.

Yes. My preferences and many other people's preferences as well. Else this thread, and the dozens of others on this board and hundreds (thousands?) elsewhere would not exist.

And a preference that is sorely lacking for everyone who made those threads, or other threads about custom item costs and creation rules, and so on.

jas61292

2017-10-23, 10:47 AM

If one type of caster is using rules X to make item Y, all casters of that type should use rule X to make item Y. Why should a PC get a "tax" of tens or hundreds of thousands of gold pieces to make a single 9th level spell scroll that an NPC doesn't?

That is 3.x thinking that I and many others fundamentally disagree with. The rules for two different people doing the same thing do not have to be the same when there is substantial differences between who and what the characters are. The rules are not a physics engine for the world, and them not working identically for everyone is a feature, because not everyone in the world is an adventurer.

Or, instead of creating a bunch of mental gymnastics into how that retirement somehow lets the craftsmen avoid paying tens to hundreds of thousands of gold pieces to make a single spell scroll, we have a ruleset that allows both NPCs and PCs equal footing in creation of said spell scrolls?

I'd still love to hear how being a craftsman automagically saves you several dragon horde's worth of treasure whenever you make a single spell scroll though.

Or, if you must have an explanation, you assume that the level of expertise a dedicated craftsman has allows them to create things for less, and that the numbers provided in the optional crafting rules have the costs of expected errors due to lack of expertise built in.

Besides, are you tracking NPC wealth? Who cares what it costs them. It's irrelevant to gameplay.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 10:54 AM

That is 3.x thinking that I and many others fundamentally disagree with. The rules for two different people doing the same thing do not have to be the same when there is substantial differences between who and what the characters are. The rules are not a physics engine for the world, and them not working identically for everyone is a feature, because not everyone in the world is an adventurer.

Great, so explain to me how Wizard A can make a 9th level scroll for say... 1,000 gp, while the PC who actually is a better wizard must spend 500,000.

Or, if you must have an explanation, you assume that the level of expertise a dedicated craftsman has allows them to create things for less, and that the numbers provided in the optional crafting rules have the costs of expected errors due to lack of expertise built in.

Great. Now instead of adventuring, my wizard PCs retire to a small laboratory to save hundreds of thousands to millions of gold pieces in expenses, and my campaign is thrown into chaos because NPCs get things PCs don't that said PCs should logically get as well. Yeah... I think it's better if both types of characters had a more even playing field, personally.

Besides, are you tracking NPC wealth? Who cares what it costs them. It's irrelevant to gameplay.

If they're making items which would cost several hundred thousand to several million gp, and are actually making said items? Yes.
Just like I don't put monsters in a specific dungeon room without a reason, I make sure any NPCs who are making items which cost X amount have the resources to do so, and have those resources change accordingly.

Allows those investigation based PCs something to chew on if they're trying to link Lord Whoever to the Death Cult when they realize that the resources he has are being lowered in an amount commensurate with what was needed to build the Altar they smashed last week before it summoned the Pit Fiends. And that's not the only way for the PCs to find this out. I run a sandbox, living world with several ways for PCs to inventively find things should they try, with interconnectivity vs. DM fiat and/or railroading.

If you're just murder-hoboing your way through life as an adventurer, granted, it's irrelevant to gameplay to keep track of NPC net worth except at the time of their death by PC hands, but as I stated, I don't just go from raid to raid with my group when I DM.

Mister_Squinty

2017-10-23, 11:11 AM

Most real people wouldn't hurl themselves into the claws of a dragon, either :smalltongue:

No argument. That's why most of my character history is concerned with why this particular idiot is running around the countryside with a sharp pointy object instead of working on a farm, in a village, etc.

Giving adventurers significant wealth is just asking the characters to question their motivations for the risk and discomfort adventuring brings.

EvilAnagram

2017-10-23, 11:13 AM

Great, so explain to me how Wizard A can make a 9th level scroll for say... 1,000 gp, while the PC who actually is a better wizard must spend 500,000.
Why should there be 9th-level spell scrolls lying around? Those should require significant investment as legendary items. There's no reason to quantify the resources that an NPC would need to make it, but there should be an understanding that these should be legendary items and correspondingly rare.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 11:20 AM

Why should there be 9th-level spell scrolls lying around? Those should require significant investment as legendary items. There's no reason to quantify the resources that an NPC would need to make it, but there should be an understanding that these should be legendary items and correspondingly rare.

This goes back to my original question- why would anyone bother to do this? That was the original question that got sidetracked into NPC/PC rule differences.

What is the point of them? And you can't say they don't exist RAW... because you can roll for them in random hordes, and there are rules for their cost and creation. Despite the fact writing it into a spellbook is a lot easier, faster, and cheaper method of preserving/copying it.

That's the issue here. The rules have nothing on which to logically spend money on. You can either run a business that will most often than not make you lose money, thus you should never spend money on it. The rules show that any sort of actual magic item you may ever want to commission or create more than a single time are prohibitively expensive in such a manner that no one would ever bother spending their money on them, and the lifestyles are so cheap that they will never make a dent in your actual money.

So... again. What's the point of it? It's essentially useless, unless you make house rules on what to spend it on. House rules which many DMs don't have time to create with any degree of ability beyond again, tossing crap against the wall and hoping it sticks. And it's an issue that could have been alleviated by having slightly more comprehensive rules on how to build things, take land grants and make castles, or logical creation rules for consumable objects vs. a Vorpal Sword.

5E is supposed to be a game with a lot of freedom for its players, and a lot of agency. It's hard to have agency when there are no mechanical rules to help support that. Unless again... murder-hobo. In which case 5e is perfect for that style of play as is. But some of us want a little more. And there is a lot of middle ground between 5e as it stands now and the 3.5 rulesets regarding complexity, and no reason not to go there. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it, but for those of use who do like it, it would be good to have.

ZorroGames

2017-10-23, 11:30 AM

Let me save you stress. Arrange for it to be transported to my “banned as no longer being recognized as Dwarfs because of sorcerous affliation with dragons” Dankil Clan care of Flint Dankil who currently is using downtime to recover and to support the younger adventurer Dankils on mission in Chult.

There, wasn’t that easy? And for a good cause.

:smallbiggrin: :smalltongue: :smallwink:

The Dankil Clan shall toast your name (using your gold to buy the ale) to honor your generosity.

Edit: Will that be in coinage, gemstones or jewelry form for payment?

Hey there,

we are currently at the very end of the campaign "Princes of the Apocalypse". Our characters are level 13 and we have dozens of thousands of gold, but we don't know on what to spend our money. The treasure system is broken. Prices are even more broken. Gold is worth nothing, if you can't by anything useful for that. The only way to get rid of gold is, if your DM finds a way to "burn it all for some hypocritical reason" like offering you a Castle for an insane, unplausible amount of gold. If you don't believe me, read Angry GM's article (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/).

In our case, we decided to give gold at least a tiny bit of usage and offer only magic consumables in a very limited amount for purchase. Therefore, the first problem we had to deal with was that there is A LOT of inconsistency between prices. We started using Sane Magic Item Prices (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?usp=sharing) to have more realistic prices that depend on the item's power, not its rarity. Though this system is far away from being perfect, it is much more consistent than RAW. Furthermore, I created Faerûn's Vendors - A flexible vendor system for magic consumables (http://www.dmsguild.com/product/202047/Faerns-Vendors--A-flexible-vendor-system-for-magic-consumables) to provide a transparent ruling system that can easily be adjusted to fit for the DM's purpose.

But that's only one side of the coin. The other problem is that players accumulate hundrets of thousands of gold. During a 20 level campaign they are supposed to earn over 3.2 million(!!) GP. You don't believe me? Have a look at this article about game math (http://dmdavid.com/tag/what-is-the-typical-amout-of-treasure-awarded-in-a-fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-campaign/). So, if you want to make buying items not only available, but also interesting, you need to force players to make decisions on what to spend their money. This is the other side of the coin: preventing characters from swimming within an insane amount of money, that allows them to buy anything they want to - regardless of the price. If you lower their treasure, they will buy items with care. And even if they have less coins, they will be satisfied, because their so hard earned money is worth more than ever before!

The questions is, how to distribute a reasonable amount of money to players. The DMG provides dozens of treasure tables for gems, art, items, consumables and, of course, gold. But as I said, the system is broken and therefore useless. Concerning this, I want to quote a passage from the Angry GM's article (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/), I already mentioned:

Applying rules for treasure distribution that are obviously broken is even worse than applying no rules at all. In another forum someone posted a treasure table that estimated the average amount of treasure handed to the players while applying the rules of the DMG. The table is included within this article (http://dmdavid.com/tag/what-is-the-typical-amout-of-treasure-awarded-in-a-fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-campaign/). I already mentioned that the amount earmed by party during their 20 level career is 3.2 million GP by RAW. Within this thread we talked about adjusting this insane amount by applyng lower multiplicators between the differet tier levels. That would allow the DM to lower the outcome to an amount that better fits his idea of treasure distribution (e.g. the default multiplicator is 10. If you lower it to 5 the characters would only earn ~500.000 GP in their career).

It felt good for a moment, but after I thought about it for a while I asked myself: Why on earth should I ever fix a broken system for treasure distribution that is related to a pricing system that is also broken? The answer was: It makes no sense at all. A pricing system that sells Glue for 50.000+ GP, but a Sentinal Shield for only 100-500 GP is ridiculous. So, fixing the treasure distribution won't solve the problem, because it is related to the pricing system that is also broken.

After all that, I agree to Angry GM that the whole treasure distribution system is a lie and not worth the work. Firstly, if I need to spend so much work to adjust a system, only to match my personal idea of treasure ditribution, I can easily give away treasure by my own system. Secondly, if I already know how much I want to give away to my players, there is no reason to start calculating this amount to solely fit into a table of a broken system.

In conclusion: If you also have problems with treasure distribution, I suggest to do the following:

1.) Become aware of how much treasure you want to distribute for each level. This depends on what you want your players to be able to afford. You also want to ask yourself, if there are some elements to "burn money" like building Strongholds, etc. Don't panic, now that you are using your own distribution, you will always be able to adjust the wealth of your group. In my case, I allow my party to buy a very limited amount of magic consumables. I looked up Sane Magic Item Prices and found out an amount that suits my purpose.

2.) Delete all gemstones and art objects from treasure. If you and your group care as less about that as my group does, don't think about it. Just do it. Gemstones and art objects are only useful to be converted into cash (except reviving diamonds). So, I suggestion to make your DM life easier and don't care for it. Of course, if your players have fun in collecting art for their home base, you might want to go on with it - otherwise don't.

3.) Divide treasure up to several parcels and determine where you want them to be found in the advanture. Consider that you can always add potions and scrolls to your parcels as you want to. If you are running a official WotC campaign, you could also only replace the amount of gold (including gems and art objects) and leave the rest of the treasure as it is. Just do it, as you wish to.

Doing so is much easier than trying to hand out treasure according to the rules, only because you fear to break the game balance. There is no balance. Accept it. You will see that your DM life will become less complicated, because you can forget about those dozens tables that have made your life so hard.

Kind regards!

jas61292

2017-10-23, 11:30 AM

Great, so explain to me how Wizard A can make a 9th level scroll for say... 1,000 gp, while the PC who actually is a better wizard must spend 500,000.

Because being a better wizard is irrelevant. Wizards cast spells. They do not craft items. The better craftsman is better at crafting. Not the better wizard.

Great. Now instead of adventuring, my wizard PCs retire to a small laboratory to save hundreds of thousands to millions of gold pieces in expenses, and my campaign is thrown into chaos because NPCs get things PCs don't that said PCs should logically get as well.

1. Ceasing to be a PC doesn't make you better at crafting. Maybe you could be eventually, but it is not the moniker of PC that limits your crafting skill. Rather it is the fact that your job as a PC is adventurer, not craftsman.

2. Sure, go ahead and retire. Maybe eventually the character will be better at crafting. But the character is no longer your PC. They are an NPC. Roll up a new character so we can get back to adventuring. Simply put, crafting is not designed to be something an adventurer is good at. It is a profession, and you don't get better at it by delving dungeons and killing monsters. And 5e is about adventurers.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 11:34 AM

Because being a better wizard is irrelevant. Wizards cast spells. They do not craft items. The better craftsman is better at crafting. Not the better wizard.

So even if the better wizard also has the scribe/sage type of background, and has spent several tens or hundreds of thousands of GP already to have tutors teach him how to scribe and provide him a workstation as good as a scribe? All while being both smarter and more magically powerful?

What then?

1. Ceasing to be a PC doesn't make you better at crafting. Maybe you could be eventually, but it is not the moniker of PC that limits your crafting skill. Rather it is the fact that your job as a PC is adventurer, not craftsman.

Except the rules don't support that. The only divide is PC/NPC. Even if the PC should, by all rights, be as skilled if not more skilled than the craftsman (perhaps an elf who spent a century learning the art prior to becoming a wizard (perhaps as part of his apprenticeship?), and who keeps up with it during downtime), the NPC will always have the advantage because the rules say that the PC needs to spend years and hundreds of thousands of gold pieces to make that scroll while the NPC... doesn't.

And if the NPC does follow the same rules as the PC in creating those items, then why would anyone make that kind of effort for a one use item? Especially for something which can be created for the same price and effort?

Ex. Scroll of Wish vs. Ring of Three Wishes.
Both are legendary. Both require the same amount of work per RAW as legendary items.
One is usable once, and only by spellcasters who have it on their list, with a chance of failure if you're not strong enough to cast that spell normally.
One is usable three times, by anyone wearing it. I don't think you even need to attune it.

Ex. 2. Casting a 5th level spell you rarely use into a Ring of Spell Storing you created vs. creating scrolls of that spell.
Both have the same rarity.
One is usable once, and then has to be remade.
The other is infinitely reusable, as long as you "prime" it beforehand.
What's the point in making the scroll?

2. Sure, go ahead and retire. Maybe eventually the character will be better at crafting. But the character is no longer your PC. They are an NPC. Roll up a new character so we can get back to adventuring. Simply put, crafting is not designed to be something an adventurer is good at. It is a profession, and you don't get better at it by delving dungeons and killing monsters.

So in other words, instead of allowing player agency, you'd just send them off to the farm somewhere.
That is a failure in the 5e system, unless your only desire out of it is to murder-hobo and horde lots of gold with nothing to do with it besides stare at it.

lkwpeter

2017-10-23, 11:45 AM

If you read this thread, please keep in mind:

My intention: My post was some kind of personal summary from another forum, where we discussed the problem of treasure distribution over several pages and there seemed to be a lot of agreement. My aim was to share this with you. I realized that doing so without the background of the previous discussion was negligent, because a lot of people don't seem to understand the problem I am talking about - either because they didn't look up the sources I linked for proving my thesis or because they didn't understand what's exactly the point.

Understanding the problem: I was quite surprised reading replies that stated that there wasn't a problem because "There is no problem of having too much money, because I like wealthy lifestyles" or "there are homebrew systems that could give money a purpose" (buying magic items is not intended by RAW). In both cases, people told me how they dealt with the problem and sold it as if there were no problem. It's like denying that there is a lack of infracstructure for blind people in urban areas with the answer that "blind people could buy themselves a guide dog". The problem is NOT not to have a guide dog. The problem is the lack of infrastructure. Unfortunately, this is something some people don't get.

My thesis was that there is a huge mismatch between the income of adventurers (3.2 million gold) and the possibilities to spend it (trivial costs, etc.). Therefore, it's unnecessary that 5E provides dozens of tables to make the DM believe, he needs to be careful giving away treasure to the adventurers, although there is nothing to spend it on. To point this out: A DM could also reward his party with 10 million gold per encounter without spending a minute on thinking about it. It would have the same effect. The party wouldn't be able to spend most of it (besides those trivial adventuring costs). Of course, a DM can always implement some mechanics for "burning money" like Strongholds, Castles, etc. But this is already intervention and misses the point. And that leads me to the supposition that the system is broken, because it shouldn't rely on such intervention.

To whom I am talking: If you interpret my posting as being unpolite or so, just keep in mind that I am not talking to you personally. I don't intend any offense. I am just blaming the rules for being inconsistent. That's it. Furthermore, English is not my mother language (as you already might have noticed reading my posts). So, this also might be a reason. I will try my best to avoid the rough edge.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 12:02 PM

lwkpeter, you're still assuming the existence of a problem. It's only a problem if you decide it's one (or if your group decides it's one). Yes, money is relatively meaningless after low levels. That's a fact, not a problem (or a virtue). It's just a thing. Personally, I find having to deal with money annoying. Same thing with logistics. They don't fit the type of game I'm interested in running

My guide-post is does the presence of a rule or mechanic for X help me (and my group) have fun?

IF AND ONLY IF the answer to this is yes do I worry about implementation details. In this case, I've played games with such mechanics and without, and find the ones that don't sweat it more fun. That is, I'm claiming that having a mechanically-effective way of spending cash is unnecessary for me. On the contrary, I have yet to see a mechanically-effective money sink be anything other that a) game-breaking due to exploits or b) an upgrade treadmill (numbers get better, but you're locked on this path--any deviation means the system falls apart). Both of those are annoying to me.

As I see it, mechanical ways to spend money break into a few categories:

a) Items/power upgrades. This leads to the upgrade treadmill or brokenness real fast, as either the system math has to account for it or is unable to cope with it.

b) Forced money sinks. In MMOs, this is repair/ammo costs. Not so fun, and quite boring as a TTRPG mechanic.

c) Strongholds/businesses/non-combat followers. These are trickier. Either they sit in the background and are for accounting purposes, or they tend to create division between the party members. After all, only one person can be the Lord of that castle. Either everybody's doing their own thing (the wizard in his tower, the fighter with his troops, the cleric in the church, etc) in which case you have N individual parties, not one coherent party (and this makes for very limited and annoying spotlight sharing) or you have one "main person" and everyone else is just following along with them in a supporting role. Having followers also tends to lead to table bloat--either they're off-camera (in which case the original problem returns) or they're taking valuable table time away from the player characters (not good).

d) Extremely reduced treasures. This is a resource sink, just in reverse. Here, you're gating combat capability (items, potions, etc) behind completing N successful adventures. This leads to the same issues as a), since it's the same idea. It's super fragile or leads to a fixed treadmill where you run and run but don't gain any relative power.

Am I missing any options? Any that don't share these problems?

KorvinStarmast

2017-10-23, 12:03 PM

Agreed, and my only response is that various TSR edition games did have price lists for luxury goods, commodities, "dancing girls," and so forth, and at least 51% of the gaming audience seemed to have considered it fill material one flipped past to get to the crunch part of the game. I don't know where you came up with that percentage, since at our tables we used most of the tables, eventually.

D&D is burdened by having multiple audiences (whom often have directly contradictory expectations) To include a lot of video game players who don't understand recursion. :smallbiggrin: (Yes, I may have started in D&D but I enjoyed me some Diablo, I did!)

I thoroughly hope that eventually there is an official 5e "Castlebuilders Guide" or somesuch. Yeah, the 2e castle building book was pretty good. Would love to see a 5e version of that.

What's wrong with the current pricing of magic items? I enjoy seeing my players scrape together every scrap of wealth they have acquired to buy an Oathbow for the Ranger after the merchant agrees to sell it at half price for a favor. Why, my players just walked away with one rare and two uncommon magic items, plus a healing potion. It only cost them everything they had and some solid rolls, and now they feel much better going into the last leg of the campaign, where told riches await (told riches are much more reliable than untold riches).
I like how difficult it is to acquire a decent magic item. It makes them much more rewarding when the players get them. Amen, deacon.

To answer the OP:

High level spells cost you gems. Take the gold and covert a lot of it to gems to be Used During Play when casting those spells that require gems.
Let me offer you a few examples of spells with expensive components:
Awaken: 1000GP gem
Augury: 25 GP gemsticks/tokens/etc
Contingency: 1500 GP gem/statue/ivory
Heroes Feast: 1000 GP value gem encrusted bowl
Imprisonment: 500 GP per HP of the target depiction of; the bigger the target in CR, the more expensive ....
Magic Jar: 500 GP gem
Simulacrum: 1500 GP worth of Ruby Dust
True Resurrection: 25,000 GP diamond dust
Resurrection 1000 GP Diamond
Raise Dead: 500 GP diamond
OK, I hope you get the picture.

The other thing GP is good for is paying for information.
Where can I find a magical sword? Well, after spending a bit of money on bribes and on a sage who specializes in history, we find that on an island in the eastern ocean is legend of a sword called flame tongue in the hoard of a blue dragon ... the only way to get a ship captain to get you close enough to that island for you to plunder it is to pay him 15, 000, since he's worried that this voyage could be his last should the dragon be awake ...

Here is my assessment of your actual problem.
You don't lack things to do with gold, your table collectively seems to lack imagination. (DM included)\

This Isn't A Video Game.

Meta

2017-10-23, 12:23 PM

I'm pretty sure once a caster in a given game world can cast Simulacrum, said game world's magic item economy is about to be upended anyways. Putting your simulacrums to work in a magic item factory is mundane but very effective.

I would say don't focus too hard on the specific numbers, they fall apart. Our group has decided that the time it takes to create a magic item is:

PC level X 100 GP progress per day worked.

When you hit the worth of the item (as listed in the downtime UA) you finish.

jas61292

2017-10-23, 12:25 PM

So in other words, instead of allowing player agency, you'd just send them off to the farm somewhere.
That is a failure in the 5e system, unless your only desire out of it is to murder-hobo and horde lots of gold with nothing to do with it besides stare at it.

Basically, your problem is that you want 5e to be something it is not. 5e is a game about adventurers going on adventures. It is not a "fantasy life simulator." Yes, the crafting rules are awkward. But that is because it is an optional addition not baked into the core game.

The default assumption is not that it takes thousands of gold and many years to make items. Rather it's that PCs cannot make magic items, period. In fact, magic items (if they even exist, being optional themselves), exist only as the DM wants them to, whether that means they were made by an ancient civilization, by gods, by powerful magical creatures, or, yes, by dedicated craftsmen.

And if the DM so chooses for them to exist and PCs to be able to make them, it is completely up to them to determine what makes any NPCs as good or better than the PCs. And simply saying that a PC who is adventuring simply cannot gain the skill to compare to such a craftsman is perfectly fine. If you want to say that you should be able to become as good if you train the same way, that is fine. But if you train that way, you are likely no longer a 5e PC, because 5e PCs are adventurers.

mephnick

2017-10-23, 12:36 PM

Basically, your problem is that you want 5e to be something it is not.

Probably 90% of the problems people have with D&D is trying to force a game style that is better served by other systems. There is a reason a monumental variety of very specific systems exist: to achieve specific design goals that other systems do not meet. Do your research and play a game that isn't designed around wilderness and dungeon adventures. It's not a hard concept.

People who want to raid dark forests and volcanos while killing monsters during a resource grinding adventuring day, here's D&D.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 01:01 PM

Probably 90% of the problems people have with D&D is trying to force a game style that is better served by other systems. There is a reason a monumental variety of very specific systems exist: to achieve specific design goals that other systems do not meet. Do your research and play a game that isn't designed around wilderness and dungeon adventures. It's not a hard concept.

People who want to raid dark forests and volcanos while killing monsters during a resource grinding adventuring day, here's D&D.

It's strange though- people are fine with it when it comes to stuff like "I don't use swords but want to look like I'm using one, can I refluff a hand-axe?" and "I want to have a monk use longswords, but I don't want to be a Kensei, can I refluff a shortsword as a longsword?" but not when it comes to people wanting to have something more than "Go here. Kill this. Take that. Wash, rinse, repeat."

Knaight

2017-10-23, 01:12 PM

This thread shows how we ended up with Pathfinder and how a large portion of the player base demands more and more details and complexity.

Games much lighter than D&D 5e (which is not a rules light game by any stretch of the imagination) have managed to avoid these problems just fine. Using the 5e economic system involves spending a lot of time doing accounting to figure out the exact details of your pile of money; most of this money is then basically decorative excess because there's so much of it that everything needed can be easily covered while living lavishly with only a fraction, and using it involved finding money sinks.

Meanwhile in REIGN you spend no time doing accounting and can find real uses for that giant pile of money that aren't just equipment upgrades. It's hardly the only example.

But no, instead every criticism of 5e must be met with the specter of Pathfinder, or with the deflection that other editions have the same problem, or with attacking the fault finders with being inferior role players. That WotC might have erred in the design is just impossible.

EvilAnagram

2017-10-23, 01:12 PM

I think a lot of the confusion I'm seeing comes from people assuming that magic item creation is about profit. At least in 5e, most magic items are not made with the intent to sell them. No one makes a rare, very rare, or legendary items in order to sell them, or else they would not be rare. The reason they are so costly to make is that they are made for use, not for purchasing or selling.

"Well, what about scrolls and potions," I hear the clamoring hordes shout. Not everything someone makes finds use when they intend it. Perhaps a wizard made a 7th-level spell scroll for a companion, but that companion died violently before he had the chance to use it. Perhaps that wizard made it as a paranoia-fueled back-up plan, but he died peacefully of an aneurysm in his tower with all its defenses still active. Maybe an alchemist put everything into making a potion, only for it to be stolen by brigands. Over the years, it has exchanged hands as a curiosity, but it has never found use. After all, who would be daft enough to drink the value of the shire?

Magic itemp should be ancillary to the economy?

I'm pretty sure once a caster in a given game world can cast Simulacrum, said game world's magic item economy is about to be upended anyways. Putting your simulacrums to work in a magic item factory is mundane but very effective.

I would say don't focus too hard on the specific numbers, they fall apart. Our group has decided that the time it takes to create a magic item is:

PC level X 100 GP progress per day worked.

When you hit the worth of the item (as listed in the downtime UA) you finish.

A simulacrum is incredibly expensive all by itself, and it does not reduce the cost of creating magic items at all. Time, certainly, but not cost.

Waazraath

2017-10-23, 01:16 PM

Hey there,

we are currently at the very end of the campaign "Princes of the Apocalypse". Our characters are level 13 and we have dozens of thousands of gold, but we don't know on what to spend our money. The treasure system is broken. Prices are even more broken. Gold is worth nothing, if you can't by anything useful for that. The only way to get rid of gold is, if your DM finds a way to "burn it all for some hypocritical reason" like offering you a Castle for an insane, unplausible amount of gold. If you don't believe me, read Angry GM's article (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/).

In our case, we decided to give gold at least a tiny bit of usage and offer only magic consumables in a very limited amount for purchase. Therefore, the first problem we had to deal with was that there is A LOT of inconsistency between prices. We started using Sane Magic Item Prices (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?usp=sharing) to have more realistic prices that depend on the item's power, not its rarity. Though this system is far away from being perfect, it is much more consistent than RAW. Furthermore, I created Faerûn's Vendors - A flexible vendor system for magic consumables (http://www.dmsguild.com/product/202047/Faerns-Vendors--A-flexible-vendor-system-for-magic-consumables) to provide a transparent ruling system that can easily be adjusted to fit for the DM's purpose.

But that's only one side of the coin. The other problem is that players accumulate hundrets of thousands of gold. During a 20 level campaign they are supposed to earn over 3.2 million(!!) GP. You don't believe me? Have a look at this article about game math (http://dmdavid.com/tag/what-is-the-typical-amout-of-treasure-awarded-in-a-fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-campaign/). So, if you want to make buying items not only available, but also interesting, you need to force players to make decisions on what to spend their money. This is the other side of the coin: preventing characters from swimming within an insane amount of money, that allows them to buy anything they want to - regardless of the price. If you lower their treasure, they will buy items with care. And even if they have less coins, they will be satisfied, because their so hard earned money is worth more than ever before!

The questions is, how to distribute a reasonable amount of money to players. The DMG provides dozens of treasure tables for gems, art, items, consumables and, of course, gold. But as I said, the system is broken and therefore useless. Concerning this, I want to quote a passage from the Angry GM's article (http://theangrygm.com/nothing-here-but-worthless-gold/), I already mentioned:

Applying rules for treasure distribution that are obviously broken is even worse than applying no rules at all. In another forum someone posted a treasure table that estimated the average amount of treasure handed to the players while applying the rules of the DMG. The table is included within this article (http://dmdavid.com/tag/what-is-the-typical-amout-of-treasure-awarded-in-a-fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-campaign/). I already mentioned that the amount earmed by party during their 20 level career is 3.2 million GP by RAW. Within this thread we talked about adjusting this insane amount by applyng lower multiplicators between the differet tier levels. That would allow the DM to lower the outcome to an amount that better fits his idea of treasure distribution (e.g. the default multiplicator is 10. If you lower it to 5 the characters would only earn ~500.000 GP in their career).

It felt good for a moment, but after I thought about it for a while I asked myself: Why on earth should I ever fix a broken system for treasure distribution that is related to a pricing system that is also broken? The answer was: It makes no sense at all. A pricing system that sells Glue for 50.000+ GP, but a Sentinal Shield for only 100-500 GP is ridiculous. So, fixing the treasure distribution won't solve the problem, because it is related to the pricing system that is also broken.

After all that, I agree to Angry GM that the whole treasure distribution system is a lie and not worth the work. Firstly, if I need to spend so much work to adjust a system, only to match my personal idea of treasure ditribution, I can easily give away treasure by my own system. Secondly, if I already know how much I want to give away to my players, there is no reason to start calculating this amount to solely fit into a table of a broken system.

In conclusion: If you also have problems with treasure distribution, I suggest to do the following:

1.) Become aware of how much treasure you want to distribute for each level. This depends on what you want your players to be able to afford. You also want to ask yourself, if there are some elements to "burn money" like building Strongholds, etc. Don't panic, now that you are using your own distribution, you will always be able to adjust the wealth of your group. In my case, I allow my party to buy a very limited amount of magic consumables. I looked up Sane Magic Item Prices and found out an amount that suits my purpose.

2.) Delete all gemstones and art objects from treasure. If you and your group care as less about that as my group does, don't think about it. Just do it. Gemstones and art objects are only useful to be converted into cash (except reviving diamonds). So, I suggestion to make your DM life easier and don't care for it. Of course, if your players have fun in collecting art for their home base, you might want to go on with it - otherwise don't.

3.) Divide treasure up to several parcels and determine where you want them to be found in the advanture. Consider that you can always add potions and scrolls to your parcels as you want to. If you are running a official WotC campaign, you could also only replace the amount of gold (including gems and art objects) and leave the rest of the treasure as it is. Just do it, as you wish to.

Doing so is much easier than trying to hand out treasure according to the rules, only because you fear to break the game balance. There is no balance. Accept it. You will see that your DM life will become less complicated, because you can forget about those dozens tables that have made your life so hard.

Kind regards!

Postscript:

If you read this thread, please keep the following in mind:

My intention: My post was some kind of personal summary from another forum, where we discussed the problem of treasure distribution over several pages and there seemed to be a lot of agreement. My aim was to share this with you. I realized that doing so without the background of the previous discussion was negligent, because a lot of people don't seem to understand the problem I am talking about - either because they didn't look up the sources I linked for proving my thesis or because they didn't understand what's exactly the point.

Understanding the problem: I was quite surprised reading replies like "There is no problem of having too much money, because I like wealthy lifestyles." or "In my campaign people can buy magic items, so there is a need for lots of money." (buying items is not intended by RAW). In both cases, people told me how they dealt with the problem and sold it as if there were no problem. It's like denying that there is a lack of infracstructure for blind people in urban areas with the answer that "blind people could buy themselves a guide dog". The problem is NOT not have a guide dog. The problem is the lack of infrastructure. Unfortunately, this is something some people don't get.

My thesis was that there is a huge mismatch between the income of adventurers (3.2 million gold) and the possibilities to spend it (trivial costs, etc.). Therefore, it's unnecessary that 5E provides dozens of tables to make the DM believe, he needs to be careful giving away treasure to the adventurers, although there is nothing to spend it on. To point this out: A DM could also reward his party with 10 million gold per encounter without spending a minute on thinking about it. It would have the same effect. The party wouldn't be able to spend most of it (besides those trivial adventuring costs). Of course, a DM can always implement some mechanics for "burning money" like Strongholds, Castles, etc. But this is already intervention and misses the point. And that leads me to the supposition that the system is broken, because it shouldn't rely on such intervention.

To whom I am talking: If you interpret my posting as being unpolite or so, just keep in mind that I am not talking to you personally. I don't intend any offense. I am just blaming the rules for being inconsistent. That's it. Furthermore, English is not my mother language (as you already might have noticed reading my posts). So, this also might be a reason. I will try my best to avoid the rough edge.

As for AngryGM's post: sorry, couldn't finish it. The writing style is too tedious, too "oh so hard trying to write angry/funny" without being able to really do it in a funny way. As for what I've seen of the argument in the different posts: personally, it doesn't bother me. I like, as a player, to get interesting treasure, other than an arbritarily number of gc. In my games, people play on those golden harps, wear those 1000+gc noble garments to parties, or spend half their fortunes on gambling, whoring and boozing. Whatever fits the character. The tables I played with even did so in 3.x, when treasure actually was supposed to be be transfered in another +1 to AC, or whatever. As a DM, so far everything that was asked for was in a book, somewhere, or easily enough to improvise.

Mikal

2017-10-23, 01:17 PM

I think a lot of the confusion I'm seeing comes from people assuming that magic item creation is about profit. At least in 5e, most magic items are not made with the intent to sell them. No one makes a rare, very rare, or legendary items in order to sell them, or else they would not be rare. The reason they are so costly to make is that they are made for use, not for purchasing or selling.

"Well, what about scrolls and potions," I hear the clamoring hordes shout. Not everything someone makes finds use when they intend it. Perhaps a wizard made a 7th-level spell scroll for a companion, but that companion died violently before he had the chance to use it. Perhaps that wizard made it as a paranoia-fueled back-up plan, but he died peacefully of an aneurysm in his tower with all its defenses still active. Maybe an alchemist put everything into making a potion, only for it to be stolen by brigands. Over the years, it has exchanged hands as a curiosity, but it has never found use. After all, who would be daft enough to drink the value of the shire?

Magic itemp should be ancillary to the economy?

A simulacrum is incredibly expensive all by itself, and it does not reduce the cost of creating magic items at all. Time, certainly, but not cost.

That's... not how economies work.
If someone can create something for X, and someone wants to buy it, then it'll be sold for X+Y. If it's rare or legendary, then that means few people create them because the market isn't really open for people to afford it, or they're status symbols, or they're niche products.

That's... also not how the rarity system works in 5e.
If magic items were meant to be created only for personal use, items such as staves of power and robes of the archmagi would be uncommon rarity, and longswords +1 and greataxes +1 would be legendary, because the crafters of those items are, the majority of the time, going to use a staff of power or robe of the archmagi before a +1 axe.

If that's how they were meant to work, then you'd see something like this, which is like, completely the opposite of what you're saying. An example would be like the below.

Sword +1: Rarity- Legendary. Cost to create- 500 gp

Sword +3: Rarity- Rare (Will a Wizard waste time making a +1 sword when they can make a +3 instead for personal use?)

Robe of the Archmagi: Rarity- Uncommon to Rare. Cost to create- 50,000 gp

jas61292

2017-10-23, 02:12 PM

First off, D&D is not an economy simulator. Whether or not it makes sense in that regard is immaterial. Secondly, if you do want to assume such people making the rare items must follow PC rules, than they must already have obscene amounts of money, and are likely not interested in spending all that time just to sell what they make.

FreddyNoNose

2017-10-23, 02:15 PM

Willie the Duck

2017-10-23, 02:59 PM

Games much lighter than D&D 5e (which is not a rules light game by any stretch of the imagination) have managed to avoid these problems just fine. Using the 5e economic system involves spending a lot of time doing accounting to figure out the exact details of your pile of money; most of this money is then basically decorative excess because there's so much of it that everything needed can be easily covered while living lavishly with only a fraction, and using it involved finding money sinks.

Can you elaborate on this one? Why and how exactly does 5e require any difficult accounting, if most of the (even lavish) expenses are covered by a fraction? Those seem like counterpoints, but I think I'm missing something.

I think most people are agreeing that the GP in 5e exists mostly for plot coupons and money sinks. OTOH, it is freed from other mechanical purpose explicitly such that it can do so.

Meanwhile in REIGN you spend no time doing accounting and can find real uses for that giant pile of money that aren't just equipment upgrades. It's hardly the only example.

As mentioned with ACKS, REIGN is a game designed around the premise, and is not beholden to the expectations and audience that D&D is.

The premise of REIGN is of leadership (company system, right?). It is explicitly designed for that purpose and gp is one of the primary advancement mechanisms that it is based upon. It makes sense within that system that the main actors of that system would consider gold predominantly as a mechanism to get better at obtaining more gold. That system, like oD&D, 1e, or 3e, is good for some stories, but not others.

But no, instead every criticism of 5e must be met with the specter of Pathfinder, or with the deflection that other editions have the same problem, or with attacking the fault finders with being inferior role players. That WotC might have erred in the design is just impossible.

It's possible that WotC's design decisions were in error. The market will bear that out (5e's amazing popularity seems to say otherwise). However, by all accounts, the decision to decouple gold from advancement mechanics was at least a deliberate choice. One that was made, it least plausibly, because some people were disenfranchised with the upgrade treadmill that the 3e/PF system had exemplified.

EvilAnagram

2017-10-23, 03:13 PM

That's... not how economies work.
Oh, boy! Someone gets to explain economics to me on an internet forum! I sure am lucky, otherwise all of the economists and statisticians I work with on a daily basis wouldn't have any use for me!

If someone can create something for X, and someone wants to buy it, then it'll be sold for X+Y. If it's rare or legendary, then that means few people create them because the market isn't really open for people to afford it, or they're status symbols, or they're niche products.
That's not entirely incorrect, but it's also not entirely correct.

For the purposes of this explanation, note that I am not an economist. I do, however, work with economists and statisticians, mostly to make their findings interesting and legible to laymen. In order to do this, I have to have a working understanding of economics, which is an oxymoron according to my economics professor.*

Anyways, you are dancing around the ideas of supply and demand. You've seen those charts before, so let's just simplify it and say that the value of something can be said to be where its supply meets its demand. As supply increases, people will be willing to pay less for something because they will have many options by which to get it. When demand increases, people will be willing to pay more for something because they need it more. Essentially, if people want something, and it is scarce enough, they will sacrifice resources to get it. That's how all markets work.

The price of something is not X+arbitrary number. The price of something is a function of both how available it is, and how much people need it, the supply and demand.

If demand for something far outstrips supply, those items can become prohibitively expensive. That's the fundamental nature of scarcity. Salt is much more important to us than gold (we would die without it), but gold is much rarer, so it is also much more expensive per unit of mass. This has not always been the case throughout human civilization, but it is absolutely the case now. As supply goes up, we place less value on the commodity. As supply goes down, the cost increases.

However, not every supply/demand curve leads to a viable market. If supply exceeds demand, attempting to sell it will be fruitless (breathable air). Likewise, if demand far outstrips supply, it will be prohibitively expensive to purchase (the Mona Lisa). Granted, other means of acquisition are also considered economic activity, but the legal exchange of goods for currency is usually the focus of economics.

Anyways, something that is rare and desired necessarily has value. Whether it is a status symbol or niche doesn't matter. An original Black Lotus from MtG is certainly a niche interest, and in certain circles they're certainly status symbols, but you can start a college fund selling one of those. In fact, being a status symbol creates demand, raising its value.

In 5e, there is a very limited supply of rare and legendary items. They are both useful and valuable, which makes complete sense economically. Being difficult and costly to produce explains why the supply is low, and being useful explains why the demand is high. High demand and low supply makes them expensive, which is entirely sensible.

If magic items were meant to be created only for personal use, items such as staves of power and robes of the archmagi would be uncommon rarity, and longswords +1 and greataxes +1 would be legendary, because the crafters of those items are, the majority of the time, going to use a staff of power or robe of the archmagi before a +1 axe.
I did not say that items were only created for personal use. I said items of extreme rarity are not created for selling at market value. I even gave the example of making an item for a friend. The example which 5e's economic system also leaves open for is services part of "goods and services," as in, "currency can be exchanged for goods and services." Essentially:
Person X wants a magic sword.
Person Y can create magic swords, but has no motivation to do so.
Person X provides resources with which to create a magic sword, and offers to reward person Y for creating the sword.
This motivates person Y, who charges a price commensurate with the principles of supply and demand.
Thus, the artificer creates without ever having to acquire the resources necessary to create, and every baron who wants to brag about his wealth can afford a +1 sword. This is also pretty much how medieval armor- and weapon-smithing worked, in practice. The materials for making armor and weapons were expensive, so a rich person would provide a smith with the money to purchase the required goods, and the smith would make those goods using the provided resources, only skimming off the top if he had the opportunity to do so without hurting the quality of the product. The smith would then charge a premium for his services.

The only problem arises when players wish to create, as the creation rules demand they use gold equal to the maximum value of the weapon, which means that the DM must either increase the price of purchased items or reduce the cost for creating items whilst increasing the difficulty of creating items in order for prices to make economic sense. However, that's as easy a fix as I've ever seen, so I don't pay it too much mind.**

Also, a Robe of the Archmagi remains scarce because of the resources and skills required to make one. The fact that demand for them would be ridiculously high amongst magic users does nothing to change the supply problem. Scarcity: It's a thing.

Tl;dr: I am not an economist.

*According to him, an economist is someone who understands why we understand so little about economics.
**I prefer to lower the cost and increase the difficulty by adding rolls, but that's just me.

JackPhoenix

2017-10-23, 03:21 PM

That's... not how economies work.
If someone can create something for X, and someone wants to buy it, then it'll be sold for X+Y. If it's rare or legendary, then that means few people create them because the market isn't really open for people to afford it, or they're status symbols, or they're niche products.

That's... also not how the rarity system works in 5e.
If magic items were meant to be created only for personal use, items such as staves of power and robes of the archmagi would be uncommon rarity, and longswords +1 and greataxes +1 would be legendary, because the crafters of those items are, the majority of the time, going to use a staff of power or robe of the archmagi before a +1 axe.

If that's how they were meant to work, then you'd see something like this, which is like, completely the opposite of what you're saying. An example would be like the below.

Sword +1: Rarity- Legendary. Cost to create- 500 gp

Sword +3: Rarity- Rare (Will a Wizard waste time making a +1 sword when they can make a +3 instead for personal use?)

Robe of the Archmagi: Rarity- Uncommon to Rare. Cost to create- 50,000 gp

You assume everyone knows how to make legendary items off-hand. What about an apprentice mage who made his first magic wand, assuming he'll upgrade it when he's more powerful, but died before that? What about a religious order which needed to arm a group of holy knights to take on a demon, because one hero wouldn't be enough even with a legendary weapon? What about master wizard who scribed scrolls to teach his apprentices new spells, because you don't give anyone access to your actual spellbook?

And non-consumable magic items last pretty much forever. You know about those people complaining why are they magic armors other than studded leather/breast/half/full plate? What were the wizards supposed to enchant before plate armor was invented? What if +1 weapons are from time and/or culture that didn't had the know-how to create anything better?

mephnick

2017-10-23, 03:46 PM

Knaight

2017-10-23, 04:16 PM

Can you elaborate on this one? Why and how exactly does 5e require any difficult accounting, if most of the (even lavish) expenses are covered by a fraction? Those seem like counterpoints, but I think I'm missing something.
5e expects you to track the precise number of coins you have in five different denominations, plus gems. That's acceptable in an economic simulator; it's incredibly irritating when the money is largely pointless pas the first few levels.

As mentioned with ACKS, REIGN is a game designed around the premise, and is not beholden to the expectations and audience that D&D is.

The premise of REIGN is of leadership (company system, right?). It is explicitly designed for that purpose and gp is one of the primary advancement mechanisms that it is based upon. It makes sense within that system that the main actors of that system would consider gold predominantly as a mechanism to get better at obtaining more gold. That system, like oD&D, 1e, or 3e, is good for some stories, but not others.
The company system of REIGN should be interpreted less as a company in the sense of a corporation and more in the sense of a company as a large group (although it can be a mercantile organization of some sort).

REIGN also doesn't use GP or anything similar - because money isn't a major focus it wasn't given particularly detailed mechanics, and instead you work with abstract Wealth and Treasure ratings.

It's possible that WotC's design decisions were in error. The market will bear that out (5e's amazing popularity seems to say otherwise). However, by all accounts, the decision to decouple gold from advancement mechanics was at least a deliberate choice. One that was made, it least plausibly, because some people were disenfranchised with the upgrade treadmill that the 3e/PF system had exemplified.

I wouldn't trust the market that much as an indicator of design quality - marketing, network effects, brand recognition, and other factors are much larger factors in terms of product success.

As for decoupling gold from advancement, that's not my beef with 5e. It's turning money into a low importance peripheral mechanic while keeping it complicated enough to require a lot of tedious accounting (again, five coin types tracked separately). From a design perspective, mechanical weight is essentially a resource. It should be spent more heavily on the major focuses of the game.

ACKS meanwhile can get away with it, because ACKS is a convoluted economic engine with a dungeon crawling game wrapped around it.

Beelzebubba

2017-10-23, 04:18 PM

It's strange though- people are fine with it when it comes to stuff like "I don't use swords but want to look like I'm using one, can I refluff a hand-axe?" and "I want to have a monk use longswords, but I don't want to be a Kensei, can I refluff a shortsword as a longsword?" but not when it comes to people wanting to have something more than "Go here. Kill this. Take that. Wash, rinse, repeat."

Who says those are the same people?

Oh, you're assuming it, because it backs up your righteous fury of a game built for high adventure, exploration, and risk-taking doesn't have fully realized rules for hiding away in a safe place, sitting on your ass behind a crafting table, doing a repetitive task.

It's funny how different tables can be. Mine, all we had to do was say 'D&D is about adventurers and risk-takers, the original game even assumed all gold you earned was lost between adventures due to partying hard.' And they said, 'Cool!'

One person asked about crafting, and I said 'the rules are pretty clear for consumable stuff like potions, but anything more becomes an epic quest that's - you guessed it - another hook to go out on a death defying adventure!' and they said 'Cool!'.

Then I said, 'there's a certain point you'll run out of ways to spend money, and when you do, think of ways you can spend it that reinforce your character's goals and aspirations, and us DMs will figure out a way to have that benefit you.' And you'll never guess what they said. And nobody bitched about wanting to know absolutely specific rules they could optimize against.

5E is a throwback towards earlier editions, before an attempt was made to turn it into a cohesive fantasy world simulation engine. Now, it's just a game.

--

And, who said it's always about murder hobos? I'm playing in a Jack the Ripper murder mystery. My Druid is turning into a Bloodhound to sniff out tracks, our Warlock is using Sense Thoughts while Bard asks dumb-sounding questions designed to elicit surface thoughts that reveal what we're actually looking for. No combat. No murder, no pillaging. Only teamwork, lots of Skill checks, clever spells, and creativity.

ZorroGames

2017-10-23, 04:20 PM

Knaight

2017-10-23, 04:25 PM

Probably 90% of the problems people have with D&D is trying to force a game style that is better served by other systems. There is a reason a monumental variety of very specific systems exist: to achieve specific design goals that other systems do not meet. Do your research and play a game that isn't designed around wilderness and dungeon adventures. It's not a hard concept.

D&D definitely gets shoehorned into campaigns it has no business seeing (spacefaring science fiction being my personal bugbear), but that 90% sounds high. There's questionable design even within D&D's niche, and I'm willing to class some of the problems regarding D&D being used where it's ill suited on D&D.

The system breaking down when it is used for something it clearly isn't for is one thing, the system breaking down when used as a general fantasy game when that's how it's presented is another. If D&D was just presented as a wilderness and dungeon adventure game it wouldn't get these criticisms.

Coffee_Dragon

2017-10-23, 04:31 PM

What does all this talk of supply and demand have to do with the price of milk?

Unoriginal

2017-10-23, 04:34 PM

Personally, I don't see any problem with the 5e treasure system, and I nearly did not reply to this thread, but there is something that need to be said regarding the "magic item crafting" side-debate.

To even be able to craft ONE specific magic item aside from the more common stuff, you need to know its formula. Learning a formula IN ITSELF is worth its own adventure, more often than not, and figuring one yourself from the ground up is more or less implied to be a years-long process

jas61292

2017-10-23, 04:36 PM

What does all this talk of supply and demand have to do with the price of milk?

What does supply and demand have to do with the price of milk? Well.... everything :tongue:

EvilAnagram

2017-10-23, 04:55 PM

What does supply and demand have to do with the price of milk? Well.... everything :tongue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xECUrlnXCqk

mephnick

2017-10-23, 04:56 PM

The system breaking down when it is used for something it clearly isn't for is one thing, the system breaking down when used as a general fantasy game when that's how it's presented is another. If D&D was just presented as a wilderness and dungeon adventure game it wouldn't get these criticisms.

Oh yeah, there is definite fault in WotC's marketing, advertising it as a ""tell any story you want!" system, which is a blatent lie.

EvilAnagram

2017-10-23, 05:05 PM

D&D definitely gets shoehorned into campaigns it has no business seeing (spacefaring science fiction being my personal bugbear), but that 90% sounds high. There's questionable design even within D&D's niche, and I'm willing to class some of the problems regarding D&D being used where it's ill suited on D&D.

The system breaking down when it is used for something it clearly isn't for is one thing, the system breaking down when used as a general fantasy game when that's how it's presented is another. If D&D was just presented as a wilderness and dungeon adventure game it wouldn't get these criticisms.

When exactly does it break down as a general fantasy game? I've run pirate campaigns, city campaigns, classic dungeon delvers, and creepy fairytales without any trouble from the system.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 05:05 PM

Oh yeah, there is definite fault in WotC's marketing, advertising it as a ""tell any story you want!" system, which is a blatent lie.

I've never actually seen such marketing for 5e. The actual product blurbs (like I posted) don't seem to contain any. The books are very explicit about the nature of the game--the game is about adventurers doing heroic adventures. The story paths are the same. Do you have an example of 5e marketing that portrays it as a "do any fantasy" system?

Estrillian

2017-10-23, 05:34 PM

Hey there,

we are currently at the very end of the campaign "Princes of the Apocalypse". Our characters are level 13 and we have dozens of thousands of gold, but we don't know on what to spend our money.

Asking the question no one else has asked ... how on earth have you got so much money! My players are halfway through PotA and have about 100gp to rub together. I know that people talk about 5E having reasonably plentiful money and nothing to spend it on, but either you are economic geniuses or my players are gold-blind.

I've gone through PotA and added up every single piece of treasure in every single Treasure entry in the book, including the side-treks and optional areas, and it comes to 62k, though of that an incredible 20k is on the floor of lakes and pools, 5k is in the Dwarf King's tomb, and 12k is on Aerisi's body. Assuming that you don't loot every body of water and the Queen's body that comes out as 25k treasure, so to have dozens of thousands you must have almost every bit of money in the entire adventure — every chair, tapestry, utensil, gem, coin, pocket contents.

I am in awe of your party's gold gathering prowess :D

mephnick

2017-10-23, 05:44 PM

I've never actually seen such marketing for 5e.

Honestly I haven't seen ANY marketing for 5e, (does Hasbro even advertise D&D?)but I'm assuming it's advertised that way judging by how few people understand what they're purchasing. I guess those go hand in hand .. But yes, the actual books make it fairly clear that it's about exploration and fighting monsters.

Of course, judging by the adventures they print, they don't understand their own system either way.

Meta

2017-10-23, 05:57 PM

A simulacrum is incredibly expensive all by itself, and it does not reduce the cost of creating magic items at all. Time, certainly, but not cost.

The items are made to be sold. The simulacrums demand an upfront cost but would pay for themselves after 1 month. Greater Healing Potions sell for more than double their creation cost with a mediocre Persuasion. A spellcaster who saves up a couple thousand GP to start the chain would end supplying the whole world if there was demand. Sounds like a fun story hook, actually.

EDIT: We added the rule that one time consumables sell for 1/5 of their rarity counterparts. Multi-use consumables sell for 1/2.

Xetheral

2017-10-23, 06:09 PM

I highly prioritize immersion in my games, in the sense that I want the players to feel like their characters are tightly enmeshed in the fabric of the game world. Money is something that most people in the game world value highly. Accordingly, I want most characters to also value it highly. I could simply expect the players to roleplay valuing money highly, but I find it far more enjoyable for everyone when the players' motivations and the characters' motivations align: it is, after all, a game, and not just a roleplaying exercise. Thus, I want the players to value (IC) money too.

In order for the players to value IC money, they have to have something fun to *do* with that money. Individual player preferences vary a lot: some might want mechanical upgrades for their characters, others might want to invest in their characters' social capital, still others might want to make grand gestures with their wealth and see a noticable impact on the game world. As written, 5e leaves all such uses for wealth entirely in the hands of the DM. That is disappointing. I would have preferred guidelines with exciting examples of using wealth (including those that gave mechanical bonuses and those that didn't) and corresponding prices, both to provide a reference point for pricing other ideas the players have and also to serve as inspiration for those ideas.

Wizards did try to include prices for magic items, but since they're entirely based on supply (i.e. rarity) and ignore demand (i.e. utility), they appear illogical to me and my players, thus damaging our immersion far more than they help it.

And no, I'm not worried about creating a gear treadmill at my table by permitting players to spend money to increase their combat effectiveness. I managed to avoid one in 3.5, and I certainly haven't had a problem avoiding one in 5e either. Mostly it's because I completely ignore CR: partially because I run semi-sandboxes where encounter difficulty isn't always tied to party level, and partially because with decades of DMing experience, I'm comfortable eyeballing encounter difficulty. I fully understand how groups that do use CR can run into a gear treadmill problem--it just happens not to be a factor at my table.

I still bought the books and support 5e. But I would have liked the system even more if it had had a few more pages with sensible prices for awesome and inspiring examples of ways to use the characters' accumulated wealth.

Edit: Such prices would also usefully provide a baseline for determining how much NPC patrons might value the PC's adventuring prowress, and thus what rewards and compensation they might offer.

Tanarii

2017-10-23, 06:10 PM

5e expects you to track the precise number of coins you have in five different denominations, plus gems. That's acceptable in an economic simulator; it's incredibly irritating when the money is largely pointless pas the first few levels.That's so players have to deal with variable value, at the same weight. Great, you found 5000 cp, 500 sp, and 50gp. But until you have a couple of hours free in a non-dangerous place, you're hauling out 111 lbs of treasure, not 11 lbs of gold and silver. Similarly, there's a huge difference between a 30 lb ivory statue and a .02 lb gem, even though they both are valued at 50gp.

Of course, if you really don't care about dealing with the logistics side of low level dungeon & adventuring site crawling, it becomes pointless again. But to me that's like complaining that money is useless at high levels. Of course its useless if you don't care about raising armies, building strongholds, bribing NPCs, or all the other things that a traditional part of high level D&D.

Edit: Also dumping absolutely ludicrous amounts of gold into spell research and magic item development. And stipends for henchmen. And training co... oh wait, that one was actually broken math. Never mind. :smallamused:

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-23, 06:16 PM

Honestly I haven't seen ANY marketing for 5e, (does Hasbro even advertise D&D?)but I'm assuming it's advertised that way judging by how few people understand what they're purchasing. I guess those go hand in hand .. But yes, the actual books make it fairly clear that it's about exploration and fighting monsters.

Of course, judging by the adventures they print, they don't understand their own system either way.

Based on my (limited) experience, most of the people claiming D&D as a "generic" or "general fantasy" system have prior experience, mostly with 3e. 4e certainly wasn't marketed as such, and I'm too young to have known how OD&D, AD&D, and 2e were marketed. 3e had pretensions of being a generic system (the d20 system) and included lots of splat stuff toward that end. From what I can tell, the generic parts that worked best were the ones that only used the core of the d20 system (resolution mechanics, feats, and the idea of race/level/class) and rewrote all the content.

The only truly generic systems I'm aware of are either a) highly abstracted and only technology-level agnostic, not genre agnostic (FATE has specific recommendations for the type of game that makes a "FATE game", for example) or b) very modular (GURPS springs to mind here). The type b) ones like GURPS are designed such that all the pieces are opt-in and come in packages that generally work together. It's still more a system-building toolkit rather than a buy-and-play system. 5e is neither of these and makes it very clear as to what it intends to be. I can't blame the system if people don't actually read the printed material.

All in all, I think more players would do well to seriously read the DMG and intro to the PHB and decide whether they want to accept the guiding philosophy of 5e or whether they'd be better off playing something else. Trying to hack a system in a way that goes against the primary philosophy will not go well. And 5e has a very different philosophy than earlier editions did. Those old-edition assumptions and thought patterns cause so much disruption and dislike, as opposed to understanding what 5e set out to do and (just as importantly) what it didn't set out to do. Judging it on something it never tried or claimed to do is unfair at best.

Unoriginal

2017-10-23, 06:25 PM

Wizards did try to include prices for magic items, but since they're entirely based on supply (i.e. rarity) and ignore demand (i.e. utility), they appear illogical to me and my players, thus damaging our immersion far more than they help it.

Even a single 2nd level scroll is already a luxury item that's worth months of wealthy lifestyle. Demand for most magical items is more like demand for rare collector cars or tailor-made jewelry than anything.

Edit: Such prices would also usefully provide a baseline for determining how much NPC patrons might value the PC's adventuring prowress, and thus what rewards and compensation they might offer.

Like, "how much does the king offer them to kill a dragon" ?

Xetheral

2017-10-23, 06:46 PM

Even a single 2nd level scroll is already a luxury item that's worth months of wealthy lifestyle. Demand for most magical items is more like demand for rare collector cars or tailor-made jewelry than anything.

I disagree. I think a better demand model would be the demand amongst professional musicians for high-quality musical instruments (for items granting mechanical bonuses) or infrastructure/public works/high-end housing (for items granting quality-of-life perks). The comparisons you provided would yield prices based more on prestige than function.

Like, "how much does the king offer them to kill a dragon" ?

Yes, although that particular example has an element of desperation to it that may inflate the price. Having a point of comparison is more useful when determing the going rate for purely-voluntary missions. For example, when determining how much a noble might be willing to pay to recover an heirloom from an infested family tomb, knowing the price it would cost that noble for something they value similarly (e.g. a tournament or festival or addition to their manor house--individual preferences will vary) would be extremely useful.

Unoriginal

2017-10-23, 07:14 PM

I disagree. I think a better demand model would be the demand amongst professional musicians for high-quality musical instruments (for items granting mechanical bonuses) or infrastructure/public works/high-end housing (for items granting quality-of-life perks). The comparisons you provided would yield prices based more on prestige than function.

While the magic items are generally useful, they're more useful like a race car: a very performant tool, the best to do its specific job, but in the end something that is too expensive for most and will probably only be used to compete with those in the same circle and to increase the prestige of the user/owner.

I know it's not the best metaphor, but the idea is basically: magic items do have a function, and they can do it well, but they're also prestige/luxury items.

Yes, although that particular example has an element of desperation to it that may inflate the price. Having a point of comparison is more useful when determing the going rate for purely-voluntary missions. For example, when determining how much a noble might be willing to pay to recover an heirloom from an infested family tomb, knowing the price it would cost that noble for something they value similarly (e.g. a tournament or festival or addition to their manor house--individual preferences will vary) would be extremely useful.

I'm sorry, I don't see how a tournament or a festival is equivalent to "go risk your life in this infested death-trap and bring me back this particular item". If anything it'd be closer to the cost of sending a military unit to go fight a battle.

Xetheral

2017-10-23, 07:29 PM

I'm sorry, I don't see how a tournament or a festival is equivalent to "go risk your life in this infested death-trap and bring me back this particular item". If anything it'd be closer to the cost of sending a military unit to go fight a battle.

If the noble would value the festival and the retrieval of heirloom similarly, then, by definition, he'd be willing to pay the same price for them. For such a noble, knowing the cost of throwing a festival would help the DM decide what the noble would be willing to pay for a retrieval mission.

By contrast, another noble might hate festivals, but would similarly value retrieval of this heirloom to adding a library to his manor house. For that noble, knowing the price of adding a library to a manor house would help the DM decide what the noble would be willing to pay for a retrieval mission.

And so on and so forth.

Unoriginal

2017-10-23, 07:45 PM

If the noble would value the festival and the retrieval of heirloom similarly, then, by definition, he'd be willing to pay the same price for them. For such a noble, knowing the cost of throwing a festival would help the DM decide what the noble would be willing to pay for a retrieval mission.

By contrast, another noble might hate festivals, but would similarly value retrieval of this heirloom to adding a library to his manor house. For that noble, knowing the price of adding a library to a manor house would help the DM decide what the noble would be willing to pay for a retrieval mission.

And so on and so forth.

So you want the game to list what various people value differently based on their personal preferences ?

After all, taking the reverse of your exemples, if someone suggested adding adding a library to his house to the first noble, he might think it's worth 150gp because he doesn't really care about it but it'd make him look good, while the second would dismiss a festival as empty frivolity and only spend the bare minimum on the festivities and only do it when the traditions force his hand.

Saying "X adventuring patron values the adventurers accomplishing this task as much as they value Y thing that cost money" seems to be a pretty awkward way to judge reward, IMO. Why not say "this guild master values the adventurers accomplishing this task as much as they value 10 bottle of good wine" or "this noble values s the adventurers accomplishing this task as much as they value 3 pigs and a war horse."

Xetheral

2017-10-23, 08:00 PM

So you want the game to list what various people value differently based on their personal preferences ?

I would have preferred if the game had listed more examples of what certain big-ticket items cost so that DMs can use them as a benchmark for gauging the value of money to NPCs, and thus have a more consistant framework for setting prices for things not listed in the books (including prices NPCs would pay for the PC's adventuring services). Also, such a list can provide inspiration for both the DM and the players for other awesome ways to spend money.

Saying "X adventuring patron values the adventurers accomplishing this task as much as they value Y thing that cost money" seems to be a pretty awkward way to judge reward, IMO. Why not say "this guild master values the adventurers accomplishing this task as much as they value 10 bottle of good wine" or "this noble values s the adventurers accomplishing this task as much as they value 3 pigs and a war horse."

Judging it in terms of wine and pigs and horses is exactly the same thing, just in smaller denominations.

EvilAnagram

2017-10-23, 08:09 PM

The items are made to be sold. The simulacrums demand an upfront cost but would pay for themselves after 1 month. Greater Healing Potions sell for more than double their creation cost with a mediocre Persuasion. A spellcaster who saves up a couple thousand GP to start the chain would end supplying the whole world if there was demand. Sounds like a fun story hook, actually.

EDIT: We added the rule that one time consumables sell for 1/5 of their rarity counterparts. Multi-use consumables sell for 1/2.

The margin is paper-thin, if it exists at all.

Let's look at the upfront cost: 1500 for a simulacrum. You can't have more than one simulacrum at a time, so that's it. Simulacrums of simulacrums are explicitly forbidden in AL, and the only sage advice I've seen also kaputs the idea.

So you get one guy, max, who can make potions over the course of 20 days for 500 gold. You can help your simulacrum, so it comes to 500 gold and ten days to make a potion. After day 10, you go out and try to sell that potion while he keeps making more.

And it doesn't sell.

The highest HP a common soldier or grunt will have is around 22. Most monstrous humanoid warriors have about that, and most people have less. Like, 95% of the population would be well-served by a standard healing potion, which means that they are better-served by a standard healing potion because it's 10x cheaper. You know what they say, 450 gold saved is literally a year's profit for a fairly successful business earned.

So, 95% of people won't want what you're selling, but adventurers will! 5e is using Faerun as the default, so there are plenty of those guys around. Yes, the best of the best. The guys at the end of Volo's. The NPCs with the most HP, the highest wisdom, the... most potential to retaliate when they realize you've been ripping them off...

Huh.

Well, let's say you're living dangerously! You wait 1d10 days for a suitable customer to come along, roll a Persuasion check, and realize he doesn't have nearly that much money.

Oh, yeah. Adventurers with cash.

So every 2d10 days, you get a group of adventurers with enough cash to spend on a stupidly expensive potion. Depending on a series of opposed checks, you might make a sale. You probably succeed on a 50% markup maybe half the time, if your DM is somewhat generous. That means you're pulling in 750 GP every 22 days, and putting in 500 GP every 20 days.

You'll have upswings and downswings, but they'll mostly be downswings because you only ever have a stock of one or two overpriced potions, and you'll get a reputation for it. Still, let's say we can rely on you making 750 gold every 22 days while you're spending 500 gold every 20 days. You'll make a profit after roughly seven and a half months.

So, you'll probably want enough money for about 8 months of living expenses on top of the 2000 gold to actually start the business.

Also, you're now spending all your time in a market hawking overpriced wares. You'll probably want to diversify your offerings because over time people will notice your profit margin and undersell you, sell better products, or just won't buy your overpriced garbage. You should probably also have a few thousand put away for precisely this.

EvilAnagram

2017-10-23, 08:56 PM

I want to be clear about something: Meta's simulacrum plan is a bad plan because it's a get-rich quick scheme. It relies on people doing what he wants them to do because he wants them to do it. "I'll just roll a good persuasion roll and it will make all my money back!" Get-rich quick schemes don't work because people don't want to be screwed over by your obvious ploy.

If you really want to make money selling potions, it takes work.

You start the game with an Herbalism Kit, and you make a Potion of Healing. Most importantly, you ask the DM, "Where does the 50 gold go?" He'll probably tell you that it goes towards getting some herbs, so you say, "What herbs?" At this point, the DM will be a little annoyed and try to avoid the question, but you need to be insistent. Ask again, saying you'd like some names, even if he pulls it out of his butt. Write down the names of every herb involved.

Later, after you make a good chunk of change, make a Potion of Greater Healing, and you ask if there are any other ingredients that weren't in the Potion of Healing. Write down any that the DM mentions.

Around level 7 or 8, you should be completing a quest that leads to a windfall of coin. While everyone else is spending theirs, you should save yours. Save up around 1,030 gold and buy a farm. A town costs 5,000 gold, so a farm should be well within that budget. You could probably get one for 500, but 1,000 at most. If it trends higher, grab another 500 gold before looking to buy. The farm will cost 5 sp a day in upkeep, with three hands, so you should account for that from now on. Plant herbs required for making a Potion of Healing, and cast Plant Growth once per year per square mile. Congratulations, you are now producing more ingredients for healing potions at a fraction of the price of all your competitors. The only material cost should be the 15 gold a month it costs to maintain your farm. You're producing a Potion of Healing every ten days, which you can sell at a discount price of 40 gold for a 35 gold profit. You're in the black by the end of the year with a more consistent customer base. Hell, you have more room to drop the price than anyone in Faerun history. Everywhere else a PoH is 50 gold, but you could sell it at 25 for a 500% profit. Those things will fly off the shelves, and your crop yield is guaranteed because of Plant Growth. You could sell to merchants and become the preferred supplier in the region, or you could sell directly to customers and let them benefit from those sweet, sweet savings.

Of course, now your friends are all gathering with you once a week for you to play Harvest Moon.

Edit: You can also sell excess herbs to your competitors if you produce more than you can utilize. Once you attain a solid cushion and have established that demand is high enough, hire another hand. Selling 6 PoHs a month is better than six, and if you're paying him 15 gold a month to make potions you're still making bank off his efforts, and he'll be making a pretty penny at a nine-to-five that gives him plenty of free time to pursue his other interests, which he's sure to have as an apprentice alchemist.

Eventually, you'll be hiring a few more alchemists at that rate and expanding your farm. You'll be casting Plant Growth every month or so, and you'll be managing the business, but you'll have freed up a lot of your time. There will have been pushback from entrenched merchants, but your strategy of vertical integration would have led you to undercut their prices and buy their stalls out from under them. Offering a variety of potions and antitoxins, you'll be able to expand your business to franchises across the Sword Coast.

Around this time, Meta's wizard will have hit level thirteen and begun the process of creating a simulacrum to make PoGHs at extortionate prices. Of course, selling at cost would still make them more expensive than the ones you sell (400 gold, and the whole farm costs you less than that a year), so no one buys his potions.

Meta

2017-10-23, 10:53 PM

EvilAnagram

2017-10-24, 05:19 AM

Your DM (you?) can do whatever they like, but my plan is entirely feasible RAW to the best of my knowledge. Please link any sources you have that say otherwise. You wrote a dozen paragraphs about supply and demand that aren't rules, just how you handle things. That's great for your table, hope it's fun!
First of all, supply and demand are essentially fundamental drivers of human behavior. Your table can account for them or not, true, but they are not simply my odd quirk.

Second, by RAW you can sell a Greater Healing Potion for a percentage of its total value (look at the Selling Magic Items section of the DMG), but you claimed that you'll be able to sell a single potion and completely make back the 2,000 gold you invested in its creation. There's nothing in RAW that says that you can make 2,000 gold selling a potion worth 500. If a DM lets you succeed on a Persuasion check to sell a PoGH for 2,000 gold, that DM is more permissive than Saudi road laws.

But it doesn't change the fact that what I wrote is entirely rules legal and would gain you 1000+ GP per month per Simulacrum. I'm happy to show the math and cite the UA.
Sure. I'd be interested in that, but UA is not RAW.

Unoriginal

2017-10-24, 06:40 AM

You start the game with an Herbalism Kit, and you make a Potion of Healing. Most importantly, you ask the DM, "Where does the 50 gold go?" He'll probably tell you that it goes towards getting some herbs, so you say, "What herbs?" At this point, the DM will be a little annoyed and try to avoid the question, but you need to be insistent. Ask again, saying you'd like some names, even if he pulls it out of his butt. Write down the names of every herb involved.

Not that I support Meta's idea, but any plan who has "annoy your DM until they give you what you want" has a first step is seriously, fundamentally flawed.

You'll be casting Plant Growth every month or so, and you'll be managing the business, but you'll have freed up a lot of your time.

I'm pretty sure you could earn more money casting Plant Growth on crops and getting payed for it, though.

Meta

2017-10-24, 07:23 AM

Sure. I'd be interested in that, but UA is not RAW.

No? Well 'Downtime' is in the newest book, let's see if anything in the UA changed when it comes out.

All my numbers are pulled directly from this link: https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA_Downtime.pdf

"Brewing Potions of HealingPotions of healing fall into a special category for item crafting, separate from other magic items. A character proficient with the herbalism kit can create them. The time and money needed to create such a potion is summarized on the Potion of Healing Creation table.

Potion of Healing 1 day 25 gp
Greater healing 1 workweek 100 gp
Superior healing 3 workweeks 1,000 gp
Supreme healing 4 workweeks 10,000 gp"

I think the assumption that our level 13 spellcaster has acquired an Herbalism kit is a pretty safe one.

"Selling a magic item is by no means an easy task. Con artists and thieves are always looking out for an easy score, and there’s no guarantee that a character will receive a good offer even if a legitimate buyer is found. Finding a buyer for one of your magic items requires one workweek of work and 100 gp in expenses, spent to spread word of the sale. You must pick one item at a time to sell. A character who wants to sell an item must make a Charisma (Persuasion) check to determine what kind of offer comes in. The character can always opt to not sell, instead wasting the workweek and trying again later. Use the Magic Item Base Prices and Magic Item Offer tables to determine the sale price."

Let's assume our Wizard has a +1 to Charisma and has proficiency in Persuasion. Nothing too special, a +6 to the roll.

"Common 50 gp
Uncommon 200 gp
Rare 2,000 gp
Very rare 10,000 gp
Legendary 25,000 gp

1–10 50% of base price
11–20 100% of base price
21+ 150% of base price"

The chance for profit comes as you climb in rarities and the cost of selling and the simulacrum become less relevant, but let's go with Superior Healing Potion for now. This is the one I was referring to originally, I thought Greater was the rare one. Too used to lesser > normal > greater.

So it costs 4 weeks and 1100 GP to make and find a seller.

15% (rolling a 1,2, or 3) of the time we only sell our potion for 1,000 GP. Womp womp
55% (rolling a 4-14) of the time we sell our potion for 2,000 GP. Getting somewhere.
30% (rolling 15-20) of the time we sell our potion for 2,500 GP. Nice

.15X1000+.55X2000+.30X2500
150+1100+750= 2000 GP

That's 900 GP in 4 weeks. Not quite 1000 GP but with a couple more points in CHA it becomes likely. The return is even better on the Supreme!

The UA also has rules on complications. The default rule is that complications occur 10% of the time, but like most things in 5e is left up to DM. I'll do the best with what were given, which is the 10% guideline.

The table (right below in the article) has a couple different results of possible complications. I'd say 2-4 of the 8 possible results would stop a sale, but I'll just assume any of them prevent a sale to be safe.

That ticks our expected profit down 810 GP.

After 8 weeks, we've paid for the Simulacrum (and the Herbalism kit I suppose) and made a little profit! It's all in the black from here on out.

There we go, adhering to all of the RAW of the UA.

I don't think a player should do this, but I also don't exactly see what rule a PC has broken if they attempt to do this. Like anything, your DM gets a say, but we're talking about the rules of gold economy not just house rulings are we not?

EvilAnagram

2017-10-24, 07:30 AM

Not that I support Meta's idea, but any plan who has "annoy your DM until they give you what you want" has a first step is seriously, fundamentally flawed.
Honestly, as a DM I expect to be pestered a bit for specific information. I understand that some DMs aren't as good at pulling random information out of their butts, but I accept that occasionally player plans will hinge on specifics, so I am willing to play along. There's no reason to be antagonistic towards your DM, but getting the names of each of those herbs is important to keep him from throwing up arbitrary road blocks.

I'm pretty sure you could earn more money casting Plant Growth on crops and getting payed for it, though.
Doubtful. Average upkeep on a farm is about 15 gp per month, with a profit of about 3d8 gp per month, according to the DMG business guidelines (if you'relucky). The sale of a single potion nets you a profit greater than the monthly income of a successful farm. The potion-making is much more profitable than farming, so it would be more profitable than anything the farmers can afford.

Of course, there's a set price for casting a third-level spell, and most farms couldn't afford it. Potion-making is a much better income source, so long as you vertically integrate.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 07:50 AM

No? Well 'Downtime' is in the newest book, let's see if anything in the UA changed when it comes out.

SNIP

The fundamental issue is that there are no RAW rules for crafting magic items. Even the UA (which requires DM buy in) merely contains suggestions for how a DM might decide to allow it.

I'll spot you the baseline "magic items exist in this campaign" for free, but here are some parts that are explicitly up to the DM by the DMG--

1) Is crafting magic items by players possible?
1a) If so, how do they get the formula? Note--the formulas are explicitly one rarity higher than the items, so that's a legendary formula.
1b) Also, what items are required? The strong advice is to require rare components that require adventure to acquire.

2) Pricing of magic items?
2a) the suggestions in the UA are just that, suggestions, not rules.
2b) How much do you get back on a sale (what percentage of the price)?

3) Is there even a magic item economy in that setting? By default the answer is no.

And most importantly:

4) what the heck is the rest of the party doing while you play shopkeep?
4a) you don't spend any table time on this. That would imply a steady 900GP return without any intervention. Yeah, that's broken. Veto (as either DM or another player).
4b) you spend table time on this. Boring for the rest of the party. Veto (as either DM or another player).

Short answer--the "rules" don't mean anything here. If you try this at my table, my response will be "go ahead and retire the character. He'll have a nice life as a shopkeeper and merchant. But he's not a PC anymore."

RAW is meaningless. Any attempt to do this requires complete and total buy-in from the DM and from the rest of the group. Anything less is selfishness and bad play.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-24, 08:31 AM

5E is a throwback towards earlier editions, before an attempt was made to turn it into a cohesive fantasy world simulation engine. Now, it's just a game.

Yeah you say that but there are dumb rules for owning a kingdom and paying soldiers and waging war so really there are still rules for dumb stuff to do in your downtime just not stuff that actually helps progress your character.

Mikal

2017-10-24, 08:36 AM

4) what the heck is the rest of the party doing while you play shopkeep?
4a) you don't spend any table time on this. That would imply a steady 900GP return without any intervention. Yeah, that's broken. Veto (as either DM or another player).
4b) you spend table time on this. Boring for the rest of the party. Veto (as either DM or another player).

4a- Why Veto? 900 gp isn't too expensive at that level... and honestly, what does it break? What are they going to spend it on that's so disruptive?

4b- You can literally spend 5 minutes of table time either before or after the main session, so not that boring.

I mean I get it. You just want to have a murder-hobo game where it's "Go here. Kill this. Take that. Wash, rinse repeat." but that doesn't mean others don't want more.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 08:39 AM

Yeah you say that but there are dumb rules for owning a kingdom and paying soldiers and waging war so really there are still rules for dumb stuff to do in your downtime just not stuff that actually helps progress your character.

You're defining "helps progress your character" in a way that differs from the 5e norm.

You seem to want explicit mechanical benefits for off-camera activities. That doesn't mesh well with this system (which wants those things to come from on-camera activities).

That, or you want the "owning a kingdom and paying soldiers and waging war" to be on-camera time, which is horribly boring for the rest of the party that might have other goals.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 08:45 AM

4a- Why Veto? 900 gp isn't too expensive at that level... and honestly, what does it break? What are they going to spend it on that's so disruptive?

4b- You can literally spend 5 minutes of table time either before or after the main session, so not that boring.

I mean I get it. You just want to have a murder-hobo game where it's "Go here. Kill this. Take that. Wash, rinse repeat." but that doesn't mean others don't want more.

4a. Because if one character is getting a large reward for no in-game effort, that's completely unbalanced if it can translate into on-camera advantage.

4b. that's no different that taking it during downtime, see 4a.

Your straw-mans of my style aside, I want the entire party to be engaged with active adventures during table time, whether those are exploration, social, or combat (the 3 pillars). Crafting and merchant activities are none of those, so they're relegated to downtime.

The DMG is explicit that downtime shouldn't substitute for adventure (3 pillars) time and should consume, not generate, money. That comes from the basic philosophy of 5e, which you disagree with. But that's not a system issue. That's you using it for something it doesn't claim to do (and in fact claims you shouldn't do with it).

molten_dragon

2017-10-24, 08:54 AM

UrielAwakened

2017-10-24, 08:59 AM

You're defining "helps progress your character" in a way that differs from the 5e norm.

You seem to want explicit mechanical benefits for off-camera activities. That doesn't mesh well with this system (which wants those things to come from on-camera activities).

That, or you want the "owning a kingdom and paying soldiers and waging war" to be on-camera time, which is horribly boring for the rest of the party that might have other goals.

I either want rules for both or rules for neither.

Mikal

2017-10-24, 09:07 AM

4a. Because if one character is getting a large reward for no in-game effort, that's completely unbalanced if it can translate into on-camera advantage.

4b. that's no different that taking it during downtime, see 4a.

What advantage? Gold is essentially worthless in 5e minus lifestyle expenses which people can easily afford from dungeon crawling.
If someone wants to have more worthless gold what advantage are they getting exactly?

Your straw-mans of my style aside, I want the entire party to be engaged with active adventures during table time, whether those are exploration, social, or combat (the 3 pillars). Crafting and merchant activities are none of those, so they're relegated to downtime.

Do you want your players to be able to do more than go adventure? Do you want for them to be able to actually build infrastructure?
If not, then it's murder-hobo style. Your PCs wander from place to place, kill things, take their stuff.

Your own quote earlier in the thread also points to wanting to be a murder-hobo, just couched in friendlier terms

But yes, the actual books make it fairly clear that it's about exploration and fighting monsters. Emphasis on above is mine. In other words, going from place to place, killing things, taking their stuff. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. The classic murder-hobo lifestyle.

The DMG is explicit that downtime shouldn't substitute for adventure (3 pillars) time and should consume, not generate, money. That comes from the basic philosophy of 5e, which you disagree with. But that's not a system issue. That's you using it for something it doesn't claim to do (and in fact claims you shouldn't do with it).

Gold is worthless in 5e. If people want to have a sideline to make more of it, what of the "3 pillars" does having a business actually negate, when that profit is less than what said adventurer gets in a single dungeon crawl, and they can't spend it on anything anyway?

If you're playing a murder-hobo style of game, I guess it could lower things since you aren't constantly going from Raid to Raid with your guild MMO style, but if you actually have any sort of imagination as a DM you could use it to expand the pillars of play.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 09:16 AM

I either want rules for both or rules for neither.

You've got rules for neither already--the rules as they exist are purely optional. As a player, just ignore them. As a DM, don't worry about them.

Rules for both would be in contravention of the basic philosophy of 5e (namely it takes focus away from the active adventuring). Read the first few chapters of the DMG. It's explicit that the point of the world being built is to play the backdrop for adventures (social, combat, and/or exploration). Everything should support that.

5e is not a world simulator. It's not designed to be. Trying to make it one is like using a race car to pull a trailer. It can, in principle, be done, but it's inefficient, bad for the car, and probably more expensive than acquiring a proper vehicle for the purpose. There are many other games that do castles, mass combat, logistics, etc. better than D&D (in any edition) even has. That's not the focus of 5e. Even when it was a possible endgame (1e), reaching those levels usually entailed retiring the character from active play.

I have a character whose goal is to create a new high elven House (clan, major family, whatever). This will take significant resources, so he's focused on that. But that's a retirement plan, by construction. Being the leader of such an organization is a desk job, just like being a General or an Admiral. Once you hit a certain rank in the Air Force, you're no longer flying planes (adventuring). You're at a desk or in meetings (being an NPC).

The developers have been very clear that they don't intend to fully support your proposed play style. If you want a subsystem, you're going to have to make it yourself. It will be difficult, because it requires swimming against the philosophy that guides the rest of the system.

Meta

2017-10-24, 09:17 AM

RAW is meaningless.

Interesting view. If RAW doesn't mean anything why are you playing 5e?

The new book has rules for downtime. It's in the table of contents. Downtime activities are a supported part of 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. This is a fact. Will the printed rules be different than what is in the UA? I dunno, maybe? But to say that downtime activity is not a part of 5th edition is factually incorrect. People can use those at their tables and are playing 5th edition as intended, regardless of your attempts to paint it otherwise.

In our group, RAW is the foundation upon which we build our house. We thought it was strange that selling a potion or other consumable is worth the same as selling a permanent item of the same rarity. So we changed that rule. It seems workable for now. I'm happy to read other people's thoughts. "RAW is meaningless" doesn't strike me as a particularly discussion-conducive sentiment, though.

EDIT: Whoever said downtime was only for spending gold and not making it is incorrect. Gambling, Pit Fighting, and Crime all focus on gaining gold.

Willie the Duck

2017-10-24, 09:21 AM

5e expects you to track the precise number of coins you have in five different denominations, plus gems. That's acceptable in an economic simulator; it's incredibly irritating when the money is largely pointless pas the first few levels.

That has been the case in all iterations of D&D. I'm not sure which if any of those would be considered an economic simulator. As to irritating, one part of D&D that some people really really like (and others find irritating) is the challenge/reward subgame of how much equipment do you cart down into the dungeon, knowing you will either have to abandon it (and consider it a sunk cost), or have less encumbrance left to cart up treasure (and is the last of the copper pieces worth lowering your speed for, etc.). This is especially a concern in the early game, where you won't have bags of holding or employees at the ready (and is when the gold is most valuable to you). This precise record keeping and hard decisions are a perfect example of what I am talking about with D&D having multiple audiences with directly contradicting preferences.

The company system of REIGN should be interpreted less as a company in the sense of a corporation and more in the sense of a company as a large group (although it can be a mercantile organization of some sort).
REIGN also doesn't use GP or anything similar - because money isn't a major focus it wasn't given particularly detailed mechanics, and instead you work with abstract Wealth and Treasure ratings.

Good to know. But doesn't that make it a pretty distant comparison point for either 3e/PF style gold mechanics or 5e?

I wouldn't trust the market that much as an indicator of design quality - marketing, network effects, brand recognition, and other factors are much larger factors in terms of product success.

This may be a difference in perspective rather than a an actual dispute. However, I strongly do not believe in any grand 'theory of game design' or anything similar. These games, like art, have quality determined only by cultural consensus. There is no metric of quality other than whether or not people want to play it.

As for decoupling gold from advancement, that's not my beef with 5e. It's turning money into a low importance peripheral mechanic while keeping it complicated enough to require a lot of tedious accounting (again, five coin types tracked separately). From a design perspective, mechanical weight is essentially a resource. It should be spent more heavily on the major focuses of the game.

Okay, that I can see. OTOH, gold is only low importance if those plot coupons or money sinks aren't a part of your game. If gold and wealth do not have a lot of importance in a given campaign or gaming group, they can be ignored. It becomes optional (theoretically true for 3e/PF, but it has serious downstream effects, not least of which because some classes are more magic item-dependent than others).

1e AD&D had an elaborate mechanism for tracking slight behavioral influences on one's alignment, including a tic-off sheet where you could slowly slide from, say, neutral good to chaotic good. If alignment was not a big part of the campaign, that section could be safely ignored. A game having an optional subsystem of which I have no use, I rarely consider it a mark against the game.

ACKS meanwhile can get away with it, because ACKS is a convoluted economic engine with a dungeon crawling game wrapped around it.

ACKS can get away with it because everyone bellying up to the table to play ACKS has the goal of playing a game with those features as a major focus. D&D has many many masters, each of which have different demands.

Mikal

2017-10-24, 09:23 AM

That has been the case in all iterations of D&D.

OD&D used gold and treasure as experience, and in fact was one of the main ways to gain it. You also had strongholds in this edition to spend it.
AD&D had plenty of options in the rules for spending your gold, including NWP training, class training, stronghold building, and so on.
3.x had plenty of options for spending gold as well, including stronghold building, item creation and purchase, and so on.
4e... I have no idea on. Pass.
5e has the least (unless 4e has even less) support on what to spend your hard earned cash on or having it be a reward in and of itself.

So out of 5 (numbered) editions we have gold that...

1) Is your main way of gaining levels at high level
2) Has lots of sinks baked into the main rules
3) Is needed to make sure you are properly geared for your level and also had lots of sinks added in supplements

Gold and treasure... has had importance in all previous editions (not counting 4th again as I don't know it) of D&D to varying degrees.

Meta

2017-10-24, 09:26 AM

That has been the case in all iterations of D&D. I'm not sure which if any of those would be considered an economic simulator. As to irritating, one part of D&D that some people really really like (and others find irritating) is the challenge/reward subgame of how much equipment do you cart down into the dungeon, knowing you will either have to abandon it (and consider it a sunk cost), or have less encumbrance left to cart up treasure (and is the last of the copper pieces worth lowering your speed for, etc.). This is especially a concern in the early game, where you won't have bags of holding or employees at the ready (and is when the gold is most valuable to you). This precise record keeping and hard decisions are a perfect example of what I am talking about with D&D having multiple audiences with directly contradicting preferences.

Chris Perkins (he writes the books) DMs for a group that does exactly this on stage at PAX. Playing the modules he has written. For WotC. They had at least 15 minutes of a session where they debated how to best get as much giant sized treasure out to their airship in a timely fashion. What could be worth transporting, what wasn't. But I mean hey, what do they know about DnD.

Tanarii

2017-10-24, 09:32 AM

That, or you want the "owning a kingdom and paying soldiers and waging war" to be on-camera time, which is horribly boring for the rest of the party that might have other goals.
Nonsense. For a long time, it was core to higher level D&D for many players. And for many players it still is.

Just because many newer players want to murderhero or murderhobo for their entire career doesn't mean we should assume that's the default. People with your attitude is precisely why we ended up with the Magic Mart and Gear Upgrade Treadmill in the first place. Luckily 5e has done away with that, and gold can once again be used for its primary purpose: investing in conquest. Well, at least it's a reasonable option now, for groups that don't just want to murderhobo an entire campaign up to 20, then retire them and start a new campaign for the next murderhobos.

Willie the Duck

2017-10-24, 09:36 AM

OD&D used gold and treasure as experience, and in fact was one of the main ways to gain it. You also had strongholds in this edition to spend it.
AD&D had plenty of options in the rules for spending your gold, including NWP training, class training, stronghold building, and so on.
3.x had plenty of options for spending gold as well, including stronghold building, item creation and purchase, and so on.
4e... I have no idea on. Pass.
5e has the least (unless 4e has even less) support on what to spend your hard earned cash on or having it be a reward in and of itself.

So out of 5 (numbered) editions we have gold that...

1) Is your main way of gaining levels at high level
2) Has lots of sinks baked into the main rules
3) Is needed to make sure you are properly geared for your level and also had lots of sinks added in supplements

Gold and treasure... has had importance in all previous editions (not counting 4th again as I don't know it) of D&D to varying degrees.

When I said, "That has been the case in all iterations of D&D," I was responding to the statement that 5e expects you to track the precise number of coins and the 5 denominations, plus gems. I don't see how what you've stated is related to that point, so I do not know why you are quoting me here.

I made clear what gp was used for in other edition on the first page of this thread.

Can you rephrase what point you think you are making that you think I am unaware of or contradicting?

Mikal

2017-10-24, 09:38 AM

When I said, "That has been the case in all iterations of D&D," I was responding to the statement that 5e expects you to track the precise number of coins and the 5 denominations, plus gems. I don't see how what you've stated is related to that point, so I do not know why you are quoting me here.

Ah. I'm sorry. The quote you had responded to had ended with (paraphrased) "gold is all but useless after the first few levels" so I thought you were saying that was always the case. My apologies. Deleted the post.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 09:42 AM

Interesting view. If RAW doesn't mean anything why are you playing 5e?

The new book has rules for downtime. It's in the table of contents. Downtime activities are a supported part of 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. This is a fact. Will the printed rules be different than what is in the UA? I dunno, maybe? But to say that downtime activity is not a part of 5th edition is factually incorrect. People can use those at their tables and are playing 5th edition as intended, regardless of your attempts to paint it otherwise.

In our group, RAW is the foundation upon which we build our house. We thought it was strange that selling a potion or other consumable is worth the same as selling a permanent item of the same rarity. So we changed that rule. It seems workable for now. I'm happy to read other people's thoughts. "RAW is meaningless" doesn't strike me as a particularly discussion-conducive sentiment, though.

EDIT: Whoever said downtime was only for spending gold and not making it is incorrect. Gambling, Pit Fighting, and Crime all focus on gaining gold.

And those rules will be marked optional, just like the ones in the DMG. Because all DM rules are optional. They're not player rules. They're DM options. They only exist in-world if the DM decides they do.

Downtime is just that. Downtime. Not intended to take table time or be a significant power boost.

To quote the DMG:

Your players might be interested in pursuing downtime activities that aren't covered in this chapter or in the Player's Handbook. If you invent new downtime activities, remember the following:

An activity should never negate the need or desire for characters to go on adventures.
Activities that have a monetary cost associated with them provide opportunities for player characters to spend their hard-won treasure.
Activities that reveal new adventure hooks and previously unknown facts about your campaign can help you foreshadow future events and conflicts.
SNIPPED mplementation details

Point 1 is key--downtime is downtime. It shouldn't be the focus of the game. Point 2 is about one of the reasons for downtime--to give a way to spend that gold they gained during adventures. If that gives mechanical advantages (increased gold/items they couldn't get while on-camera/mechanically-relevant followers/etc), then that is in contravention to point 1 (by diminishing the need to have on-camera adventures). Point 3 gives another use for downtime--to generate story hooks.

Crafting is an example. The DMG-supported cycle goes:

* Adventure to find a formula (possibly as a quest reward, but with an adventure attached).
* Adventure to find the ingredients (possibly locations or creature parts or exotic items only available through adventure)
* Craft during downtime, off-camera.
* Use item during further adventures.
* Repeat.

If you're trying to run a business as a crafter or merchant, that takes your time. You don't have the time left to go adventuring. By definition, that makes you an NPC, not a PC in 5e.

Willie the Duck

2017-10-24, 09:43 AM

For a long time, it was core to higher level D&D for many players. And for many players it still is.

Just because many newer players want to murderhero or murderhobo for their entire career doesn't mean we should assume that's the default. People with your attitude is precisely why we ended up with the Magic Mart and Gear Upgrade Treadmill in the first place. Luckily 5e has done away with that, and gold can once again be used for its primary purpose: investing in conquest. Well, at least it's a reasonable option now, for groups that don't just want to murderhobo an entire campaign up to 20, then retire them and start a new campaign for the next murderhobos.

This whole murderhobo and gear upgrade treadmill (that I too used) terms have no reason to be here. They are diminutive terms trying to call various types of gaming bad. 5e was produced to bring all types of gaming back into the same fold. However, you are right that the people who wanted to play lord and commander had a problem doing so in the 3e/PF era because of the incentivization structure that routine gear purchasing created. And disconnecting the reward used to fuel the lord and commander game from those that fuel the personal combat effectiveness game is the primary purpose I see (and suspect) in the decision on what gold can routinely be used for in 5e.

Mikal

2017-10-24, 09:49 AM

This whole murderhobo and gear upgrade treadmill (that I too used) terms have no reason to be here. They are diminutive terms trying to call various types of gaming bad. 5e was produced to bring all types of gaming back into the same fold. However, you are right that the people who wanted to play lord and commander had a problem doing so in the 3e/PF era because of the incentivization structure that routine gear purchasing created. And disconnecting the reward used to fuel the lord and commander game from those that fuel the personal combat effectiveness game is the primary purpose I see (and suspect) in the decision on what gold can routinely be used for in 5e.

But are they trying to bring all types of gaming into the same fold? This entire thread's discussion has been because you can't play certain ways out of the box, RAW, and that there's a camp of people who feel that the proper way to use and play 5e is literally "Go to X. Kill Y. Take Z. Wash, Rinse Repeat." which is essentially murder-hoboism in prettier terms ("Adventure! Legendary Treasure!").

And for those who want a more nuanced game, we keep getting told that we're playing it wrong, the system isn't designed for that etc.

If 5e was truly trying to be inclusive of all game types, then the above wouldn't happen, would it?

Meta

2017-10-24, 10:14 AM

And those rules will be marked optional, just like the ones in the DMG. Because all DM rules are optional. They're not player rules. They're DM options. They only exist in-world if the DM decides they do.

Downtime is just that. Downtime. Not intended to take table time or be a significant power boost.

To quote the DMG:

Point 1 is key--downtime is downtime. It shouldn't be the focus of the game. Point 2 is about one of the reasons for downtime--to give a way to spend that gold they gained during adventures. If that gives mechanical advantages (increased gold/items they couldn't get while on-camera/mechanically-relevant followers/etc), then that is in contravention to point 1 (by diminishing the need to have on-camera adventures). Point 3 gives another use for downtime--to generate story hooks.

Crafting is an example. The DMG-supported cycle goes:

* Adventure to find a formula (possibly as a quest reward, but with an adventure attached).
* Adventure to find the ingredients (possibly locations or creature parts or exotic items only available through adventure)
* Craft during downtime, off-camera.
* Use item during further adventures.
* Repeat.

If you're trying to run a business as a crafter or merchant, that takes your time. You don't have the time left to go adventuring. By definition, that makes you an NPC, not a PC in 5e.

None of that refutes my points. I cited numeric rules. You're citing guidelines twisted to your own goal.

You quote this:

"An activity should never negate the need or desire for characters to go on adventures.
Activities that have a monetary cost associated with them provide opportunities for player characters to spend their hard-won treasure.
Activities that reveal new adventure hooks and previously unknown facts about your campaign can help you foreshadow future events and conflicts."

Can you explain to me where that says a spellcaster can't use their spells to make more potions to sell?

EvilAnagram

2017-10-24, 10:16 AM

snip

Didn't see that post earlier. With the cost-of-brewing adjustments in the UA, your plan makes a whole hell of a lot more sense.

Tanarii

2017-10-24, 10:23 AM

This whole murderhobo and gear upgrade treadmill (that I too used) terms have no reason to be here. They are diminutive terms trying to call various types of gaming bad.Murderhero and murderhobo are technical terms I use to distinguish from hero and villain. I never use them as a diminutive. They're both of them esteemed careers, and a traditions at low levels in every game I've ever run. Like the vast majority of DMs, I always start D&D campaigns off with the PCs off as one of these two. Their goal is to raid some dungeon or adventuring site, kill things, and probably loot everything in sight.

But not everyone wants to keep doing that for their entire D&D campaign. About the only time I see people really wanting that is if they're running a single party campaign adventure path, or official play.

Otoh I used the term gear upgrade treadmill very intentionally as a diminutive. It sucks. I don't like it in RPG video games clearly based off D&D either. I understand why it's there for CRPGs, but it's a poison pill concept for TRPGs, outside of ones structured like a CRPG. Ie adventure paths (built like single player CRPGs) or official play (built like MMOs).

Mikal

2017-10-24, 10:33 AM

UrielAwakened

2017-10-24, 10:34 AM

Rules for both would be in contravention of the basic philosophy of 5e (namely it takes focus away from the active adventuring).

Yeah you keep repeating that but I remain thoroughly unconvinced that that's true.

Mikal

2017-10-24, 10:37 AM

Yeah you keep repeating that but I remain thoroughly unconvinced that that's true.

Also, what about other things that take away from active adventuring?

I mean... encumbrance takes away from it. Why not remove that?
Having to eat, drink, and sleep take away from active adventuring, should remove those as well.
And that whole short/long rest thing. If the focus is to always be active adventuring, then we should probably go back to a 4e style of round/encounter type of powers and remove the other limitations.

If the focus is supposed to be active adventuring to the detriment of everything else, remove all those distractions... and truly turn D&D into a table top video game.

Or this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroQuest

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 10:55 AM

None of that refutes my points. I cited numeric rules. You're citing guidelines twisted to your own goal.

You quote this:

"An activity should never negate the need or desire for characters to go on adventures.
Activities that have a monetary cost associated with them provide opportunities for player characters to spend their hard-won treasure.
Activities that reveal new adventure hooks and previously unknown facts about your campaign can help you foreshadow future events and conflicts."

Can you explain to me where that says a spellcaster can't use their spells to make more potions to sell?

These are instructions for DMs to use in deciding what downtime activities to allow (since the default is none--they're optional.) Nothing here is permission to players--it's advice to DMs. "But the rules don't say I can't" is obtuse and oppositional. The player's role is to show the DM why it's more fun for the table to allow an action, not to use the rules (more particularly one interpretation of those rules) as a bludgeon and make demands. No one has yet explained what the rest of the party's doing while you're playing shopkeeper. That's the missing thing here. Either

a) they're each doing their own thing between adventures, in which case it's downtime and it doesn't matter the exact mechanics. The amount of money made is relatively irrelevant as long as it makes sense in-world and doesn't cause mechanical imbalances. It may be even useful as long as it creates hooks for adventures--finding contacts, ingredients, etc.

OR

b) you insist on taking table (and DM) time for this. Here it feels like you're supplanting adventures (whatever those may be, which may or may not involve killing things!) with shopkeeping-simulator activities. This is what is warned against in the DMG.

My basic rule of thumb is that mechanical power advantages should only come from on-camera time, one way or another. Relaxing this either ends up giving incentives to munchkin the downtime using whatever creative readings you can sneak past the DM or ends up as a treadmill--a required activity like grinding in an MMO (which is annoying to me). On-camera time should be group time, with as many people participating as possible. Shop-keeping/crafting/stronghold management makes really crappy on-camera time in my experience due to the inability for more than one person to participate simultaneously.

None of this means that players can't have plans and goals beyond killing things and taking their stuff. For example, one character intends to found a noble house. To do this, he's going to need money and more importantly power and influence. Another has already founded a monastery; another is building a druid grove. The last is working on founding an arcane research organization. None of these are on-camera things--they're slowly-building things that happen in parallel to the on-camera activities that fuel (either in wealth, in power, or in prestige) these goals. They adventure since that's the best (ie most fun for the players) way of gaining the prerequisites for their goals. If they had wanted to make characters that were trying to become merchant princes by buying and selling commodities, I'd bow out of DMing, because that's boring to me. I also wouldn't expect them to use 5e D&D to do so.

Adventuring is a means to other ends. For some, the ends and the means are the same--the journey is the destination. For others, it's not. But adventuring is what 5e is all about at the mechanical level.

Eric Diaz

2017-10-24, 10:56 AM

My 2c:

5e does not have a good "economy" mini-game.

It is all very hand-wavy, the crafting rules are bad, etc.

Same with miniatures. Miniatures are not as supported in 5e as they were on 4e or even 3e.

Is that a good or a bad thing? For me, it is good; I think the game is already complex enough and I don't use minis and deep accounting in my games.

But if you WANT this stuff, you have to find it elsewhere. My suggestion is ACKS or Dark Dungeons (which is awesome, free, BECMI stuff) for domain management.

If you want to buy and sell magic items, there is probably some homebrewed version out there. Not my cup of tea, but it might work in a FR setting etc.

(I think 5e's assumption is that magic items are "above" money in a sense, like Tywin Lannister trying to buy a valiyran sword, but some people would offer their daughters before their swords)

Tanarii

2017-10-24, 11:08 AM

Shop-keeping/crafting/stronghold management makes really crappy on-camera time in my experience due to the inability for more than one person to participate simultaneously.

&

Adventuring is a means to other ends. For some, the ends and the means are the same--the journey is the destination. For others, it's not. But adventuring is what 5e is all about at the mechanical level.Stronghold day to day management may be boring for other players, but the use of strongholds and armies as part of adventuring sure isn't.

Used wisely by the players, they can be core components of "on screen" adventuring time and be very un-boring for the entire group. That doesn't even require mass combat or seige rules, that part can all be hand waved. Although I suspect you'd consider that "off-screen" in that case, I sure don't.

Or they can be a back-drop that enables adventuring, without which the adventure wouldn't even be possible. Sending your army to do fight the BBEG hoards of Mongol-surrogate warriors, while you and your alpha strike team try to assassinate the khan. Or whatever.

Meta

2017-10-24, 11:09 AM

Stuff

This is more of your opinions. Not rules. Fine opinions, I hope you have fun with them at your table.

Eric, the 5e design team published an article that goes deeper in to the world of magic item economy. I find it a little lacking and not entirely thought out, but there's clearly an attempt to codify such rules beyond the DMG. A DnD player does not need to "find it elsewhere" as there are rules for it in 5e.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-24, 11:12 AM

Stronghold day to day management may be boring for other players, but the use of strongholds and armies as part of adventuring sure isn't.

Used wisely by the players, they can be core components of "on screen" adventuring time and be very un-boring for the entire group. That doesn't even require mass combat or seige rules, that part can all be hand waved. Although I suspect you'd consider that "off-screen" in that case, I sure don't.

Or they can be a back-drop that enables adventuring, without which the adventure wouldn't even be possible. Sending your army to do fight the BBEG hoards of Mongol-surrogate warriors, while you and your alpha strike team try to assassinate the khan. Or whatever.

Item buying can even be a great plot-hook.

The more perceptive characters get a bonus to finding items in the UA rules and the more charismatic ones get a bonus to purchasing.

Send out teams of characters to scour for items. Stumble upon all sorts of weird organizations, cults, and orders that have a vested interest in acquiring the same items. Now you have new contacts. Or new rivals.

Your Druid wants an item that mimics medium armor but isn't made of metal? Looks like you're going hunting for a Chuul!

Eric Diaz

2017-10-24, 11:22 AM

Eric, the 5e design team published an article that goes deeper in to the world of magic item economy. I find it a little lacking and not entirely thought out, but there's clearly an attempt to codify such rules beyond the DMG. A DnD player does not need to "find it elsewhere" as there are rules for it in 5e.

I'd love to see that! Even though I'm not a fan of "magic shops" myself.

Do you have a link?

I mean, from what I've seem, I'd advise people to find "economy" rules elsewhere... Sure, there might be some guidelines for 5e out there, but nothing to the level of ACKS, for example.

Meta

2017-10-24, 11:47 AM

I'd love to see that! Even though I'm not a fan of "magic shops" myself.

Do you have a link?

I mean, from what I've seem, I'd advise people to find "economy" rules elsewhere... Sure, there might be some guidelines for 5e out there, but nothing to the level of ACKS, for example.

It's not shops so much as the rules for finding people willing to buy or sell you what your character wants but here ya go: https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA_Downtime.pdf

Still play test so it's subject to change but there's a section in the upcoming Xanathar's Guide book titled "Downtime" so I expect we're going to see some iteration of these rules make it to hardback in... just under a month if they hold to the scheduled release.

Eric Diaz

2017-10-24, 12:16 PM

It's not shops so much as the rules for finding people willing to buy or sell you what your character wants but here ya go: https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA_Downtime.pdf

Still play test so it's subject to change but there's a section in the upcoming Xanathar's Guide book titled "Downtime" so I expect we're going to see some iteration of these rules make it to hardback in... just under a month if they hold to the scheduled release.

Thank you! This might be useful to lots of people here. So, there IS something to spend all your money on!

Willie the Duck

2017-10-24, 12:34 PM

Thank you! This might be useful to lots of people here. So, there IS something to spend all your money on!

Well of course there is. It is just how baked-into the assumptions of the basic structure of the game that has changed. I don't think anyone was arguing that you should never be allowed to buy magic items.

KorvinStarmast

2017-10-24, 01:08 PM

And I'll point out that I've been playing and DM'ing D&D (and Pathfinder) since about 2000. I've played with dozens, if not hundreds of different people. And I've never once run into a DM that refused to allow magic items to be purchased with gold. I've played a lot of D&D where buying magic items was not at all possible (I started in 1975) and our current campaign does not have that option. You have to go out and find it/them. Our first 5e campaign was set in FR, and if we went to waterdeep, we might or might not find what we are looking for, and might or might not be able to afford it unless we also traded in another magic item. The magic item market, such as it was, was very much underground and we had to bribe a few people, and do a favor for a priest at a temple, to get our first contact.
We also had to spend cash to get greater restoration cast on one of our characters thanks to problems with a Night Hag. :smalleek:

The magic mart model is a 3e/4e feature (WBL) that is not part of the game system that preceded it.

Just because many newer players want to murderhero or murderhobo for their entire career doesn't mean we should assume that's the default. People with your attitude is precisely why we ended up with the Magic Mart and Gear Upgrade Treadmill in the first place. Luckily 5e has done away with that, and gold can once again be used for its primary purpose: investing in conquest. Well, at least it's a reasonable option now, for groups that don't just want to murderhobo an entire campaign up to 20, then retire them and start a new campaign for the next murderhobos. Yeah.

If you're trying to run a business as a crafter or merchant, that takes your time. You don't have the time left to go adventuring. By definition, that makes you an NPC, not a PC in 5e. Heck, we even did that in OD&D and 1e sometimes ... retire a character and play a new one with new players. But OD&D had a reasonable rule book on how to craft magic items if you wanted to expend the effort and GP.
(I think 5e's assumption is that magic items are "above" money in a sense, like Tywin Lannister trying to buy a valiyran sword, but some people would offer their daughters before their swords) Nicely said, Eric, and that's how I roll on magic items. They are incredibly rare, each one was made at great expense with a particular purpose (healing potions aside) and are not easily coaxed from the possession of its owner. FFS, it's magic!

F.H. Zebedee

2017-10-24, 01:10 PM

I started DMing this edition without a proper DMG (I basically spent my first six months literally running off of a 3rd party app that only had classes and some monster stats). That said, I feel I am better for it.

In my setting, getting tons of money takes work; if you murder people and take their stuff, there is always a repercussion of some kind. And monsters typically don't have much gear besides the possessions of their victims that you can scrounge.

So, even though my party is going into the early 10's, I doubt I've got a single party member who has gotten a total of more than 2,000 gold this whole adventure. Money exists tangentially to adventuring; you can use it to take care of niceties, grease wheels in society, etc, but you have to seek it out to have it (spending downtime mining/performing, deliberately seeking out ruins with valuable art and texts, and then spending time finding a buyer).

In a way, it helps that I'm running a very high magic setting; the man on the street won't have an enchanted sword, but smithing at a plus one level is in any town, and some even have plus twos available. by smashing down the amount of gold available to my players, but also reducing magic items to a pittance (well, by pittance, I mean 100 to 300 gold for a plus one, and typically around 800 to 1200 plus quests for a plus two), it has meant gold actually still means something even in upper levels.

(As an aside, I loathe the 3.e assumption that your wealth goes quadratic and costs go through the roof. That only makes sense in a heavily casted society where you have "tiers" of society. I feel it's much more genuine for party wealth to be a fairly flat curve, with even the top end as a matter of scale only being say, 10 to 30 times what they were capable of getting in lower levels.)

(Also thought I should clarify; magic weapons are widely available in my setting, but it's also clearly established in setting that these are objects of great worth which had one of the greatest smiths in the world pour days of time and effort into it. It's not "yawn, a plus one dagger" as much as "this a truly exquisite dagger, and it will probably be worth the time, effort, and danger it takes to further enchant it and draw out the unique potential it was crafted with". Think a luxury car; you can get one in almost any location with more than a few people, but it isn't throwaway just because it is available elsewhere)

Willie the Duck

2017-10-24, 01:41 PM

But OD&D had a reasonable rule book on how to craft magic items if you wanted to expend the effort and GP.

I would say that OD&D, 1e, and 5e are roughly on the same level, with 5e being a little too much on the 'we deliberately made this take forever', but if you just change a multiplier, it is in fact easier and more reasonable than the other editions. Although I can't quite remember the oD&D rules, so I want to hedge my bets. Which book had that?

UrielAwakened

2017-10-24, 01:44 PM

Heck, we even did that in OD&D and 1e sometimes ... retire a character and play a new one with new players. But OD&D had a reasonable rule book on how to craft magic items if you wanted to expend the effort and GP. Nicely said, Eric, and that's how I roll on magic items. They are incredibly rare, each one was made at great expense with a particular purpose (healing potions aside) and are not easily coaxed from the possession of its owner. FFS, it's magic!

I hear this from DMs around here and I have no idea what they give their players as a reward beyond XP.

Like if you are getting an average of one non-consumable magic item per session (which is the AL standard), can you really say that they're that rare? You're finding like one a day. That isn't rare to me.

If you aren't getting them that frequently, and are only giving out one a level, or one every few levels, what tangible rewards are your players getting? Gold?

If it's just gold, we run into the same problem that myself and so many others have repeatedly mentioned in this topic: Just what is gold for in your world? As a player, why do I care that I'm receiving gold? Especially if I'm the type of player who doesn't care about things that happen outside of adventures.

I just don't see any scenario where you can make magic items actually be rare AND keep players engaged with their rewards without trying to turn it into a fantasy simulator. And once you've done that, why not just make "buying magic items" part of said simulator?. Once a session, the AL standard, is already not so rare that it's believable NOBODY sells these things.

The rules regarding magic items completely mismatch the narrative the book tries to beat into your head.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 01:54 PM

I hear this from DMs around here and I have no idea what they give their players as a reward beyond XP.

Like if you are getting an average of one non-consumable magic item per session (which is the AL standard), can you really say that they're that rare? You're finding like one a day. That isn't rare to me.

If you aren't getting them that frequently, and are only giving out one a level, or one every few levels, what tangible rewards are your players getting? Gold?

If it's just gold, we run into the same problem that myself and so many others have repeatedly mentioned in this topic: Just what is gold for in your world? As a player, why do I care that I'm receiving gold? Especially if I'm the type of player who doesn't care about things that happen outside of adventures.

I just don't see any scenario where you can make magic items actually be rare AND keep players engaged with their rewards without trying to turn it into a fantasy simulator. And once you've done that, why not just make "buying magic items" part of said simulator?. Once a session, the AL standard, is already not so rare that it's believable NOBODY sells these things.

The rules regarding magic items completely mismatch the narrative the book tries to beat into your head.

Why do there have to be tangible rewards (either gold or items)? I as a person do lots of things that don't have tangible rewards. As a player, I'm much more motivated by seeing fantastic things, having engaging fights, and seeing stories take twists. Gear is something that is required to clear hurdles, not an intrinsic reward. Upgrading that +X to a +Y does nothing for me. Neither does having X wealth vs Y wealth. Those are purely instrumental goods.

I recognize that there are many valid ways of doing things, but I can't be alone in this motivation. My parties often tend to forget to distribute the loot they get, and they've been more motivated by progressing their goals, showing up that jerk NPC, or taking trophies to hang in their house. I think this is a taste issue, not an objective issue (in either direction).

Knaight

2017-10-24, 01:55 PM

That has been the case in all iterations of D&D. I'm not sure which if any of those would be considered an economic simulator. As to irritating, one part of D&D that some people really really like (and others find irritating) is the challenge/reward subgame of how much equipment do you cart down into the dungeon, knowing you will either have to abandon it (and consider it a sunk cost), or have less encumbrance left to cart up treasure (and is the last of the copper pieces worth lowering your speed for, etc.). This is especially a concern in the early game, where you won't have bags of holding or employees at the ready (and is when the gold is most valuable to you). This precise record keeping and hard decisions are a perfect example of what I am talking about with D&D having multiple audiences with directly contradicting preferences.

Prior editions had just as much complexity in accounting, but they all also had explicit designs around where that money goes, even at high levels. Earlier editions generally explicitly made the late game about domain management, armies, etc. which were a major money sink. Later editions had expensive magic items.

5e doesn't really have much for either, having focused more tightly on the adventuring party and deliberately excising the magic item economy. Both of those are entirely reasonable decisions, but it leaves an overly developed vestigial money system. It should have either been trimmed or tied into something and rendered nonvestigial.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-24, 02:02 PM

Why do there have to be tangible rewards (either gold or items)?

Because it's a game.

More importantly, it doesn't answer my central question of what you give your players. If your answer is, "Nothing," you're already having such a different experience than me that there's little point in discussing it.

If I ask someone, "What's the safest way to go swimming," and their answer is, "Why do you need to go swimming?" they're not being helpful.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 02:03 PM

5e doesn't really have much for either, having focused more tightly on the adventuring party and deliberately excising the magic item economy. Both of those are entirely reasonable decisions, but it leaves an overly developed vestigial money system. It should have either been trimmed or tied into something and rendered nonvestigial.

I'd be willing to bet that one big reason that (removing it) didn't happen is that it would require slaughtering a whole herd of sacred cows. The howling would have been...epic, for lack of a better word. It's also useful for one particular play-style--the low-resource, high-logistic style. Is that enough? Dunno. It doesn't bug me either way.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 02:06 PM

Because it's a game.

More importantly, it doesn't answer my central question of what you give your players. If your answer is, "Nothing," you're already having such a different experience than me that there's little point in discussing it.

I did answer it. They have other, non-tangible rewards. NOT ALL REWARDS ARE TANGIBLE OR MECHANICAL. Most of the enjoyment is in the doing, at least for me and my players. One of the best sessions we ever had was a whole session spent with a goblin tribe. They gathered fruits and nuts, played with the goblin kids, and generally had a blast. No tangible rewards, not even XP. No dice were rolled at all. It wasn't intended, but it was how it worked out. But everyone still claims it was one of the best ones we've had. Other times, it's the thrill of a hard-won fight. Or the joy of seeing that BBEG that's been obnoxious take a hard fall.

Oh, and I still give magic items and gold. Those just don't matter to the players as much. In fact, they tend to forget they have them.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-24, 02:07 PM

I did answer it. They have other, non-tangible rewards. NOT ALL REWARDS ARE TANGIBLE OR MECHANICAL. Most of the enjoyment is in the doing, at least for me and my players. One of the best sessions we ever had was a whole session spent with a goblin tribe. They gathered fruits and nuts, played with the goblin kids, and generally had a blast. No tangible rewards, not even XP. But everyone still claims it was one of the best ones we've had. Other times, it's the thrill of a hard-won fight. Or the joy of seeing that BBEG that's been obnoxious take a hard fall.

Oh, and I still give magic items and gold. Those just don't matter to the players as much. In fact, they tend to forget they have them.

Not all, but you're acting like it's impossible to integrate mechanical and tangible rewards with a meaningful story. If the goblins had given them a family heirloom or an amulet of sorts they'd have a meaningful parcel to remember that experience.

I don't know about you but I manage both pretty regularly. And my players tend to enjoy both equally. If your players regularly forget about their items, then maybe your items just aren't that interesting.

Xetheral

2017-10-24, 02:10 PM

Why do there have to be tangible rewards (either gold or items)? I as a person do lots of things that don't have tangible rewards. As a player, I'm much more motivated by seeing fantastic things, having engaging fights, and seeing stories take twists.

Because the range of characters who would be willing to go on voluntary adventures without a tangible incentive for doing so is much more limited than the combined range of characters who don't require a reward PLUS those who do.

Similarly, the range of possible campaigns that only have involuntary adventures (e.g. save the world plots, survival plots) is much more limited than the combined range of campaigns with involuntary adventures PLUS those with voluntary adventures.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-10-24, 02:11 PM

Not all, but you're acting like it's impossible to integrate mechanical and tangible rewards with a meaningful story.

That's...I don't know how you got that. If I gave that impression, I apologize. I'm just trying to emphasize that, for many people, the tangible rewards are less important and may only be instrumental. I've played with groups that would have been happy never getting new gear. And the game math doesn't break too badly if that happens. It's not optimized, but it works. This is in strong contravention to 3.5e or 4e, where the whole system falls apart if the players don't have the right numbers.

I don't know about you but I manage both pretty regularly. And my players tend to enjoy both equally. If your players regularly forget about their items, then maybe your items just aren't that interesting.

Or because they care more about other things. People are different--things you don't like aren't necessarily flaws; nor are things you like necessarily features. You're elevating a matter of taste (the proper rewards) to a matter of objective quality.

UrielAwakened

2017-10-24, 02:12 PM

You're elevating a matter of taste ... to a matter of objective quality.

Yeah but you've been doing that for 6 pages.

Anyway this system still falls apart either way it just has nothing to do with numbers. CR is still a mess. Classes are still unbalanced with each other. Some items are wildly better than others despite their rarity being the same.

The fact that you no longer need a +3 longsword by level 15 to be relevant is just one less thing. It's not like removing that aspect of the game means it magically works better. And tons of monsters STILL have resistance to all non-magical weapons which just further illustrates the fact that this problem is still very much a problem.

Willie the Duck

2017-10-24, 02:14 PM

Because it's a game.

More importantly, it doesn't answer my central question of what you give your players. If your answer is, "Nothing," you're already having such a different experience than me that there's little point in discussing it.

Off the top of my head:

Bling, Adoring fans, and other puffery
Xp
Gp, even if they just blow it
expendible magic items
magic items of limited capacity to break the game (self-refilling waterskins, self-replenishing quiver, device of unseen servant/prestidigitation, the powerful but rarely used water breathing items).
Favors
Allies. Lots and lots of allies. Spear carriers. At higher levels, spear bearers who keep the giant from circumventing the fighters and wallop the wizard, and are resilient to enemy fireballs, yet somehow still have crummy attack values so won't outshine the PCs.

It's certainly not that different from B/X or BECM, where gp = xp, so it was important then, but if you weren't into the castles and crusades, there wasn't all that much to do with it once you'd successfully hauled it to the surface and collected your xp.

KorvinStarmast

2017-10-24, 03:13 PM

I would say that OD&D, 1e, and 5e are roughly on the same level, with 5e being a little too much on the 'we deliberately made this take forever', but if you just change a multiplier, it is in fact easier and more reasonable than the other editions. Although I can't quite remember the oD&D rules, so I want to hedge my bets. Which book had that? Men and Magic, pages 6 and 7

Wizards and above may manufacture for their own use (or for sale) such items as potions, scrolls, and just about anything else magical. Costs are commensurate with the value of the item, as is the amount of game time required to enchant it.

Examples of costs are:
Item Cost
Scroll of Spells100 Gold Pieces/Spell/Spell Level/Week (a 5th level spell would require 500 GP and 5 weeks.)
Potion of Healing 250 Gold Pieces + 1 week
Potion of Giant Strength 1,000 Gold Pieces + 4 weeks
Enchanting 20 Arrows 1,000 Gold Pieces + 4 weeks
Enchanting Armor to +1 2,000 Gold Pieces + 2 months
Wand of Cold 10,000 Gold Pieces + 6 months
X-Ray Vision Ring 50,000 Gold Pieces + 1 year

IIRC, you could start making some magical items in 1e at 7th level, but I'd have to look that one up.

Research by magical types can be done at any level of experience, but the level of magic involved dictates the possibility of success, as well as the amount of money necessary to invest. Assume that a Magic-User can use a 4th level spell (explained later), therefore he could develop a new spell provided it was equal to or less than 4th level. Researching spells was pretty important when you wanted to add spells to your book. It ate a lot of money for my first character.

I hear this from DMs around here and I have no idea what they give their players as a reward beyond XP. Sometimes, getting a map to the next old ruin/adventure location is a reward in itself. Getting information on a possible weakness for a monster is another reward for a few encounters. A nice set of half plate at 3rd level is an awesome find.

Like if you are getting an average of one non-consumable magic item per session (which is the AL standard), can you really say that they're that rare? You're finding like one a day. That isn't rare to me. I won't comment on that, since AL has some particular things it's trying to achieve for WoTC's business model.

If you are only giving out one every few levels, what tangible rewards are your players getting? Gold?
Gems, jewels, gold, nice weapons ... consumables like scrolls and potions are very handy in certain situations ...
If they find two platinum rings at level 3, this allows the cleric to use the spell warding bond, for example. That's handy.

If it's just gold, We have a failure of imagination.
Favors from an NPC.
Use of a cart to carry them to the next adventure.
Free passage on a boat, for five, with food.

I just don't see any scenario where you can make magic items actually be rare AND keep players engaged with their rewards without trying to turn it into a fantasy simulator. Keeping the magical items rare keeps them hungry. XP and new powers are by themselves a good incentive. Consumables are the best things IMO to drop per adventure to offer a tool here and there (potion of growth? a vial of poison for getting an edge against that nasty enemy?) to at least keep a "ding" happening for your more video game assumptioned players ...

The rules regarding magic items completely mismatch the narrative the book tries to beat into your head.
No, they don't. the DMG even has a guideline for high, medium, and low magic item outfits for players starting at low, mid, and high levels.

DanDare2050

2019-05-23, 08:07 AM

So its been a couple of years since this topic ground to a halt. Let me contribute something that some may find of value.

I run an open table club. Its been going a bit over 2 years. Players drop in and play casually. Each DM has their own part of the same world. We play using only the 3 core books.

More important is how we track time and experience gain.

Time: The time in the game world synchronises with the time in the real world at the beginning of each session. So if you play today (23 May 2019) and adventure a few days your session date at the end will be 25 May 2019. If your next session is the 30 May 2019 then 5 days have passed in the game world and you account for them with a slightly filled out version of the downtime rules. Life styles determine the odds of various bad and good life events happening, so its bad to live a wretched lifestyle and good to live a wealthy one. Magic items and so on can be crafted, but if they take 6 months game time, then they take about 6 months real time too.

Experience Gain: Any experience you gain is "raw" and cannot be used for levelling up. After every long rest you convert some experience to "trained", which can be used for levelling up. The formula is 5 x current level is converted per long rest. (max 1 such per day, elves count their shorter rest). You can also spend a whole day in training. During that time you can spend up to 50gp on training. Each GP spent this way converts xp from raw to trained equal to your current level. So a 3rd level character can convert 3 x 5 = 15xp a night, and up to 50 x 3 = 150 xp a day of solid training. In the above time example, you have 5 days between adventures. Our 3rd level character converts 5 x 5 x 3 = 75xp automatically. They can also spend 5 x 50 gp (250gp) to convert 750 additional xp in that time.

That has the effect of chewing lots of gold to accelerate how quickly you can level and also throttles level growth to something roughly even between players regardless of the awarding habits of the different GMs. And so people value their treasure. A couple of players last year hauled out 5,000gp in an adventure each. It dwindled away pretty quickly. After 2 years of 2 sessions a month we have our first 9th level characters. They are wealthy. Some have manors. A good deal of extra wealth gets drained off by politics. The local Lord is always interested in patronage in return for favours that cost him little.

You'll find our player guides at my strangeflight blog on the Kenmore Role Playing Society page. (I'll post a link when I have enough posts to be allowed to).