The issue of eaily obtained material wealth of mid-level casters.

[Crake]

So it came up in an earlier thread, the idea of using wall of salt to produce an egregious amount of salt. But similar things could be concieved with wall of iron and fabricate to create a tonne of masterwork weapons, or honestly, just fabricate in general to mass-produce expensive items to quickly make enormous amounts of cash. So the question becomes: how do you overcome this hurdle?

For some people, they insist that someone else has done the trick before, so the market has devalued to the point of being worthless, others say that the demand would be so tiny that it wouldn't be profitable, but honestly, a single wizard could produce everything a town would need. Instead of having dozens of different tradesmen, taking days to produce things, a single wizard could do it all in a matter of moments. It either means literally all non-magical goods should be devauled to the point of worthlessness, or no wizard ever happens to bother looking into making that kind of money, in which case the market is certainly open for a player to take over, should they so happen to choose that route.

So how do people handle this issue?

Personally, the world I run is a very low magic world, so the notion that wizards have cornered every niche of the market is pretty far-fetched. Wizards do in fact do these tricks, but they are so few and far between that it has a minimal impact on the market. So what's to stop a player from doing it you ask? Well... the answer is simple: Nothing. But the question then arises: What are they going to do with all that money? You may have guessed my solution by this point: Material wealth is easy to come by for mid level casters.... but it has very little value to them. You might be able to buy a home, an estate even, you might be able to equip yourself with the best mundane gear, buy (or hell, build yourself) the most amazing caraval for naval travel for your expeditions.... but ultimately, money doesn't serve you very well. In a low magic world rare materials for crafting, or magical items are not for sale except in the most concetrated magical societies, and even then, all those mages? They also have egregious amounts of cash, and guess what? They don't want more. If you want something, you have to trade for it. Either with materials, magic items, or, if you're a wizard, trading spells from your spellbook.

This solution was actually a very natural outcome of my setting, and one I hadn't even realised had put itself in place until I thought about it from reading other threads. Ultimately though, the point of this thread was to see how other people handle this issue, so I'd love to hear from the forum about it.

[Mike Miller]

I have a campaign as DM where there is no currency exchange. Everything the party wants is either found, crafted, or bartered with rare individuals who may have something worth bartering.

It works well in my campaign. The party has slowly accrued useful items from level one to roughly level 12 now. At this point, they mostly craft what they want. I just control the amount of crafting materials and they do the rest. Once in a while they find a magic item they desire, but crafting is more common.

[Elder_Basilisk]

A lot is going to depend upon how you view the use of such spells. If you view it as abuse and ask your players not to do so, assume that there is something that makes it not work for NPCs either. If that something is DM Fiat, that's fine. On the other hand, if you want your players to be able to use those spells like that you'll need to adjust your setting to account for it.

What are other options? These will depend on the setting:
1. The nature of magic. If magic warps its users so that in general they no longer have easily recognizable human desires, then no explanation is needed. If wizards are like Sheelba and ningauble from Fritz Lieber's stories or the mad maguses of lovecrafts's stories then they won't be running around trying to compete with the craftsmen.

They might use magic to get things they need personally but they won't be mass manufacturing swords and armor.

2. Fear. At mid levels, wizards are most definitely not invulnerable and it's position that craft guilds could hire assassins to eliminate wizards who disrupt the economy.

3. Social status. If wizards are upper class as in a mageocracy or an aristocracy where nobility and magic go together, it's entirely possible that commerce is seen as a job for servants and true wizards eschew it entirely. Maybe in that setting no one even researched fabricate, wall of iron, or wall of salt. It's just not something that came up and if they need lots of masterwork weapons, they would rather conjure a forge devil and feed it the souls of slaves for it's price than cast fabricate themselves.

There are societies that never developed the wheel and lots of examples of people who committed economic suicide due to cultural pressures. If you want to combine explanations and have magic drive its users to madness too, you can come up with some flavorful reasons why it hasn't happened.

[Nifft]

Scenario 1 - Everybody is doing it. They're just doing it quietly, in non-disruptive ways, since they don't want to get pressured to spend all their time doing it.

If your PC starts disrupting the status quo by using economic disrupting magic in loud ways, for example advertising cheap swords or whatever, then two things will happen:
- Over-supply for fixed demand will remove the profits from swords (or whatever).
- Kings, guilds, and other magic-users will suddenly have a keen interest in your activities. They'll want a cut. If you don't share your wealth (and thus end up working for someone else), you'll suddenly find yourself in an exciting combat-heavy adventure which doesn't give you time to craft.

In the worst case, you'll spur other foolish local magic-users into action, since they'll feel that they should be competing with you. Then you enter a trade war in which all prices race to the bottom, or you enter an arms race whereby you try to put each other out of business by any means necessary.

Remember those ruins you explored at level 6? They came from a Wizard trade war that heated up 100 years ago. That's why the dungeons are full of tasty magic items.

What smart Wizards do is pay their taxes using Wall of Salt / Wall of Iron / etc., so the local kings & such have a good reason to protect them, and no reason to wish them grievous bodily harm.

-- -- --

Scenario 2 - Nobody is doing it, and that's for a good reason. Is there a Blood War happening in this setting? Well, who do you think makes all the weapons for the soldiers of the Abyss? If you advertise that you have the capability to produce weapons for an army, you will be caught by powerful fiends and compelled to actually do so, all the time, for zero profit.

Or maybe the iron / salt / etc. actually come from a real place, and when someone summons too much, the rulers of that place come looking for you.

Or maybe the fabricate spell actually calls Faerie spirits who do the crafting, and using them too often calls down the wrath of the elder Fey.


Scenario 2 might be a bit heavy-handed, but it's quite easy to integrate into existing settings.

[AnimeTheCat]

I've had a few players who wanted to sit back and amass tons of wealth using this method, but I didn't have to do anything. The party was basically like "no man... That's boring and lame and we don't want to do that". I've never once had to step in and make up rulings or decide on a course of action.

I have had a party decide to use wall of salt to conjur up tons of salt, load it in to several bags of holding, handy haversacks, and portable holes and then fly over and dump it on the crops of a kingdom they were at war with, ultimately destroying the crops.

Another experience had a party member offer to conjur up a wall of iron for a barbarian tribe as payment for an artifact or service of great value (since the tribe would not deal in coinage). That much workable iron propelled the tribe to the top in the area and later assisted the party in overthrowing a Derugar city in the underdark for a group of dwarven refugees, creating an unlikely bond between the LG Dwarves of Moradin and the CN tribe of Orcs. Ultimately, the alliance caused the creation of the first great empire in the world with a multi-cultural rule that still is persisting. The party was immortalized when they alone stood against an elder evil and sealed it with their very souls, creating The Order of the Five Souls which persists in the game world. Their reward was a bit better than just money in these cases.

I guess how I deal with it is that I don't and just let things happen. The party usually doesn't want all the down time to sell all that material anyway so I'm fine with it.

[emeraldstreak]

Scenario 2 - Nobody is doing it, and that's for a good reason. Is there a Blood War happening in this setting? Well, who do you think makes all the weapons for the soldiers of the Abyss? If you advertise that you have the capability to produce weapons for an army, you will be caught by powerful fiends and compelled to actually do so, all the time, for zero profit.

Or maybe the iron / salt / etc. actually come from a real place, and when someone summons too much, the rulers of that place come looking for you.

Or maybe the fabricate spell actually calls Faerie spirits who do the crafting, and using them too often calls down the wrath of the elder Fey.

Scenario 2 might be a bit heavy-handed, but it's quite easy to integrate into existing settings.

Once again Nifft has the right idea. If you want reasons why high levels wizards won't do this or that, and why they hire low level adventurers to help them, you have to imagine a world that's less friendly than ours. Those wizards don't spellcast because they are afraid, of being noticed, or of being attacked the moment they spend higher spellslots. They are elders who really play it safe.

[Florian]

So how do people handle this issue?

By just saying no to it.

[Venger]

By just saying no to it.

I know right?

No using wall of x to make money falls comfortable under the gentleman's agreement. PCs are assumed by the way game balance is set up to accrue money through overcoming cr-appropriate challenges. These spells mess that up, so the gm should just say so and move on from there.

It's okay to houserule stuff for metagame reasons.

[Nifft]

Once again Nifft has the right idea. If you want reasons why high levels wizards won't do this or that, and why they hire low level adventurers to help them, you have to imagine a world that's less friendly than ours. Those wizards don't spellcast because they are afraid, of being noticed, or of being attacked the moment they spend higher spellslots. They are elders who really play it safe.

Thanks!

I came up with a 3rd one.

Everybody does it, and in fact it is required. The world is slowly losing matter. Rust Monsters and rusting grasp spells actually destroy metal atoms. Spheres of Annihilation and disintegrate spells do the same thing, and don't care if you're metal or not.

Everybody expects a Wizard of high enough level to start making stuff, and thus everyone is prepared to react very swiftly to an abundance of goods. When a new, naive Wizard rolls into town with a huge quantity of a trade good, the price drops immediately.

You can optimize your way out of the price-drop situation by carefully trickling in a diverse selection of products slowly, over many different markets.

But if you do that -- optimize for GP per unit spell -- then you are upholding established market prices, and not disrupting them. Also it's a lot of work. The Fighter gets the same returns (roughly) just for riding through the villages near his keep and waving at the peasants. (The peasants cheer. A youth in the front row blushes furiously and faints. It's good to be the lord.)

So anyway, what established Wizards and other high-level spellcasters do is collude. They divvy up markets, preserving their own profits and compensating for the depletion of natural resources.

Same goes for stuff like Druids using plant growth -- it's required, not disruptive. That sort of thing must be how human populations survive in spite of monster attacks, or something.

[Cruiser1]

So it came up in an earlier thread, the idea of using wall of salt to produce an egregious amount of salt. So how do people handle this issue?
This is easy to handle: Wall of Salt doesn't create edible table salt (Sodium Chloride, or NaCl). There are numerous types of chemical salts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(chemistry)#Properties), of which the valuable D&D trade good of table salt is only one type among many. To keep table salt as a valuable trade good worth 5gp per lb that can't just be mass produced by any 7th level caster, RAI is obviously that Wall of Salt instead brings forth a mixture of various inedible chemical salts, which aren't useful and therefore have no value.

Same for Wall of Iron: It doesn't produce valuable pure elemental iron, but rather an impure mixture of various iron ores (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore). One could smelt usable iron from a casting of Wall of Iron, but that's an expensive process no different from what a real iron mine does.

[Coretron03]

This is easy to handle: Wall of Salt doesn't create edible table salt (Sodium Chloride, or NaCl). There are numerous types of chemical salts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(chemistry)#Properties), of which the valuable D&D trade good of table salt is only one type among many. To keep table salt as a valuable trade good worth 5gp per lb that can't just be mass produced by any 7th level caster, RAI is obviously that Wall of Salt instead brings forth a mixture of various inedible chemical salts, which aren't useful and therefore have no value.

Same for Wall of Iron: It doesn't produce valuable pure elemental iron, but rather an impure mixture of various iron ores (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore). One could smelt usable iron from a casting of Wall of Iron, but that's an expensive process no different from what a real iron mine does.

You’ll notice that neither of those spells actually say those things.


This spell creates a gleaming wall of salt crystal that merges into adjoining rock surfaces.
The wall can seal off a passage or breach, or be used to construct new walls.
A wall of salt is 1 inch thick per caster level.
You can double the wall's area by halving its thickness.
The wall cannot be conjured so that it occupies the same space as a creature or another object.
You can form a wall of salt into nearly any shape desired.
The wall need not be vertical, nor rest upon any firm foundation; however, it must merge with and be solidly supported by existing stone.
It can be used to bridge a chasm or as a ramp.
If such a span is more than 20 feet long, the wall must be arched and buttressed, reducing the spell's area by half.
For example, a 10th-level caster could create a salt span with a surface area of five 5-foot squares.
The wall can be crudely shaped to allow crenellations, battlements, and so forth, by likewise reducing the area.
The wall can be destroyed normally by a disintegrate spell or by chipping and breaking.
Each 5-foot square of the wall has 3 hit points per inch and hardness 2.
A section of wall whose hit points drop to 0 is breached.
If a creature tries to break through the wall with a single attack, the DC for the Strength check is 15 + 1 per inch of thickness.
Directing a constant blast of water at a wall of salt (for example, a geyser from a decanter of endless water) dissolves the mineral, dealing 10 points of damage per minute (which hardness does not reduce).
It is possible, but difficult, to trap mobile opponents within or under a wall of salt, provided the wall is shaped so it can hold the creatures.
Creatures can avoid entrapment with successful Reflex saves.
Arcane Material Component: A crystal of rock salt.

None of this says anything of the sort that it isn’t what the game deems as “Salt”. The spells says it creates salt. In the goods section, it says “Merchants commonly exchange trade goods without using currency. As a means of comparison, some trade goods are detailed below.” and lists salt as such a good. Just salt, not table salt, not anything else. Unless your willing to argue that “Gleaming” in WOS description is a distinction the developer made but they didn’t define it, theres not much you can argue with. Even then, is a “gleaming” bit of gold worthless because of the word gleaming, which should be applied consistently?

You also say the that its clear the developers intended your idea, even though nothing I’ve seen backs them up and it would be an easier leap to make that the developers didn’t intend it, except it was purely out of carlessness of ignorance than invoking chemical differences.

[Falontani]

You’ll notice that neither of those spells actually say those things.



None of this says anything of the sort that it isn’t what the game deems as “Salt”. The spells says it creates salt. In the goods section, it says “Merchants commonly exchange trade goods without using currency. As a means of comparison, some trade goods are detailed below.” and lists salt as such a good. Just salt, not table salt, not anything else. Unless your willing to argue that “Gleaming” in WOS description is a distinction the developer made but they didn’t define it, theres not much you can argue with. Even then, is a “gleaming” bit of gold worthless because of the word gleaming, which should be applied consistently?

You also say the that its clear the developers intended your idea, even though nothing I’ve seen backs them up and it would be an easier leap to make that the developers didn’t intend it, except it was purely out of carlessness of ignorance than invoking chemical differences.

I do not believe they were stating that this was what the spells entailed, but I believe they were suggesting that you make it as such to address the problem that the thread is devoted to

[Âmesang]

After reading/playing through the Sagard the Barbarian books my first thought was to shadow walk/plane shift/gate to Yarth and use all of that salt to destroy some zombies. :smalltongue:

Similarly the thought of travelling to Krynn to sell off such goods in gold pieces (being 40 to 1 steel piece) had also come to mind, bringing the copious amounts of gold back to Oerth/Toril/Eberron/&c…

…but I've never gone through with it, and I doubt I ever will.

[Fizban]

First off NPC city generation does not give sufficient casters to crush the world, so ruling that the wizards capable of doing such things are rare isn't exactly novel, it's already right there in the rules. Maybe if the small number of casters capable of casting those spells in particular cities decided they actually wanted to mess with the economy, then that specific area would be different, if I decided it worked that way. Because as I outlined here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?543316-3-x-Magic-Also-Taketh), there are plenty of ways the DM can stonewall such attempts simply by not reading things the way the char-OP wants them read (declaring the salt of Wall of Salt useless has already been mentioned).

Not listed in that thread was the fact that Fabricate and Unseen Crafter still require you to personally have the skills you're trying to obviate, and there are dozens of different crafts holding up society. Unless you can personally do everything, you can't do everything.

[Crake]

Not listed in that thread was the fact that Fabricate and Unseen Crafter still require you to personally have the skills you're trying to obviate, and there are dozens of different crafts holding up society. Unless you can personally do everything, you can't do everything.

Except that there are numerous spells that can boost your skill checks by incredible amounts. Divine insight and guidance of the avatar combined can grant you a combined total of up to +35, plus a wizard's already innate high int modifier, and a take 10, you're looking at 50 being easily achievable... Not that you really need all that. Divine insight at it's lowest CL, plus a +5 int bonus and a take 10 gets you DC20, which is "masterwork". If you can manage to get your int up to +10 you don't even need to worry about those spells for the majority of crafts.


Same for Wall of Iron: It doesn't produce valuable pure elemental iron, but rather an impure mixture of various iron ores (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore). One could smelt usable iron from a casting of Wall of Iron, but that's an expensive process no different from what a real iron mine does.

Fabricate still specifically works for iron ore, albeit at a 10:1 ratio, but you can still produce far more than the 50gp worth of gold dust in weapons per casting.


I know right?

No using wall of x to make money falls comfortable under the gentleman's agreement. PCs are assumed by the way game balance is set up to accrue money through overcoming cr-appropriate challenges. These spells mess that up, so the gm should just say so and move on from there.

It's okay to houserule stuff for metagame reasons.

The problem with this answer is twofold in my opinion:
a) I don't believe a gentleman's agreement should alter mechanics of the setting. The gentleman's agreement should be with regards to style and method of play. Any mechanical issues should be sorted out on the mechanical level.
b) Preventing players from overcoming wealth by level limits means that the players will focus all of their wealth onto themselves as a character. If, on the other hand, raw GP can only buy you mundane, material goods, it allows players to actually involve themselves in the world, buying an estate, or building a business, or hell, as recently happened in my e6 game, hire sailors and go sailing on the high seas.

There are just so many things that are hardly ever explored because "nah, it costs too much, I'd rather just buy this magical item". I've found that when you separate magical gear from gold, suddenly gold is used in more interesting ways, players start investing into the world, and hell, that GP is then used to fuel adventures, rather than being the reward of adventures. I have no problem with "infinite" money generation, because it reaches a point where you just sit and ask yourself "I have all this money... now what".

[Mordaedil]

The problem with wall of salt, is that you create a surplus resource that diminishes the value of the product as a sales item. The reason salt is valuable in the first place is because the processes to obtain it are either costly or resource intensive. Once you start selling your salt in large quantities, it will create a market collapse and demand will lower and cost will crash. It is a neat way to obtain some money early on, but as a DM, you have the right to cause price of salt to drop after the players do this even once.

There are other ways to make money using your spells, such as using telekinesis to replace heavy labor, essentially becoming a one-man construction company. As a caster, you have a lot of options available to you and pretty much every spell can be used to some sort of monetary benefit.

Like using Heroics to offer fighters a method to test out new martial art techniques before they devote themselves to it entirely. Think of how valuable that is from a setting perspective. You can save them years of training at a field they are not going to be happy going down.

[Fizban]

Except that there are numerous spells that can boost your skill checks by incredible amounts. Divine insight and guidance of the avatar combined can grant you a combined total of up to +35, plus a wizard's already innate high int modifier, and a take 10, you're looking at 50 being easily achievable... Not that you really need all that. Divine insight at it's lowest CL, plus a +5 int bonus and a take 10 gets you DC20, which is "masterwork". If you can manage to get your int up to +10 you don't even need to worry about those spells for the majority of crafts.
True, those spells are borked, but they're also cleric spells, so now you're mixing spell lists, multiple casters, custom magic items, or extra costs on consumables. +10 in bonus requires a significantly higher level than Fabricate for an NPC. Masterwork tools don't count when you're crafting via a spell, nor would any of the official craft bonus items I'm vaguely aware of. People capable of casting Fabricate and Unseen Crafter are already rare enough, any required combo is commensurately rarer.

(Nevermind that Guidance of the Avatar is a web article spell, a clear "same but different source/better" that shouldn't exist alongside Divine Insight, and neither spell actually lasts long enough to make a craft check. Divine Insight lasts long enough to combo with Fabricate, which still requires a custom item, specific build, or pair of characters to pull off).

[Venger]

The problem with this answer is twofold in my opinion:
a) I don't believe a gentleman's agreement should alter mechanics of the setting. The gentleman's agreement should be with regards to style and method of play. Any mechanical issues should be sorted out on the mechanical level.
b) Preventing players from overcoming wealth by level limits means that the players will focus all of their wealth onto themselves as a character. If, on the other hand, raw GP can only buy you mundane, material goods, it allows players to actually involve themselves in the world, buying an estate, or building a business, or hell, as recently happened in my e6 game, hire sailors and go sailing on the high seas.

There are just so many things that are hardly ever explored because "nah, it costs too much, I'd rather just buy this magical item". I've found that when you separate magical gear from gold, suddenly gold is used in more interesting ways, players start investing into the world, and hell, that GP is then used to fuel adventures, rather than being the reward of adventures. I have no problem with "infinite" money generation, because it reaches a point where you just sit and ask yourself "I have all this money... now what".

a) Why? That doesn't make any sense. Gentleman's agreement has to alter some mechanical elements of the setting. There isn't anything wrong with houseruling on the meta level. Everything doesn't need an in-universe justification behind it. You're allowed to just say "I don't like drown healing, so I don't want to do it in the campaign I'm going to run," without saying "in my game the composition of water is different so it doesn't set you to -1hp when you begin drowning."

This is a symptom of a larger prevailing philosophy that you aren't allowed to just talk to your players about stuff you do or don't want to do in the game and have to hide it behind in-game mechanics as a way to passive-aggressively avoid conflict. It's not necessary and is ultimately counterproductive.

b) that's cool but that has just nothing to do with D&D the way the game is actually set up. the only reason money exists in regular D&D is to buy magic items. while that may not be true in your homebrew setting, the design principles really don't carry over.

it's not a consequence of other people playing the game wrong. it's that in regular D&D, there isn't a lot of stuff to buy besides magic items. mundane gear such as rope or salt or lantern oil or what have you possesses a couple of niche uses but again (I'm assuming in your homebrew system you have a lot more mundane gear for pcs to buy to do fun things) I don't really see the connection between these two things.

[Florian]

"nah, it costs too much, I'd rather just buy this magical item"

That's more or less a 3E problem and also strongly based on verisimilitude. In PF, those things have their prices rated on what their actual (mechanical) benefits are compared to equipment, with the base-line D&D focus on being an adventure game. So you want to set up that inn and want it to be the front for your thieves guild? Costs around 1K and doesn't need stuff like Leadership or being of "name level" to get your first team of burglars and merry men going.

[Zombimode]

The problem with this answer is twofold in my opinion:
a) I don't believe a gentleman's agreement should alter mechanics of the setting. The gentleman's agreement should be with regards to style and method of play. Any mechanical issues should be sorted out on the mechanical level.

In addition to what Venger already said, the Gentleman's Agreement doesn't mean that the mechanic/interaction in question does actually work in the setting but Player characters and NPCs alike just don't use it for 4th wall breaking metagame reasons.
Instead it is assumed that there are in-game reasons for why the mechanic/interaction in question doesn't work, but the specific reason is not important since the players choose to ignore it for metagame reasons.

[Fizban]

b) that's cool but that has just nothing to do with D&D the way the game is actually set up. the only reason money exists in regular D&D is to buy magic items. while that may not be true in your homebrew setting, the design principles really don't carry over.

That's more or less a 3E problem and also strongly based on verisimilitude. In PF, those things have their prices rated on what their actual (mechanical) benefits are compared to equipment, with the base-line D&D focus on being an adventure game. So you want to set up that inn and want it to be the front for your thieves guild? Costs around 1K and doesn't need stuff like Leadership or being of "name level" to get your first team of burglars and merry men going.
The latter isn't really a solution either, it just means that non-adventuring stuff is ridiculously cheap because it has "low mechanical benefits," which makes the non-adventuring monetary value of what the PCs are caring even crazier. There's the common trope of "I'm saving money to buy an inn," or the retired adventurer who runs an inn. If an inn costs only the WBL of a 2nd level character, you're not saving, you barely even need to finish one adventure. If a retired high level adventurer can afford to build half a city, it's even more odd when they're managing one solitary business. Obviously there will never be an agreement on what the ratio of WBL to castle building power should be, when people don't agree on anything else regarding level progression.

If you want to have the PCs gaining large amounts of currency and spending it on plot progression and world alteration, then divorce that currency from the magic item currency. This can be done by making them actually different currencies, replacing magic items with other systems that may or may not involve a "currency" that exists the world, or by replacing the non-magic item "currency" with something else (like only favors from the right people will get you what you want).

[Jack_Simth]

House Rule:

Things originally created by the deities have some leftover "spark of creation" (replace with whatever term you like) in them, which is necessary for many different things. Items created or meaningfully altered via magic do not have this "spark of creation". How much there is (and how easily it can be extracted) varies. With trade goods in particular, it's easy to extract - prices of these are where they are due to the amount of "spark of creation" that can be easily extracted... and it's generally used in magic item creation. When the supply of one sort of trade good goes up relative to the others... crafters all over flock to the area to buy up that item. Demand goes up (relative to all other trade goods) sufficient to balance the supply. Likewise, when the supply of one sort of trade good goes down relative to the others... all the crafters purchase other items in preference, and the demand goes down to match supply. As the metal in coins is included in the list of trade goods, prices for all these items become essentially "fixed", because the reference used is subject to the exact same effect. So you can cast Wall of Salt and break it up... but the inkeeper won't take it as payment, because he can tell he won't be able trade it in turn for when he needs to pay the local cleric for a Remove Disease at some point (the Cleric can't use it for crafting). An item without the "spark of creation" can't be properly enchanted, isn't useful as a spell component, and will give people an uneasy feeling... which allows anyone trained in such things (Spellcraft or Appraise) to identify it. Additionally, that "spark of creation" is not just needed for magic item creation. It's also necessary for growth and breeding. An adult can survive on magically-created food just fine... but won't have any children unless most of the adult's diet is real food. A child fed on the stuff will survive, but won't grow up - and is still subject to aging with time. This also extends to anyone who's surrounded by too many "void" items, although it's not clear to anyone exactly where the line is for these effects.

People have tried it before. Civilizations have built "traps" of beneficial spells to keep the population fed, warm, and healthy... and all such civilizations failed within a few generations due to lack of kids. Goods produced by Fabricate are perfectly useful for mundane purposes... but make people feel a little uneasy so end up not getting purchased even when the prospective buyer isn't personally aware of the source. It's fine for personal use once you're grown, and you can probably convince your own soldiers to wear such armor and wield such weapons for a short time... but nobody else is interested.

[Crake]

The latter isn't really a solution either, it just means that non-adventuring stuff is ridiculously cheap because it has "low mechanical benefits," which makes the non-adventuring monetary value of what the PCs are caring even crazier. There's the common trope of "I'm saving money to buy an inn," or the retired adventurer who runs an inn. If an inn costs only the WBL of a 2nd level character, you're not saving, you barely even need to finish one adventure. If a retired high level adventurer can afford to build half a city, it's even more odd when they're managing one solitary business. Obviously there will never be an agreement on what the ratio of WBL to castle building power should be, when people don't agree on anything else regarding level progression.

If you want to have the PCs gaining large amounts of currency and spending it on plot progression and world alteration, then divorce that currency from the magic item currency. This can be done by making them actually different currencies, replacing magic items with other systems that may or may not involve a "currency" that exists the world, or by replacing the non-magic item "currency" with something else (like only favors from the right people will get you what you want).

This is pretty much what I, and it seems a few other people in this thread, have done. Mind you, it's not a "currancy" so to speak, but rather a system of barter. You have these rare materials, someone else wants them, you exchange them for something else that you want and so on. The kinds of people who handle these rare materials have no real need for material plane currancy, because to them it's just as easy to come by as it is for you.


a) Why? That doesn't make any sense. Gentleman's agreement has to alter some mechanical elements of the setting. There isn't anything wrong with houseruling on the meta level. Everything doesn't need an in-universe justification behind it. You're allowed to just say "I don't like drown healing, so I don't want to do it in the campaign I'm going to run," without saying "in my game the composition of water is different so it doesn't set you to -1hp when you begin drowning."

I think we have a fundanmental difference in our interpretation on what a gentleman's agreement is. Saying "we won't use drown healing" isn't a gentleman's agreement, that should honestly just be every DM's houserule. To say "we won't use it" implies it actually exists. For something like that, it's easy to say it just doesn't work. However for something like magically generating wealth, it's not so simple. You can either say it doesn't work for some reason, and you have that reason, or you change the spells so they don't actually produce wealth, but to simply say "we won't do it" isn't a sufficient answer as to why everyone else in the setting doesn't do it.

For me, a gentleman's agreement is more along the lines of "we'll follow the plot hooks in the first session to the best of our ability, and focus on the DM's story, rather than derailing the campaign for our own purposes". As I said earlier, it's about the style of play, not the how of play.


This is a symptom of a larger prevailing philosophy that you aren't allowed to just talk to your players about stuff you do or don't want to do in the game and have to hide it behind in-game mechanics as a way to passive-aggressively avoid conflict. It's not necessary and is ultimately counterproductive.

Honestly, this has never come up with my players, because, well.. it just never has. Doesn't mean it's something I haven't thought about from the DM's side. I most certainly outline the limits of whatever game I'm running, and have no qualms about making those limitations clear, but I see no reason to deny players the opportunity to generate wealth and let that wealth have an impact on the setting. Perhaps your style of play is more micro-oriented, focused around the players, the dungeons they delve into, and the monsters they fight, but not every game looks like that.


b) that's cool but that has just nothing to do with D&D the way the game is actually set up. the only reason money exists in regular D&D is to buy magic items. while that may not be true in your homebrew setting, the design principles really don't carry over.

Actually, it carries over quite well. Separating mundane wealth from "wealth by level", or as you could put it "roleplay wealth" and "mechanical wealth" is surprisingly easy. Magic items themselves become the currancy in a way, trading ones you don't want for ones that you do, along with rare materials which hold the same. You use their "market value" to determine their relative value, but very rarely will a magic item ever actually be on a market for simple gold (in my setting at least). This promotes actively adventuring to procure these rare materials that you can use to barter for the things you want, or to simply use them to craft for yourself.


it's not a consequence of other people playing the game wrong. it's that in regular D&D, there isn't a lot of stuff to buy besides magic items. mundane gear such as rope or salt or lantern oil or what have you possesses a couple of niche uses but again (I'm assuming in your homebrew system you have a lot more mundane gear for pcs to buy to do fun things) I don't really see the connection between these two things.

Well, many things, from rare materials (adamantine fullplate costs 16,500gp, almost half the WBL of a 9th level character, but many will call it severely overpriced), exotic weapons (pathfinder firearms sell for thousands on their own), property (a mansion in a wealthy city can go upward of 100,000gp), land (I haven't found exact values for this), businesses (again, some businesses may have costs upward of 100,000gp), strongholds (which may or may not incorporate magic), vehicles (mostly naval vehicles, but depending on the setting, airships and the like may also be possible), and with many vehicles comes the need to hire crew, which can be incredibly expensive as well, depending on what sort of crew you want, and how good you want them to be.

[Fizban]

This is pretty much what I, and it seems a few other people in this thread, have done. Mind you, it's not a "currancy" so to speak, but rather a system of barter. You have these rare materials, someone else wants them, you exchange them for something else that you want and so on. The kinds of people who handle these rare materials have no real need for material plane currancy, because to them it's just as easy to come by as it is for you.
Sure, but it has nothing to do with "easily obtained material wealth of casters." If the DM wants gp as their non-WBL currency for buying buildings and ships and plot stuff and whatnot, as it already works, with magic items on a different track, that doesn't mean infinite-gp schemes are solved.

Making gp the roleplaying currency and then letting specific characters have infinity gp just makes an even better highlight for why obvious loopholes are obvious, and having that currency just stop mattering past a certain point makes it real hard for me to see why I'd care. Travel problems going away at higher levels, sure, teleport is a staple of fantasy. Having infinite resources with which to buy off anyone who can be bought? Generally not a staple of the protagonists.

[Albions_Angel]

I did think long and hard about this issue when setting up my world, which I wanted to feel more low to mid tier with the NPCs (most people are level 1-3 commoners, guards are level 5 Warriors, army is level 8-12 PC classes, kings are level 15, etc)

Several things happen then. The first is, when you start building up a significant number of casters, they keep each other in check. And then there is asking how do they level. The party is doing heroic things, but NPCs, even in the army, are restricted a much slower XP climb. Researched magic is slow and difficult and dangerous, innate magic is just dangerous.

All this results in most casters dying before adulthood, and before level 3 or 4. Those that progress beyond that either try not to attract attention, or are snapped up for military or governance.

Besides, you dump that much salt or iron into the economy, and the economy crashes. Sure you will build up a lot of wealth initially, but its all worthless when hyperinflation happens.

I have much bigger problems trying to keep bits of my worlds history secret when elves live so damn long. Solved that with a magical plague that disproportionately affected longer lived races and limited their lifespan to that of shorter lived ones, but then burned itself out. That itself causes issues, but those are more easily handwaved than "wait, how does no one know the gods lied and were the bad guys in that war 4000 years ago, if I can just ask my great grandfather what his great grandfather said about it?" or "the Cataclysm was only 5000 years ago, but no one knows anything about it? Why not? Cant we ask a dragon or something?"

[Psyren]

Scenario 1 - Everybody is doing it. They're just doing it quietly, in non-disruptive ways, since they don't want to get pressured to spend all their time doing it.

If your PC starts disrupting the status quo by using economic disrupting magic in loud ways, for example advertising cheap swords or whatever, then two things will happen:
- Over-supply for fixed demand will remove the profits from swords (or whatever).
- Kings, guilds, and other magic-users will suddenly have a keen interest in your activities. They'll want a cut. If you don't share your wealth (and thus end up working for someone else), you'll suddenly find yourself in an exciting combat-heavy adventure which doesn't give you time to craft.

In the worst case, you'll spur other foolish local magic-users into action, since they'll feel that they should be competing with you. Then you enter a trade war in which all prices race to the bottom, or you enter an arms race whereby you try to put each other out of business by any means necessary.

Remember those ruins you explored at level 6? They came from a Wizard trade war that heated up 100 years ago. That's why the dungeons are full of tasty magic items.

What smart Wizards do is pay their taxes using Wall of Salt / Wall of Iron / etc., so the local kings & such have a good reason to protect them, and no reason to wish them grievous bodily harm.

-- -- --

Scenario 2 - Nobody is doing it, and that's for a good reason. Is there a Blood War happening in this setting? Well, who do you think makes all the weapons for the soldiers of the Abyss? If you advertise that you have the capability to produce weapons for an army, you will be caught by powerful fiends and compelled to actually do so, all the time, for zero profit.

Or maybe the iron / salt / etc. actually come from a real place, and when someone summons too much, the rulers of that place come looking for you.

Or maybe the fabricate spell actually calls Faerie spirits who do the crafting, and using them too often calls down the wrath of the elder Fey.


Scenario 2 might be a bit heavy-handed, but it's quite easy to integrate into existing settings.


Thanks!

I came up with a 3rd one.

Everybody does it, and in fact it is required. The world is slowly losing matter. Rust Monsters and rusting grasp spells actually destroy metal atoms. Spheres of Annihilation and disintegrate spells do the same thing, and don't care if you're metal or not.

Everybody expects a Wizard of high enough level to start making stuff, and thus everyone is prepared to react very swiftly to an abundance of goods. When a new, naive Wizard rolls into town with a huge quantity of a trade good, the price drops immediately.

You can optimize your way out of the price-drop situation by carefully trickling in a diverse selection of products slowly, over many different markets.

But if you do that -- optimize for GP per unit spell -- then you are upholding established market prices, and not disrupting them. Also it's a lot of work. The Fighter gets the same returns (roughly) just for riding through the villages near his keep and waving at the peasants. (The peasants cheer. A youth in the front row blushes furiously and faints. It's good to be the lord.)

So anyway, what established Wizards and other high-level spellcasters do is collude. They divvy up markets, preserving their own profits and compensating for the depletion of natural resources.

Same goes for stuff like Druids using plant growth -- it's required, not disruptive. That sort of thing must be how human populations survive in spite of monster attacks, or something.

I agree and think it's a combination of all three of these. i.e. there is a lot of small-scale 1 and 3 happening, say for the benevolent wizard whose tower is near a thorp and he's not too busy with research, or for the wizards employed by the craftsman's guild. But should one get too prolific, you risk attracting undue attention and a 2 scenario occurs.

Note that the gods would also have a vested interest in keeping this sort of thing from getting too widespread too. Moradin and Gond for instance want actual smithing to be going on, not just the "snap-your-fingers-for-a-sword" variety. But Mystra and Boccob want some fabrication too. And certainly the more ruin/decay-focused gods will want to be dedicating themselves to ruining the works championed by both former sets, which is where the various monsters and other deleterious forces come into play.

[Crake]

Sure, but it has nothing to do with "easily obtained material wealth of casters." If the DM wants gp as their non-WBL currency for buying buildings and ships and plot stuff and whatnot, as it already works, with magic items on a different track, that doesn't mean infinite-gp schemes are solved.

Making gp the roleplaying currency and then letting specific characters have infinity gp just makes an even better highlight for why obvious loopholes are obvious, and having that currency just stop mattering past a certain point makes it real hard for me to see why I'd care. Travel problems going away at higher levels, sure, teleport is a staple of fantasy. Having infinite resources with which to buy off anyone who can be bought? Generally not a staple of the protagonists.

Teleport can transport people, but not necessarily high amounts of, or heavy cargo. Not to mention it has a distance limit at mid levels, and sometimes you need a base of operations out in the middle of the sea when doing deep sea expeditions. Obviously you would need to put some effort into where you're generating your wealth, supplying a town with thousands of swords when they have no active need for them would be pointless, but on the other hand, helping a frontier town erect buildings and defenses would get you a LOT of money very quickly, or supplying a nation at war with weapons. This is where having a network of information would be useful to a wizard, "oh, someone in freeport needs a ship built quickly, I can get that put together in less than a week".

Generally speaking a wizard would continue this kind of activity until suddenly they hit the point of "well... I don't really need money anymore..." which should happen well before the market becomes saturated, and at that point, it opens up for another up and coming wizard to fill the niche. This of course completely breaks down when there becomes an overabundance of casters, but that's a problem for the high magic worlds to figure out. Perhaps post-scarcity societies like that should have mundane things be practically free.

[Troacctid]

Honestly, if the player's goal is to make a consistent profit, I would just pull out the PHB2 rules for running a business. Because the real work is going to be selling the goods, not making them.

[Necroticplague]

Simple: design a setting where trying to sell anything made by magic is a really bad idea. On the level of 'hope you can skip town before the 'epic-level' (actually, entirely fiat-based) inquisitors get here.'.

Arcane magic is obviously an evil perversion of the Gods' art, and thus heresy if practiced, and thus deserving of summary execution. Divine casters who do such things aren't following the Church's position (which would view it as horrific sacrilege to use the Gods' gifts for mere earthly monetary game), and are likewise heretics to be executed for their crimes against nature. Anybody who's magic is an innate gift (like sorcerers) are clearly dangerous loose cannons harboring demons within their form at best, who must be destroyed for everybody's safety. Any more esoteric forms of magic is usually can be categorized or treated as one or more of the above.

So, if you're found selling things using magic, expect to die very quickly. At best, you can make things magically in secret, and lie about their origin in underground circles (ones willing to ignore the proper steps of verifying things to ensure no demonic taint is present), but that'll only work for so long before one of your buyers is caught and rats you out for a lighter sentence (i.e, banishment and excocommunication, marginally better than death). But that'll only work so many times before people catch on or get suspicious.

[Nifft]

I agree and think it's a combination of all three of these. i.e. there is a lot of small-scale 1 and 3 happening, say for the benevolent wizard whose tower is near a thorp and he's not too busy with research, or for the wizards employed by the craftsman's guild. But should one get too prolific, you risk attracting undue attention and a 2 scenario occurs. Oh yeah, absolutely true. You can mix & match all of those.


Note that the gods would also have a vested interest in keeping this sort of thing from getting too widespread too. Moradin and Gond for instance want actual smithing to be going on, not just the "snap-your-fingers-for-a-sword" variety. But Mystra and Boccob want some fabrication too. And certainly the more ruin/decay-focused gods will want to be dedicating themselves to ruining the works championed by both former sets, which is where the various monsters and other deleterious forces come into play. Hmm, I think that's strongly setting-dependent.

In Faerun, you're probably correct: the gods will come down and remind you to buy some turnips for Gnomish Mother's Day, and they'll surely decide that industry is good or bad, and therefore you need to be punished or double-punished.

But in Greyhawk, I don't think the gods are that activist. IIRC, Boccob in specific was the god of giving zero f... force missiles, and his title was "the Uncaring". Are there any well-known activist gods beyond (current) Iuz and (historical) St. Cuthbert?

To round out the Big Three, in Eberron the gods are expressly non-interventionist. Given the prevalence of magic in artifice & crafting, I feel like it's a lot more natural to assume the gods (if real) don't abhor the Magical-Industrial Complex -- maybe it's something like there are too few high-level spellcasters, so none of my scenarios are actually relevant? Or maybe it's #3, since Khyber is both the foundation of the world, and also a force of hateful corruption & abnegation, so perhaps Eberron is a world where new matter must be produced, since the whole of the world is continuously devoured from below.

[Venger]

I think we have a fundanmental difference in our interpretation on what a gentleman's agreement is. Saying "we won't use drown healing" isn't a gentleman's agreement, that should honestly just be every DM's houserule. To say "we won't use it" implies it actually exists. For something like that, it's easy to say it just doesn't work. However for something like magically generating wealth, it's not so simple. You can either say it doesn't work for some reason, and you have that reason, or you change the spells so they don't actually produce wealth, but to simply say "we won't do it" isn't a sufficient answer as to why everyone else in the setting doesn't do it.

For me, a gentleman's agreement is more along the lines of "we'll follow the plot hooks in the first session to the best of our ability, and focus on the DM's story, rather than derailing the campaign for our own purposes". As I said earlier, it's about the style of play, not the how of play.
That's not what the gentleman's agreement is. The way it's used here and in general in ttrpgs is just a more general statement referring broadly to the players and gm agreeing not to be jerks to each other and eeach will refrain from chain gating monsters and destroying spellbooks and whatnot. What you call gentleman's agreement is also definitely a good way to play the game.




Honestly, this has never come up with my players, because, well.. it just never has. Doesn't mean it's something I haven't thought about from the DM's side. I most certainly outline the limits of whatever game I'm running, and have no qualms about making those limitations clear, but I see no reason to deny players the opportunity to generate wealth and let that wealth have an impact on the setting. Perhaps your style of play is more micro-oriented, focused around the players, the dungeons they delve into, and the monsters they fight, but not every game looks like that.
Sure, I didn't mean it was the issue with your group, it's just a general trend. Well, yeah, of course my style of play is focused around the players. What exactly is the alternative?


Actually, it carries over quite well. Separating mundane wealth from "wealth by level", or as you could put it "roleplay wealth" and "mechanical wealth" is surprisingly easy. Magic items themselves become the currancy in a way, trading ones you don't want for ones that you do, along with rare materials which hold the same. You use their "market value" to determine their relative value, but very rarely will a magic item ever actually be on a market for simple gold (in my setting at least). This promotes actively adventuring to procure these rare materials that you can use to barter for the things you want, or to simply use them to craft for yourself.
Ok, so you only give WBL to players in the form of items and gems, so they're allowed to use that to buy magic items so they can still overcome cr-appropriate monsters and they use their money from farming walls of iron to buy... houses and stuff? All right.



Well, many things, from rare materials (adamantine fullplate costs 16,500gp, almost half the WBL of a 9th level character, but many will call it severely overpriced), exotic weapons (pathfinder firearms sell for thousands on their own), property (a mansion in a wealthy city can go upward of 100,000gp), land (I haven't found exact values for this), businesses (again, some businesses may have costs upward of 100,000gp), strongholds (which may or may not incorporate magic), vehicles (mostly naval vehicles, but depending on the setting, airships and the like may also be possible), and with many vehicles comes the need to hire crew, which can be incredibly expensive as well, depending on what sort of crew you want, and how good you want them to be.
Adamantine fullplate is severely overpriced, but if you're allowed to essentially get it for free, then it is certainly attractive. The reason pcs don't buy stuff like houses in default dnd is because they have no mechanical effect. If you give them a bottomless reserve of story money, it can definitely be a good resource for roleplay by seeing what kind of useless stuff they buy.

Thanks for explaining.


Honestly, if the player's goal is to make a consistent profit, I would just pull out the PHB2 rules for running a business. Because the real work is going to be selling the goods, not making them.
Don't use those, they are terrible. A quarter of the results destroy your business.

[Nifft]

Don't use those, they are terrible. A quarter of the results destroy your business.

... does the business get destroyed in an exciting way?

I'm suddenly interested in these rules.

[Florian]

Don't use those, they are terrible. A quarter of the results destroy your business.

Ain´t actual business survival chance a tad below 1%? So that sounds suitable "heroic".

[Venger]

... does the business get destroyed in an exciting way?

I'm suddenly interested in these rules.
Well, they can.

Losing all your character's wbl is decidedly less sexy. But if you have a separate pool of infinite story money, then go for it, it sounds like a fun idea for a oneshot.


Ain´t actual business survival chance a tad below 1%? So that sounds suitable "heroic".

You've got me there

[Crake]

That's not what the gentleman's agreement is. The way it's used here and in general in ttrpgs is just a more general statement referring broadly to the players and gm agreeing not to be jerks to each other and eeach will refrain from chain gating monsters and destroying spellbooks and whatnot. What you call gentleman's agreement is also definitely a good way to play the game.



Sure, I didn't mean it was the issue with your group, it's just a general trend. Well, yeah, of course my style of play is focused around the players. What exactly is the alternative?


Ok, so you only give WBL to players in the form of items and gems, so they're allowed to use that to buy magic items so they can still overcome cr-appropriate monsters and they use their money from farming walls of iron to buy... houses and stuff? All right.



Adamantine fullplate is severely overpriced, but if you're allowed to essentially get it for free, then it is certainly attractive. The reason pcs don't buy stuff like houses in default dnd is because they have no mechanical effect. If you give them a bottomless reserve of story money, it can definitely be a good resource for roleplay by seeing what kind of useless stuff they buy.

Thanks for explaining.

Glad I could help you see things from my perspective :smallsmile: I can certainly understand if not everyone wants to play things that way, but this thread is more about what each individual person does to overcome this hurdle than looking for the one true answer. :smalltongue:


Don't use those, they are terrible. A quarter of the results destroy your business.

If you run the rules absent of the monthly encounters, or make up your own, then the rules are much better. Also, they're in DMG2, not PHB2. I just think it's silly that setting up a business suddenly gives the region a 5-10% chance to suffer a natural disaster each month, or that your place has a 5% chance to burn down each month. Business survival may be 1%, but it's usually due to failing to make a consistent profit, not because the world seems to cascade around your business to tear it down. Perhaps, what I would do, is instead of running 2 encounters each month like it suggests, I would roll to see if an encounter happens twice a month. Maybe give it a 5-20% chance, based on season and what the business is.

While those rules do take into account the idea of selling magic items, and that generally speaking magic items will move pretty slowly, what they don't take into account is using magic to produce mundane items, so the rules on a blacksmithy assume that you likely have a collection of weapons for sale, and can make things on commission, which would probably take a few weeks to a few months depending on the item. When suddenly that fullplate commission can literally be done the next day, and be done to absolute perfection.... you'll suddenly have people rushing to your business, which will generate even more income. But honestly, setting up a business for this sort of thing isn't really the point. Businesses are stationary, but to make money you need to find the demand and supply it directly. Or sometimes make the demand :smalltongue: Oh no, the docks are on fire and all your ships burned down... guess who's able to make you a bunch of ships in no time :smallbiggrin:

Do that last one at your own peril though.

[death390]

So it came up in an earlier thread, the idea of using wall of salt to produce an egregious amount of salt. But similar things could be concieved with wall of iron and fabricate to create a tonne of masterwork weapons, or honestly, just fabricate in general to mass-produce expensive items to quickly make enormous amounts of cash. So the question becomes: how do you overcome this hurdle?

For some people, they insist that someone else has done the trick before, so the market has devalued to the point of being worthless, others say that the demand would be so tiny that it wouldn't be profitable, but honestly, a single wizard could produce everything a town would need. Instead of having dozens of different tradesmen, taking days to produce things, a single wizard could do it all in a matter of moments. It either means literally all non-magical goods should be devauled to the point of worthlessness, or no wizard ever happens to bother looking into making that kind of money, in which case the market is certainly open for a player to take over, should they so happen to choose that route.

So how do people handle this issue?

Personally, the world I run is a very low magic world, so the notion that wizards have cornered every niche of the market is pretty far-fetched. Wizards do in fact do these tricks, but they are so few and far between that it has a minimal impact on the market. So what's to stop a player from doing it you ask? Well... the answer is simple: Nothing. But the question then arises: What are they going to do with all that money? You may have guessed my solution by this point: Material wealth is easy to come by for mid level casters.... but it has very little value to them. You might be able to buy a home, an estate even, you might be able to equip yourself with the best mundane gear, buy (or hell, build yourself) the most amazing caraval for naval travel for your expeditions.... but ultimately, money doesn't serve you very well. In a low magic world rare materials for crafting, or magical items are not for sale except in the most concetrated magical societies, and even then, all those mages? They also have egregious amounts of cash, and guess what? They don't want more. If you want something, you have to trade for it. Either with materials, magic items, or, if you're a wizard, trading spells from your spellbook.

This solution was actually a very natural outcome of my setting, and one I hadn't even realised had put itself in place until I thought about it from reading other threads. Ultimately though, the point of this thread was to see how other people handle this issue, so I'd love to hear from the forum about it.



dude this is like the 3rd version of this you have posted in a week. we get it you don't like WBLmancy.

[Fizban]

Another simple enough houserule from the obvious direction, is to just put a limit on how often you can cast it: Fabricate (and maybe Unseen Crafter) are really the only serious problems. Jack_Smith rules that people will inevitably refuse to use or buy stuff created with the spell, but that stuff still exists and how willing they are to use it can be argued about.

If instead, casting Fabricate lets you make and use something immediately and then go do something else with your time, but you also can't cast it again by any means until enough time has elapsed that you could have naturally crafted the thing you made, the result is effectively at most one extra craftsman in the world, assuming you craft mundanely in between Fabricates (having an active Unseen Crafter would of course prevent you from casting Fabricate or any addition UC's until it expires).

This could be known in-universe as the compromise made by the gods, if people don't find it plausible that arcane magic would be so arbitrarily limited (ha)- the caster could very well know that their spell could let them dominate industry, if it weren't for those meddling gods, so the player can complain in-game!


Teleport can transport people, but not necessarily high amounts of, or heavy cargo.
Yes, I am well aware of the limits on Teleport and RAW methods of transporting goods. I was talking about how the PCs engage with the world. As in, gaining the ability to Teleport removes most of the overland travel paradigm that can be a very large part of things up until the moment you learn Teleport, which is fine since Teleport is a staple of fantasy. But I don't see "infinite wealth" as a usual staple of fantasy protagonists.

Unless your point is that the restrictions on Teleport are yet another reason why infinite money tricks don't actually work so well, but that seems counter to how you want the PCs to have inifinite gp as long as they can't buy magic items with it.

[Crake]

Yes, I am well aware of the limits on Teleport and RAW methods of transporting goods. I was talking about how the PCs engage with the world. As in, gaining the ability to Teleport removes most of the overland travel paradigm that can be a very large part of things up until the moment you learn Teleport, which is fine since Teleport is a staple of fantasy. But I don't see "infinite wealth" as a usual staple of fantasy protagonists.

Unless your point is that the restrictions on Teleport are yet another reason why infinite money tricks don't actually work so well, but that seems counter to how you want the PCs to have inifinite gp as long as they can't buy magic items with it.

I was under the impression that you were bringing up teleport in response to the idea of spending money on vehicles for transport, making them irrelevant. I was simply asserting that those vehicles still had some value, even past the point where teleporting becomes commonplace.


dude this is like the 3rd version of this you have posted in a week. we get it you don't like WBLmancy.

Except... it isn't? The last thread I made before this one was about trying to bypass the penalties of soft cover in pathfinder without improved precise shot. And that was back in mid january. Also, I'm probably one of the few people who do allow WBLmancy in this thread, but only for mundane things, rather than magic item stacking.

[Andor13]

For some people, they insist that someone else has done the trick before, so the market has devalued to the point of being worthless, others say that the demand would be so tiny that it wouldn't be profitable, but honestly, a single wizard could produce everything a town would need. Instead of having dozens of different tradesmen, taking days to produce things, a single wizard could do it all in a matter of moments. It either means literally all non-magical goods should be devauled to the point of worthlessness, or no wizard ever happens to bother looking into making that kind of money, in which case the market is certainly open for a player to take over, should they so happen to choose that route.

Part of it is probably that those dozens of craftsmen are going to be pretty upset. In our world pretty much every labor saving gadget that reduced the labour needed to accomplish a task was met with unrest, protests and usually violence. The first factory to produce sewing machines was burned down by people fearful of losing their jobs. When a lot of locals who are used to being respected, and fairly wealthy suddenly find themselves being underbid by the wizard, the wizard is going to start having problems. If he ticks off enough people, or fireballs a riot, then the local rulers will get involved. If he's powerful enough he may not care, but then again, if he was powerful enough to live in safe isolation from the local law/army/economy, then he didn't need the money in the first place.

[Segev]

In general, I agree that the easiest solution is just to forbid it. Don't let them have the spell, or don't let them sell the salt. Handle it OOC.

If that doesn't fly for whatever reason, then...well, build the next adventure or two around it. Congratulations! You have a huge source of wealth! Now you need to convert it to spendable wealth. No, market prices are not remaining unchanged as you shift the supply/demand curve. Yes, there are people all up and down the underworld and legal apparatus (but I repeat myself) who want to steal it, or at least get a cut of it for themselves. And, sure, guilds who want to protect monopolies, but just out-and-out thieves and tax collectors will be an issue.

Conjure it in the middle of town, and (depending on the setting) you may well have people who refuse to buy it because they don't trust magically-created material. Either they're superstitious about it being spiritually tainted, or they're afraid you're pulling a fast one and it'll vanish after you're out of reach with their money.

In essence, if the party wants to go this route, build an adventure around it.

[Quarian Rex]

I've been incorporating aspects of Heroes of Prime (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222339/Heroes-of-Prime) to an upcoming campaign, making xp a tangible, harvest-able, sell-able, resource. All normal humans are level one commoners who provide 32 xp upon death that can be harvested from their skull and is consumed to gain class levels (1024 at level one and doubled for every level thereafter). Every time someone dies you can harvest 1/16 of the xp that was invested (so commoners technically have 512 just for being alive) so there are diminishing returns and one must be careful where you invest your power.

The part that's relevant to the discussion is that this tangible xp is a replacement for expensive material components in spells (1 xp for every 5 gp, this also enforces a price fix on the cost of xp) and also for magic item creation, swapping the gold and xp costs (so enchanting a sword to +1 would cost 200 xp (instead of 1,000 gp) and 400 gp (instead of 80 xp). You can even reclaim the invested xp from a destroyed magic item (at 1/16 the value) as an option.

This seems to be a remarkably elegant solution to this thread (and many other things really). Wall of iron abuse cannot just become an infinite feedback loop (since it cannot directly pay for itself) and magic item sales will be in large part based in xp trade (or something of equivalent value). It also removes heavy handed DM intervention from some encounters since he doesn't have to bend over backwards trying to provide monetary treasure on creatures where it wouldn't make sense. The harvested xp is also the treasure, something that can be sold or used as the players so choose.

Wealth by level is something that can essentially be ignored since gearing (magically) and leveling are using the same resource. This would free up a lot of mundane wealth for investment in caravans, castles, mercenaries, or even just carousing, things that a character would normally not do since it would negatively impact their survivability.

[Psyren]

Hmm, I think that's strongly setting-dependent.

In Faerun, you're probably correct: the gods will come down and remind you to buy some turnips for Gnomish Mother's Day, and they'll surely decide that industry is good or bad, and therefore you need to be punished or double-punished.

But in Greyhawk, I don't think the gods are that activist. IIRC, Boccob in specific was the god of giving zero f... force missiles, and his title was "the Uncaring". Are there any well-known activist gods beyond (current) Iuz and (historical) St. Cuthbert?

To round out the Big Three, in Eberron the gods are expressly non-interventionist. Given the prevalence of magic in artifice & crafting, I feel like it's a lot more natural to assume the gods (if real) don't abhor the Magical-Industrial Complex -- maybe it's something like there are too few high-level spellcasters, so none of my scenarios are actually relevant? Or maybe it's #3, since Khyber is both the foundation of the world, and also a force of hateful corruption & abnegation, so perhaps Eberron is a world where new matter must be produced, since the whole of the world is continuously devoured from below.

Well in Eberron, the gods may be hands-off (if they even exist), but there's still a Prophecy yoking everyone to the wheel that will stop any true shenanigans from happening.

As for Greyhawk - yeah Boccob may not care how many or how few items get made magically, but Moradin is also Greater and is quite literally in charge of smithing, so he is probably going to want some smiths around.

[Vaern]

I think we just need a new type of Inevitable whose purpose is to hunt those who upset the balance of society by using magic to manipulate the economy to a gross extent.

[Crake]

I've been incorporating aspects of Heroes of Prime (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222339/Heroes-of-Prime) to an upcoming campaign, making xp a tangible, harvest-able, sell-able, resource. All normal humans are level one commoners who provide 32 xp upon death that can be harvested from their skull and is consumed to gain class levels (1024 at level one and doubled for every level thereafter). Every time someone dies you can harvest 1/16 of the xp that was invested (so commoners technically have 512 just for being alive) so there are diminishing returns and one must be careful where you invest your power.

The part that's relevant to the discussion is that this tangible xp is a replacement for expensive material components in spells (1 xp for every 5 gp, this also enforces a price fix on the cost of xp) and also for magic item creation, swapping the gold and xp costs (so enchanting a sword to +1 would cost 200 xp (instead of 1,000 gp) and 400 gp (instead of 80 xp). You can even reclaim the invested xp from a destroyed magic item (at 1/16 the value) as an option.

This seems to be a remarkably elegant solution to this thread (and many other things really). Wall of iron abuse cannot just become an infinite feedback loop (since it cannot directly pay for itself) and magic item sales will be in large part based in xp trade (or something of equivalent value). It also removes heavy handed DM intervention from some encounters since he doesn't have to bend over backwards trying to provide monetary treasure on creatures where it wouldn't make sense. The harvested xp is also the treasure, something that can be sold or used as the players so choose.

Wealth by level is something that can essentially be ignored since gearing (magically) and leveling are using the same resource. This would free up a lot of mundane wealth for investment in caravans, castles, mercenaries, or even just carousing, things that a character would normally not do since it would negatively impact their survivability.

My solution is actually quite similar to this, though it's not xp that you harvest, but rare materials. It doesn't quite carry over to most humanoids (though humanoids with darkvision for example might have their eyes harvestable to brew potions of darkvision), but it certainly works for monsters who wouldn't reasonably have a random pile of treasure. Using those rare materials as trade, instead of this tangible xp that you describe does feel more elegant. I generally have the rare materials mostly, if not entirely cover the material costs of an item, typically tailored to the item that they want to craft (so if you want a ring of fire resistance, you need to hunt something known for it's resistance to fire, something like a red or gold dragon, or devils). I typically made the harvestable materials worth half of whatever the monster's treasure value was supposed to be, but with the introduction of ultimate wilderness and the trophy harvesting rules, I just use those values. If there's a small remainder between the trophy value and the cost needed to craft I'll usually say it can be covered by mundane goods that can be bought in town, otherwise they need to go out and harvest more rare materials.

[RoboEmperor]

You are incorrect about Fabricate.

1. Fabricate's material component is 1/3 of the product in GP. GP. I'll say that once more. GP!. Fabricate defies law of conservation of mass and energy. Instead Fabricate works off WORTH.

Result? You have a pile of gp worth 1000gp? Cast fabricate on it and it will be completely annihilated (because by RAW all material components are annihilated) and the result will be a pile of gp worth 3000gp.

So you can have a vat of Liquid Pain or Ambrosia, and Triple its volume with Fabricate.

This is the ultimate wealth breaking spell, especially when using outsiders like Rejkar who have at-will fabricate.

2. Everything is fine (including farming gp) if you don't break wealth by level. So lets say our WBL is 10,000gp. My DM tracks the amount of consumables we used. So lets say we used 2,000gp worth in potions and 8,000gp in magic items. If the 8,000gp of items is destroyed by Mage's Disjunction or something, he lets us farm up to 8,000gp, but never the 2,000gp used for consumables.

Also if our WBL is 10,000 but we only have 6,000gp, he'll let us farm up until we hit 10,000gp. So basically farming GP is just a way to fix WBL, never break it.

[tiercel]

On “gentleman’s agreements” and potentially world-breaking exploits generally:

If one or more of my players wants/tries to do something along these lines because the rules can read as allowing it, I just ask them if that’s the way they want the world to work. If the answer is “yes,” and the campaign isn’t set at the Dawn of Time and all the BBEGs aren’t hard locked to be lower in level than the PCs, it means someone else will have done so first, we can talk about known consequences of that having already happened, and if we are all cool with that kind of game, we can proceed.

Otherwise, we can rationalize why it doesn’t happen, interpret the rules accordingly, or just simply agree that it doesn’t and move on.

In general there will be areas D&D is never going to have full-verisimilitude rulesets for because it is Dungeons & Dragons, not Engineering & Economics.

[Cosi]

If magic warps its users so that in general they no longer have easily recognizable human desires, ... mad maguses of lovecrafts's ... Fear. At mid levels, wizards are most definitely not invulnerable and it's position that craft guilds could hire assassins to eliminate wizards who disrupt the economy.

Nobody is doing it, and that's for a good reason. Is there a Blood War happening in this setting? Well, who do you think makes all the weapons for the soldiers of the Abyss? If you advertise that you have the capability to produce weapons for an army, you will be caught by powerful fiends and compelled to actually do so, all the time, for zero profit.

Simple: design a setting where trying to sell anything made by magic is a really bad idea. On the level of 'hope you can skip town before the 'epic-level' (actually, entirely fiat-based) inquisitors get here.

I think we just need a new type of Inevitable whose purpose is to hunt those who upset the balance of society by using magic to manipulate the economy to a gross extent.

This is easy to handle: Wall of Salt doesn't create edible table salt (Sodium Chloride, or NaCl).

there are plenty of ways the DM can stonewall such attempts simply by not reading things the way the char-OP wants them read (declaring the salt of Wall of Salt useless has already been mentioned).

No. All of these solutions are terrible and if you use them in an actual game you are a bad DM. The correct solution is the one pointed to by Venger:


No using wall of x to make money falls comfortable under the gentleman's agreement.

If the players are doing something you don't like, you should treat them like the adult human beings they are and talk to them. Then agree to whatever level of economic shenanigans you find mutually agreeable (with emphasis on the "mutually"). The fact that people's first response to this is some combination of "arbitrarily tell the PCs their abilities don't work" or "arbitrarily murder the PCs" speaks incredibly poorly of the DMing ability of everyone has made these suggestions.


PCs are assumed by the way game balance is set up to accrue money through overcoming cr-appropriate challenges. These spells mess that up, so the gm should just say so and move on from there.

That said, while I agree with the sentiment that you should talk to players instead of arbitrarily punching them in the **** until they agree to not do whatever pissed you off (because obviously), I actually disagree with your characterization of the situation here. Because the problem isn't just the spells. It's also adventuring. Because adventures take place in locations that are very often valuable in one way or another, generally far beyond WBL. "Defeat the evil baron" is a low level adventure that is common to the point of cliche, but it leaves the PCs in control of the baron's castle, which is (per DMG) 500,000 GP. That's more than the WBL of an entire 13th level party. Of course, things get even worse when you consider the possibility of more exotic locations like castles of diamond, cities of gold, or fortresses of black onyx.

The problem is that the magic item christmass tree turns large piles of gold into disproportionate power. That's a problem with or without aggressive use of fabricate, so we should probably look at something other than fabricate to find a solution here.


First off NPC city generation does not give sufficient casters to crush the world,

Yes it does. It generates any number of casters who can cast planar binding other than zero, so it generates enough casters to crush the world. Also, there are races like Dragons that just breed mages (and also live for literal thousands of years). And the accumulation of magic items. And the Mentor/Apprentice or Leadership feats. Your math is stupid, because it started from the conclusion ("clearly the rules can't generate anything other than a medieval setting") and reasoned backwards instead of seeing where the rule lead.


Note that the gods would also have a vested interest in keeping this sort of thing from getting too widespread too. Moradin and Gond for instance want actual smithing to be going on, not just the "snap-your-fingers-for-a-sword" variety. But Mystra and Boccob want some fabrication too. And certainly the more ruin/decay-focused gods will want to be dedicating themselves to ruining the works championed by both former sets, which is where the various monsters and other deleterious forces come into play.

If the gods want the world to be trapped in medieval stasis where 90% of people spend their lives turning dirt into food before living to the ripe old age of "died in childbirth", they are evil and the only remotely justifiable course of action is to destroy them entirely. I suppose that makes for an interesting enough campaign, but I don't necessarily think "murder the gods and topple their thrones" is less disruptive to the apparent goal of "run a normal D&D campaign" than "people have large piles of mundane currency".


Arcane magic is obviously an evil perversion of the Gods' art, and thus heresy if practiced, and thus deserving of summary execution. Divine casters who do such things aren't following the Church's position (which would view it as horrific sacrilege to use the Gods' gifts for mere earthly monetary game), and are likewise heretics to be executed for their crimes against nature. Anybody who's magic is an innate gift (like sorcerers) are clearly dangerous loose cannons harboring demons within their form at best, who must be destroyed for everybody's safety. Any more esoteric forms of magic is usually can be categorized or treated as one or more of the above.

3. Social status. If wizards are upper class as in a mageocracy or an aristocracy where nobility and magic go together, it's entirely possible that commerce is seen as a job for servants and true wizards eschew it entirely. Maybe in that setting no one even researched fabricate, wall of iron, or wall of salt. It's just not something that came up and if they need lots of masterwork weapons, they would rather conjure a forge devil and feed it the souls of slaves for it's price than cast fabricate themselves.

This solution doesn't make sense. If magic makes you win, people will use it to win, because otherwise their enemies who do use magic will defeat them. If the only people willing to use magic for war (or trade, or whatever) are heretics who don't mind being told they court demons and doom, the world will be conquered by heretics. Because it turns out the ability to destroy your enemies with fire is a lot more valuable than the ability to be sure you have the favor of the gods. Unless the gods step in on the world enough to make up the balance, which is again more disruptive than just having people be very rich.


The problem with wall of salt, is that you create a surplus resource that diminishes the value of the product as a sales item.

This is a symptom of a larger prevailing philosophy that you aren't allowed to just talk to your players about stuff you do or don't want to do in the game and have to hide it behind in-game mechanics as a way to passive-aggressively avoid conflict. It's not necessary and is ultimately counterproductive.

These are the two good solutions proposed in this thread. If your setting breaks when fabricate looks at it funny, there are two ways to solve the problem. You can change the setting so fabricate doesn't break it, or you can ignore the effects of fabricate because you want to play a game about exploring dungeons in a faux-medieval setting. While the second solution is probably the more common, it's a lot less interesting, so I'm going to spill some digital ink on the second.

The obvious answer to "why don't people sell salt and make all the money" is "because if you had infinite salt, it would be worth zero money". And that's fair, and good economics rules should reflect that. But there's another, somewhat less obvious issue. Bluntly, if you can break the economy (because you can make everything better and cheaper than the rest of the economy can), you have no reason to interact with the economy. If you can make food, shelter, and art better than the peasants can, you have to reason to undercut their farmers or barrel-makers because you can just make your own damn barrels. You might decide to conquer them and force them to do your bidding, but "worship me or I blow up your town" is not really an economic interaction in the traditional sense.

This naturally flows into something like the Wish Economy (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/The_Three_Economies_(DnD_Other)#The_Wish_Economy). If you can make as much of any mundane good as you want, you don't care about anyone who produces mundane goods. But you potentially do care about people who produce non-mundane goods that you can't make with fabricate. So high level people live in an entirely separate economy. This has the added benefit of making the giant pile of gold you get from selling castles or kingdoms meaningless, so people will actually hold on to castles instead of selling them to buy better pants.

And yes, none of this does much to stop someone who wants to improve standards of living by fabricating better equipment for peasants from doing that. But that's a good thing. The PCs are heroes. They should have the ability to make the world a better place, not just stop people from being eaten by manticores or conquered by dark lords. Because in a world where the status quo is "dark ages Europe", having "maintain the status quo" be the best you can do is laughably grimdark.

[Quarian Rex]

My solution is actually quite similar to this, though it's not xp that you harvest, but rare materials. It doesn't quite carry over to most humanoids (though humanoids with darkvision for example might have their eyes harvestable to brew potions of darkvision), but it certainly works for monsters who wouldn't reasonably have a random pile of treasure. Using those rare materials as trade, instead of this tangible xp that you describe does feel more elegant. I generally have the rare materials mostly, if not entirely cover the material costs of an item, typically tailored to the item that they want to craft (so if you want a ring of fire resistance, you need to hunt something known for it's resistance to fire, something like a red or gold dragon, or devils). I typically made the harvestable materials worth half of whatever the monster's treasure value was supposed to be, but with the introduction of ultimate wilderness and the trophy harvesting rules, I just use those values. If there's a small remainder between the trophy value and the cost needed to craft I'll usually say it can be covered by mundane goods that can be bought in town, otherwise they need to go out and harvest more rare materials.


I've considered such a system, and might be partially implementing one, but by itself it just feels oddly restrictive and still leaves a number of difficulties that need to be addressed (for me at least). If you require the special materials for item creation then you can have weird campaign derailments as the PCs scurry off to find some esoteric beasty to make their desired trinket, or they find themselves c*ck blocked because they cannot find a source of dragon spleen. If the special materials aren't required (just an optional substitution) then you have just another form of possibly useless loot (like finding magical greataxes when no one in the party uses a greataxe) to be sold off. The problem that I have is that it does nothing to resolve concerns about WBL and such. They are still getting wealth that is ultimately used to get magical upgrades, you are just changing the currency. If the players come up with a scheme to get a crapton of cash it is converted into personal power (they would be proven fools to do otherwise, as they will realize the next time they get into a tough scrap).

Tying a PCs personal power (class levels), material power (magic items), and strategic spell power (spell with expensive spell components) to the same resource pool seems to solve all my problems in one shot. Trying to min/max any one aspect comes at the expense of the other two, so it is a self balancing system, and the best part is that the entire process is left in the hands of the players. No clunky DM fiats or heavy handed nerfs, everything is laid out for the players to manipulate. The best part of this is that regardless of how the player spends his resources he is always getting something worth it.

Now, the way that I'm planning on incorporating special materials is that any time that actual expensive material components are provided (in full) then the xp cost of the spell would be cut in half, that sort of thing. I want Necromancers to have a reason to take over an onyx mine, and I think the option to spend extra muggle money to save on the power currency is a good trade-off.




Also if our WBL is 10,000 but we only have 6,000gp, he'll let us farm up until we hit 10,000gp. So basically farming GP is just a way to fix WBL, never break it.


It's this kind of enforcement of WBL that I find really artificial and just takes me out of the game TBH. I also find it to be a weird motivation killer. There is very little point in a character going through the motions of trying to be ambitious when the very universe itself (the DM) will conspire to make sure that your resources will never exceed X amount. Such strict limitations would be fine for a short hack and slash campaign where everyone is essentially testing out builds or something, but a longer campaign where I get invested in a character and I expect the world to make sense (to a reasonable extent) is somewhere that I want to see that characters' brilliance (or stupidity) have actual consequence, for good or ill, rather than be unnaturally kept at a steady state. The challenge is finding a way to do that while keeping the game from going completely off the rails. That's where I think that my above thoughts provide a graceful solution. Thus far I have yet to find a better one.

[Nifft]

Well in Eberron, the gods may be hands-off (if they even exist), but there's still a Prophecy yoking everyone to the wheel that will stop any true shenanigans from happening.

As for Greyhawk - yeah Boccob may not care how many or how few items get made magically, but Moradin is also Greater and is quite literally in charge of smithing, so he is probably going to want some smiths around. Eberron had the Giants making existence-wrecking weapons before getting Dragon'd. The Prophecy didn't intervene cause the dragons to intervene -- the use of one of those weapons did that.

Sarlona has the Quorri currently making an existence-modifying weapon, and again the Prophecy hasn't done much.

Khorvaire is in the middle of an industrial revolution, and the Prophecy didn't stop it.

I just can't see the Prophecy behaving like an FR busy-gody.


As for Greyhawk, I wonder if Moradin would see any distinction between a PC using magic & skill to forge weapons, vs. an NPC Expert using muscle & skill to forge weapons.

Also, I'm not sure if Greyhawk gods do nasty things to mortals directly. IIRC, there was a time when a god was so angry with the Suel (for voting to create Derro from Dwarves) that he left the Suel pantheon, but he didn't actually do anything to punish them. He just left.



It's this kind of enforcement of WBL that I find really artificial and just takes me out of the game TBH. I also find it to be a weird motivation killer. If you're trying to rules-lawyer your way to a broken setting, you've left the game.

The proper way to achieve your WBL is to TEAR GOLD AND EMERALDS FROM THE SPLEENS OF YOUR VANQUISHED FOES.

Sitting in a tower, planning get-rich-quick schemes -- that's something a bad guy would do. And your job is to stop him! And then take all of his stuff!

[Necroticplague]

This solution doesn't make sense. If magic makes you win, people will use it to win, because otherwise their enemies who do use magic will defeat them. If the only people willing to use magic for war (or trade, or whatever) are heretics who don't mind being told they court demons and doom, the world will be conquered by heretics. Because it turns out the ability to destroy your enemies with fire is a lot more valuable than the ability to be sure you have the favor of the gods. Unless the gods step in on the world enough to make up the balance, which is again more disruptive than just having people be very rich.
There is a massive difference between a random individual doing something for profit, and a member of an approved organization doing something for more noble reasons. So fielding and repairing war material with such magics is something that occurs, it's just not by PCs, and for more noble reasons than lining a pocket (onstensably, at least. No organization is corruption-proof, though Clerical oversight helps).

[Âmesang]

You know, this reminds me of wanting to try and replicate the South Sea Bubble… (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company)

Even attempted a faction emblem for the "Great Sea Company":


https://www.schadenfreudestudios.com/dnd/books/forgotten%20realms/factions/great%20sea%20company.png

[Quarian Rex]

If you're trying to rules-lawyer your way to a broken setting, you've left the game.

The proper way to achieve your WBL is to TEAR GOLD AND EMERALDS FROM THE SPLEENS OF YOUR VANQUISHED FOES.

Sitting in a tower, planning get-rich-quick schemes -- that's something a bad guy would do. And your job is to stop him! And then take all of his stuff!


I don't think it's really about being a rules-lawyer, it's about consequence and risk vs. reward. Perhaps that's just because most of the games I play have a strong sandbox leaning (multiple possible paths to take, attempts to minimize railroading, etc.). The party could play it safe and tackle the local bandits and goblins, gathering loot and and their just rewards as per the norm. But if they are feeling ballsy and decide to invade the Evil Baron™'s castle and, through clever planning, lucky rolls, and/or sheer testicular fortitude, find themselves barely clinging to life but clearly victorious, should the party then be granted the same reward as if they had stuck to goblin hunting? Or should they get the castle and all that is in it (for to the victor goes the spoils) even though it would break WBL wide open? Big risk, big reward, no?

Standard WBL rules (and DMs who enforce them) just come off as arbitrary and unsatisfying. If you have a DM who is that worried about it then you will always be behind the eightball (they'll catch you up to WBL but never let you get ahead), and feeling like you're under prepared, without any real way to actively remedy that (since you must wait till the next time the DM thinks your wealth should go up) is a problem. This isn't to say that PCs should have more (or less) than WBL. Just that if WBL is being enforced then any deviation or dissatisfaction thereof is now the DMs fault. If WBL is not being enforced then having too little is something that the players are responsible for (and can remedy), while exceeding WBL is something that they would have earned by tackling something out of their league.

That, and it leads to all kinds of internal inconsistencies that do nothing but take away from the game. Say the party does wind up taking the castle from the Evil Baron™ and they decide to keep it, only to discover that the Baron had Evil Backers™ in the surrounding kingdoms and they are going to invade. Engage training montage as the party tries to whip the peasantry into a fighting force (Seven Samurai like) and the mages crank out enough magically created gear to kit an army of a quality to put the Kingsguard to shame. Whose WBL will take the hit for all of those conscripts? WBL got slammed for those scrolls that helped in a previous battle, why not the army that will help in this one? Gonna let that slide? Ok, np. What about the next time the best solution to a problem is the mass creation of goods? What? Can't do it now? Is this an episode of Star Trek where once you have a good solution you can never use it again?

In my experience, a large part of player cleverness comes as a result of them pushing at the boundaries of the rules. Eventually the DM will throw something a little too big at them to see if they can punch above their weight, and their attempts to do that is where the system tends to be at its greatest strain. While the PCs can usually do very little to tweak their race/class resources in such a situation, their monetary resources offer much greater flexibility. Allowing players the freedom to acquire resources to buy a ship or hire an army (should the need arise) opens many fascinating opportunities in the game and should be left as a viable option (in my opinion). Having a valid in-game reason why said resources shouldn't/can't be used for direct personal empowerment is vitally important. Please note that the reason needs to be valid. Just saying that no one wants their money, or that their goods (though perfectly functional in all ways) give people the heeby-jeebies, and so are worthless, just doesn't cut it. You really need something tangible so that the players can push those boundaries without being able to break them.

[Crake]

You are incorrect about Fabricate.

1. Fabricate's material component is 1/3 of the product in GP. GP. I'll say that once more. GP!. Fabricate defies law of conservation of mass and energy. Instead Fabricate works off WORTH.

Result? You have a pile of gp worth 1000gp? Cast fabricate on it and it will be completely annihilated (because by RAW all material components are annihilated) and the result will be a pile of gp worth 3000gp.

So you can have a vat of Liquid Pain or Ambrosia, and Triple its volume with Fabricate.

This is the ultimate wealth breaking spell, especially when using outsiders like Rejkar who have at-will fabricate.

That's not true at all:


Material Component

The original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created.

It says nothing about raw GP. You need the original material needed to make the item.

The original material's value has a GP cost, but you still need the raw materials, not just a random pile of gold.

[Incorrect]

In my campaigns, prices are as they appear in the books, and all economic shenanigans like OP mentions are heavily regulated. This is done by a powerful organisation of wizards that live by the coast.
I have not had issues with players wanting to challenge this.

[RoboEmperor]

That's not true at all:



It says nothing about raw GP. You need the original material needed to make the item.

The original material's value has a GP cost, but you still need the raw materials, not just a random pile of gold.

Yeah that's what I meant.

The raw materials for a pile of 3,000gp is a pile of 1,000gp.
The raw materials for a vat of ambrosia worth 3,000gp is a vat of ambrosia worth 1,000gp.

The important thing here is Ambrosia. Using fabricate on it lets you bypass all crafting xp requirements.

edit: If you think "Pile" is not a product, then change pile to a "solid block".
Also the important thing here is you can triple your wealth with every casting without needing a market to peddle your goods to.

[Yahzi]

everything is laid out for the players to manipulate.
In my experience with the Heroes of Prime (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222339/Heroes-of-Prime) approach, players invariably get their hands on a big chunk of XP, gloat over how much gold it is worth and all the the things they could buy... but never actually do.

I've never seen them change a single XP into gold. Even magic items are rarely purchased, because they are always chasing that next level.

Now sometimes they do spend XP on their followers and hirelings, to make them into more effective soldiers; but what DM could ever object to that?

As for the reverse problem - where they pull some magical stunt and suddenly have a ton of gold they can theoretically turn into XP - that's limited by Lords of Prime (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217953/Lords-of-Prime), in the sense that the kingdom they are in only has a finite amount of XP to sell. The trade limit also sets the maximum you can extract from an economy in a reasonable way, without having to calculate commodity prices.

And in any case, by the time the players can manipulate the entire economy of a small kingdom... they can just have a small kingdom. At which point they don't want to manipulate the gold economy. Because the whole point of a kingdom is the XP it produces.

Now it is true that players with a kingdom will reap thousands of XP per year without adventuring... but that's a plus. It means players want to run kingdoms. And obviously, protecting a small kingdom in a dangerous world where entire races of monsters exist solely off of eating humanoid beings is an adventure in and of itself.


Now, the way that I'm planning on incorporating special materials is that any time that actual expensive material components are provided (in full) then the xp cost of the spell would be cut in half, that sort of thing.
That's a neat idea. It incentivizes players to do special quests without forcing them to.

[Andor13]

Yeah that's what I meant.

The raw materials for a pile of 3,000gp is a pile of 1,000gp.
The raw materials for a vat of ambrosia worth 3,000gp is a vat of ambrosia worth 1,000gp.


Um... no. The raw materials for a pile of 3000gp is an equal weight of raw gold or many times that weight in ore.
The raw materials for wine are grapes, yeast and oak.
The raw materials for beer are grains, water and hops.

If you have a vat of milk, it counts as raw materials for cream, or butter, or yogurt, or cheese. It does not count as raw materials for milk, it is milk.

[Segev]

Um... no. The raw materials for a pile of 3000gp is an equal weight of raw gold or many times that weight in ore.
The raw materials for wine are grapes, yeast and oak.
The raw materials for beer are grains, water and hops.

If you have a vat of milk, it counts as raw materials for cream, or butter, or yogurt, or cheese. It does not count as raw materials for milk, it is milk.

You’re missing the context of what he’s saying. The rules for crafting in d20 say that any product of a craft roll costs 1/3 its end market value in raw materials.

If we accept that you can use craft to make a gold piece, and that a gold piece has a market value of 1gp, then it costs roughly 3sp+4cp (rounding up) worth of gold lumps to make 1 gold piece that is worth 1gp.

It is a pure RAW argument.

[RoboEmperor]

Um... no. The raw materials for a pile of 3000gp is an equal weight of raw gold or many times that weight in ore.
The raw materials for wine are grapes, yeast and oak.
The raw materials for beer are grains, water and hops.

If you have a vat of milk, it counts as raw materials for cream, or butter, or yogurt, or cheese. It does not count as raw materials for milk, it is milk.

As Crake aptly quoted



Material Component

The original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created.

The original material is gold. 1,000gp of gold costs the same amount as the raw materials to craft 3,000gp of gold. You don't need raw materials, you just need the original material's worth in gp equivalent to the cost of raw materials of the final product.

So if it cost 1,000gp of whatever to craft 3,000gp milk, you only need 1,000gp (costs the same amount as the raw materials) of milk (original material) to fabricate 3,000gp of milk.

[Âmesang]

Wouldn't it be more likely to suggest that the raw materials in question would be a 60 lb. block of gold ore valued at 1,000 gp in its natural state, but valued at 3,000 gp as a finished product (in this case… 3,000 gold pieces)?

[RoboEmperor]

Wouldn't it be more likely to suggest that the raw materials in question would be a 60 lb. block of gold ore valued at 1,000 gp in its natural state, but valued at 3,000 gp as a finished product (in this case… 3,000 gold pieces)?

No, the material component of Fabricate is the original material which costs the same as the raw materials, not the actual raw materials.

[Âmesang]

…so gold isn't the original material for gold? :smallamused:

[Psyren]

Eberron had the Giants making existence-wrecking weapons before getting Dragon'd. The Prophecy didn't intervene cause the dragons to intervene -- the use of one of those weapons did that.

Sarlona has the Quorri currently making an existence-modifying weapon, and again the Prophecy hasn't done much.

Khorvaire is in the middle of an industrial revolution, and the Prophecy didn't stop it.

I just can't see the Prophecy behaving like an FR busy-gody.

Until any of those actually succeeds, you can't really claim the Prophecy to be a failure. After all, it caused Dragonmarked PCs and organizations to appear to deal with all that stuff.



As for Greyhawk, I wonder if Moradin would see any distinction between a PC using magic & skill to forge weapons, vs. an NPC Expert using muscle & skill to forge weapons.

Again, his portfolio is blacksmiths - not mass-producing wizards who make blacksmiths irrelevant.

And I'm not saying he'd intervene necessarily. He may not need to - remember, in-universe the magic solutions don't work out as perfectly as the PHB would have us believe, otherwise stuff like Owlbears and Wild Magic wouldn't exist. The PCs don't generally create that stuff, but they're also generally not trying to revolutionize the world economy either. They are, to use your own words, "stopping the guy in the tower who tries, and taking all his stuff."

[Zanos]

I didn't read everything in the thread but the easiest way is a gentleman's agreement. The other is kind of obvious: wizard's are one of the only guilds that directly and mechanically benefit from a guild or other organization, and are the most likely to know downtime spells. They collude to keep this influence to a minimum, and not complying means you lose access to the guild's services, including their spell libraries. Pretty minor change that can be easily slapped into most settings.

Also, mid level wizards aren't exactly common.

[Cosi]

The proper way to achieve your WBL is to TEAR GOLD AND EMERALDS FROM THE SPLEENS OF YOUR VANQUISHED FOES.

Sitting in a tower, planning get-rich-quick schemes -- that's something a bad guy would do. And your job is to stop him! And then take all of his stuff!

See, this is the problem with the fantasy genre. You live in a medieval world with medieval technology and medieval social mores and medieval standards of living. But the only people who every try to change things are bad guys. The hell is up with that? Players should be encouraged to change the world to be better than it is, because that is what being a hero means.


There is a massive difference between a random individual doing something for profit, and a member of an approved organization doing something for more noble reasons. So fielding and repairing war material with such magics is something that occurs, it's just not by PCs, and for more noble reasons than lining a pocket (onstensably, at least. No organization is corruption-proof, though Clerical oversight helps).

I don't understand how you think this was responsive to my points, or possibly I misunderstood your original post. My point was that no amount of "society doesn't like it when you use magic for <thing magic is obviously superior for>" is a sufficient answer for "why hasn't magic transformed society", because societies are competitive, and if there is a strategic advantage to be had, people (or cultures) will out-compete people who don't. There's a reason why we don't fight wars with mounted knights any more, and it's not because the knights decided that chivalry was for suckers.

[Zanos]

Actually, knights falling out of favor was more because of society than technology. The disintegration of feudal systems meant that expensive, highly trained, well equipped vassals fell out of favor in exchange for cheap centrally controlled and centrally funded armies.

[RoboEmperor]

In fallout 4, I spend the first 10 hours of the game setting up a purified water production plant and then use the massive amount of profits to fund my super expensive heavy weapons and stop looting my enemies altogether.

I liked it, and I wanted to do something similar in d&d.

But the difference is, your wealth can only make you so strong in fallout 4, and everyone can reach that power cap eventually without needing a purified water production plant. In d&d however, wealth breaks entire games.

So the problem I think is that in d&d, magic items turn you into a literal god which is why wealth farming breaks the game. If there was a cap to how much stronger you can get from wealth (like magic item bonuses are dependent on the character's level rather than being flat) we wouldn't be having this problem.

Not that I'm saying this is a bad thing. WBL is fun, but it doesn't support wealth farming.

[Cosi]

Actually, knights falling out of favor was more because of society than technology. The disintegration of feudal systems meant that expensive, highly trained, well equipped vassals fell out of favor in exchange for cheap centrally controlled and centrally funded armies.

Those advances were facilitated by technological developments, and are themselves a form of technology.


But the difference is, your wealth can only make you so strong in fallout 4, and everyone can reach that power cap eventually without needing a purified water production plant. In d&d however, wealth breaks entire games.

So the problem I think is that in d&d, magic items turn you into a literal god which is why wealth farming breaks the game. If there was a cap to how much stronger you can get from wealth (like magic item bonuses are dependent on the character's level rather than being flat) we wouldn't be having this problem.

Yes. Though my preferred solution would be to remove the need for magic item bonuses entirely, and have (most) magic items simply be artifacts that can't be bought or sold on a market, because it is much cooler to find the Sceptre of Orcus than a +5 Mace. However, in general, reducing the amount of power you get from gear would reduce the impact wealth loops have on the tactical combat portion of the game.

[RoboEmperor]

I think a house rule saying you can't be affected by gear whose combined total exceeds your WBL would fix wealth farming problems too.

So even if you have 1,000,000gp, you can't be affected by more than 9,000gp worth of items if you're level 5.

Of course you need to keep a running total of all the consumable items you've used and subtract that from your WBL.

[Cosi]

I think a house rule saying you can't be affected by gear whose combined total exceeds your WBL would fix wealth farming problems too.

So even if you have 1,000,000gp, you can't be affected by more than 9,000gp worth of items if you're level 5.

I think that's kind of lame. You want to be able to tell a story where people find gear that is arbitrarily way more powerful than level appropriate (because The Hobbit is about exactly that and it is an iconic fantasy story). Therefore we can't have the restriction be a level-based one on use. I think you should fix things by making it impossible to buy powerful magical items with mundane wealth, because that is minimally disruptive. Also, it fixes the issue where you use a series of consumables to get around the wealth cap.

[Quarian Rex]

I think a house rule saying you can't be affected by gear whose combined total exceeds your WBL would fix wealth farming problems too.

So even if you have 1,000,000gp, you can't be affected by more than 9,000gp worth of items if you're level 5.

Of course you need to keep a running total of all the consumable items you've used and subtract that from your WBL.

I think that's kind of lame. You want to be able to tell a story where people find gear that is arbitrarily way more powerful than level appropriate (because The Hobbit is about exactly that and it is an iconic fantasy story). Therefore we can't have the restriction be a level-based one on use. I think you should fix things by making it impossible to buy powerful magical items with mundane wealth, because that is minimally disruptive. Also, it fixes the issue where you use a series of consumables to get around the wealth cap.

Hence the idea to use xp as a practical alternative to mundane wealth. Seems like a lot of these problems resolve themselves when the players have to choose between twinking their gear and getting another level, or so it appears from Yahzi's experience.

[Cosi]

Hence the idea to use xp as a practical alternative to mundane wealth. Seems like a lot of these problems resolve themselves when the players have to choose between twinking their gear and getting another level, or so it appears from Yahzi's experience.

I think that's bad too.

We want characters to be personally powerful, have cool gear, and rule kingdoms. If all those things use the same resource, people will end up setting their kingdom on fire to buy better pants, or going around naked because it lets them cast higher level spells. I mean, isn't the problem we are trying to solve pretty much "when you activate abilities that let you do kingdom-scale actions, they produce inappropriate personal-scale wealth"? Why would coupling personal and strategic power more tightly solve that problem?

Also, giving out pity magic items to under-performing PCs is a powerful tool for DMs to correct imbalance, and establishing a paradigm where people destroy magic items so the party levels up undermines that.

[RoboEmperor]

Hence the idea to use xp as a practical alternative to mundane wealth. Seems like a lot of these problems resolve themselves when the players have to choose between twinking their gear and getting another level, or so it appears from Yahzi's experience.

This is a terrible idea. I would literally make my character walk around naked for faster higher level spells. Which is fine because it is MUNDANES who are DEPENDENT ON WEALTH. Spellcasters are INDEPEDNENT OF WEALTH.

[ericgrau]

Making high level characters rare is a good idea supported by the system. Making magic items hard to get creates a bigger problem than what you'd solve, and ruins the system.

I'd just make the wall of iron low quality iron so that it takes some work and expense to extract refined iron ingots from that 10 ton wall. Even if it were 100% pure shiny iron, trying to use it as a trade good to buy or trade is like buying a car with a bucket of pennies... except the pennies are all welded together. So yeah, maybe you get paid a 1,000-2,000 gp from some miners for saving them part of their trouble. Assuming another wizard hasn't done it already and you haven't already filled the town's iron needs. And at level 11 really you could kill a bunch of monsters in a single fight and make way more gold so it isn't too far fetched. Of course locating a buyer and casting a spell is a lot safer.

1e actually used to encourage the mentality of harvesting everything that wasn't nailed down from a dungeon, and then getting a hammer to pull the nails. Oh, and sell the nails too. Making gold every way you can isn't too far from it, and treasure hunting used to be an even bigger part of the system. You could also own profitable land and a keep.

So... I'd say:
NPC: "Sorry, we don't have need for 10 tons of iron, but you could try the capital."
NPC: "Sorry, the court wizard already filled our needs, try the famous port city.
NPC: "Actually, sir, a war just started across the sea, go fetch some miners and smelters to break it down and I'm sure we can work out NPC: a deal. We have to pay them and I have to haul it, so your cut will be 1,500 gp and that's being pretty fair."
PC: "I'll teleport us there."
NPC: "Fine, fine, 2,500 gp. I'm still taking a small cut for myself since I know the people who need it. And you gotta teleport me back."
PC: "Give me a day to prepare another one."
other PC: "Dan, can we go kill some stone giants now? Last time we made 20,000 gp from magic items and jewelry from a single group."
Dan: "But I'm busy breaking the economy! We can make money this way without the danger of adventuring."
other PC: "Yes, yes, you've given them all the iron they need now, let's move on."

[Segev]

If fabricate requires the raw materials, and a block of gold worth 1,000 (finished) gold pieces is the raw material for 3,000 (finished) gold pieces, then taking 1,000 actual gold pieces and trying to use them as raw materials for gold pieces would first require you to convert them to a block of gold. Which would be worth 333 and 1/3 gp. This wouldn't be a use of Craft.

If you're actually turning 1 gp into a 3 gp-worth item, you're probably forging it into some sort of figurine or statuette worth that much. or maybe you're making it a collector's item with much shaper features.

[Cosi]

Again, if you are not going to let PCs do something, just tell them no out-of-game. Don't jerk them around in game. If you put up in game obstacles, those obstacles should eventually be overcome. Otherwise you're just being immature. Forcing the players to go on a shaggy dog adventure every time they try something you don't want to do will only piss them off and waste everyone's time.

I'm interested in what you mean by this:


Making magic items hard to get creates a bigger problem than what you'd solve, and ruins the system.

I think it's just an observation that people need sufficiently plussed magic items to survive, but if it's something more than that I'd appreciate you expounding on it a little.

[ericgrau]

If you're actually turning 1 gp into a 3 gp-worth item, you're probably forging it into some sort of figurine or statuette worth that much. or maybe you're making it a collector's item with much shaper features.

Or most gold statues are melted down for their gold, and your art just isn't that special.



I'm interested in what you mean by this:



I think it's just an observation that people need sufficiently plussed magic items to survive, but if it's something more than that I'd appreciate you expounding on it a little.
Plusses and other magical abilities provided by items. Utility is a big category, for example. It's an expected part of system balance (however you may complain, there really is some balance maintained), and high level 3.5 completely falls apart without the expected quantity of magic items.

[Necroticplague]

I don't understand how you think this was responsive to my points, or possibly I misunderstood your original post. My point was that no amount of "society doesn't like it when you use magic for <thing magic is obviously superior for>" is a sufficient answer for "why hasn't magic transformed society", because societies are competitive, and if there is a strategic advantage to be had, people (or cultures) will out-compete people who don't. There's a reason why we don't fight wars with mounted knights any more, and it's not because the knights decided that chivalry was for suckers.1. That depends entirely on the timeframe of the campaign. It's entirely possible that society will eventually change. However, that does little to help out the PCs in the present, when that change hasn't happened yet. To use your analogy: while cavalry might eventually give way to artillery, there is a time period when this wasn't true. if you're playing in that time period, they fact they eventually will is at best irrelevant trivia.
2.People, and the societies they form, aren't wholly rational. Various forms of bigotry and poor policy based on absurdly incorrect ideas can continue for years in real life, why not in fantastic worlds? For years, there were very strict limits on usury in the West despite the advantages it offered, precisely because of religious reasons, not too dissimilar to the proposed setting. Yes, these eventually went away, but see point 1.

[RoboEmperor]

If fabricate requires the raw materials, and a block of gold worth 1,000 (finished) gold pieces is the raw material for 3,000 (finished) gold pieces, then taking 1,000 actual gold pieces and trying to use them as raw materials for gold pieces would first require you to convert them to a block of gold. Which would be worth 333 and 1/3 gp. This wouldn't be a use of Craft.

If you're actually turning 1 gp into a 3 gp-worth item, you're probably forging it into some sort of figurine or statuette worth that much. or maybe you're making it a collector's item with much shaper features.

The Spell says the material component is the original material that costs the same as the raw materials, as in it's not the raw materials. It just costs the same as the raw materials.

In any case, there's no reason you can't use a 3gp figurine or statuette to fabricate it into a 9gp figurine or statuette and that into a 27gp figurine or statuette.

I'm just pointing this out for fun. WotC really worded fabricate absolutely atrociously, but I get why they did that, because everything in d&d is based on GP instead of mass.

[Nifft]

I don't think it's really about being a rules-lawyer, it's about consequence and risk vs. reward. Perhaps that's just because most of the games I play have a strong sandbox leaning (multiple possible paths to take, attempts to minimize railroading, etc.). The party could play it safe and tackle the local bandits and goblins, gathering loot and and their just rewards as per the norm. But if they are feeling ballsy and decide to invade the Evil Baron™'s castle and, through clever planning, lucky rolls, and/or sheer testicular fortitude, find themselves barely clinging to life but clearly victorious, should the party then be granted the same reward as if they had stuck to goblin hunting? Or should they get the castle and all that is in it (for to the victor goes the spoils) even though it would break WBL wide open? Big risk, big reward, no?

Standard WBL rules (and DMs who enforce them) just come off as arbitrary and unsatisfying. If you have a DM who is that worried about it then you will always be behind the eightball (they'll catch you up to WBL but never let you get ahead), and feeling like you're under prepared, without any real way to actively remedy that (since you must wait till the next time the DM thinks your wealth should go up) is a problem. This isn't to say that PCs should have more (or less) than WBL. Just that if WBL is being enforced then any deviation or dissatisfaction thereof is now the DMs fault. If WBL is not being enforced then having too little is something that the players are responsible for (and can remedy), while exceeding WBL is something that they would have earned by tackling something out of their league.

That, and it leads to all kinds of internal inconsistencies that do nothing but take away from the game. Say the party does wind up taking the castle from the Evil Baron™ and they decide to keep it, only to discover that the Baron had Evil Backers™ in the surrounding kingdoms and they are going to invade. Engage training montage as the party tries to whip the peasantry into a fighting force (Seven Samurai like) and the mages crank out enough magically created gear to kit an army of a quality to put the Kingsguard to shame. Whose WBL will take the hit for all of those conscripts? WBL got slammed for those scrolls that helped in a previous battle, why not the army that will help in this one? Gonna let that slide? Ok, np. What about the next time the best solution to a problem is the mass creation of goods? What? Can't do it now? Is this an episode of Star Trek where once you have a good solution you can never use it again?

In my experience, a large part of player cleverness comes as a result of them pushing at the boundaries of the rules. Eventually the DM will throw something a little too big at them to see if they can punch above their weight, and their attempts to do that is where the system tends to be at its greatest strain. While the PCs can usually do very little to tweak their race/class resources in such a situation, their monetary resources offer much greater flexibility. Allowing players the freedom to acquire resources to buy a ship or hire an army (should the need arise) opens many fascinating opportunities in the game and should be left as a viable option (in my opinion). Having a valid in-game reason why said resources shouldn't/can't be used for direct personal empowerment is vitally important. Please note that the reason needs to be valid. Just saying that no one wants their money, or that their goods (though perfectly functional in all ways) give people the heeby-jeebies, and so are worthless, just doesn't cut it. You really need something tangible so that the players can push those boundaries without being able to break them. A goblin tribe is a nomadic group of non-citizens. The Evil Baron (apparently) has the approval of the higher governmental authorities and rules with their approval.

If you walk over and defeat a tribe of goblins, it's entirely reasonable that the human kingdom in which you achieved this defeat will welcome you, and will allow you to sell whatever you loot from the goblins.

If you walk over and defeat the local Evil Baron, you have declared war against the government under which the Baron served. It's entirely reasonable that you will be declared a treasonous usurper, and hunted down by very powerful people who serve the King, or who wish for the King's favor.

Your party will be executed for treason / usurpation / lese majesty / being uppity commoners / etc. You will not be permitted to liquidate the Baron's assets. You will not collect 200 gp.

Perhaps you just chose a bad example. Would you prefer to find another?



Until any of those actually succeeds, you can't really claim the Prophecy to be a failure. After all, it caused Dragonmarked PCs and organizations to appear to deal with all that stuff. 1/ All of those things already succeeded; and
2/ The Draconic Prophecy is not a failure, and nobody is calling it one. What I'm saying is that it's just not applicable in the same way that activist FR gods might be used to railroad PCs.

Eberron has a different (and IMHO more entertaining) concept of railroads. :smallsmile:


Again, his portfolio is blacksmiths - not mass-producing wizards who make blacksmiths irrelevant. Who says a wizard can't qualify as a blacksmith?

Seriously, his domains include Knowledge. All that Wizardly book-learning stuff is congruous with the Forge Lord.



See, this is the problem with the fantasy genre. You live in a medieval world with medieval technology and medieval social mores and medieval standards of living. But the only people who every try to change things are bad guys. The hell is up with that? Players should be encouraged to change the world to be better than it is, because that is what being a hero means. So the only two choices you can see are either (a) eternal stasis, or (b) wreck the economy? Are you role-playing as the IMF?

That's a bit of a false dichotomy.

Players should be encouraged to create something interesting, and thereby add value to the game. Using fabricate as an I-Win button is not how you create something interesting.

There are published settings with significant social and technological change, and with room for more. Greyhawk and Eberron stand out in that regard; homebrew settings can do it better, of course.

[Jay R]

The real answer is for the party to go adventuring. There are ten thousand different ways that the players could decide to not bother with the point of the game. You don't need magic spells to break the absurd D&D economy.

If somebody wants to stay in town and play tycoon, that's fine, and I hope he finds a Games Master who wants to run that kind of a game. Meanwhile, who's up for the quest I've just written?

[Endarire]

In my setting of Yevir, the world for The Metaphysical Revolution (https://campbellgrege.com/work-listing/the-metaphysical-revolution-dd-3-5-module/), the in-game explanations are thus:

-The casters who can do it are rare enough as to avoid it happening willy-nilly.

-There are various trade houses who have a gentleman's agreement to keep trade going in this recent post-apocalyptic world. Simultaneously, these trade houses acknowledge to some of their members that each house performs covert operations on the other houses, Cold War-style. (The planned campaign deals with some of the ramifications of in-game figures going against this agreement which also disrupts society. The campaign is also somewhat of an allegory of player behavior.)

-Magic on a mass-produced scale is expensive! It's so expensive that each trade house has generally specialized in one set or subset of things - arcane magic, divine magic, or psionics - and even then, not to the extent that it's the Wal-Mart of Magic Items of the in-game world.

-Politics. People bicker about stuff in reality. What do you do with super valuable goods and services that are generally expensive to make and that only a small portion of the population can make?

In another campaign, the GM's answer was simple: You're either a merchant or an adventurer. You can be super rich by spamming wall of salt or other wealth creation abilities, but if you want to play with us then you must be an adventurer.

[Andor13]

Heh. This reminds me of a thought I've long had about how to completely wreck the assumptions behind the 3e economic system. Think about material components. No really, think about them. What are they? Where do they come from? Who profits from them? Who regulates the trade? Is the trade regulated? If not, why the hell not? If Umlaut the Unwashed wants to make a Staff of the Magi, does Ye Local Magick Shoppe have every thing he needs in stock, somehow, or is he depleting the entire continent for a year with his order? (Not to mention destabilizing the economy for decades to come.) If components are so valuable (and they are,) how come they never show up in loot tables?

I feel the generic and nebulous nature of 3e magic components represents a huge untouched realm of world building and design space.

Any way on topic, fabricate occasionally requires the GM to insert some sense instead of mindlessly following the RAW for craft skills while ignoring in world implications. For example what the fabricate spell actually says is "(the original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created)". Note that it does not say "as determined by the standard craft skill rules." For 3000 gp the raw materials are 30 lbs of gold, which actually costs ... 3000 gp. Gold does not become more valuable when you cast it into coins, merely more convenient. (Unless you debase your currency. Fabricate would let you easily convert 28 lbs of gold and 2lbs of copper/silver into 3000 gp worth of forged coins, which works great until you run into a merchant who owns scales or bites his incoming coins to test their hardness.)

[Segev]

Or most gold statues are melted down for their gold, and your art just isn't that special.
Apparently it is, given what the rules say.

You’re trying to bounce in and out of the rules to achieve a nonsense “matter ex nihilism” result from the rules when merged with non-rule examples. This is the same kind of logic that turns a peasant instant messaging system into a peasant rail gun. The former is silly, but fully rules-compliant. The latter is silly, broken, and requires that you stop applying he rules after the last peasant and substitute real-world physics that you ignored in favor of the rules as written to this point.

Yes, my art is that special if I can make the Craft check.

The Spell says the material component is the original material that costs the same as the raw materials, as in it's not the raw materials. It just costs the same as the raw materials.

In any case, there's no reason you can't use a 3gp figurine or statuette to fabricate it into a 9gp figurine or statuette and that into a 27gp figurine or statuette.

I'm just pointing this out for fun. WotC really worded fabricate absolutely atrociously, but I get why they did that, because everything in d&d is based on GP instead of mass.this has nothing to do with Fabricate. You can do the same with mundane craft. Just keep refining that gold statue with repeated craft efforts.

[Mechalich]

At the end of the day the answer to this issue is simply to talk to the players and tell them that no, they cannot easily break the economic assumptions of the world because it breaks the game. And you're all trying to have fun by playing the game, so please don't break it because we'd like to continue. A good GM will also, while doing this, explain to the players that if you take the RAW at all seriously for anything even close to 3.X D&D the verisimilitude of the world shatters like a soap bubble in a room made of knife blades. Playing D&D that includes high level characters with even close to the DMG frequency of occurrence (to say nothing of the much higher occurrence of high-level characters and monsters in things like Adventure Paths) requires taking you're suspension of belief out back and beating its head in with a shovel.

And that's okay if you can do it. You can tell great stories in a setting where the world-building makes no sense whatsoever, Marvel's got one in theaters right now making hundreds of millions of dollars. Not everyone can, and if you can't the solution to that is to stop running standard D&D. Run a variant like E6 that drastically lowers magical abundance and power - the latter is actually more important, a single 20th level wizard can rip the world apart in a way thousands of level four wizards never will.

[vasilidor]

I have, when running my own game, given out material components for spells and the creation of magical items as part of treasure. I figured that stuff had to come from some where. I had a village whose only trade good was the ink that wizards needed for their spell books and scrolls. on the topic of what do i do when the characters try to break WBL is it has never happened to me. OK, i had one guy who wanted his character to stay at home and run a shop, and i told him i had no interest in running such a game. though it does bear to mention that for in game purposes i assume that only half of each persons at each level will ever make it to the next for multiple reasons. 1: they die, or are otherwise unable to continue. 2: they accomplish what they set out to do and settle into mediocrity (hey, i went into the dangerous hole for a pile of money and got it, now bugger off). 3: while they may still adventure, they no longer encounter things that challenge them as such things have become rare and hard to find resulting in stagnation. at early levels #1 is the most common, at middling or higher levels it is #2 or #3 that become more and more common. this leads wizards or other spell casters capable of doing such things a rarity, often with all the money that they could want and are moving past things that could be done with a larger pile of gold. until the pile runs out or they notice it running low for some reason, at which point they may make a magic sword or some such for sale (play in pathfinder with no XP for magic item creation cost).

[tiercel]

I do like that rationale: if you're going to do something absurdly world-breaking, someone else will have though of it before you. Is your PC ready to face the consequences of adventuring in that game world?

I mean, there are settings/game-styles like the Tippyverse, which is fine for those who enjoy that kind of thing, but it's the exception rather than the norm...at least IMHO.

Indeed; “most settings aren’t the Tippyverse” would be an understatement, which tells me that most people don’t particularly try to play a “pure RAW” campaign. Theorycrafting is its own fun metagame and certainly has a big place on forums such as these, but an actual game rarely runs that way...

...and so if a PC is trying shenanigans like these in a game and expecting to actually get away with it as the first person ever to do so, the only way it makes sense is if the technique is literally new to the game world and so no one else could have (e.g. “psionics never existed in the world until The Great Crystal Meteor of Crystalline Psionicness crashed into the ocean, spraying psi and psionics-is-crystals all over the setting for the first time, which is why no one abused, e.g. psychic reformation up until now”). Otherwise it seems strangely arrogant to simply assume that no one else in the world has ever been clever, powerful, or ambitious enough to try to exploit what is known that spells etc can actually do!

In a sense, it’s the anthropic principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle) of RPGs: if the campaign actually works a certain way, then the rules must be such that the campaign can work that way. —Equivalently, if the rules don’t actually work in a given game in such a way as to allow the campaign world to be, then that campaign must be different.

It is disingenuous for players to try to have it both ways by insisting “no, no, the world works this way despite the rules, and only MY character is smart enough to have figured out the rules and powerful enough to have taken advantage of them!”

Short version: if a campaign doesn’t look like, e.g., the Tippyverse, then the rules of the Tippyverse (i.e. literal-as-possible-RAW) must not actually apply.

Even shorter version: DM reminds players “anything you can do, I can do better” (https://youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0) :tongue:

(And maybe instead both sides agree to not try to “break” each other.)

[Nifft]

I just realized that you don't even need to be a mid-level caster to have infinite wealth by (relentlessly blind adherence to) RAW.

Source: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/wealthAndMoney.htm

The first section:

Wealth And Money

Assume a character owns at least one outfit of normal clothes. Pick any one of the following clothing outfits: artisan’s outfit, entertainer’s outfit, explorer’s outfit, monk’s outfit, peasant’s outfit, scholar’s outfit, or traveler’s outfit. You are instructed to assume that your character owns at least one outfit.

Pick an explorer's outfit (retail price: 10 gp). Sell the outfit for 5 gp.

After this, you are still instructed to assume that your character owns at least one outfit.

Pick an explorer's outfit (retail price: 10 gp). Sell the outfit for 5 gp.

After this, you are still instructed to assume that your character owns at least one outfit.

Pick an explorer's outfit (retail price: 10 gp). Sell the outfit for 5 gp.

Repeat until satisfied.


By using this willfully malicious reading of RAW, you can achieve unlimited wealth at level 1 simply by being a character.

I suspect that nobody plays willfully malicious interpretations of RAW, though technically those would still be RAW.

[Psyren]

1/ All of those things already succeeded; and
2/ The Draconic Prophecy is not a failure, and nobody is calling it one. What I'm saying is that it's just not applicable in the same way that activist FR gods might be used to railroad PCs.

Eberron has a different (and IMHO more entertaining) concept of railroads. :smallsmile:

They really haven't. The quori for one have not succeeded (yet) by any stretch of the imagination. They have a single country under their thumb with a very active resistance movement undermining them at every turn. The Giants aren't running things either, and I'm not sure what Khorvaire's technological advancements have to do with anything.


Who says a wizard can't qualify as a blacksmith?

Seriously, his domains include Knowledge. All that Wizardly book-learning stuff is congruous with the Forge Lord.

I'm not saying he's incompatible with wizards, I'm saying he still wants hammers and anvils and smocks and sweat to be a thing - at least, until the setting as a whole advances Starfinder-style.


So the only two choices you can see are either (a) eternal stasis, or (b) wreck the economy? Are you role-playing as the IMF?

That's a bit of a false dichotomy.

Players should be encouraged to create something interesting, and thereby add value to the game. Using fabricate as an I-Win button is not how you create something interesting.

There are published settings with significant social and technological change, and with room for more. Greyhawk and Eberron stand out in that regard; homebrew settings can do it better, of course.

On this you and I agree completely.

[Nifft]

They really haven't. The quori for one have not succeeded (yet) by any stretch of the imagination. They have a single country under their thumb with a very active resistance movement undermining them at every turn. The Giants aren't running things either, and I'm not sure what Khorvaire's technological advancements have to do with anything. The Quori have already delayed the turning of the age for Dal Quor. The fact that it's late is a plot hook.

The Giants have already altered the planar orbit of Dal Quor. After they succeeded in doing this, the dragons decided to not let them continue to perform planar landscaping.

The continent of Khorvaire is full of people using magic to manufacture goods and thereby produce wealth, and the dragons & their prophecy have done nothing to prevent this state of affairs. I hope you see how this is relevant to the thread's topic.


I'm not saying he's incompatible with wizards, I'm saying he still wants hammers and anvils and smocks and sweat to be a thing - at least, until the setting as a whole advances Starfinder-style. It sounds like you're saying that the PCs should not be allowed to change the setting, but if NPCs did exactly the same thing off-stage and advanced the setting into Starfinder, then it's all good.

Or maybe it's not NPCs, but rather designers? It's bad if players try to modify a setting, but it's cool if designers create a modified setting?

(I personally prefer to favor player actions. That's my bias.)


On this you and I agree completely. Cool.

[Crake]

As Crake aptly quoted



The original material is gold. 1,000gp of gold costs the same amount as the raw materials to craft 3,000gp of gold. You don't need raw materials, you just need the original material's worth in gp equivalent to the cost of raw materials of the final product.

So if it cost 1,000gp of whatever to craft 3,000gp milk, you only need 1,000gp (costs the same amount as the raw materials) of milk (original material) to fabricate 3,000gp of milk.

GP is literally worth its weight in gold, because "gp" is not the final product, "gold" is. A 1lb bar of gold is worth 50gp, and 50gp weighs 1lb for a reason. Gold pieces are literally just smaller cuts of gold for a more granular currancy system. The "raw materials" for gp would be unprocessed gold ore. And as others have already mentioned, milk is not the raw material for milk. If you're ending up with the same final product, then you're not converting raw materials into a final product, you're converting one thing into three times itself, which makes no sense.

[RoboEmperor]

GP is literally worth its weight in gold, because "gp" is not the final product, "gold" is. A 1lb bar of gold is worth 50gp, and 50gp weighs 1lb for a reason. Gold pieces are literally just smaller cuts of gold for a more granular currancy system. The "raw materials" for gp would be unprocessed gold ore. And as others have already mentioned, milk is not the raw material for milk. If you're ending up with the same final product, then you're not converting raw materials into a final product, you're converting one thing into three times itself, which makes no sense.

How many times do I have to repeat this @_@

It doesn't say Material Components: Raw Materials
It says Material Components: Original material worth the same as the RAW materials.

If it said Material Components: Raw Materials, then you'd be right.
But it doesn't. It says the original material that is worth equivalently as the raw materials.

So you aren't using sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create a wooden table with fabricate. You are using a wooden chair whose worth in gp is identical to the worth of gp of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide it takes to create a wooden table..

Do you understand? The raw materials are not the material components of this spell.

[Crake]

How many times do I have to repeat this @_@

It doesn't say Material Components: Raw Materials
It says Material Components: Original material worth the same as the RAW materials.

If it said Material Components: Raw Materials, then you'd be right.
But it doesn't. It says the original material that is worth equivalently as the raw materials.

So you aren't using sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create a wooden table with fabricate. You are using a wooden chair whose worth in gp is identical to the worth of gp of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide it takes to create a wooden table..

Do you understand? The raw materials are not the material components of this spell.

So your argument is based on the semantics of what the text means by "original materials"? Because that can swing either way.

[RoboEmperor]

So your argument is based on the semantics of what the text means by "original materials"? Because that can swing either way.

It's Material. Nonplural. Without the S.



Transmutation
Level: Sor/Wiz 5
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: See text
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: Up to 10 cu. ft./level; see text
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No

You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created or transmuted by the fabricate spell. The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication. If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet.

You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.

Casting requires 1 round per 10 cubic feet (or 1 cubic foot) of material to be affected by the spell.
Material Component

The original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created.

You can only fabricate with one material. So wooden table -> wooden door. Stone wall -> stone statue. Iron wall -> Iron weapons. Ectoplasm -> Ectoplasm furniture. Gold bar->Gold Statue. Gold Statue->More expensive Gold Statue.

[unseenmage]

...
... The world is slowly losing matter. Rust Monsters and rusting grasp spells actually destroy metal atoms. Spheres of Annihilation and disintegrate spells do the same thing, and don't care if you're metal or not.

...

Glad this got mentioned, even if only in passing. I would love to see a proper analysis of which can happen more often and to more volume, creation or deletion of matter, but I lack the requisite skill to perform such myself.

Though responses to the idea in other threads would indicate that Disintegrate alone covers enough volume to undo most if not all creation magic pound for pound so to speak.

[vasilidor]

i like toying with the idea that the stuff summoned is matter that was originally displaced by such methods as sphere of annihilation or disintegrate... actually kind of interesting...

[Cosi]

Plusses and other magical abilities provided by items. Utility is a big category, for example. It's an expected part of system balance (however you may complain, there really is some balance maintained), and high level 3.5 completely falls apart without the expected quantity of magic items.

Sure. But the suggestion isn't that those things are impossible to buy. It's that, above a certain threshold (namely, whatever the price of the most expensive thing you can costlessly* create with magic is), they're impossible to buy with gold (or anything else you can create via fabricate). You can still buy them with Planar Pearls or Souls or whatever other magical currency you have.

*: Or with some relatively trivial cost like "a use of a daily ability."


1. That depends entirely on the timeframe of the campaign. It's entirely possible that society will eventually change. However, that does little to help out the PCs in the present, when that change hasn't happened yet. To use your analogy: while cavalry might eventually give way to artillery, there is a time period when this wasn't true. if you're playing in that time period, they fact they eventually will is at best irrelevant trivia.

Sure, even if we postulated technological development, there would be periods where it hasn't happened yet. But once we postulate that such development can occur. we're back at a place where PCs can (potentially) destabilize the setting by being the change they wish to see in the world. I just don't see a way to have in-setting restraints that are simultaneously effective and good DMing. If something exists in the world, the PCs should be able to interact with it and (should that interaction be oppositional in nature), overcome it. If you don't want PCs to do that with your restrictions against magical industrialization, tell them out of game that you don't want that sort of thing happening.


So the only two choices you can see are either (a) eternal stasis, or (b) wreck the economy? Are you role-playing as the IMF?

fabricate doesn't wreck the economy. It lowers the price of certain goods (or rather it does in any economy dynamic enough to be wrecked -- under the RAW economy all it does is make PCs richer) by substituting a lot of labor from individual craftsmen for a smaller amount of labor from a Wizard. If that is cheaper (and it must be for the plan to make money), it raises standards of living in the same way that mass production of textiles raised standards of living.


I just realized that you don't even need to be a mid-level caster to have infinite wealth by (relentlessly blind adherence to) RAW.

Yes. Obviously. There are wealth loops in the prices provided for goods that don't require readings nearly as tortured as yours (for example, ladders and ten foot poles).


In short, if you try to break the economy, the economy will reciprocate the gesture for the sake of its survival. It also helps that the main threats to economic balance have either existed for a relatively short period of time, or have been around for so long that any society worth its salt has already adapted to their effects.

Honestly, most of these wealth loops don't even come terribly close to breaking the economy. They just make some goods cheaper (sometimes much cheaper). The economy doesn't "break" if the price of new cookware drops 90%. It just means people buy more pots and pans (and probably save enough money anyway to buy more stuff from other sectors).


Glad this got mentioned, even if only in passing. I would love to see a proper analysis of which can happen more often and to more volume, creation or deletion of matter, but I lack the requisite skill to perform such myself.

Planes in D&D are (mostly) infinite. The setting as a whole isn't at risk of being destroyed by loss of matter, because it has infinite matter. You might still destroy any particular thing in the setting (as those things are themselves finite), but the ability to create new matter mostly doesn't help with replacing individual things that have been lost. If a Wizard's spellbook gets thrown into a Sphere of Annihilation, the fact that someone could fabricate up a new spellbook doesn't really help her out. The original spellbook is still gone.

[Psyren]

The Quori have already delayed the turning of the age for Dal Quor. The fact that it's late is a plot hook.

The Giants have already altered the planar orbit of Dal Quor. After they succeeded in doing this, the dragons decided to not let them continue to perform planar landscaping.

The continent of Khorvaire is full of people using magic to manufacture goods and thereby produce wealth, and the dragons & their prophecy have done nothing to prevent this state of affairs. I hope you see how this is relevant to the thread's topic.

I suspect your definition of "succeed" is fundamentally different than mine then. Delays, planting seeds, indications, all these are hooks to say that they will succeed if left alone - but they haven't yet, otherwise it would be too late for the players to make a difference. I find it particularly odd that you feel this way given that you yourself state a belief that player actions should matter not three sentences later.


It sounds like you're saying that the PCs should not be allowed to change the setting, but if NPCs did exactly the same thing off-stage and advanced the setting into Starfinder, then it's all good.

Or maybe it's not NPCs, but rather designers? It's bad if players try to modify a setting, but it's cool if designers create a modified setting?

(I personally prefer to favor player actions. That's my bias.)

I'm fine with player- driven change as a concept, but the setting should give the DM ammunition to plausibly say "this doesn't work" without being forced to resort to pure caprice and fiat.

[Cosi]

Sure, but the parallel application of every wealth generating exploit available to mages and psychics of 10th level or lower can make virtually anyone without mystical abilities utterly irrelevant. Even benevolent or charitable activity can lead to systemic poverty, as it'd take plenty of time and resources for many to acquire new and marketable skills, assuming those that have suddenly lost their livelihoods don't just resign themselves to being dependent on a system that no longer needs them.

Sure. But is that really a bad thing? What you're saying is that, essentially, society can achieve the same standard of living with smaller labor inputs and equivalent resource inputs. That seems like a win to me, because it leaves more time for people to do what they want to do, whether that's whatever they were doing before (which would now be for artistic or personal fulfillment reasons), learning new skills, or engaging in leisure activities. The only reason that's bad is if society somehow doesn't actualize those efficiency gains or if you consider it morally important that people engage in a sufficient amount of grinding manual labor.

This question is, basically, analogous to the question of "what do we do when we develop automation that replaces human labor". And while there are certainly way to answer that question that result in poor outcomes (although even the comparatively poor ones are likely better than a world without that automation), there are also answers that result in good ones.


As the hyperproducers accrue accelerating amounts of wealth by offering goods and services at very low prices, the rest of the economy could experience everything from mass unemployment to money scarcity.

Sure. There are absolutely challenges (even "adventures") to be had in a world where magic produces goods and services. I think that is almost certainly a good thing for a game about going on adventures.

[Nifft]

I suspect your definition of "succeed" is fundamentally different than mine then. Delays, planting seeds, indications, all these are hooks to say that they will succeed if left alone - but they haven't yet, otherwise it would be too late for the players to make a difference.
Nah, what's going on here is that the Quori delayed the turning of the age -- that's like a bunch of trees deciding the sun shouldn't set, and now the sun is still high in the sky an hour after night should have started. Sure, so far it's only long enough that we think of it as a delay. But stopping the sun in the sky is a big deal, even if it's not known to be permanent. Especially since it's ongoing.

The other two things which I talked about aren't ongoing -- they're historical facts. There's nothing the PCs can do to change the past, and that's okay.


I find it particularly odd that you feel this way given that you yourself state a belief that player actions should matter not three sentences later.
How in the world is that odd? Do you think there's a conflict somewhere?


I'm fine with player- driven change as a concept, but the setting should give the DM ammunition to plausibly say "this doesn't work" without being forced to resort to pure caprice and fiat.
A setting could, but that's a bad precedent.

Really, the system should do that, by not having infinite no-effort wreck-the-economy buttons.

If every setting were responsible for that sort of thing, then homebrew settings would face an unexpected barrier to entry, and published settings books would all need more careful editing to ensure nobody introduced anything that broke the setting's special protections. Given that we know published settings can't always keep even their simple facts straight between books, that's too high a hurtle for this industry.

[Cosi]

There should be no tools for the DM to say "no, don't do that" in setting, because that is a bad thing for the DM to be able to say. If the DM thinks an action is categorically inappropriate for the game he wants to run, he should say so out-of-game (just as a player who thinks an action is categorically inappropriate for a game they want to play in should). In the DM puts up obstacles in game, those obstacles should be things they players can confront and overcome in all cases (as least in theory). Having some in-game things be real challenges that can be beaten and other in-game things be passive-aggressive warnings from the DM is bad communication and should be discouraged.

In game solutions for in game problems. Out of game solutions for out of game problems. People wanting to play different styles of campaign (e.g. Hack 'n' Slash vs. Logistics and Dragons) is an out of game problem, just like people wanting to play different systems. Do you have an in character reason the campaign is being run with D&D rules rather than Shadowrun rules?

[PersonMan]

I would think that most of these built-in GM "no" buttons would be of the type that already exists and keeps the PCs from saying "we go kill the king" or similar - generally something that can be overcome, but there's no guarantee that the PCs will be able to do so in their current state. Certainly not something they can overcome in all cases, but also not a passive-aggressive warning.

[Cosi]

I would think that most of these built-in GM "no" buttons would be of the type that already exists and keeps the PCs from saying "we go kill the king" or similar - generally something that can be overcome, but there's no guarantee that the PCs will be able to do so in their current state. Certainly not something they can overcome in all cases, but also not a passive-aggressive warning.

The suggestions I have seen in this thread include "the gods tell you to knock it off", "doing that will make your character Lovecraftianly insane", and "there is a prophecy that explicitly precludes you doing that". Which of those sound like reasonable obstacles rather than passive-aggressive no buttons to you?

[skunk3]

Personally I come from a Forgotten Realms background and I've read lots of books and read wayyyyy too many stories of wizards using magic for all of the wrong reasons. I wouldn't want a visit from Azuth or Mystra, chastising me for abusing the Art. It's as simple as that, really. There's ways of generating tons of wealth but I think that most players agree that it's just lame and cheesy and should be avoided just for the sake of the game. There's powergamers who will try to do anything they can to be godly but ultimately, D&D is a game, and games are supposed to be FUN. I personally kinda look at most magic users as quasi-clerics of Mystra, whether they know it or not. ;)

[Psyren]

Nah, what's going on here is that the Quori delayed the turning of the age -- that's like a bunch of trees deciding the sun shouldn't set, and now the sun is still high in the sky an hour after night should have started. Sure, so far it's only long enough that we think of it as a delay. But stopping the sun in the sky is a big deal, even if it's not known to be permanent. Especially since it's ongoing.

Agreed, it's a big deal - but the bad guy's plans always start with a big deal, that's how we know they're serious. But again, I don't define that start as "success."


The other two things which I talked about aren't ongoing -- they're historical facts. There's nothing the PCs can do to change the past, and that's okay.

I guess I'm not seeing the significance of those events then if heroism can still exist in spite of them.


How in the world is that odd? Do you think there's a conflict somewhere?

The conflict I see is between "Quori have started X" and "Quori have succeeded." One will lead to the other if left unchallenged, but until then, they're not the same thing.



A setting could, but that's a bad precedent.

Really, the system should do that, by not having infinite no-effort wreck-the-economy buttons.

If every setting were responsible for that sort of thing, then homebrew settings would face an unexpected barrier to entry, and published settings books would all need more careful editing to ensure nobody introduced anything that broke the setting's special protections. Given that we know published settings can't always keep even their simple facts straight between books, that's too high a hurtle for this industry.

Agreed 100%, and this is why gods and prophecies and the like exist as a stopgap/kludge (in lieu of flawless human editing.)

[Fizban]

I was under the impression that you were bringing up teleport in response to the idea of spending money on vehicles for transport, making them irrelevant. I was simply asserting that those vehicles still had some value, even past the point where teleporting becomes commonplace.
I did want to come back to this- yeah, ships definitely remain important. Unless you have to ferry the goods very long distances, ships still maintain an excellent cargo/speed ratio compared to magical transport, simply because magical transport of anything other than creatures and what they can carry depends on a few specific effects (which are suited best for high density materials), and that assumes those can even be afforded or crafted in the first place. Even a continuous portal doesn't so much allow transport of goods as it connects the people of two locations- small loads are easily transported, but anything that's hard for a person to carry still gets bogged down. Without the higher level mass transit items, basic Teleport pretty much just gives secure (non-bandit-able) transport of stuff like gems/art/spices/magic items.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I did want to come back to this- yeah, ships definitely remain important. Unless you have to ferry the goods very long distances, ships still maintain an excellent cargo/speed ratio compared to magical transport, simply because magical transport of anything other than creatures and what they can carry depends on a few specific effects (which are suited best for high density materials), and that assumes those can even be afforded or crafted in the first place. Even a continuous portal doesn't so much allow transport of goods as it connects the people of two locations- small loads are easily transported, but anything that's hard for a person to carry still gets bogged down. Without the higher level mass transit items, basic Teleport pretty much just gives secure (non-bandit-able) transport of stuff like gems/art/spices/magic items.

That's true.

In RL terms (updated from the original),


Never underestimate the bandwidth of a moving van full of hard drives going down the interstate at 75 mph.

See also https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/--a backup service that sends you a whole 45-foot shipping container full of backup equipment for your data and then drives it to their servers.

For things that last, speed often doesn't matter--having a consistent supply and being able to move huge quantities is often more important.

[Nifft]

I would think that most of these built-in GM "no" buttons would be of the type that already exists and keeps the PCs from saying "we go kill the king" or similar - generally something that can be overcome, but there's no guarantee that the PCs will be able to do so in their current state. Certainly not something they can overcome in all cases, but also not a passive-aggressive warning. IMHO the ideal outcome would be that a magic-user producing wealth via magic would be modeled as a type of business, using the same rules as any other PC business.

Instead of just saying "no" or breaking the setting, it'd be cool if the PCs could integrate deeper into the setting -- a "yes, and" / "yes, but" type of response.



I guess I'm not seeing the significance of those events then if heroism can still exist in spite of them.

Your initial objection was that the Draconic Prophecy would stop humans from using magic to create wealth.

Now you want to move the goalposts to "heroism can still exist"? Sorry but no, that's not the target.


Instead, let me just run down your past objections.

Question: "Will the Draconic Prophecy stop all objectionable events?"
Answer: Nope. Two cited events, one past and one present, confirm that this is not the case.

Question: "Will the Draconic Prophecy stop humans from using magic to create wealth?"
Answer: Nope. Khorvaire's industrialization is ample evidence against that.


gods and prophecies and the like exist as a stopgap/kludge Not in canon Eberron.

In your own games, you can obviously do whatever you want, but this is not a kludge that canonically exists in Eberron.

[Psyren]

Your initial objection was that the Draconic Prophecy would stop humans from using magic to create wealth.

Now you want to move the goalposts to "heroism can still exist"? Sorry but no, that's not the target.

My point in saying that was that the Prophecy provides a serviceable excuse for why spellcasters have not rendered many facets of the setting obsolete. I brought up heroism because of your counterexamples like "the Quori have started doing bad things, so clearly the prophecy isn't stopping them" - pointing out that until they've achieved their ultimate goals, you can't actually say that.

[Nifft]

My point in saying that was that the Prophecy provides a serviceable excuse for why spellcasters have not rendered many facets of the setting obsolete. I brought up heroism because of your counterexamples like "the Quori have started doing bad things, so clearly the prophecy isn't stopping them" - pointing out that until they've achieved their ultimate goals, you can't actually say that.

It looks like you've abandoned even the pretense of disagreeing with my other two examples (Giants severing Dal Quor and magical industrialization of Khorvaire).

Even discarding this 3rd example, with which you seem to have a quibble about heroism for some reason, the other two are more than sufficient to demonstrate that the Draconic Prophecy doesn't do what you had implied.

Are we done here?

[Psyren]

It looks like you've abandoned even the pretense of disagreeing with my other two examples (Giants severing Dal Quor and magical industrialization of Khorvaire).

I said I didn't see their relevance to PCs having free rein to subvert/advance the setting, and still don't.


Are we done here?

I guess so. This was one of the more civil interactions we've had at least.

[Nifft]

I said I didn't see their relevance to PCs having free rein to subvert/advance the setting, and still don't.

I guess so. This was one of the more civil interactions we've had at least.

My side is civil because I'm no longer lowering my arguments to match your goal-post moving, your dismissals, or your mischaricatizations (e.g. your above assertion that "free rein to subvert the setting" is somehow relevant to my argument).

It'd be nice if we got to the point where both sides were that civil.

[Cosi]

You know Nifft, if you act uncivil enough to Psyren, he will eventually stop being stupid at you.


My point in saying that was that the Prophecy provides a serviceable excuse for why spellcasters have not rendered many facets of the setting obsolete.

... but that wasn't even the topic.

The question was "what stops the PCs from wrecking the setting right now with economy warping magic", not "why doesn't the setting reflect the economy warping magic that is already in it". How is "the prophecy stops spellcasters who were not the PCs" a solution? Hell, what power does "the Prophecy" even have that is not the DM literally saying "no, it is literally impossible for you to do that because FATE."

[Andor13]

A couple of thoughts occur to me.

First, if you're in Eberron, the economy is already fully adapted to industrialized magic. However if you try doing it on your own, House Canith will have some words for you. You should listen to them.

Second, A 10th level wizard making his money with fabricate is like someone earning a PhD, doing years of Post-Doc work, and then settling down to become a 3rd rate knockoff factory. (Did your wizard really put points in the craft skill in question? Really?) Wizards have better ways to make money.

Can it happen? Sure. Would there be repercussions? Yes, if the market is large enough to provide a steady demand, then there will be powerful interests that will resist disruption. They may well fail, 10th level Wizard, after all. If everyone is sensible I suspect what would happen is that the guilds would work out a deal with the wizard where they pay him a retainer not to cast Fabricate, but also get the right to ask him to cast it at a cut rate when there is a sudden surge in demand that they cannot meet. He then gets to go back to wizarding, and occasionally acts as an on-demand fab shop.

[Psyren]

Sure Nifft, good talk.


Yes, if the market is large enough to provide a steady demand, then there will be powerful interests that will resist disruption. They may well fail, 10th level Wizard, after all. If everyone is sensible I suspect what would happen is that the guilds would work out a deal with the wizard where they pay him a retainer not to cast Fabricate, but also get the right to ask him to cast it at a cut rate when there is a sudden surge in demand that they cannot meet. He then gets to go back to wizarding, and occasionally acts as an on-demand fab shop.

There's also the fact that there were 10th-level wizards in the world before the PC came along; centuries worth in some cases. Such deals, guilds, etc, if they exist at all, would likely be well-established with existing mages already. Now, an interesting proposition would be whether a PC mage could co-opt such a deal, through persuasion or force.

[unseenmage]

To my knowledge, in the real world emergent magic tech making careers obsolete has generally been a boon more than a bane.

The displaced workforce is often forced to relocate and/or learn new trade skills but very rarely is there just a mass die-off of working stiffs just because some new bit of modernization took their jobs.
If t hat were the case I doubt folk would ever let new tech get developed at all.

The above being based more on the history of the industrialized world it might only be applicable to Eberron but still, we have ample evidence (if that one TED talk I watched that one time is to be believed) that people are generally adaptable and will mold themselves to fit new paradigms by and large.



...

Second, A 10th level wizard making his money with fabricate is like someone earning a PhD, doing years of Post-Doc work, and then settling down to become a 3rd rate knockoff factory. (Did your wizard really put points in the craft skill in question? Really?) Wizards have better ways to make money.

...

Isn't that the point of the thread though? That, pound for pound, there really is not a 'better way to make money'?

[Andor13]

To my knowledge, in the real world emergent tech making careers obsolete has generally been a boon more than a bane.

The displaced workforce is often forced to relocate and/or learn new trade skills but very rarely is there just a mass die-off of working stiffs just because some new bit of modernization took their jobs.
If t hat were the case I doubt folk would ever let new tech get developed at all.

The above being based more on the history of the industrialized world it might only be applicable to Everton but still, we have ample evidence (if that one TED talk I watched that one time is to be believed) that people are generally adaptable and will mold themselves to fit new paradigms by and large.

This is true, but it's worth noting that ancient societies were not familiar with this concept and were frequently highly resistant to introducing labor saving devices or techniques, for fear of the trouble they anticipated from displaced workers. Whether this tendency would be enhanced or suppressed by the chaotic and multi cultural/racial nature of most campaign worlds is a GM call. When you have to deal with cranky dragons on a regular basis, worker riots might seem less terrifying.

[unseenmage]

This is true, but it's worth noting that ancient societies were not familiar with this concept and were frequently highly resistant to introducing labor saving devices or techniques, for fear of the trouble they anticipated from displaced workers. Whether this tendency would be enhanced or suppressed by the chaotic and multi cultural/racial nature of most campaign worlds is a GM call. When you have to deal with cranky dragons on a regular basis, worker riots might seem less terrifying.


Agreed, which is why I tried to reference Eberron as the most industrial-like world where the effect could/would be minimal. (stupid autocorrect)

Additionally, emergent tech has never been completely painless, as has been pointed out.

My point is that the real world examples show us that the base assumption that 'economies would get crashed and everyone will lose their minds! Oh-em-gee!' is likely a hyperbolous overreaction.

More exiting than the alternative and thus potentially more appropriate for a D&D game but still.

[Quarian Rex]

Late responses since I was away for the weekend.



This is a terrible idea. I would literally make my character walk around naked for faster higher level spells. Which is fine because it is MUNDANES who are DEPENDENT ON WEALTH. Spellcasters are INDEPEDNENT OF WEALTH.


I think that placing that choice in the characters hands is a fascinating thing to do. With the escalating cost of leveling (remember that I will be doubling xp required per level) at which point will the player look at magic item creation/purchase as a small enough percentage of their level budget to invest in? How badly do you really need to upgrade your entire defensive suite of magic items? These are all interesting choices and all the choices get to be seen as worth it. A mundane who devotes moderate investment into equipment will see massive gains in their capabilities, usually far greater than the gains of a mere level (as is the nature of mundanes and magic items). The caster who decides to be an ascetic to pursue mastery of the arcane at the expense of all else will eventually be able to drop a spell of a level higher than the norm to save the day/show off, but the price of such discipline may become apparent the next time they get targeted or have to make a save. All valid options that will lead to valuable lessons. Lessons that the players will teach themselves, all without the ability to b*tch about heavy-handed/stingy/whatever DMs.

Where you seem to be upset that you wouldn't be able to have the best gear and the fastest progression at the same time, I see incredible RP opportunities driven by the mechanics.




I think that's bad too.

We want characters to be personally powerful, have cool gear, and rule kingdoms.


And with this system, one of the best ways to be personally powerful and have cool gear is to rule a kingdom. The xp harvested from natural commoner death is provided to the ruler, because it is with that power that he protects the commoners. This has always been the background expectation in the game, it is just that now there is a collective, in-game, mechanical acknowledgement of the fact.



If all those things use the same resource, people will end up setting their kingdom on fire to buy better pants, or going around naked because it lets them cast higher level spells.


You are absolutely right, and I think that could lead to some really interesting possibilities. I already addresses naked casters above in this post (it is a players choice, and an interesting one, with every decision having its advantages) but what you mentioned about destroying ones kingdom for profit is interesting as well. If the player does the math and figures that destroying three of his neighbors villages (or even his own!) is all that is needed to give him access to the next game changing capability (Raise Dead/Planar Binding/fancy magic item/whatever) then he now has an interesting moral dilemma, especially if that game changing capability is needed to meet some greater challenge on the horizon.

This sort of thing provides actual mechanical support for standard medieval practices (like raiding and such) that players might never think to do. This stirs dramatic conflict in that game and can be a great tool on both sides of the table. Now, the despicable actions of the Evil Baron™ (burning villages and slaughtering the populace, his own or those of his neighbors) aren't just mere acts of a viscous madman, but the calculated acts of someone harvesting strength at all costs (who may still be a madman...), someone who the PCs must stop before his power grows too great.

The consequences of these mechanics can lead to something absolutely beautiful. One thing I found when reading Lords of Prime (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217953/Lords-of-Prime) was a great example of this. To provide a little context, normal people are all essentially Commoner 1. Gaining class levels is only done through consuming harvested soul residue (xp, as has been previously described) called Tael. Those who acquire class levels (ranks) are considered to be supernaturally empowered (because in D&D that is an accurate assessment) nobility whose responsibility is to protect the common folk (whether they live up to that expectation depends on the individual). As such, for uprisings to have any prayer of success they are always lead by ranked individuals. And if there is no one of rank willing to protect the commoners, and all other hope is lost...


Peasant Rebellions

In the worst case, when no other leader is available, six villages will band together in a terrible pact. Each will have a contest or election to select a village champion. The champion, his wife (he will be provided with one if necessary), and the village headman leave the village in secrecy to meet the other village delegations.

At the chosen place, the champions don crude masks chosen at random, each representing a different Elder god. A series of duels to the death will follow, starting with the opposed alignments (Yellow vs Green, etc.). The surviving three will draw straws to determine the next duel. The final two will then fight to the death.

Once a winner has been determined, he murders the wives and headmen of the other champions. This, plus the tael from the defeated champions, elevates him to first rank. He returns to his own village where the men bow and pledge fealty to him.

The men of the village then dress in the colors and costumes of their old lord. In this crude disguise they visit the other villages, murdering every adult. The children are generally left to fend for themselves. No resistance is offered by the other villages; they have lost their headman, their champion, and the will of the gods, and in any case they have already accepted imminent destruction: nothing less would have made them agree to the pact in the first place. With the tael thus gained, the victorious champion promotes himself to 5th rank of a Primitive class (usually Warrior), and 100 village men to 1st rank. The men burn the old costumes in a nighttime ritual designed to divert the blame for their atrocities, don new colors, proclaim their new lord, and now the rebellion has its usurper and his army.


This is the kind of emergent gameplay that can arise from this sort of thing and I bloody love it. Just the fact that something like this could happen in the game (for mechanically sound reasons that make the most horribly practical sense within the in-game world), either as a consequence of the player's actions (whether that is because they were, "setting their kingdom on fire to buy better pants", or they failed to act when they initially heard of the actions of the Evil Baron™, later learning of the horrible sacrifices made by the people that they were supposed to protect), or even as a pretty epic basis for a character backstory (perhaps they were one of those initial 100).

Even the potential 'downsides' of this idea are so full of interesting story/character/plot hooks that I can't help but see them as advantages.




I mean, isn't the problem we are trying to solve pretty much "when you activate abilities that let you do kingdom-scale actions, they produce inappropriate personal-scale wealth"? Why would coupling personal and strategic power more tightly solve that problem?


Because coupling personal and strategic power more tightly means that attempts to multiply strategic power via magical means now has a personal cost, something that single-handedly closes infinite loops, and therefore game breaking craziness, without reducing the characters' ability to act. If a wizard needs to arm and equip am army with Fabricate, he has that option, and it is well worth the price. A well armed and armored army is a force multiplier that can lead to greater victory, using the arcane to create an edge in that regard is a smart call. Why doesn't the mage just blow off all excess spell slots on fabricate every day to turn gold -> resources -> goods -> gold (ad nauseam)? Because doing so comes at a personal cost, and mere mundane wealth isn't worth that cost (you were willing to run around naked to level faster, right?).

Remember, mundane wealth isn't really that much of a problem. The ability to convert that mundane wealth into enough twinked out magic gear to become a functional Demigod is the problem. Coupling personal and strategic power more tightly does seem to solve that problem




Also, giving out pity magic items to under-performing PCs is a powerful tool for DMs to correct imbalance, and establishing a paradigm where people destroy magic items so the party levels up undermines that.


Pity items never seem to work out well in-game (from what I've seen). Either they are overpowered and hyper-specific to a character (which comes off as extremely contrived, smacks of favoritism, and tends to pull most people out of the game), or it is a technical upgrade that none of the characters actually want (sure the +3 Flaming Keen Scimitar is nice, but I was taught how to use a longsword by my father in honor if the favored weapon of our god, and that scimitar belonged to Igon the Masticator, who famously cleaved through three orphanages and a nunnery with that blade...). Pity items are still a valid tool if a DM still wants to do so, it is just no longer required, which is an important distinction.

Also, since xp can be sold (thus 1HD humanoids/monsters/etc. are worth at least 160gp) the players never have to be lacking, they can pool resources to catch someone up after death/level loss/replacement/etc., and no sacrifice 'for the group' ever needs to be born by a single character alone. And regardless of the opposition the players never have to grouch about there being (https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1032) no (https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=880) loot (https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1077).

The bit about destroying magic items for xp is just an option, not necessarily a good option. I like it for the in-world consistency (bound xp, regardless of how it is bound, can still be released in the same way) and for those niche times when the PCs encounter something that they really don't want out in the world like cursed items, or a party of good humans finding an Unholy Human-Bane Sword (regardless of how much you could sell it for you know it will bite you in the arse if you release it into the wild). Now, if they do what they feel needs to be done, they still have an additional reward for doing so, and that reward is not game breaking. Under this system, destroying a +10 (equivalent) sword would provide 1,250 xp [100,000 crafting cost paid for in xp (20,000 at 1 xp = 5 gp), divided by 16 (you can only recover a fraction of what was bound, whether in people or items)], enough to raise a 1st level character to 2nd. It is a nice little benefit, not something that you have to balance around. I know a lot of this stuff sounds intimidating (so you might have a knee-jerk reaction against it) but once you look at the math it just seems to work so bloody well.








I don't think it's really about being a rules-lawyer, it's about consequence and risk vs. reward. Perhaps that's just because most of the games I play have a strong sandbox leaning (multiple possible paths to take, attempts to minimize railroading, etc.). The party could play it safe and tackle the local bandits and goblins, gathering loot and and their just rewards as per the norm. But if they are feeling ballsy and decide to invade the Evil Baron™'s castle and, through clever planning, lucky rolls, and/or sheer testicular fortitude, find themselves barely clinging to life but clearly victorious, should the party then be granted the same reward as if they had stuck to goblin hunting? Or should they get the castle and all that is in it (for to the victor goes the spoils) even though it would break WBL wide open? Big risk, big reward, no?

Standard WBL rules (and DMs who enforce them) just come off as arbitrary and unsatisfying. If you have a DM who is that worried about it then you will always be behind the eightball (they'll catch you up to WBL but never let you get ahead), and feeling like you're under prepared, without any real way to actively remedy that (since you must wait till the next time the DM thinks your wealth should go up) is a problem. This isn't to say that PCs should have more (or less) than WBL. Just that if WBL is being enforced then any deviation or dissatisfaction thereof is now the DMs fault. If WBL is not being enforced then having too little is something that the players are responsible for (and can remedy), while exceeding WBL is something that they would have earned by tackling something out of their league.

That, and it leads to all kinds of internal inconsistencies that do nothing but take away from the game. Say the party does wind up taking the castle from the Evil Baron™ and they decide to keep it, only to discover that the Baron had Evil Backers™ in the surrounding kingdoms and they are going to invade. Engage training montage as the party tries to whip the peasantry into a fighting force (Seven Samurai like) and the mages crank out enough magically created gear to kit an army of a quality to put the Kingsguard to shame. Whose WBL will take the hit for all of those conscripts? WBL got slammed for those scrolls that helped in a previous battle, why not the army that will help in this one? Gonna let that slide? Ok, np. What about the next time the best solution to a problem is the mass creation of goods? What? Can't do it now? Is this an episode of Star Trek where once you have a good solution you can never use it again?

In my experience, a large part of player cleverness comes as a result of them pushing at the boundaries of the rules. Eventually the DM will throw something a little too big at them to see if they can punch above their weight, and their attempts to do that is where the system tends to be at its greatest strain. While the PCs can usually do very little to tweak their race/class resources in such a situation, their monetary resources offer much greater flexibility. Allowing players the freedom to acquire resources to buy a ship or hire an army (should the need arise) opens many fascinating opportunities in the game and should be left as a viable option (in my opinion). Having a valid in-game reason why said resources shouldn't/can't be used for direct personal empowerment is vitally important. Please note that the reason needs to be valid. Just saying that no one wants their money, or that their goods (though perfectly functional in all ways) give people the heeby-jeebies, and so are worthless, just doesn't cut it. You really need something tangible so that the players can push those boundaries without being able to break them.



A goblin tribe is a nomadic group of non-citizens. The Evil Baron (apparently) has the approval of the higher governmental authorities and rules with their approval.

If you walk over and defeat a tribe of goblins, it's entirely reasonable that the human kingdom in which you achieved this defeat will welcome you, and will allow you to sell whatever you loot from the goblins.

If you walk over and defeat the local Evil Baron, you have declared war against the government under which the Baron served. It's entirely reasonable that you will be declared a treasonous usurper, and hunted down by very powerful people who serve the King, or who wish for the King's favor.

Your party will be executed for treason / usurpation / lese majesty / being uppity commoners / etc. You will not be permitted to liquidate the Baron's assets. You will not collect 200 gp.

Perhaps you just chose a bad example. Would you prefer to find another?


Nope, still think it's a great example. All you've shown is that it is within the DMs power to belittle/minimize any accomplishment the players make and really have done nothing to address any of the points I was making. If this is how you run your games then that is your choice to make. I tend to think such things are a sign of poor DMing. Good DMing is kind of like good improv, it is usually about finding a way to say yes in the most interesting way. From what you have written you seem to only be able to find ways to say no. Head-scratchingly inconsistent ones as well. How did the Evil Baron™'s land suddenly lose all towns/shops/value upon his defeat? If the Evil Baron™ owed fealty to a greater governmental body, one that feels justified in direct intervention in the affairs of it's vassal states and has the monolithic power to dictate terms so completely, then where were they during the attrocities of the Evil Baron™? Are you going to pretend that such a kingdom has a just claim to rulership, or is anything but completely corrupt and evil? If the kingdom had reasons not to intervene (fear of the Baron's power, a war being too costly, etc.) how exactly have those reasons changed now that the Baron has been replaced by an even more powerful group (one that would make intervention even less attractive that it was with the Evil Baron™)?

See? Your ham-fisted attempts to maintain the status-quo just result in compounding inconsistencies that raise questions that you can't answer, which result in more ham-fisted attempts to maintain the status-quo, etc., etc. Simply admitting that feudal institutions are not, in fact, omnipotent, and that players do have the capacity to actually affect the world in a meaningful way can solve most of your problems. Having players defend a newly acquired realm from hostile neighbors is an exciting storyline. Having the DM automatically declare victory for the hostile neighbor is not.

Material wealth (especially the easily obtained variety) is not really a problem so long as is is not easily converted in magical wealth. It can even be a great driver for the storyline. To keep mundane and magical wealth seperate you need a valid mechanical reason why it is so. Heavy-handed DM fiat to negate the utility of wealth leads to more problems than it can ever solve.

[PersonMan]

The suggestions I have seen in this thread include "the gods tell you to knock it off", "doing that will make your character Lovecraftianly insane", and "there is a prophecy that explicitly precludes you doing that". Which of those sound like reasonable obstacles rather than passive-aggressive no buttons to you?

Looking at the first two, they seem less like "oh, you should spring these on players" and more of "if the setting is like this, that isn't a problem".

And if the setting is like that from the start...well, none of those are passive-aggressive no buttons. The same way it's not a PANB if avoiding the toll for entering the city by climbing the walls results in nigh-unwinnable conflicts with the city authority. Unless it's brought out of the blue in response to something, it's just part of the setting.

Now, the prophecy one is a bit odd. But as long as it, like the others, exists as a thing in the setting rather than being created to block something, it's not inherently passive-aggressive or otherwise an issue.

[Fizban]

A couple of thoughts occur to me. First, if you're in Eberron, the economy is already fully adapted to industrialized magic. However if you try doing it on your own, House Canith will have some words for you. You should listen to them.

Not to stick my foot in the other part of the discussion, but I'd also point out that Eberron. . . really isn't adapted to industrialized magic at all.

Eberron is a perfect example of a couple specific understandings.

-First, that if you want spells to matter you have to actually give a significant portion of the population the spells: I've been told one of the books puts the dragonmarked population at 25% of the the total population, rather than the something like .5-1% you get on normal casters. The dragonmarks aren't neccesarily all the important spells, and you split them like 8 different ways, but the bottom tier is still actually common enough to guarantee it pretty much everywhere and with a guild system deliberately spreading them out it's not confusing. The prices for hiring dragonmarks are still based on the PHB's spell hiring cost, with maybe a little discount to "undercut" normal spellcasters as if those spellcasters were actually locked to that price.

-Second, that if you just pile on enough bs, you can pretend anything is a legit part of the setting (because that's how settings work). Eberron is not developed from a bottom-up rules-based perspective: it has magic trains that aren't fully priced (try finding the cost to craft a conductor stone) because the writer wanted magic trains, it has magic airships at a more reasonable price because the writer wanted magic airships, and the fluff and mechanics often contradict themselves over the place ("Minor Schemas contain spells like Continual Flame/Minor Schemas can't include spells with expensive components"). They make a big point of extremely limited high level casters in the main book, then put out a book detailing a city and it's full of high level casters in chump roles (because they actually used the standard city generation rather than winging it, IIRC).

Eberron does not include the effects of Fabricate spam on a serious level, it just says that some people get it from a feat and they control whatever economic impact it has, which is apparently nothing. It does not include the effects of Wall of Iron harvesting. It does not include any serious effects from access to infinite fire. The most important new mechanics are generally the least detailed, so that the DM can fill in the blanks as desired. In short, it is not an "industrial magic" campaign setting- it's just a setting with magic trains and hard-written "sure it happens but it's already accounted for" hand-waving.


@Quarian Rex: so wait, this Lords of Prime setting says that hundreds of villagers will lay down and die because they lack a single 5th level "Warrior" or other "primitive class?" What game is this even based on? It would be hard enough to justify that for a 5th level Wizard when a hundred peasants could still easily kill them.

[Quarian Rex]

@Quarian Rex: so wait, this Lords of Prime setting says that hundreds of villagers will lay down and die because they lack a single 5th level "Warrior" or other "primitive class?" What game is this even based on? It would be hard enough to justify that for a 5th level Wizard when a hundred peasants could still easily kill them.


Hmm... I tried to provide enough context to alleviate confusion. Sorry if that wasn't the case. This is the sort of thing that would happen if the local area was looking at complete annihilation, whether through unchecked monsters or, more likely, their current lord turning cannibal or somesuch (see previous mentions of the Evil Baron™ or what have you). When they have lost all hope the pact may seem like a good idea. If there is any other option, it will be taken, but sometimes there is not. The reference to Primitive classes is a reference to the NPC classes, they were the first expressions of empowerment (classes) developed before people started finding more sophisticated outlets of power (classes that don't suck). They cost half the normal xp cost to level, most of them get some slight tweaks (Experts get Prestidigitation/Mend 3/day with proficient Profession/Craft skills and later getting Craft Weapons and Armor using their Class level as Caster level, that sort of thing), and they all get a bonus attribute point per level (up to a max. of 18 in any given stat). There is a reason why tales of your ancestors keep saying that they were tougher, stronger, and faster that you, and there is also a reason why people usually don't actually level those classes any more.

Commoner HD are always a single d4+Con while all class HD are calculated using 1d4+(max HD roll - 4)+Con (maxed for first level as per the norm, etc.). So a Barbarian would get 1d4+8+Con (due to d12 HD) per level, etc. You also get your Point Buy from your class. This generally means that even the first level provides a significant boost to survivability and effectiveness over their commoner bretheren, and that 100 1st level Warriors and a 5th level leader could indeed be vastly more powerful that many times their number in commoners.

The 5th level aspect is fairly specific to the setting. It is considered to be the minimum level at which someone is powerful enough to rule. At 9th level you can set up somewhere and people will be drawn to your protection (bit of a throwback to 2e follower ideas), but at 5th they won't flock to you, but they will stay (you can also take further action to draw more people in but that's beside the point). Don't get too hung up on the specifics with this (or take a look at the books I linked, I'm tweaking quite a bit for my own use but they provide a fascinating base). The important takeaway (for me at least) was that the importance and prevalence of leveled power is known and accepted in the world and that there are contingency plans (however desperate they may be) that take this into account should all else fail.

I get the resistance to the idea of this sort of thing. I happened to stumble upon the books while looking for kingdom mechanics to cannibalize and I glossed over a lot of the rest. But the more I looked into it the more interested I got. The author even wrote some novels (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00J1HDEH4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?tag=ca-skim1x138954-20&_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) that are pretty good and really sold me on this being something that would be really usable in a game, adding to the immersion instead of breaking it.

[Cosi]

First, if you're in Eberron, the economy is already fully adapted to industrialized magic. However if you try doing it on your own, House Canith will have some words for you. You should listen to them.

It's really not. Eberron doesn't look like what you'd get if you extrapolated the economic progress of a D&D setting as "technology" developed. It's just "early industrial pastiche, but some stuff is magic". There are no (for example) Spell-Stitched Undead being used as sources of magic, but there are "magic trains" because the guy who wrote the setting though they were cool.

You could do a very interesting setting that explored the consequences of using D&D's magic at scale to alter society. Eberron is not that setting.


(Did your wizard really put points in the craft skill in question? Really?)

1 rank in Craft and a 20+ INT is already enough to be about as good as a skilled craftsman. If I'm planning to take fabricate, you can bet I'm taking ranks in a couple of Craft skills.


If everyone is sensible I suspect what would happen is that the guilds would work out a deal with the wizard where they pay him a retainer not to cast Fabricate, but also get the right to ask him to cast it at a cut rate when there is a sudden surge in demand that they cannot meet. He then gets to go back to wizarding, and occasionally acts as an on-demand fab shop.

Wat.

That is not how economics works. The Wizard has a lower marginal cost. Whatever production he supplies will be used first, not held in reserve. Also, you're literally proposing that people will respond to the threat of being undercut by spending money to not produce things. That doesn't actually make sense.


And with this system, one of the best ways to be personally powerful and have cool gear is to rule a kingdom. The xp harvested from natural commoner death is provided to the ruler, because it is with that power that he protects the commoners. This has always been the background expectation in the game, it is just that now there is a collective, in-game, mechanical acknowledgement of the fact.

No it's not. The best way to be personally powerful and have cool gear is to murder everyone in a kingdom. If you get XP for killing mook-level Goblins or Demons or Constructs, people will fight those. If killing CR 1 enemies makes you level up, your best be it to go run roughshod over a pile of CR 1 enemies, not wait for natural causes to do its grinding job. Do you not understand why the base game doesn't hand out XP for killing stuff eight levels under you? It's because letting that work generates stupid incentives.


Because coupling personal and strategic power more tightly means that attempts to multiply strategic power via magical means now has a personal cost, something that single-handedly closes infinite loops, and therefore game breaking craziness, without reducing the characters' ability to act. If a wizard needs to arm and equip am army with Fabricate, he has that option, and it is well worth the price. A well armed and armored army is a force multiplier that can lead to greater victory, using the arcane to create an edge in that regard is a smart call. Why doesn't the mage just blow off all excess spell slots on fabricate every day to turn gold -> resources -> goods -> gold (ad nauseam)? Because doing so comes at a personal cost, and mere mundane wealth isn't worth that cost (you were willing to run around naked to level faster, right?).

It's a spell slot. It doesn't cost anything, because you get it back tomorrow for free. You're going to need to explain to me the mechanics where XP being a thing you can buy with gold somehow makes generating infinite gold out of resources you will get back tomorrow worse, because right now it just sounds like you don't understand how costs work.


Pity items are still a valid tool if a DM still wants to do so, it is just no longer required, which is an important distinction.

Again, what? Pity items are a solution to Fighters sucking. How does a more developed economic and kingdom management minigame make the Fighter (who, I remind you, cannot interact with the economy or kingdom management) suck less?


Looking at the first two, they seem less like "oh, you should spring these on players" and more of "if the setting is like this, that isn't a problem".

But all of those things only actually stop anything if you step in and say "you go insane" or "fate blows up your machine" or "the gods start a crusade against you". The problem with all of those is that they're all explicitly disempowering to the players. If magic drives you insane, you no longer get to play your character. If the world looks the way it does because "the gods" or "fate", nothing you do matters.


And if the setting is like that from the start...well, none of those are passive-aggressive no buttons. The same way it's not a PANB if avoiding the toll for entering the city by climbing the walls results in nigh-unwinnable conflicts with the city authority. Unless it's brought out of the blue in response to something, it's just part of the setting.

What's passive-aggressive isn't just the surprise, it's the impossibility of overcoming the obstacle. If the city guard attacks you and defeats you because you are low level, that is fine. What is not fine is being told that the city guard will always be higher level than you. You can't beat the Prophecy. You can't beat the gods (or if you can, there is an entirely different story happening). That's what makes using them instead of communicating unhealthy. If you want a flat no, say so out of game. If you do that in advance, sure, but some stuff in the setting that flows from that. But the communication has to come first.

[Quarian Rex]

It's a spell slot. It doesn't cost anything, because you get it back tomorrow for free. You're going to need to explain to me the mechanics where XP being a thing you can buy with gold somehow makes generating infinite gold out of resources you will get back tomorrow worse, because right now it just sounds like you don't understand how costs work.


Perhaps you missed my first posts in this thread here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22903296&postcount=41), here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22904244&postcount=48), and here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22904704&postcount=52). If you don't understand something, please either look at previous posts or just ask for clarification, instead of implying incompetence.

TL;DR - replace expensive spellcasting components with equivalent xp costs (where 1xp=5gp) and flip the gp and xp costs (as per 3.5) on magic item creation [so enchanting a sword to +1 would cost 200 xp (instead of 1,000 gp) and 400 gp (instead of 80 xp)]. Provides a two-tiered economy that can't be overtly manipulated by mundane wealth.

That should give you more context and make my more recent posts less confusing for you.



No it's not. The best way to be personally powerful and have cool gear is to murder everyone in a kingdom. If you get XP for killing mook-level Goblins or Demons or Constructs, people will fight those. If killing CR 1 enemies makes you level up, your best be it to go run roughshod over a pile of CR 1 enemies, not wait for natural causes to do its grinding job. Do you not understand why the base game doesn't hand out XP for killing stuff eight levels under you? It's because letting that work generates stupid incentives.


Yup, I already laid the groundwork for this in my previous posts. Feel free to look at them to catch up. If an 8th level character wants to get to 9th it would take the xp harvested from 4,096 dead commoners to do so (one of the things I mentioned was doubling the xp requirement per level), another 8,192 to get to 10th, etc. Even if you decided that your character was going to enact a 'final solution' on commoners (the weakest source of xp) the DM has plenty of time to cobble together opposition (since you are functionally now the BBEG of the campaign). Going to stick to goblins and such? They are far more used to guerilla tactics than the average farmer, and good luck finding thousands of them at once. They are not known for setting up metropolises (known for being nomadic as has been mentioned). If the DM lets you round up that many, well, enjoy the slog.

Or, you could just harvest xp from 16 things of your own CR. Or four things 2 CR higher. Or only 1 thing at CR+4. Or just focus on growing your kingdom as you gain a passive income of xp based on its size, and have fun adventures as you protect your people from threats and seek to expand your power by conquering vassals and forcing them to pay you further tribute. A lot of this stuff is pretty self-regulating once you look at it.

Sure, you could take over a kingdom and then enact a plan to harvest the population for personal empowerment. If your plan is good enough you might even get most of them. But not all. You will probably get quite a few levels as well. Now what? You have shown your hand as a genocidal monster and a threat to all your neighbors. You have succeeded at painting a target on your back and ensuring that no quarter will ever be given. Could be an interesting campaign and you would be adding some interesting lore to the future of the setting (probably as a cautionary tale about the corruption of power) but I don't know if that would be considered breaking anything. Other than your character.




Again, what? Pity items are a solution to Fighters sucking. How does a more developed economic and kingdom management minigame make the Fighter (who, I remind you, cannot interact with the economy or kingdom management) suck less?


Wat?

Why, on earth, do you think that mundanes (or are you actually trying to suggest that this is something Fighter specific?) are barred from leading a kingdom? You make none of the sense.

[Cosi]

Perhaps you missed my first posts in this thread here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22903296&postcount=41), here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22904244&postcount=48), and here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22904704&postcount=52). If you don't understand something, please either look at previous posts or just ask for clarification, instead of implying incompetence.

Hey, you remember how this entire thread started because of wall of salt, a spell that produces valuable salt but costs zero gold, XP, or anything other than a spell slot? Before you suggest that I've misunderstood you, you should probably check to make sure you've covered all the holes, because it sure looks like you haven't. There are infinite wealth loops. If wealth translates directly to XP, there are infinite XP loops.

You have not fixed the problem. Frankly, it doesn't even look like you understand the problem.


If the DM lets you round up that many, well, enjoy the slog.

"The DM just says no" was already a solution to every problem the game could have. If your "fix" still requires "the DM just says no", it is not a fix, it is just shuffling stuff around.


Why, on earth, do you think that mundanes (or are you actually trying to suggest that this is something Fighter specific?) are barred from leading a kingdom? You make none of the sense.

What abilities do Fighters get that let them do kingdom management better than Commoners exactly? Is it their ability to take Weapon Specialization as a bonus feat? Perhaps it's their d10 hit die?

[Mechalich]

Yup, I already laid the groundwork for this in my previous posts. Feel free to look at them to catch up. If an 8th level character wants to get to 9th it would take the xp harvested from 4,096 dead commoners to do so (one of the things I mentioned was doubling the xp requirement per level), another 8,192 to get to 10th, etc. Even if you decided that your character was going to enact a 'final solution' on commoners (the weakest source of xp) the DM has plenty of time to cobble together opposition (since you are functionally now the BBEG of the campaign). Going to stick to goblins and such? They are far more used to guerilla tactics than the average farmer, and good luck finding thousands of them at once. They are not known for setting up metropolises (known for being nomadic as has been mentioned). If the DM lets you round up that many, well, enjoy the slog.


There are immortal beings in D&D game worlds. You are creating a mechanic wherein the abject slaughter of all lifeforms on a planet - something whole classes of beings in D&D already desire - also massively increases power in the process. This is reconfiguring the universe according to the mad dreams of the Ethergaunts.

[Fizban]

Commoner HD are always a single d4+Con while all class HD are calculated using 1d4+(max HD roll - 4)+Con (maxed for first level as per the norm, etc.). So a Barbarian would get 1d4+8+Con (due to d12 HD) per level, etc. You also get your Point Buy from your class. This generally means that even the first level provides a significant boost to survivability and effectiveness over their commoner bretheren, and that 100 1st level Warriors and a 5th level leader could indeed be vastly more powerful that many times their number in commoners.
I was gonna focus on the modified hp rules, but they don't actually change much and it's still. . . no? If many is 2x, then maybe. If it is assumed that the warriors all have significantly better armor and weapons (armor +4's and longbows over crossbows), then maybe they could reach 4x, maybe. But the force of numbers in ranged attacks or simple mob tactics is absolutely devastating and I just don't see six villages of presumably 100 or more people dying just to create 100 1st level warriors- it relies on them giving up their lives on the basis of this one specific mechanic they believe in, rather than obvious force of numbers where most of them will survive. You'd need to focus on either the effective compulsion of new people to accept the rule, or a famine where there's only enough food for that 1/6 of the population. Murdering your neighbors to take their food in response to famine doesn't need tangible xp mechanics to back it up.

I mean, you can say not to get hung up on it, but emergent occurence from mechanics hinges on those mechanics, and in 3.5 with low-level mundanes or even Adepts it just doesn't add up without that more specific context, so I have to disagree with it increasing immersion (though it might be more rigidly described originally). And it just makes me think less of the source, though I suppose if I hear enough things I don't like I might wrap around and decide I need to see for myself.

[Quarian Rex]

Hey, you remember how this entire thread started because of wall of salt, a spell that produces valuable salt but costs zero gold, XP, or anything other than a spell slot? Before you suggest that I've misunderstood you, you should probably check to make sure you've covered all the holes, because it sure looks like you haven't. There are infinite wealth loops. If wealth translates directly to XP, there are infinite XP loops.

You have not fixed the problem. Frankly, it doesn't even look like you understand the problem.


Yet again, I strongly suggest that you actually read the posts that you are trying to comment on (I even linked them and provided a handy-dandy TL;DR, now you're just being lazy). The entire point of what I've been posting is a way to keep mundane wealth from negatively impacting the rest of the game. If you want to spam Wall of Salt then you can. It just doesn't really matter. You want a boat? Go ahead. Want a gold plated chamber pot? Go nuts. Want to convert all that salt money into magic items or use it to pay for expensive components of spells? Sorry, that currency doesn't apply. While xp is now a salable commodity, it is one that is strictly limited in it's availability on the open market, limited both by the size of the kingdom and by competition with others who want to make use of it's power as well. So much so that mercantile acquisition of xp would be an order of magnitude slower than actually running your own kingdom.

So, wealth would not translate directly into xp and there are no infinite xp loops. Perhaps if you bothered to look at previous posts you would finally understand how this seeks to address the problem instead of randomly pointing to issues that don't exist.




"The DM just says no" was already a solution to every problem the game could have. If your "fix" still requires "the DM just says no", it is not a fix, it is just shuffling stuff around.


This is not a, "The DM just says no", situation. This is a, "The DM is under no obligation to serve you a goblin holocaust on a silver platter", situation. There are no random encounter tables (that I'm aware of) that have 2d6x1000 goblins as an entry. If you have a plan to slaughter tens of thousands of goblins because you think it would be easier then you, good sir, will have to be the one to go out there and find them. We are not really talking about some TO build that only exists based on the assumption of a lobotomized DM willing to produce whatever the player desires in whatever quantity he wants.

We're talking about (from my perspective) a way to incorporate wealth (and ways to acquire it with relative ease) into an actual campaign in a manner that can generally be considered to still be playable. I believe that what I have so far mentioned does an admirable job of that. I do appreciate thoughtful feedback on this, since I'm still hammering out parts of how I'm going to incorporate various aspects, but please, for the love of the babby jebus, let me know if there are any actual holes in the thinking, as opposed to post after post of completely missing the point, seemingly due to an unwillingness to read.




What abilities do Fighters get that let them do kingdom management better than Commoners exactly? Is it their ability to take Weapon Specialization as a bonus feat? Perhaps it's their d10 hit die?


The purpose of a ruler (and all nobles, those with any form of class level) is to protect the people of the kingdom, so yes, that d10 HD and taking Weapon Specialization as a bonus feat would allow the Fighter to be a far better ruler than any commoner. Are there better options? Perhaps, but that wan't the issue. The issue was...


How does a more developed economic and kingdom management minigame make the Fighter (who, I remind you, cannot interact with the economy or kingdom management) suck less?

... you spouting gibberish.




There are immortal beings in D&D game worlds. You are creating a mechanic wherein the abject slaughter of all lifeforms on a planet - something whole classes of beings in D&D already desire - also massively increases power in the process. This is reconfiguring the universe according to the mad dreams of the Ethergaunts.


Yup, that's already kind of touched on in the books as well. Something called the Dark Harvest. It can be a little harder to get to extremely high levels (with the doubling xp requirement per level thing) but when someone gets to 17th level it triggers an apocalypse (kinda). That much soul energy concentrated in one person would usually mean an extremely populous civilization capable supporting/creating such a focused juggernaut of (demi)human potential. One that is worthy of being harvested by the true masters of the world. Now, who these masters are is pretty much up to the DM, Chaos Dragons, Eldritch Abominations, Super-Illithids, Ethergaunts, whatever. These are immortal(ish) beings who have actually put the work in on Cosi's harvest-all-the-weak-guys plan. When someone hits 17th level the dinner bell is wrung and the campaign can go into the apocalypse arc. I think that it could be a great payoff for a campaign as the players get to marshal the resources of their respective kingdoms to stave off Armageddon.

Not sure if I'd ever get to use that, my games never seem to last to that high a level. But I do like that some thought was given to that aspect as well.



I was gonna focus on the modified hp rules, but they don't actually change much and it's still. . . no? If many is 2x, then maybe. If it is assumed that the warriors all have significantly better armor and weapons (armor +4's and longbows over crossbows), then maybe they could reach 4x, maybe. But the force of numbers in ranged attacks or simple mob tactics is absolutely devastating and I just don't see six villages of presumably 100 or more people dying just to create 100 1st level warriors- it relies on them giving up their lives on the basis of this one specific mechanic they believe in, rather than obvious force of numbers where most of them will survive. You'd need to focus on either the effective compulsion of new people to accept the rule, or a famine where there's only enough food for that 1/6 of the population. Murdering your neighbors to take their food in response to famine doesn't need tangible xp mechanics to back it up.


I think that you are probably undervaluing the significance of base proficiencies and proper stats. Commoners get the standard (11's or 10's in all stats) or nonelite array (stats going from 13 to 8) and a single simple weapon proficiency. The Warrior (in this context) would get an actual 29 point-buy (and the ability to place stats where most advantageous, not necessarily something that can be done in an array) with an additional +1 attribute point (like from leveling) along with normal proficiencies. The commoner's single simple weapon proficiency will probably be with a club, staff, sickle, or sling, something cheap and useful on a day-to-day basis. Crossbows probably wouldn't be selected due to expense (you don't use what you can't afford) even though they would be the optimal choice.

Even assuming that both the Warriors and commoners had squirreled away some basic arms and armor the commoners actually trying to use any of it would result in non-proficiency penalties of -5(?) to hit (assuming just about any weapon and say something like studded leather). Warriors can use just about anything without penalty and would have significant stat modifiers (probably a +4 from Str. or Dex. and then a +2 or +3 from the other two physicals). I think that the difference would be far more significant than you are allowing. Especially in this situation, where the Warriors would essentially be allowed to optimize (to a limited extent, they know the resources they have on hand and can choose their options to best utilize them) while the commoners are essentially optimized for farming or what have you.



I mean, you can say not to get hung up on it, but emergent occurence from mechanics hinges on those mechanics, and in 3.5 with low-level mundanes or even Adepts it just doesn't add up without that more specific context, so I have to disagree with it increasing immersion (though it might be more rigidly described originally).


Hey, there is a lot more context (mechanical and fluff) which is why I linked the books. I don't expect anyone to comb through all of it just because I point at them, which is why I said not to get hung up on it. This is just a little blurb that (I think) works in the setting that was presented. This is not to say that it works well, but as an act of pure desperation in the face of certain death (remember, nothing short of that would make anyone consider this) I like the idea of this.

Also, this is definitely not a go-to move in the case of famine or disease (I did not mean to give you that impression at all). Hunger and sickness are not countered with super soldiers. Monsters coming over the hills need super soldiers. Hooded men burning you homes in the night need super soldiers. The ruler of your land going from village to village, cracking open peoples skulls to consume their souls (because he needs a new pair of pants) needs super soldiers. I like the idea of normal people staring into the abyss, seeing a situation so bad that a 1/6 chance of surviving the night is seen as the best shot they have. Knowing that even if they win that lottery they will have to commit atrocities upon their neighbors just to have the slightest hair of a chance to strike back at what is looming over them, and that they will most likely still die in that coming conflict. Knowing that even if they survive their old life is now over, they have picked up the sword and it is now their job to go into the night and kill the things that they fear. Accepting the fact that they probably won't win that lottery, that someone else will come to kill them that night and welcoming that fate, because at least then their death can strengthen someone else who will strike back in their name, and that is still a better fate than what awaits them.

I just think that there is something cinematic about that (maybe that's just me). People having to make a sacrifice (that may not be even close to enough) to take one last desperate shot at their tormentors, even if it kills them (and it will kill most of them) is just way more satisfying then having the DM handwave a training montage and tell you that your village just learned how to fight on the eve of the rebellion or something.



And it just makes me think less of the source, though I suppose if I hear enough things I don't like I might wrap around and decide I need to see for myself.


If any of my descriptions of this (mechanically or fluff wise) is turning you off from looking at it then I do apologize. When I first looked at it I thought it was too 'gamey' and had many of the concerns I've seen raised here. I've looked through it, ran the math (so to speak) and it seems to allow me to do exactly what I want. I'm looking for something that can add a little 'drag' to character progression, something to even out the mad acceleration of power that usually comes when you get to the mid levels, without actually enforcing any real limitations on player actions, something that opens up strategic options without forcing said options on the players. I find that the whole tangible xp thing allows me to do just that.

If you do take a look (the books are free and not very long) throw up a post and let me know. I like to poke around at the mechanics of what I'm planning on using and it would be interesting to see if you found any inconsistencies and such that I would need to account for. There is a lot in the books that I'm not using but there is still a lot of gold.

[PersonMan]

But all of those things only actually stop anything if you step in and say "you go insane" or "fate blows up your machine" or "the gods start a crusade against you".

Yes. The same way having, say, a wall around a city doesn't stop anything until you say "the guards on the wall spot you trying to climb up and go to stop you".


The problem with all of those is that they're all explicitly disempowering to the players.

They are, but a lot of other things are, too. Anything that limits what can be done is explicitly disempowering, even if it can be overcome, unless you consider all options equal even if some have tags like "but not until X level" or "only with the Maelstrom Device acquired via sidequest".


If magic drives you insane, you no longer get to play your character.

Yes. Making it something to be avoided or worked around, similar to mechanics like Corruption or...well, Sanity points.


If the world looks the way it does because "the gods" or "fate", nothing you do matters.

Not necessarily. If the gods take an active part in keeping the world the way it is, there can still be a range within which you move things. Does it matter, in the grand scheme of things, looking over decades or centuries and at the scale of continents, whether or not your town is wiped out by a goblin attack, or whether the mad doctor is able to keep kidnapping sick children from the orphanage to experiment on?

No. But it still matters.


That's what makes using them instead of communicating unhealthy. If you want a flat no, say so out of game.

I think we're coming at this from differing perspectives. I don't see the entirety of a setting deriving from the idea "using magic twists your mind until it eventually breaks" as necessitating a "This means you can't use Wall of X spells to make money" tag on it, the same way it doesn't need a "This means you can't cast your infinite cantrips constantly without it breaking your mind" tag, since at that point you're dealing with far more than a ruling in response to some individual exploit or similar, but rather a structure that is its own thing, and happens to exclude the individual exploit.

I do agree that there should be direct communication when relevant - I just don't think it's going to be relevant here, unless there are other pieces on in play. If you make a "magic makes your mind break" setting, and someone you know is fond of using magic in inventive ways is talking about grabbing the Wall of X line with the wizard he's making, you should mention it, but it isn't something that needs to be brought up with the rest of the setting, as it's not a central component of it.

EDIT: I agree on the 'if the guards are always higher level, there's a problem' point; however I think the comparison gets tricky when connecting to divine or higher powers, which to me fit more into the baseline assumptions of a setting like "wizards have to prepare their spells" i.e. not something any character is expected to ever get beyond or change. It works better if the guards map to organizations or states or whatnot that benefit from the status quo, and will therefore want to keep it from changing in a way that is detrimental to them.

[Fizban]

The least I can do is spoiler my tangent (which should have about run it's course now, I do love the subject though):


I think that you are probably undervaluing the significance of base proficiencies and proper stats. Commoners get the standard (11's or 10's in all stats) or nonelite array (stats going from 13 to 8) and a single simple weapon proficiency. The Warrior (in this context) would get an actual 29 point-buy (and the ability to place stats where most advantageous, not necessarily something that can be done in an array) with an additional +1 attribute point (like from leveling) along with normal proficiencies. The commoner's single simple weapon proficiency will probably be with a club, staff, sickle, or sling, something cheap and useful on a day-to-day basis. Crossbows probably wouldn't be selected due to expense (you don't use what you can't afford) even though they would be the optimal choice.
A commoner has +0 attack and 10-12 AC from unarmored to leather armor. While the commoner only has one proficiency, they're almost certain to have a copy of that weapon, be it a club or crossbow, so there's no reason for they'd be eating a nonproficiency penalty. While crossbows would not be the norm, they're still half the price of the next serious step up on ranged weaponry: the longbow, with it's faster firing speed, longer range, and increased proficiency requirement, is 75gp. While the comparably priced shortbow (which would likely be called a horsebow or hunting bow) has significantly less range than the light crossbow. Either way, there's not going to be significantly more weapons lying around than people who can use them: maybe 10% of people can wield martial weapons, out of 600 that's equipment for 60, so roughly a third of those warriors are going to be wielding whatever. (And that's assuming DMG city generation, which I'm guessing is not used in this setting- if this setting says no-one has classes and thus proficiencies without specific reason, there shouldn't be any martial weapons or armor lying around).


Even assuming that both the Warriors and commoners had squirreled away some basic arms and armor the commoners actually trying to use any of it would result in non-proficiency penalties of -5(?) to hit (assuming just about any weapon and say something like studded leather). Warriors can use just about anything without penalty and would have significant stat modifiers (probably a +4 from Str. or Dex. and then a +2 or +3 from the other two physicals). I think that the difference would be far more significant than you are allowing. Especially in this situation, where the Warriors would essentially be allowed to optimize (to a limited extent, they know the resources they have on hand and can choose their options to best utilize them) while the commoners are essentially optimized for farming or what have you.
Ah, good old starting 18s because reasons. 29 point buy must be one of their changes, since 3.5 standard is 25, the assumed delta being +3 or so from 15 str and 1 BAB.

In turn, I don't think you're seriously considering the ramifications of more rolls and more bodies. +0 attack vs AC 10 is 50% accuracy, two people making that attack is 75% accuracy, and four is 87.5%. Elites take more than one hit to drop (maybe 3), but can still only drop one person per round, if they hit, and +3 vs AC 12 is still only 60% accuracy. If the elite has say, AC 15, that's a base 30% accuracy, four attacks at +0 have a net 76% or so (though admittedly only three can be melee, but clubs and spears are throwable). 76% accuracy vs 60% accuracy, 4 bodies vs 3 hits, depending on luck and who strikes first this is still very even, and sure elites vs commoners at 1v4 is pretty impressive. But that was six villages, and 1v6 is still a no-go.

But maybe those elites all have AC 17 or higher from heavier armors? Say hello to the real-life response to heavier armors: grappling. Once again, the elite only has a single AoO per round, but if outnumbered 4 to 1 that still leaves three people, only one of whom needs to confirm the grapple. Confirming the hold deals automatic unarmed damage, a piddly 2 points, but once grappled a total of four foes can dogpile automatically. The elite remains incapable of dropping more than one foe per round with maybe the same accuracy as before, unless one of the four foes makes a pin, in which case the elite can't do anything but try to break out. In real life, even with great armor and skill, being double teamed is a losing proposition, and the elites here are being compared to numbers four or even six times their own. The only thing that makes up that difference is fortifications- and more people behind fortifications is still better unless you lack the supplies to feed them.

Ranged weapons? Like I said, both versions would be drawing on the same stock of weapons. Additionally, 3.5's volley of arrows mechanic (Heroes of Battle/Complete Warrior) is quite unrealistic in not caring about armor or the attack rolls of most of the shooters: one good leader turns a block of ranged weapons into a reflex save. The smaller number of elites might all have weapons, but if there's more than 100 ranged weapons between the 600 people then the mob would have more, their individual proficiency wouldn't matter as much, and the armor of either side doesn't matter as much. Ranged fire comes down to range and hit points, the 6x commoners have twice as many hits to drop in full and the same weapons (though this is a place were a smaller group has a slight advantage since if they're taking volley fire there's more chance for scatter to miss them).

If you're going to beat 6 to 1 numbers advantage, without fortifications, then you're going to need something else. Superior tactics? Same leaders weather you keep everyone or sac a bunch, unless of course the way the lines are drawn you'd have sacrificed some of your smart people, in which case the elites have worse leaders. The only way the sacrifice works is if it has mechanics written than say their levels also include magically gained tactical knowledge, which is then given a mechanical effect via a mass battle system (which granted, WoP might already have?), and even then it makes far more sense to generate one leader with more bodies to command unless the mass battle system is built to penalize people without Warrior status (which they usually are)- but both of those are from a mass battle system/DM adjudication, not the mechanical ability of the commoners.


Hey, there is a lot more context (mechanical and fluff) which is why I linked the books. I don't expect anyone to comb through all of it just because I point at them, which is why I said not to get hung up on it. This is just a little blurb that (I think) works in the setting that was presented. This is not to say that it works well, but as an act of pure desperation in the face of certain death (remember, nothing short of that would make anyone consider this) I like the idea of this.
Indeed- I haven't bothered to read it myself yet, else I'd be going after their mechanics rather than just the emergent interpretation. But tell me this: can you think of an actual example where this course of action would make sense? In what context would 100 elite warriors succeed where 600 commoners would absolutely fail? Under what psychology would 500 people give up and die when human psycology is terrible at probability and always thinks they'll be the lucky one to survive? Especially when every iota of common (and even mechanical) sense says that 6 are better than one?

Hunger and sickness are not countered with super soldiers. Monsters coming over the hills need super soldiers. Hooded men burning you homes in the night need super soldiers. The ruler of your land going from village to village, cracking open peoples skulls to consume their souls (because he needs a new pair of pants) needs super soldiers.
Except famine and disease are the only threats I can think of where cutting your numbers to 1/6 and boosting their base ability scores/saving throws by the given margins might actually be a good idea: food vs bodies is simple math you can actually see coming and respond to, and a dnd disease can have a high enough DC that the only real chance of making the saves is to have more fort, and you'd have a better ratio of healers to patients (though I wasn't actually suggesting disease myself, they're weird).

Monsters coming over the hills which can be defeated by 1st level warriors, can be defeated by 6x as many 1st level commoners- in fact "coming over the hills" implies the sort of situation where those extra bodies could build fortifications and generally do all sorts of things more useful than being dead. Hooded men burning homes in the night is better countered by having more people to watch at all places in the night and crush the hooded men with a mob- fewer people just means you care less about the homes you lost. The ruler going around cracking skulls depends entirely on the ruler and their entourage, but there's nothing that elite warriors can do which will matter more

I like the idea of normal people staring into the abyss, seeing a situation so bad that a 1/6 chance of surviving the night is seen as the best shot they have.
And I would like to like it, but the mechanics of low-level DnD are actually realistic enough that that's not actually a winning proposition. If it doesn't make sense psychologically or mechanically, then. . . ? My mechanical evaluations all point to this response actually being a total cop-out, a way for people that are already broken an defeated in spirit to pretend they're not giving up, when they're actually just giving up. Which is evocative in it's own way, just not any sort of "from hell's heart/success at any cost" way. Meanwhile, I'm way more up for a group of stubborn peasants that look "certain doom" in the eye and say "Screw you, I've got a d20 and more than zero hp, let's rumble." 'Cause when the mechanics already support heroism, making "hard" choices is just a cop-out.

I feel (again, without the full context of what the original said and what changes you've made), that this sacrifice plan was concocted with the supremacy of 5th level full casters (or other supernatural classes) in mind, missing the part where their most powerful magical leader is a 5th level Adept thanks to the primitive class restriction. With the further assumption of perfectly optimized and geared elites (at a higher power level even) rather than the natural result you'd get from small villages, and without seriously considering how the mechanics still support numbers advantage. If the plan included proper supernatural advantages like dispersed Crusaders and Warlocks with Summon Swarm, sure 100 elites could wreck 600 commoners no-contest, but a few extra hit points and proficiencies is not enough. Against higher level/supernatural threats, the need for your own supernatural abilities is even more important, with force of numbers being the next best option. Even stuff like DR, regeneration, or fast healing can be overcome if you can mob or engineer the target into drowning/suffocating.

If you do take a look (the books are free and not very long) throw up a post and let me know.
I'm sure I will eventually- if I wasn't having more fun explaining my own breakdown (and then back to doing other stuff) then I might have already. It's popular/come up enough that I'm gonna have to in order to make a proper argument rather than reacting to specific scenarios. (And if you can fire off an example situation where it makes sense quick enough I'd love to hear it).

[Crichton]

3.5 standard is 25, the assumed delta being +3 or so from 15 str and 1 BAB.



I've heard this on here several times before, so maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the standard method to roll 6 sets of 4d6 drop lowest, then arrange as preferred? That's what's laid out in the PHB under the lofty heading of "Character Creation" and again under "Ability Scores." I realize that point buy, including 25 point buy is allowed for in the DMG and is noted as the "standard" amongst the point buy methods, but it's listed there in a section specifically noted as alternative methods, with the standard method again being specifically noted to be 46d drop lowest.

[Fizban]

Quarian Rex mentioned 29 point buy, as in point buy. Don't see how there's any confusion. I've already been over why the elite array/25 point buy is clearly the standard for game assumptions regardless of the PHB rolling method, on other threads.

[Crichton]

Quarian Rex mentioned 29 point buy, as in point buy. Don't see how there's any confusion. I've already been over why the elite array/25 point buy is clearly the standard for game assumptions regardless of the PHB rolling method, on other threads.

You went over that it is more fair and less random, and that npc generation sections use it, and why it's preferable. Not why it's standard. For PC generation, the PHB rolling method IS the standard. Not that it's better, not that it's fair, not that I prefer it, or even use it.

But by RAW, it's the standard, regardless of what methods people prefer. I don't prefer it, and rarely use it, but I keep seeing people say 25 point buy is standard, and it's not. It's every bit as much an optional feature as the 29 point buy Rex mentioned. It's a very very widely used optional feature, but it's an option, not the RAW standard.

[Cosi]

Want to convert all that salt money into magic items or use it to pay for expensive components of spells? Sorry, that currency doesn't apply.

That solution has nothing to do with your "what if you could buy XP, and also you kept getting XP from killing CR 1 monsters" scheme. Yes, it works. But it doesn't work because any of the ideas you actually have.


While xp is now a salable commodity, it is one that is strictly limited in it's availability on the open market, limited both by the size of the kingdom and by competition with others who want to make use of it's power as well. So much so that mercantile acquisition of xp would be an order of magnitude slower than actually running your own kingdom.

How do you think competition for resources for gold works when some people have infinite gold? Also, you have teleport.


So, wealth would not translate directly into xp and there are no infinite xp loops. Perhaps if you bothered to look at previous posts you would finally understand how this seeks to address the problem instead of randomly pointing to issues that don't exist.

Yes it does, and yes there are. You can buy animals which you can then kill and get XP out of. And yes, you can make some argument about how there are only a finite number of horses, and you can't buy all of them, but if you make economics that reasonable you don't need any of the weird XP stuff you want to do.


The purpose of a ruler (and all nobles, those with any form of class level) is to protect the people of the kingdom, so yes, that d10 HD and taking Weapon Specialization as a bonus feat would allow the Fighter to be a far better ruler than any commoner. Are there better options? Perhaps, but that wan't the issue. The issue was...

Stop being dense. "Some Storm Giants are invading" is not a kingdom management event. It is a skirmish combat event that is related your kingdom, but it is not actually a kingdom management event. Just like the city guard attacking you because you failed a diplomacy check is not part of the diplomacy minigame.


They are, but a lot of other things are, too. Anything that limits what can be done is explicitly disempowering, even if it can be overcome, unless you consider all options equal even if some have tags like "but not until X level" or "only with the Maelstrom Device acquired via sidequest".

I disagree. There's a plan that defeats the city guard, even if that plan involves gaining some levels. You don't have to follow that plan, just as you don't have to follow any given plot hook, but it exists, and that's the important thing.


Not necessarily. If the gods take an active part in keeping the world the way it is, there can still be a range within which you move things. Does it matter, in the grand scheme of things, looking over decades or centuries and at the scale of continents, whether or not your town is wiped out by a goblin attack, or whether the mad doctor is able to keep kidnapping sick children from the orphanage to experiment on?

Sure. You can have some adventures. But you can't, for instance, save the world. And I would like to be able to save the world. Because that is a cool adventure, and it has a lot of support in the source material.


I think we're coming at this from differing perspectives. I don't see the entirety of a setting deriving from the idea "using magic twists your mind until it eventually breaks" as necessitating a "This means you can't use Wall of X spells to make money" tag on it, the same way it doesn't need a "This means you can't cast your infinite cantrips constantly without it breaking your mind" tag, since at that point you're dealing with far more than a ruling in response to some individual exploit or similar, but rather a structure that is its own thing, and happens to exclude the individual exploit.

I do agree that there should be direct communication when relevant - I just don't think it's going to be relevant here, unless there are other pieces on in play. If you make a "magic makes your mind break" setting, and someone you know is fond of using magic in inventive ways is talking about grabbing the Wall of X line with the wizard he's making, you should mention it, but it isn't something that needs to be brought up with the rest of the setting, as it's not a central component of it.

The context of the thread is important. Those things were presented as ways to stop economic abuses, not cool setting ideas that happened to stop economic abuses.

[Tvtyrant]

So it came up in an earlier thread, the idea of using wall of salt to produce an egregious amount of salt. But similar things could be concieved with wall of iron and fabricate to create a tonne of masterwork weapons, or honestly, just fabricate in general to mass-produce expensive items to quickly make enormous amounts of cash. So the question becomes: how do you overcome this hurdle?

For some people, they insist that someone else has done the trick before, so the market has devalued to the point of being worthless, others say that the demand would be so tiny that it wouldn't be profitable, but honestly, a single wizard could produce everything a town would need. Instead of having dozens of different tradesmen, taking days to produce things, a single wizard could do it all in a matter of moments. It either means literally all non-magical goods should be devauled to the point of worthlessness, or no wizard ever happens to bother looking into making that kind of money, in which case the market is certainly open for a player to take over, should they so happen to choose that route.

So how do people handle this issue?

Personally, the world I run is a very low magic world, so the notion that wizards have cornered every niche of the market is pretty far-fetched. Wizards do in fact do these tricks, but they are so few and far between that it has a minimal impact on the market. So what's to stop a player from doing it you ask? Well... the answer is simple: Nothing. But the question then arises: What are they going to do with all that money? You may have guessed my solution by this point: Material wealth is easy to come by for mid level casters.... but it has very little value to them. You might be able to buy a home, an estate even, you might be able to equip yourself with the best mundane gear, buy (or hell, build yourself) the most amazing caraval for naval travel for your expeditions.... but ultimately, money doesn't serve you very well. In a low magic world rare materials for crafting, or magical items are not for sale except in the most concetrated magical societies, and even then, all those mages? They also have egregious amounts of cash, and guess what? They don't want more. If you want something, you have to trade for it. Either with materials, magic items, or, if you're a wizard, trading spells from your spellbook.

This solution was actually a very natural outcome of my setting, and one I hadn't even realised had put itself in place until I thought about it from reading other threads. Ultimately though, the point of this thread was to see how other people handle this issue, so I'd love to hear from the forum about it.
Guild law forbids the sale of more then a restricted number of a given item annually, if you try to dump goods on rhe market they first bring up legal charges and then put a bounty on yoyr head if that fails.

Wizard Y makes 500 masterwork swords and tries to sell them in City X. City Xs Blacksmith guild forbids this. First they have the lord give you a desist message, then they call the guards, then they pay a dragon 20,000GP to bite off your head. If you get past the dragon they cower in fear of you and give you their belongings, but now you are firmly person none grata and people flee from you instead of buying your goods.

[vasilidor]

in response to the above, I would not waste my time at that point, but rather go looking for someone looking for a large pile of master work swords. I am fairly convinced that someone is looking to buy that many. also if I get to the point were i am persona nongrata i may just take my 500 swords and get an army to go with them and conquer a nice piece of real estate some where.

[Fizban]

You went over that it is more fair and less random, and that npc generation sections use it, and why it's preferable. Not why it's standard. For PC generation, the PHB rolling method IS the standard. Not that it's better, not that it's fair, not that I prefer it, or even use it.
Then it's a good thing Quarian and I aren't talking about PCs? I felt like explaining in detail why an emergent quality of tangible xp incentivizing villagers to murder each other for xp in certain situations wasn't emergent because it doesn't make sense. Part of his counter was predicated on 29 point buy (a small part but one I always take issue with), which is not standard for NPCs- nor is it standard for PCs. RAW PC rolling has nothing to do with it.

Standard is literally part of the name:

1. Standard Point Buy: All ability scores start at 8. Take 25 points. . .
2: Nonstandard Point Buy: Use the standard point buy method, except that the player has fewer or more points. . .
Standard point buy is 25 points. Other point values are nonstandard. NPCs are not PCs. Making the elite NPCs generated by this tangible xp setting more powerful is a separate rule from the one of tangible xp. The entire thing is a tangent I was filling out for fun and this minor point of that tangent is not relevant to the thread- you've already read my posts on the matter and there is no reason to continue here.

[Tvtyrant]

in response to the above, I would not waste my time at that point, but rather go looking for someone looking for a large pile of master work swords. I am fairly convinced that someone is looking to buy that many. also if I get to the point were i am persona nongrata i may just take my 500 swords and get an army to go with them and conquer a nice piece of real estate some where.

That is kind of the point. Good wizards are constrained by morality and law to not dump free items on the market, evil wizards aren't and are the targets for adventurers, knights and mercenaries.

Dragonlance has a great scene where a wizard is being burned at the stake for making and spending fake coins. Two other wizards watch her die and remark on how dumb she was to make herself the enemy of everyone in power when she could have made tremendous money making magic items and predicting weather patterns.

[Segev]

That is kind of the point. Good wizards are constrained by morality and law to not dump free items on the market.

This is stupid. Decreasing the cost of a resource is not a bad thing. It spurs greater wealth in the economy in general.

Guild protectionism is actually very BAD for economic growth. It promotes scarcity of resources, and thus poverty in general.

[RoboEmperor]

This is stupid. Decreasing the cost of a resource is not a bad thing. It spurs greater wealth in the economy in general.

Guild protectionism is actually very BAD for economic growth. It promotes scarcity of resources, and thus poverty in general.

Truth doesn't matter.

In real life, if a new invention would get rid of 1,000,000 jobs, should the inventor unleash it?

The answer is yes he should. Despite the drastic amount of poverty it would cause in the long run it is much better, as history without a doubt proves.

But the inventor still might not unleash it because he's more worried about the 1,000,000 employees rather than the greater long term good.

Same logic could apply here.

But in all honesty d&d is a game. If you want to make it more realistic it ends up being the tippyverse. There's no way around it.

[Tvtyrant]

This is stupid. Decreasing the cost of a resource is not a bad thing. It spurs greater wealth in the economy in general.

Guild protectionism is actually very BAD for economic growth. It promotes scarcity of resources, and thus poverty in general.

According to modern economists starting 300 years ago, sure. According to Eurasian societies starting with the invention of crops and running through the early modern period, not so much. Adam Smith probably hasn't happened yet, free trade is an anachronism.

[Andor13]

It's really not. Eberron doesn't look like what you'd get if you extrapolated the economic progress of a D&D setting as "technology" developed. It's just "early industrial pastiche, but some stuff is magic". There are no (for example) Spell-Stitched Undead being used as sources of magic, but there are "magic trains" because the guy who wrote the setting though they were cool.

You could do a very interesting setting that explored the consequences of using D&D's magic at scale to alter society. Eberron is not that setting.


Not to stick my foot in the other part of the discussion, but I'd also point out that Eberron. . . really isn't adapted to industrialized magic at all.

I must not have communicated well, as you both missed my point. First, yes, the Eberron numbers do not account for the spells. Eberron does not do numbers well (I recall once calculating that Sharn, assuming 1 level per 50', has the population density of the Gobi desert), so what? The problem was "How do I as a GM deal with..." In Eberron the answer is that some polite people from house Canith show up and tell you that you need to buy a license and then sell at standard rates, and if you don't then some less polite Artificers specialized in quickdraw show up with wands and explain monopoly power with scorching rays.


Wat.

That is not how economics works. The Wizard has a lower marginal cost. Whatever production he supplies will be used first, not held in reserve. Also, you're literally proposing that people will respond to the threat of being undercut by spending money to not produce things. That doesn't actually make sense.

We are not discussing economics, particularly modern economics. We are discussing politics. The guildsmen are not looking to reduce their costs, they are looking to maintain their employment and power. Although you are aware that we routinely pay people not to produce right? And people do pay for reserve production capacity, even if it goes unused.

[Quarian Rex]

Spoilering is a good idea.



~Fizban giving a good breakdown of a hypothetical battlesim~


Hey, you're going to get no argument from me that in white-room optimized combat action economy will always win with enough numbers. I just don't think that that applies here. Like I said before, there is a lot of context surrounding this (and, as with most context, one tends to forget just how much of it can be tied to a given point) which is why I said not to get hung up on it (rabbit holes like this are a consequence, much as I enjoy them).

One of the things that I like about the tangible xp thing is that it allows the fluff of the setting to line up with the mechanics. One aspect of this is that you get to remove some of the assumed granularity from character development (both PC and NPC). It is normally assumed that characters trained for years to get to where they are but in practice this just isn't the case. What training could a Fighter possibly do to allow him to walk away from a 100' fall? None, yet this is how the game works. It's assumed that the Wizard spent years trying to master arcane mysteries just to get to 1st level, yet a 1st level Fighter who takes Wizard as his 2nd level class skips all of that and achieves immediate arcane enlightenment, perhaps after only a few days of actual adventuring. Accepting that power and capability are a result of consuming soul residue and not the granulated accumulation of competence can have some consequence. One is that the social divide between commoners and nobles (those with class levels) is pretty vast, seeming to justify some of the worst facets of feudalism (knights taking advantage of the peasantry, samurai beheading commoners in the middle of the street for perceived insults, etc.). Another consequence would be that commoners just don't use real weapons. If their lord needs them to, then they would be permitted the Super-Soldier upgrade that is leveling and their skill would be provided by their empowerment. Even if the commoner happened to find weapons/valuables then thay had best hand them over to a noble before they are taken (where did you get something like that? Did you steal it? You must have. That is a crime...).

This is a bit of a ramble-y way to say that, in this context, (I would think that) commoners wouldn't have any combat capability (spending a feat on Martial Weapon Proficiency, etc.) aside from the use of farm tools.




Ah, good old starting 18s because reasons. 29 point buy must be one of their changes, since 3.5 standard is 25, the assumed delta being +3 or so from 15 str and 1 BAB.


Yup, point-buy is based on class (generally 21 for full casters, 25 for half casters like Bards, and 29 for just about everyone else). It was an idea that I initially balked at but it has been growing on me and is one of the things that I'll be incorporating. Play testing will see how well it works out but I like the implications. As for, "good old starting 18s because reasons", that is a bit of cheese that becomes justified (from my perspective) in the context of these mechanics. When you look at good stats as a property of Super-Soldier empowerment, and not just raw genetics, then having casual min/maxing actually makes more sense, especially in this context. Powering up before a death-battle is a good motivation to hulk-out and dump the mental stats to survive. Does dumping the mentals have a consequence? Hell's yeah. Lack of skills, vulnerability to mental manipulation, and poor leadership ability all may severely limit future development but may have little effect on immediate survival.

This leads to a world where player munchkinism is no longer a source of cognitive dissonance, where such a thing can make sense (as well as taking more well rounded approaches) for both the PCs and NPCs. This kind of emergent property, enabled by these xp mechanics, allows any character in the world to be created as a PC and for such things to make perfect sense in the game world.



Ranged weapons? Like I said, both versions would be drawing on the same stock of weapons. ... The smaller number of elites might all have weapons, but if there's more than 100 ranged weapons between the 600 people then the mob would have more, their individual proficiency wouldn't matter as much, and the armor of either side doesn't matter as much. Ranged fire comes down to range and hit points, the 6x commoners have twice as many hits to drop in full and the same weapons (though this is a place were a smaller group has a slight advantage since if they're taking volley fire there's more chance for scatter to miss them).


Looking at the ranged advantage is a bit misleading as well. Any ranged weapons that are available are almost guaranteed to be something the commoners can't use properly and only hitting on a 19 or 20 (or even just on a natural 20) is a massive hindrance. Saying that such a deficiency can just be countered with raw numbers is a conceit inherent to this kind of battlesim discussion. The idea that this would all be taking place in an empty white room, where the math advantage of raw numbers can be brought to bear, probably isn't something that you would ever find in-game. Assuming ranged as a default also makes it an extremely simple numbers game that favors the horde. Melee tends to change much of that. Ability modifiers (Str of 16 or 18, with Dex and Con of 14 or 16 isn't unreasonable, as mentioned above) become even more of a factor (even minimum damage will drop a commoner when you include Str bonus), limiting number of attackers (fewer can fit in melee) favors competence over numbers, and Attacks of Opportunity shift the action economy to those who can utilize them. Those benefits are further multiplied by the fact that it takes at least three hits on the Warrior to take him out while the commoners are being dropped in one hit.



But maybe those elites all have AC 17 or higher from heavier armors? Say hello to the real-life response to heavier armors: grappling. Once again, the elite only has a single AoO per round, but if outnumbered 4 to 1 that still leaves three people, only one of whom needs to confirm the grapple. Confirming the hold deals automatic unarmed damage, a piddly 2 points, but once grappled a total of four foes can dogpile automatically. The elite remains incapable of dropping more than one foe per round with maybe the same accuracy as before, unless one of the four foes makes a pin, in which case the elite can't do anything but try to break out. In real life, even with great armor and skill, being double teamed is a losing proposition, and the elites here are being compared to numbers four or even six times their own. The only thing that makes up that difference is fortifications- and more people behind fortifications is still better unless you lack the supplies to feed them.


Grappling is another one of those most-optimal options that normally gets a hand-wave as an auto-counter, but is probably a lot less effective that we might think. Even looking at 1v6 (a battle that would probably never be engaged, but... thought experiment) I would hedge my bets on the Warriors. The Warriors would have a +5 to hit/grapple (if we're going to assume unobstructed numbers advantage to the commoners, we'll assume the Warriors stat'ed smartly with 18/14/14 on the physicals, though not including feat choices to keep it simple) and so a 70% chance to hit leather-clad commoners. In the first round he has @50% chance to drop two of the commoners (one due to attack, one due to grapple-provoked AoO). The effectiveness of the grappling commoners is based almost purely on luck. While additional grapplers get to auto dogpile that is dependent on someone actually getting that first grapple and then keeping it. This would require a touch attack with a 40% hit chance, followed by a +0 vs +5 grapple check (@25% success chance). That means that each grappler gets an average 10% chance to actually stick per round. Each round that they're trying this they are being dropped, 50% chance of two going down per round (91% chance of at least one per round). Even if all of the grapplers get through the first round unscathed all 6 only have @46% chance to have one of them actually land the grapple. If that is the last guy then he gets killed on the second round by the Warrior (70% chance) and they are back to square one. Aid other is an option but then you start putting all your eggs in one basket and are even more vulnerable to AoO.

Even if everything works out perfectly for the commoners there is a cluster nearby where the opposite is true and a Warrior will be stabbing grapplers in the back in a few rounds. And this is without considering the feat selections of the Warriors. Just the basic additions of Combat Reflexes, Cleave, or even humble Weapon Focus. Any of that in the mix and melee is even more of a meat grinder for the commoners. I know that it sounds like I'm just being incredible biased and such, but this is one of the incredibly rare situations that I think such an approach is actually warranted. The commoners are civilian dirt farmers at their very lowest point (by definition), while the elites are the survivors of said group augmented with triple the strength, buoyed by the duty of protecting what's left and avenging what's been sacrificed, and given a second wind of hope. Such things make a difference.



But tell me this: can you think of an actual example where this course of action would make sense? In what context would 100 elite warriors succeed where 600 commoners would absolutely fail? Under what psychology would 500 people give up and die when human psycology is terrible at probability and always thinks they'll be the lucky one to survive? Especially when every iota of common (and even mechanical) sense says that 6 are better than one?


This sort of thing is almost completely RP dependent. When talking about what it takes for a group to hit the Despair Event Horizon (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DespairEventHorizon) much of that's probably best left to the player's imagination. If you want to bring psychology into it then that won't be to your advantage. People are skittish, easily frightened creatures. If you are raised that your lot in life is to serve your betters, and that they are your betters by eating the souls of your brethren, empowering them to be the sole line of defense between you and the multitudinous horrors of the world (this is D&D, the horrors are indeed a multitude). Perhaps seeing those betters cut down trying to save you/the land is enough to make them give up hope. Perhaps when those peers that actually thought that they could make a difference ran off and where cut down in futile acts of bravery (they always thought they'd be the lucky ones to survive) was too much for them. Perhaps seeing that the nobles they supported, the ones charged with their protection, turn on those you know is a betrayal that shakes them so hard that they loose all hope (remember in Braveheart when William Wallace was betrayed by Robert the Bruce? His anger instantly became despair and he just gave up).

Still want to look at the psychology of people? Civilians can't coordinate for sh*t. You know when you watch a movie and see the mooks rush the protagonist one at a time? Yeah, people actually fight like that. I have a buddy who spent most of his 20's just getting into bar fights (having a chip on his shoulder and growing up in the wrong part of town is a fun combo). He used to love fighting groups. If they all rushed him he would have been beat, but they never did. Everyone if afraid of getting hit and no one wants to be first. Eventually one (sometimes two) would rush in, get flattened and the rest would start getting second thoughts. Just because 6 are better than one doesn't mean that any of the 6 are actually willing to test it. If you want to start applying human psychology to this scenario then things start looking grimmer and the Pact more valid.



My mechanical evaluations all point to this response actually being a total cop-out, a way for people that are already broken an defeated in spirit to pretend they're not giving up, when they're actually just giving up.


Yes...? I thought that it was pretty clear that's exactly what this is. Hence the whole only-use-in-a-moment-of-absolute-despair thing. This is more of a "from hell's heart/choke on it" kind of thing. At no point is this supposed to be a valid strategy for PCs or something like that. While plucky resistance is a great game option as well (I believe that I mentioned the Seven Samurai situation in a previous post) but that is something that really works best in conjunction with player intervention. I think that the Pact option is just a great counterpoint to player inaction. In a world where power is a discreet resource that is denied to the peasantry, it provides a tragic and potentially horrifying means for the powerless to scrape together power when there is no other choice. I find the option evocative and it is something that only makes sense within this particular mechanical groundwork.

There aren't any particular limitations to primitive (NPC) classes, it's just that they are cheaper (cost half xp to level). If you harvest from more people then you have more options, etc. The Warrior aspect is really just a minimum entry kind of thing.

As I've tried to get across above, I think that there are plenty of potential justifications for this being an actual thing that is, one that could be used to great effect in an actual game. Are there situations where the sacrificed commoners, if fully equipped and have optimal placing with perfect co-ordination, could be more effective due to sheer action economy? Yup. I just don't think that such a situation takes anything away from the option.

[unseenmage]

Spoilering is a good idea.



Hey, you're going to get no argument from me that in white-room optimized combat action economy will always win with enough numbers. I just don't think that that applies here. Like I said before, there is a lot of context surrounding this (and, as with most context, one tends to forget just how much of it can be tied to a given point) which is why I said not to get hung up on it (rabbit holes like this are a consequence, much as I enjoy them).

One of the things that I like about the tangible xp thing is that it allows the fluff of the setting to line up with the mechanics. One aspect of this is that you get to remove some of the assumed granularity from character development (both PC and NPC). It is normally assumed that characters trained for years to get to where they are but in practice this just isn't the case. What training could a Fighter possibly do to allow him to walk away from a 100' fall? None, yet this is how the game works. It's assumed that the Wizard spent years trying to master arcane mysteries just to get to 1st level, yet a 1st level Fighter who takes Wizard as his 2nd level class skips all of that and achieves immediate arcane enlightenment, perhaps after only a few days of actual adventuring. Accepting that power and capability are a result of consuming soul residue and not the granulated accumulation of competence can have some consequence. One is that the social divide between commoners and nobles (those with class levels) is pretty vast, seeming to justify some of the worst facets of feudalism (knights taking advantage of the peasantry, samurai beheading commoners in the middle of the street for perceived insults, etc.). Another consequence would be that commoners just don't use real weapons. If their lord needs them to, then they would be permitted the Super-Soldier upgrade that is leveling and their skill would be provided by their empowerment. Even if the commoner happened to find weapons/valuables then thay had best hand them over to a noble before they are taken (where did you get something like that? Did you steal it? You must have. That is a crime...).

This is a bit of a ramble-y way to say that, in this context, (I would think that) commoners wouldn't have any combat capability (spending a feat on Martial Weapon Proficiency, etc.) aside from the use of farm tools.




Yup, point-buy is based on class (generally 21 for full casters, 25 for half casters like Bards, and 29 for just about everyone else). It was an idea that I initially balked at but it has been growing on me and is one of the things that I'll be incorporating. Play testing will see how well it works out but I like the implications. As for, "good old starting 18s because reasons", that is a bit of cheese that becomes justified (from my perspective) in the context of these mechanics. When you look at good stats as a property of Super-Soldier empowerment, and not just raw genetics, then having casual min/maxing actually makes more sense, especially in this context. Powering up before a death-battle is a good motivation to hulk-out and dump the mental stats to survive. Does dumping the mentals have a consequence? Hell's yeah. Lack of skills, vulnerability to mental manipulation, and poor leadership ability all may severely limit future development but may have little effect on immediate survival.

This leads to a world where player munchkinism is no longer a source of cognitive dissonance, where such a thing can make sense (as well as taking more well rounded approaches) for both the PCs and NPCs. This kind of emergent property, enabled by these xp mechanics, allows any character in the world to be created as a PC and for such things to make perfect sense in the game world.



Looking at the ranged advantage is a bit misleading as well. Any ranged weapons that are available are almost guaranteed to be something the commoners can't use properly and only hitting on a 19 or 20 (or even just on a natural 20) is a massive hindrance. Saying that such a deficiency can just be countered with raw numbers is a conceit inherent to this kind of battlesim discussion. The idea that this would all be taking place in an empty white room, where the math advantage of raw numbers can be brought to bear, probably isn't something that you would ever find in-game. Assuming ranged as a default also makes it an extremely simple numbers game that favors the horde. Melee tends to change much of that. Ability modifiers (Str of 16 or 18, with Dex and Con of 14 or 16 isn't unreasonable, as mentioned above) become even more of a factor (even minimum damage will drop a commoner when you include Str bonus), limiting number of attackers (fewer can fit in melee) favors competence over numbers, and Attacks of Opportunity shift the action economy to those who can utilize them. Those benefits are further multiplied by the fact that it takes at least three hits on the Warrior to take him out while the commoners are being dropped in one hit.



Grappling is another one of those most-optimal options that normally gets a hand-wave as an auto-counter, but is probably a lot less effective that we might think. Even looking at 1v6 (a battle that would probably never be engaged, but... thought experiment) I would hedge my bets on the Warriors. The Warriors would have a +5 to hit/grapple (if we're going to assume unobstructed numbers advantage to the commoners, we'll assume the Warriors stat'ed smartly with 18/14/14 on the physicals, though not including feat choices to keep it simple) and so a 70% chance to hit leather-clad commoners. In the first round he has @50% chance to drop two of the commoners (one due to attack, one due to grapple-provoked AoO). The effectiveness of the grappling commoners is based almost purely on luck. While additional grapplers get to auto dogpile that is dependent on someone actually getting that first grapple and then keeping it. This would require a touch attack with a 40% hit chance, followed by a +0 vs +5 grapple check (@25% success chance). That means that each grappler gets an average 10% chance to actually stick per round. Each round that they're trying this they are being dropped, 50% chance of two going down per round (91% chance of at least one per round). Even if all of the grapplers get through the first round unscathed all 6 only have @46% chance to have one of them actually land the grapple. If that is the last guy then he gets killed on the second round by the Warrior (70% chance) and they are back to square one. Aid other is an option but then you start putting all your eggs in one basket and are even more vulnerable to AoO.

Even if everything works out perfectly for the commoners there is a cluster nearby where the opposite is true and a Warrior will be stabbing grapplers in the back in a few rounds. And this is without considering the feat selections of the Warriors. Just the basic additions of Combat Reflexes, Cleave, or even humble Weapon Focus. Any of that in the mix and melee is even more of a meat grinder for the commoners. I know that it sounds like I'm just being incredible biased and such, but this is one of the incredibly rare situations that I think such an approach is actually warranted. The commoners are civilian dirt farmers at their very lowest point (by definition), while the elites are the survivors of said group augmented with triple the strength, buoyed by the duty of protecting what's left and avenging what's been sacrificed, and given a second wind of hope. Such things make a difference.



This sort of thing is almost completely RP dependent. When talking about what it takes for a group to hit the Despair Event Horizon (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DespairEventHorizon) much of that's probably best left to the player's imagination. If you want to bring psychology into it then that won't be to your advantage. People are skittish, easily frightened creatures. If you are raised that your lot in life is to serve your betters, and that they are your betters by eating the souls of your brethren, empowering them to be the sole line of defense between you and the multitudinous horrors of the world (this is D&D, the horrors are indeed a multitude). Perhaps seeing those betters cut down trying to save you/the land is enough to make them give up hope. Perhaps when those peers that actually thought that they could make a difference ran off and where cut down in futile acts of bravery (they always thought they'd be the lucky ones to survive) was too much for them. Perhaps seeing that the nobles they supported, the ones charged with their protection, turn on those you know is a betrayal that shakes them so hard that they loose all hope (remember in Braveheart when William Wallace was betrayed by Robert the Bruce? His anger instantly became despair and he just gave up).

Still want to look at the psychology of people? Civilians can't coordinate for sh*t. You know when you watch a movie and see the mooks rush the protagonist one at a time? Yeah, people actually fight like that. I have a buddy who spent most of his 20's just getting into bar fights (having a chip on his shoulder and growing up in the wrong part of town is a fun combo). He used to love fighting groups. If they all rushed him he would have been beat, but they never did. Everyone if afraid of getting hit and no one wants to be first. Eventually one (sometimes two) would rush in, get flattened and the rest would start getting second thoughts. Just because 6 are better than one doesn't mean that any of the 6 are actually willing to test it. If you want to start applying human psychology to this scenario then things start looking grimmer and the Pact more valid.



Yes...? I thought that it was pretty clear that's exactly what this is. Hence the whole only-use-in-a-moment-of-absolute-despair thing. This is more of a "from hell's heart/choke on it" kind of thing. At no point is this supposed to be a valid strategy for PCs or something like that. While plucky resistance is a great game option as well (I believe that I mentioned the Seven Samurai situation in a previous post) but that is something that really works best in conjunction with player intervention. I think that the Pact option is just a great counterpoint to player inaction. In a world where power is a discreet resource that is denied to the peasantry, it provides a tragic and potentially horrifying means for the powerless to scrape together power when there is no other choice. I find the option evocative and it is something that only makes sense within this particular mechanical groundwork.

There aren't any particular limitations to primitive (NPC) classes, it's just that they are cheaper (cost half xp to level). If you harvest from more people then you have more options, etc. The Warrior aspect is really just a minimum entry kind of thing.

As I've tried to get across above, I think that there are plenty of potential justifications for this being an actual thing that is, one that could be used to great effect in an actual game. Are there situations where the sacrificed commoners, if fully equipped and have optimal placing with perfect co-ordination, could be more effective due to sheer action economy? Yup. I just don't think that such a situation takes anything away from the option.

You repeat 'battleism' and 'white room' a lot as if your favored mass sacrifice mechanic is somehow immune to such.
If their side must be assumed to have to role play it out and never have enough number of troops to make their arguement's math work then why should your side?


Additionally, 3.x already has a gp for xp exchange rate. It's from a web article about the DMG2 IIRC and only applies to magic item creation but it does set the precedent for xp being a buyable thing within the official 3.x framework.

[Fizban]

I've moved the tangent to a new thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?553642-Tangible-XP) so it won't take up more space here.


I must not have communicated well, as you both missed my point. First, yes, the Eberron numbers do not account for the spells. Eberron does not do numbers well (I recall once calculating that Sharn, assuming 1 level per 50', has the population density of the Gobi desert), so what? The problem was "How do I as a GM deal with..." In Eberron the answer is that some polite people from house Canith show up and tell you that you need to buy a license and then sell at standard rates, and if you don't then some less polite Artificers specialized in quickdraw show up with wands and explain monopoly power with scorching rays.
If the economy doesn't account for the spells, it can't very well be accounting for industrialized magic. Guild chokeholds are one of the tools the DM can use to explain why things aren't being accounted for, and Eberron uses that tool (as I agreed it's hard-written in), but they're not actually being accounted for. So it's a good example of a top-down "this is magic because I say so and it works because reasons," which is perfectly fine- I just have an automatic reaction to anything that tries to present 3.5 Eberron as being grounded in the way magic works in 3.5, when in actuality it's grounded in it's own made-up mechanics. A great example of how and why you should/could/would do it that way, but it is what it is.

As for population density, I remember there was some kerfuffle about one of the books saying the countries had X measurements, and another saying it was actually 10X. Dunno the population details, but if someone wrote Sharn as being nothing but the one city and no other population then it's population density would make zero sense as well.

[Quarian Rex]

You repeat 'battleism' and 'white room' a lot as if your favored mass sacrifice mechanic is somehow immune to such.
If their side must be assumed to have to role play it out and never have enough number of troops to make their arguement's math work then why should your side?


I thought that I've been pretty clear that I think this is an interesting DM tool/RP option that only exists due to this specific mechanical basis. I'm not shifting the goal posts trying to defend Pun-Pun in a game or anything like that. We're just all aware of how to exploit D&D's action economy. With enough actions anything can be won, regardless of where those actions really come from. We are also quite aware of why such a thing is usually never seen in game. Because the specific conditions that allow it to succeed just don't usually exist.

Pointing that out, that a purely numerical commoner advantage would be greatly diminished when used in a story when compared to a purely story-based option, is valid.




Additionally, 3.x already has a gp for xp exchange rate. It's from a web article about the DMG2 IIRC and only applies to magic item creation but it does set the precedent for xp being a buyable thing within the official 3.x framework.


Except that it doesn't? It has some magic items that allow the xp burden of crafting to be shared with other characters. From what I recall the xp absorbed even has to be for a specific crafting and so cannot even be sold to another caster. This really is apples and oranges and doesn't address any of the issues that tangible xp does.




I've moved the tangent to a new thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?553642-Tangible-XP) so it won't take up more space here.


Good idea.

[unseenmage]

...

Good idea.
Agreed.

As such I placed my response over there (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22921168&postcount=4).

[Jay R]

I'm running adventures. If a player wants to do something else, fine. But I won't let it get in the way of everybody else's fun.

"OK, Bob's wizard is setting up a shop. That will take a few days to find a location, buy it, and stock it. Meanwhile, everybody else hears about a ruined castle two days to the north. Bob, I guess you don't need to show up next time and maybe the two or three sessions after that, since your character is busy running a business.

"How long will you want to stay in town? I can call you when the rest of the players get that far along on their adventures."

[Cosi]

I'm running adventures. If a player wants to do something else, fine. But I won't let it get in the way of everybody else's fun.

"OK, Bob's wizard is setting up a shop. That will take a few days to find a location, buy it, and stock it. Meanwhile, everybody else hears about a ruined castle two days to the north. Bob, I guess you don't need to show up next time and maybe the two or three sessions after that, since your character is busy running a business.

"How long will you want to stay in town? I can call you when the rest of the players get that far along on their adventures."

This just being passive-aggressive. If you want to run Hack 'n' Slash adventures instead of doing Logistics and Dragons, just say that. Tell Bob that he can't build a business in your game. No need to be petty about it.

[Jay R]

This just being passive-aggressive. If you want to run Hack 'n' Slash adventures instead of doing Logistics and Dragons, just say that. Tell Bob that he can't build a business in your game. No need to be petty about it.

Insult received. In fact, I have never had a player who wanted to substitute shopkeeping for adventures, so I have no idea how I would phrase it. My point, which you want to ignore in favor of personal insult, is that adventures are in fact happening, and staying in town precludes going on them.

[Crake]

I'm running adventures. If a player wants to do something else, fine. But I won't let it get in the way of everybody else's fun.

"OK, Bob's wizard is setting up a shop. That will take a few days to find a location, buy it, and stock it. Meanwhile, everybody else hears about a ruined castle two days to the north. Bob, I guess you don't need to show up next time and maybe the two or three sessions after that, since your character is busy running a business.

"How long will you want to stay in town? I can call you when the rest of the players get that far along on their adventures."

If you've got access to fabricate, you also probably have access to teleport, at which point either a) the party is traveling on your schedule, or b) you can catch up to the party easily enough after they spend a few days traveling.

That's assuming that the party is non-stop, go-go-go, adventure-all-the-time. Most groups, however, usually stop to rest between adventures, maybe commission a magic item that might take a month or so to make, develop their character beyond "hack and slash guy" and so on.

[Cosi]

Insult received. In fact, I have never had a player who wanted to substitute shopkeeping for adventures, so I have no idea how I would phrase it. My point, which you want to ignore in favor of personal insult, is that adventures are in fact happening, and staying in town precludes going on them.

Yes, and an economy is also happening. And going into the dungeon precludes participating in it.

However, that's not the point. The point is emphatically not that it is inappropriate for you to want to run a game where people go into dungeons and fight monsters instead of staying in town and building businesses. The point is how you are phrasing that sentiment -- specifically, how you are saying "no, you can totally do that, you can just not show up until we get back" instead of being a mature adult and saying "I don't want to run that kind of game, if you want to play that kind of game you will need to find someone else to run it".

My problem over this entire thread has been 0% that people don't want to do economic adventures and 100% how they go about expressing that.

[Segev]

Yes, and an economy is also happening. And going into the dungeon precludes participating in it.

However, that's not the point. The point is emphatically not that it is inappropriate for you to want to run a game where people go into dungeons and fight monsters instead of staying in town and building businesses. The point is how you are phrasing that sentiment -- specifically, how you are saying "no, you can totally do that, you can just not show up until we get back" instead of being a mature adult and saying "I don't want to run that kind of game, if you want to play that kind of game you will need to find someone else to run it".

My problem over this entire thread has been 0% that people don't want to do economic adventures and 100% how they go about expressing that.

I still think that, unless you don't want to run such a game (in which case, discuss this OOC with the players), the best solution is to use their new business ventures as plot hooks. What trials and obstacles arise to their success? Who wants to thwart them, and how do they try? Got a "dragon in a keep" adventure? Maybe that dragon is interfering with their new business, somehow.

[Cosi]

I still think that, unless you don't want to run such a game (in which case, discuss this OOC with the players), the best solution is to use their new business ventures as plot hooks. What trials and obstacles arise to their success? Who wants to thwart them, and how do they try? Got a "dragon in a keep" adventure? Maybe that dragon is interfering with their new business, somehow.

I agree. There are absolutely opportunities to have adventures where part of the premise is that the party has some kind of economic assets. For example, The Craft Sequence is an entire book series about having fantasy economics adventures. I have no problem with there being plot hooks based on players economic activities. My problem is when those things are thinly veiled attempts by the DM to shut down the players, rather than actual obstacles for the players to defeat.