ElFi
2018-10-17, 09:04 PM
Hi, Playground! I've got a lot of ground to cover with this post, so bear with me here.
These past few months I've been tinkering around with trying to make my own d20 RPG system, pulling on my favorite points of a lot of different game systems and editions to try and make the ideal system that I'd want to play. I went into starting the project with a lot of more-or-less clear ideas of what I wanted to change about games like D&D and Pathfinder (probably the closest systems to my own ideas) and how I could use those changes to make my own game. One aspect of the game that I was less certain on (well, two aspects I guess) was wealth and magic items. I hate grappling with managing gold in a campaign, whether I'm GMing and trying to keep everyone's WBL on par, or playing as a PC and making sure I have enough to buy that item I wanted the next time we visit a big city. And that's not even getting into the realism problems with a gold economy system, particularly how it's generated and how much more of it the average adventuring party will have compared to normal people (though that's probably a forum thread for another day, so I digress). A simplified currency system seemed like a good idea; I've seen it used in a few game systems and it seemed to work well enough there. But, of course, that brought me to my next problem:
Magic items. Hoo boy, magic items. I think tabletop RPGs that have magic items tend to approach them in one of three ways: common to the point that they're basically required to play the game (D&D 3E amd PF), common and useful but tightly regulated by the system (Legend RPG), and uncommon to the point that you can play without using them at all (D&D 5E). My IRL gaming group mostly plays Pathfinder, which as I've just mentioned has a lot of magic items. I like magic items a lot. I hate the way Pathfinder handles them with a passion. For one concern, there's optimization- I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks a party that all runs around wearing the same stat-boosting belts, amulets of natural armor, and cloaks of resistance is not making use of PF's stupidly broad wondrous item selection in a fun way, but you need those items at higher level just to remain competitive with monster scaling more times than not.
For another, there's the fiddlyness of the system as a whole- even aside from the limitless +x bonuses running around, which are useful but painfully boring in my opinion, PF stocks adventurers with way too many items of the one-and-done or limited-use variety, to the point that the average high-level party can be running around with dozens if not hundreds of potions, wands, and scrolls. Pathfinder 2E's devs dubbed this the "wand of cure light wounds problem", and while I think that's a somewhat reductionist way of looking at it, I also don't entirely disagree. I can't think of a single quality work of fantasy fiction (that isn't in itself a retroactive take on RPG settings) where magic items are as ubiquitous and as inconsequential as they are in most of D&D's editions and their various clones.
In my eyes, magic items should be fun and something the PC's should have access to, but they should also mean something. Player characters shouldn't be able to just stroll into the local equipment shop and walk back out with enchanted gear worth more than the rest of the town the shop's in. Acquiring magic items should be an integral part of advancement, and if at all possible it should directly factor into roleplaying and the PCs' individual character arcs, if such exists. That way, players can have their flaming swords and enchanted spyglasses and automaton pegasi, but they can also feel like they earned them. The driving question, then, was how to approach such an idea when currency and magic items are normally so inexorably tied together.
So, what's the solution? I decided to try and take a two-pronged approach here:
Improve characters from the ground up: That is, make PCs stronger without the need for magic items to do the growing for them. I haven't hashed out all the particulars on character advancement thus far, but I do know that saving throw bonuses from class levels scale higher and faster, your Base Attack Bonus periodically grants extra damage dice to all attacks as you level, and also provides improvements to your AC (that last part I'm a little fuzzy on, but it's definitely in the cards). Feats are more powerful and grant scaling benefits as you level, rather than static bonuses. Pathfinder tried for something similar with its Automatic Bonus Progression alternate rules, and there's also Grod_The_Giant's excellent Chopping Down The Christmas Tree (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?357810-Chopping-Down-the-Christmas-Tree-Low-Magic-Item-Rules) houserule set for low-magic item campaigns, but both of those feel like band-aids on bullet wounds to me- that is, retroactively applying fixes to systems that are in some way inherently broken. I'd rather make fixes from the foundation and without preexisting design space in my way, if it's within my power.
Divorcing magic items from the economy: This is the bigger and more substantial change, and the one I'm most hungry for the Playground's opinions on. I was discussing this problem with a friend who's more experienced with RPGs than I am, and he suggested, rather than paying for them, making acquiring each magic item feel like its own mini-quest. But that feels like a lot of work to me for a GM to ad-hoc on the fly, especially since I'd probably the one GMing this system off the bat. So I decided to try and find a middle ground between buying magic items and questing for them, and came upon what I hope is a pretty nifty solution: dividing character wealth of the PC's into two separate pools, Currency and Wealth.
Currency is the GP equivalent, and provides for mundane services, gear, stays in the inn, that sort of thing. PCs would acquire it by selling treasure, as bounty from quests, looted off the corpses of their victims, etc. Not much depth there, but it allows players to have a meaningful handle on their cash reserves without needing to resort to something as simple as the wealth level concept used in systems like Open Legend and Mutants and Masterminds. Favor, the second resource, is the more important one to be considered- think of it as "narrative points" that you expend to gain benefits for your character both mechanically and plotwise. Burn a couple favor points, and your character could acquire or advance a place in the noble court, connect with a point of eldritch power out in the far reaches of reality, or yes, acquire a magic item or two. Maybe the orphaned warrior finds that his family sword is now empowered by the spirits of his ancestors, or the wizardly scholar has made so many notes in his spellbook that it comes to possess arcane power in and of itself. Favor would be primarily acquired by level-up, but I'd also plan on including guidelines for GMs to reward players with extra points for following plot hooks or resolving events in their characters' personal narrative arcs (and adjoining rules to scale up monster encounters accordingly). You can also tweak what Favor can or can't be spent on, depending on the tone and intent of your campaign (so maybe the PCs are in a desolate land with no time for such things, or it's a no-magic campaign with no enchanted gear at all, and so on).
Phew, that was a lot of writing. So, it comes down to this, Playground: what do you think about the nature of currency and magic items in the games you play? And how do you think my fixes measure up against the problems you may or may not agree with? I'm all yours.
(TL;DR, I ramble on a lot about gold and magic items and my issues with them, then propose a couple connected fixes. Read from the paragraph with a bolded first sentence onwards if you want to skip my thoughts and just read the part I want people to talk about.)
These past few months I've been tinkering around with trying to make my own d20 RPG system, pulling on my favorite points of a lot of different game systems and editions to try and make the ideal system that I'd want to play. I went into starting the project with a lot of more-or-less clear ideas of what I wanted to change about games like D&D and Pathfinder (probably the closest systems to my own ideas) and how I could use those changes to make my own game. One aspect of the game that I was less certain on (well, two aspects I guess) was wealth and magic items. I hate grappling with managing gold in a campaign, whether I'm GMing and trying to keep everyone's WBL on par, or playing as a PC and making sure I have enough to buy that item I wanted the next time we visit a big city. And that's not even getting into the realism problems with a gold economy system, particularly how it's generated and how much more of it the average adventuring party will have compared to normal people (though that's probably a forum thread for another day, so I digress). A simplified currency system seemed like a good idea; I've seen it used in a few game systems and it seemed to work well enough there. But, of course, that brought me to my next problem:
Magic items. Hoo boy, magic items. I think tabletop RPGs that have magic items tend to approach them in one of three ways: common to the point that they're basically required to play the game (D&D 3E amd PF), common and useful but tightly regulated by the system (Legend RPG), and uncommon to the point that you can play without using them at all (D&D 5E). My IRL gaming group mostly plays Pathfinder, which as I've just mentioned has a lot of magic items. I like magic items a lot. I hate the way Pathfinder handles them with a passion. For one concern, there's optimization- I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks a party that all runs around wearing the same stat-boosting belts, amulets of natural armor, and cloaks of resistance is not making use of PF's stupidly broad wondrous item selection in a fun way, but you need those items at higher level just to remain competitive with monster scaling more times than not.
For another, there's the fiddlyness of the system as a whole- even aside from the limitless +x bonuses running around, which are useful but painfully boring in my opinion, PF stocks adventurers with way too many items of the one-and-done or limited-use variety, to the point that the average high-level party can be running around with dozens if not hundreds of potions, wands, and scrolls. Pathfinder 2E's devs dubbed this the "wand of cure light wounds problem", and while I think that's a somewhat reductionist way of looking at it, I also don't entirely disagree. I can't think of a single quality work of fantasy fiction (that isn't in itself a retroactive take on RPG settings) where magic items are as ubiquitous and as inconsequential as they are in most of D&D's editions and their various clones.
In my eyes, magic items should be fun and something the PC's should have access to, but they should also mean something. Player characters shouldn't be able to just stroll into the local equipment shop and walk back out with enchanted gear worth more than the rest of the town the shop's in. Acquiring magic items should be an integral part of advancement, and if at all possible it should directly factor into roleplaying and the PCs' individual character arcs, if such exists. That way, players can have their flaming swords and enchanted spyglasses and automaton pegasi, but they can also feel like they earned them. The driving question, then, was how to approach such an idea when currency and magic items are normally so inexorably tied together.
So, what's the solution? I decided to try and take a two-pronged approach here:
Improve characters from the ground up: That is, make PCs stronger without the need for magic items to do the growing for them. I haven't hashed out all the particulars on character advancement thus far, but I do know that saving throw bonuses from class levels scale higher and faster, your Base Attack Bonus periodically grants extra damage dice to all attacks as you level, and also provides improvements to your AC (that last part I'm a little fuzzy on, but it's definitely in the cards). Feats are more powerful and grant scaling benefits as you level, rather than static bonuses. Pathfinder tried for something similar with its Automatic Bonus Progression alternate rules, and there's also Grod_The_Giant's excellent Chopping Down The Christmas Tree (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?357810-Chopping-Down-the-Christmas-Tree-Low-Magic-Item-Rules) houserule set for low-magic item campaigns, but both of those feel like band-aids on bullet wounds to me- that is, retroactively applying fixes to systems that are in some way inherently broken. I'd rather make fixes from the foundation and without preexisting design space in my way, if it's within my power.
Divorcing magic items from the economy: This is the bigger and more substantial change, and the one I'm most hungry for the Playground's opinions on. I was discussing this problem with a friend who's more experienced with RPGs than I am, and he suggested, rather than paying for them, making acquiring each magic item feel like its own mini-quest. But that feels like a lot of work to me for a GM to ad-hoc on the fly, especially since I'd probably the one GMing this system off the bat. So I decided to try and find a middle ground between buying magic items and questing for them, and came upon what I hope is a pretty nifty solution: dividing character wealth of the PC's into two separate pools, Currency and Wealth.
Currency is the GP equivalent, and provides for mundane services, gear, stays in the inn, that sort of thing. PCs would acquire it by selling treasure, as bounty from quests, looted off the corpses of their victims, etc. Not much depth there, but it allows players to have a meaningful handle on their cash reserves without needing to resort to something as simple as the wealth level concept used in systems like Open Legend and Mutants and Masterminds. Favor, the second resource, is the more important one to be considered- think of it as "narrative points" that you expend to gain benefits for your character both mechanically and plotwise. Burn a couple favor points, and your character could acquire or advance a place in the noble court, connect with a point of eldritch power out in the far reaches of reality, or yes, acquire a magic item or two. Maybe the orphaned warrior finds that his family sword is now empowered by the spirits of his ancestors, or the wizardly scholar has made so many notes in his spellbook that it comes to possess arcane power in and of itself. Favor would be primarily acquired by level-up, but I'd also plan on including guidelines for GMs to reward players with extra points for following plot hooks or resolving events in their characters' personal narrative arcs (and adjoining rules to scale up monster encounters accordingly). You can also tweak what Favor can or can't be spent on, depending on the tone and intent of your campaign (so maybe the PCs are in a desolate land with no time for such things, or it's a no-magic campaign with no enchanted gear at all, and so on).
Phew, that was a lot of writing. So, it comes down to this, Playground: what do you think about the nature of currency and magic items in the games you play? And how do you think my fixes measure up against the problems you may or may not agree with? I'm all yours.
(TL;DR, I ramble on a lot about gold and magic items and my issues with them, then propose a couple connected fixes. Read from the paragraph with a bolded first sentence onwards if you want to skip my thoughts and just read the part I want people to talk about.)