Any problem with too much gp if can't buy magic?

[reddir]

If a campaign world has very slow xp gain, then I foresee a concern about PCs having too much treasure for their level.

Some solutions:
1) money sinks - paternity suits, taxes, various fines, entertainment expenses, travel expenses, property ownership, local schmoozing, etc, etc.
2) no magic-marts - buying magic items is very difficult, they need to be traded for (usually giving up a better magic item unless one is willing to wait a long time for an even trade) or found on adventures.

With the second proviso, would "too much gp" be an issue? I see a lot of rp potential for having a lot of gp, but would it make the characters OP when it comes to going on actual dungeon dives or combat-heavy quests?

The main problem I see is they might hire mercenaries and such, enough gp and they could field whole armies. But if that prospect is removed (random rationalization for GM fiat)...

Any other things to be wary of?

[sreservoir]

If you take out the ability to convert wealth into power, then "too much" wealth won't convert into too much power, no.

On the flip side, you'll need to be a bit more careful about PCs having too little power. In particular, the less widely available magic items and spell effects are the more power concentrates in the hands of characters who have magic from non-wealth sources.

[reddir]

If you take out the ability to convert wealth into power, then "too much" wealth won't convert into too much power, no.

Am I overlooking anything? Magic Items and Mercenaries were the problems that occurred to me. But I have the nagging feeling that I am missing some other ways to convert wealth into power.


On the flip side, you'll need to be a bit more careful about PCs having too little power. In particular, the less widely available magic items and spell effects are the more power concentrates in the hands of characters who have magic from non-wealth sources.

When I said very slow xp gain, I meant it. I foresee enough adventures at each level to collect lots of magical items...just, they will all be random. I don't know how exactly it will play out but I expect this will balance things...and if not then the restrictions on hirelings/mercenaries can be relaxed.

[Maat Mons]

If you remove the ability to (easily) buy magic items, it incentivizes crafting magic items. Crafting requires only money and time. So if you don't want PCs converting their money into magic items that way, you'll either need to ensure they never have any time to spare, or house-rule magic items into requiring some resource other than money and time.

So you could do a thing where, instead of having a gp and xp cost, every crafted magic item has a, let's say, magicite cost. Magicite crystals, and things that derive from them, are the true currency of power. Gold is just a shiny thing muggles barter with.

[Vaern]

The DMG's recommended solution is to just cut the treasure rewards from encounters.


When modifying awards in this way, keep track of the amount of change you impose on the PCs' progress. You need to balance this with the pace of treasure awarded, For example, if you increase the amount of experience earned by the characters by 20% across the board, treasure also need to increase by 20%, or else the PCs end up pore and underequipped for their level.

So if your characters are gaining XP very slowly, they should also be gaining GP very slowly. Cut their XP gain in half and you should also be cutting the treasure they find in half.


Am I overlooking anything? Magic Items and Mercenaries were the problems that occurred to me. But I have the nagging feeling that I am missing some other ways to convert wealth into power.

That would probably be spell components. Death has a bit less impact if your characters have a gross overabundance of gold to throw at resurrection-type spells. Literally any cleric of sufficiently high level can cast spells to raise the dead with nothing more than a day's notice so they can prepare the spell in the morning.
That's an easy fix, though. Clerics pray to their deity to grant them spell power every day. Simply say that, when they are preparing spells, their deity refuses to grant them any sort of resurrection spell because they disapprove of tampering with the balance of life and death or whatever.
...but then your party still has tons of gold to spend on other spells with expensive material components. You're better off just cutting their income than trying to slap bandaids on every little thing that they could abuse with sufficient gold.


Crafting requires only money and time.

It also requires and investment of feat slots and XP. If they're leveling slowly enough that it's going to be a very long time before they have a chance to pick a new feat, they may be unwilling to put their first choice of feat on hold just for the opportunity to spend XP and make it take even longer to pick up the feat that they really wanted.
It would certainly be a significant advantage to the party to have a character who can craft whatever specific items they happen to need rather than be at the mercy of RNG to supply them with decent loot, but that one player could end up pretty far behind in terms of character development.

[Maat Mons]

You can substitute for the xp cost of crafting with dark craft xp (Book of Vile Darkness, p27), the souls of your vanquished enemies (Book of Vile Darkness, p33), or someone else's xp (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20060526a).

In the distant future, if party members hit 5th level, an Artificer would be able to salvage the xp from an item he doesn't want, and use it to build an item he does want.

[reddir]

If you remove the ability to (easily) buy magic items, it incentivizes crafting magic items. Crafting requires only money and time. So if you don't want PCs converting their money into magic items that way, you'll either need to ensure they never have any time to spare, or house-rule magic items into requiring some resource other than money and time.

So you could do a thing where, instead of having a gp and xp cost, every crafted magic item has a, let's say, magicite cost. Magicite crystals, and things that derive from them, are the true currency of power. Gold is just a shiny thing muggles barter with.


It also requires and investment of feat slots and XP. If they're leveling slowly enough that it's going to be a very long time before they have a chance to pick a new feat, they may be unwilling to put their first choice of feat on hold just for the opportunity to spend XP and make it take even longer to pick up the feat that they really wanted.

I'm still pondering magic item crafting, it has several facets and I'm trying to wrap my head around how they all might interact.

1) XP is super precious to anyone who wants to level so I doubt a PC would want to spend it...and any NPC crafters would be national treasure with their custom creations having long waiting lists, so effectively not available for just gp.
2) Having Deities being able to contribute something to make modifying existing/found magic items possible - ex, a +1 sword into a +2 sword, or refill the charges on a wand, or improve an item of Cure Light Wounds into an item of Cure Moderate Wounds... this is almost all rp balanced (deities) and I am having a hard time setting any rules for this... but it does lend itself to applying it on an "as needed" basis and it being completely unavailable when it would be inconvenient.
3) "Magicite" is an interesting idea, and can even be combined with concept 2 above. It too can be placed by fiat, and can be moderated to only move enchantments from one object to another, or full-out 'embed' a spell effect into an item as usual, etc.

But yeah, having trouble putting all this together in some coherent way that also seems natural. But the topic is a good one and needs to be considered.

[RandomPeasant]

The easiest way to solve your problem is to cap the power people can get from magic items. There are two parts to that. First, cap the power people can get from individual items (this also helps the balance of SAD and MAD classes). Second, cap the number of items people can have at once (slots kind of do this, but in practice it's not enough). There are multiple ways to do either of those, but if you do that people will eventually reach a point where they simply don't get any more power from magic items, and it won't matter how much money they get.

[reddir]

The DMG's recommended solution is to just cut the treasure rewards from encounters.
...
So if your characters are gaining XP very slowly, they should also be gaining GP very slowly. Cut their XP gain in half and you should also be cutting the treasure they find in half.

It seemed to me that doing this might make it difficult to justify facing the danger and hardship of adventuring. If one can earn as much or more by crafting or getting a job, why not just do that?

The only solution that I came up for this, other than the PCs just being adrenaline junkies, was to have periodic monster waves if the surrounding area is not cleaned out regularly...but I hate the grimdark settings and this seemed to be leaning in that direction... unless the settlements were prosperous enough to pay the PCs to do this in which case there really is no reduction in gp gain.


That would probably be spell components. Death has a bit less impact if your characters have a gross overabundance of gold to throw at resurrection-type spells. Literally any cleric of sufficiently high level can cast spells to raise the dead with nothing more than a day's notice so they can prepare the spell in the morning.
That's an easy fix, though. Clerics pray to their deity to grant them spell power every day. Simply say that, when they are preparing spells, their deity refuses to grant them any sort of resurrection spell because they disapprove of tampering with the balance of life and death or whatever.

I don't mind this so much. For one thing, they do need to find a high enough level Cleric to do the casting and this might be very inconvenient, a whole quest in itself. Slow xp gain is for both PCs and NPCs alike. For another, it makes it a little easier to justify going out on one life-or-death adventure after another even when a character has enough gp to live quite well for the next 10 years if the "or-death" part is closer to "or-temporary-coma".

I have been toying with the idea that Deities are somewhat strict on who is allowed to be blessed by the spell effects they make available through their Clerics...so a simple alignment restriction (as liberal as non-Evil or a single component matching the Deity) or up to full on "only my worshipers"... but this somehow feels so very wrong in the context of D&D, even if it makes a lot of sense. Does anyone do this, if so how does it play out in your games?

[reddir]

You can substitute for the xp cost of crafting with dark craft xp (Book of Vile Darkness, p27), the souls of your vanquished enemies (Book of Vile Darkness, p33), or someone else's xp (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20060526a).

This seems like an excellent premise for some villains that need to be dealt with! It is both very "Evil" and intolerable, and completely sensible in the context of a pittance of xp gains. Thank you for the idea!


In the distant future, if party members hit 5th level, an Artificer would be able to salvage the xp from an item he doesn't want, and use it to build an item he does want.

Yeah, something to consider how to deal with. There would have to be restrictions... at minimum the xp would be 'conditioned' by how it was used, now restricted to that school of magic that it was used to effect. I think it would be okay to transfer the spell effect wholesale to another item - no new effect but copy/paste the existing effect to another item.

Above (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25127815&postcount=4), poster Maat Mons recommended using a McGuffin like "Magicite" for magic item crafting. In this case, maybe the Artificers need some to do any kind of xp salvage, on top of any restrictions on how that salvaged xp might be reused.

[reddir]

The easiest way to solve your problem is to cap the power people can get from magic items. There are two parts to that. First, cap the power people can get from individual items (this also helps the balance of SAD and MAD classes). Second, cap the number of items people can have at once (slots kind of do this, but in practice it's not enough). There are multiple ways to do either of those, but if you do that people will eventually reach a point where they simply don't get any more power from magic items, and it won't matter how much money they get.

This is a sensible way to do this, but I kind of want to see people come up with gonzo ideas on how to do things with lots of random magic, only 1 or 2 pieces of which would be what they would 'normally' choose if they had the option.

EDIT - do you see any other problems with a very slow xp rate, beyond concerns about magic items?

[icefractal]

Something that may or may not be a problem, but if gold can't buy items, and it can't buy mercenaries, and judging by those it probably can't do anything else adventure-deciding (like bribing people rather than needing to fight or sneak past them) ... then I wouldn't expect players to be excited by it.

Like, being rich is significant IC, but ultimately the PCs can't taste the fine food and they can't see the fine artwork or performances. And a character whose primary motivation was just affording a luxury lifestyle would probably retire from adventuring at the point they achieved that. So for many characters, it's just not a motivation to go into a dungeon for.

Random magic items are (a potential motivation) though. Although in a world as you describe, where crafting was severely limited and supply was scarce, I would expect a lot of magic item trading to be going on. So you might want to figure out the rules for that, because it seems like a natural thing to try if the PCs find something that's good but not usable by their particular party.

[Vaern]

It seemed to me that doing this might make it difficult to justify facing the danger and hardship of adventuring. If one can earn as much or more by crafting or getting a job, why not just do that?

The only solution that I came up for this, other than the PCs just being adrenaline junkies, was to have periodic monster waves if the surrounding area is not cleaned out regularly...but I hate the grimdark settings and this seemed to be leaning in that direction... unless the settlements were prosperous enough to pay the PCs to do this in which case there really is no reduction in gp gain.

I guess it's kind of a question of just how hard you're throttling back XP income. A 1st level encounter is supposed to give an average of 300 gp, so even if you're only giving 10% rewards for encounters your party is still getting 30 gold from an encounter which is more than a crafter should expect to make in a week. Once you get into level 2 encounters your expected income doubles, making the more challenging encounters much more appealing.
Granted, that's not all strictly coin - it's also including the value of magic items that are found along the way, which is a bit harder to cut down to 10% per encounter... unless you simply reduce the sell price of magic items? Make it, like, 10% or 20% of the purchase price instead of the standard 50%? If magic items are less impactful as a source of gold then you really don't have to worry about handing out fewer magic items at all.


I have been toying with the idea that Deities are somewhat strict on who is allowed to be blessed by the spell effects they make available through their Clerics...so a simple alignment restriction (as liberal as non-Evil or a single component matching the Deity) or up to full on "only my worshipers"... but this somehow feels so very wrong in the context of D&D, even if it makes a lot of sense. Does anyone do this, if so how does it play out in your games?
By RAW, if the cleric offends his deity or violates his code of conduct, the deity can strip his power away until he atones. I don't think you should prevent a cleric from using his spells once you've allowed him to prepare them, but you can certainly punish him for using them in an inappropriate way if it becomes problematic.

[icefractal]

By RAW, if the cleric offends his deity or violates his code of conduct, the deity can strip his power away until he atones. I don't think you should prevent a cleric from using his spells once you've allowed him to prepare them, but you can certainly punish him for using them in an inappropriate way if it becomes problematic.
I'm gonna recommend not to do this.

"Surprise, you lose your powers!" is almost universally hated by players. And because it's driven by metagame considerations, it can make the god in question look like a random jerk. And really, a devoted and very wise Cleric should know what their deity does and doesn't disapprove of, it shouldn't be a surprise.

Furthermore - what would even be the purpose of limiting resurrection here? If the PC instead stays dead, and the player brings in a new character, has that made the game better? In what way, if so?

[reddir]

Something that may or may not be a problem, but if gold can't buy items, and it can't buy mercenaries, and judging by those it probably can't do anything else adventure-deciding (like bribing people rather than needing to fight or sneak past them) ... then I wouldn't expect players to be excited by it.

Bribing is definitely in! I mean, you can't really bribe monsters, but guards and informers and such are sure targets if you have enough gp to pay directly or obtain something they want/need. I really like the rp options that come with this. And I'd think it wouldn't work on the really committed villains so it wouldn't derail an entire adventure, at most clear the entry parts and maybe ease some of the intermediate scenes.

Any other adventure-deciding ways to use gp that I should keep in mind? I don't want to just blanket stop everything - I'd rather plan for things that might come up and have them improve the experience offered. Magic Items and Mercenaries are more heavily restricted because the other ways of keeping them in check (which I could think of) seemed far more intrusive.


Random magic items are (a potential motivation) though. Although in a world as you describe, where crafting was severely limited and supply was scarce, I would expect a lot of magic item trading to be going on. So you might want to figure out the rules for that, because it seems like a natural thing to try if the PCs find something that's good but not usable by their particular party.

Yup!

I want to come up with some price multiplier for the magic items, especially for those items that are more conventionally useful. Auctions would be a really important and potentially fun or at least complex adventure in such a setting.

I have gotten only as far as trading magic for magic, at some loss to the PCs because they want things within the next few months rather than being willing to wait a few years to find an ideal trade.

[reddir]

By RAW, if the cleric offends his deity or violates his code of conduct, the deity can strip his power away until he atones. I don't think you should prevent a cleric from using his spells once you've allowed him to prepare them, but you can certainly punish him for using them in an inappropriate way if it becomes problematic.


I'm gonna recommend not to do this.

"Surprise, you lose your powers!" is almost universally hated by players. And because it's driven by metagame considerations, it can make the god in question look like a random jerk. And really, a devoted and very wise Cleric should know what their deity does and doesn't disapprove of, it shouldn't be a surprise.

Furthermore - what would even be the purpose of limiting resurrection here? If the PC instead stays dead, and the player brings in a new character, has that made the game better? In what way, if so?

I didn't mean having the Cleric lose any power or such. I meant not allowing the Cleric to use the "blessing" on anyone the Deity did not approve of for whatever reason.

It could even be justified with existing mechanics in an impersonal way - Cure spells harm the undead...maybe power (spells) from Good Deities (delivered via their Clerics) can only harm Evil characters, etc.

[reddir]

I guess it's kind of a question of just how hard you're throttling back XP income. A 1st level encounter is supposed to give an average of 300 gp, so even if you're only giving 10% rewards for encounters your party is still getting 30 gold from an encounter which is more than a crafter should expect to make in a week. Once you get into level 2 encounters your expected income doubles, making the more challenging encounters much more appealing.

I'm scared to say :smalleek: It is horribly terrible looking without context and maybe only works for a particular style of setting that most would immediately "nope" out of even considering. I only came to it after trying to figure out how to set up a setting that would work in a particular way - I would have thought it crazy otherwise.

Maybe consider it as a kind of slower than usual milestone leveling? So really the only benefits of smaller adventures/quests are treasure and maybe reputation/gratitude.

[Harrow]

It shouldn't be too difficult to manage, but do remember to make poisons more difficult to get ahold of than just spending money on them. Normally, they get out-competed by magic items, and your party won't be able to afford to go all-out with them every fight, but I could see many a boss encounter ending swiftly after the important guy is hit with three doses of black lotus extract before he gets his first initiative. Again, it's simple enough to say "those are illegal, good luck finding them without getting arrested" but I bring it up because it's also easy to forget.

[reddir]

It shouldn't be too difficult to manage, but do remember to make poisons more difficult to get ahold of than just spending money on them. Normally, they get out-competed by magic items, and your party won't be able to afford to go all-out with them every fight, but I could see many a boss encounter ending swiftly after the important guy is hit with three doses of black lotus extract before he gets his first initiative. Again, it's simple enough to say "those are illegal, good luck finding them without getting arrested" but I bring it up because it's also easy to forget.

Ah, poisons. I never really see them in play so they hadn’t even crossed my mind.

Yeah, loads of gp and no magic to spend it on could make these very attractive.

Thank you! Both for the warning and the potential solution.

[AvatarVecna]

As far as crafting goes, you need time, money, and XP. This particular setup makes money more plentiful, and XP more scarce. Fortunately...you can buy XP, at least for the purposes of crafting. Normally, it's an awful deal:

1) You buy a magic item from the market that would normally cost (as an example) 75000 gp, 0 XP, and 1 day (at most).

2) You craft that item yourself. This costs 37500 gp, 3000 XP, and 75 days (assuming no crafting cost reductions). However, you could buy crafting XP in the form of Distilled Joy (200 gp for 2 XP worth when crafting) or in the form of Liquid Pain (200 gp for 3 XP worth when crafting). Buying enough Liquid Pain to cover the XP costs would require 200000 gp in addition to the materials to actually build the item in the first place (and using Distilled Joy would cost 300000 gp instead). So you'd end up paying 337500 gp, 0 XP, and 75 days.

Option 2 is, obviously, inherently, worse than option 1 in a normal setup. But in a setup where, for example, XP is gained at 1/25th the normal pace, and gold acquisition is more or less left untouched...

...

Let's assume a 4-man band for our party, facing typical challenges for a party of their level, but getting 1/25th the normal XP. Reaching 2nd level requires 1000 XP. One way that's more or less in line with DMG guidelines that could reach this would be 40 encounters at CR 1/3, 100 at CR 1, 20 at CR 2, 20 at CR 3, and 20 at CR 5. There's more powerful encounters than adventurers this level would typically face, but the GP-to-XP ratio ends up about the same so it doesn't make much difference. Assuming standard treasure distribution for those encounters, the PCs will have acquired 96000 gp worth of stuff by the time they reach lvl 2. Assuming maybe 4 fights per day, it'll take the party 50 days to reach lvl 2 in this fashion, assuming they're constantly adventuring. If they're being upstanding citizens a lot of the time, it might take much longer - maybe they have a day of adventure per week, so it basically takes them a full year to gain enough XP to level (with a couple extra weeks of downtime to properly level up).

The party then marches towards 3rd lvl, needing another 2000 XP to get there. One way that's more or less in line with DMG guidelines that could this this would be 20 encounters at CR 1/3, 40 at CR 1, 100 at CR 2, 50 at CR 3, 30 at CR 5, and 10 at CR 6. This would also acquire 187000 gp worth of stuff by the time they reach lvl 3. Assuming maybe 5 fights per day (they're tougher now), it'll take the party another 50 days to reach lvl 3, assuming they're constantly adventuring. Once more, let's assume one day of adventure per week on average, so one year to get enough XP and two weeks of downtime to level up properly.

From this perspective...of course the mages will consider a crafting feat. The magic items they find are weak and random - sure, they've probably found something suitable for their party members just by a matter of the sheer volume, but they've got tons and tons of gold, and that's going to be the case no matter how much they spend on gear that's reasonable for their level (via magic items trading and the like). And they've already got some 10 months of downtime per year they're not spending adventuring anyway - why not turn all that time and money into items they can actually use?

Crafting a Wondrous item would take 500 gp, 40 XP, and 1 day per 1000 gp of the market price, but we can buy 20 doses of Distilled Joy instead. This raises the cost to 3500 gp, 0 XP, and 1 day per 1000 gp of the market price. Normally, that's an awful awful deal, but when you can't just buy the magic items you want...well, alchemical substances are much easier to buy than magic items, and it's not like you're lacking in funds.

...

You could also use Liquid Pain to be even more efficient, but that's generally going to be harder to acquire since it's a drug that can only be obtained via torture of some kind. And if you're willing to go the super-evil route to make your magic happen, you may as well just abuse the sacrifice rules instead: buy a bunch of chickens for 1 copper each, have your best lore-whore sacrifice them until they nat 20 the Knowledge/Religion check, and turn it into dark craft XP. Wizard 3 maybe has 7 ranks, 3 int, and that's it, so we're looking at DC 30? That'll give 90 XP that can only be used on crafting, that's an item with market price 2250 gp (costing 1125 gp, 90 XP, and 3 days to craft). The way the math works out, 100 sacrifices has a 99.5% chance of you getting a nat 20 (and you can explicitly spam them, since only the best sacrifice for a day gets the reward). That's a single gold piece worth of chickens for 90 XP worth of crafting (instead of 6000 gp worth of Liquid Pain).

EDIT: If you were going to go this route, I'd also recommend picking up ways to reduce the time requirements - you're flush with gold, and you've got ways to turn gp into XP, but time is a resource that's harder to just buy outright. The more crafters the party has, the better. By the time you're into the low-mid levels, it might be worthwhile to invest some of your millions into a demiplane that can manipulate the flow of time.

[Efrate]

5e kind of does this and its pretty, imo. Since magic items are by default unbuyable and uncraftable, money loses nearly all value. If i cannot covert my loot into power, whats the point of loot? Finding a random +1 orc double axe loses nearly all meaning. If you need to trade say 5 plus 1 weapons and gold to get a plus 2 you want after months of waiting, it seems to make the entire concept of wealth meaningless.

It also hurts your non full casters a lot. It may be overstated how much mundanes need magic items to keep up, but turning money into power is all they have. A caster can change spells, learn some for free at each level, and alter their capabilities drastically overnight. Without the ability to convert wealth into power and options, your mundane is exactly the same for a very long time. Especially when they start needing magic to stay relevant.

The only other real source of power is feats, which are super slow gaining at slower xp, very limited in number and in scope, and largely unchangable. Random items also can make any build potentially unworkable. 3.5 does not handle organic growth well, and you might need certain items to fit a concept.

Take a stock tripper. They need a reach weapon, size and strength boosters, dex boosters for more AoOs, reach boosters and/or swift movement options to position correctly. You start as a burly half orc 20 strength. Never find anything other than your starting trip polearm. Now your concept, which requires at least combat expertise, combat reflexes, and improved trip, does not work after a few levels. You have invested 3 of your 7 feats, nearly half your power options, which are wasted and useless because 10 ft. reach and a plus 11 bonus at say level 6 does not help versus a huge creature with 15 ft reach and a size modifer that pretty much negates your bonus before bab and strength.

Sure your party casters can provide buffs to cover some of that, but if you need say 3 spells a combat, thats a significant portion of their resources tied up in helping you be competent. Also a lot of slots, a lot of rounds of actions. That can cause them to feel like sidekicks and be resentful, when they could use a single spell a combat to summon a creature that does that better. If they do, then your martials feel like their place is pointless because summons do their job better.

[AvatarVecna]

Honestly, what I'd suggest is that you allow magic items to be purchased, but however much you're reducing XP gains by, you're increasing magic item prices by on the market. The basic idea is, magic items cost XP to create. If XP is (for example) gained at 1/10th the normal rate, then XP is 10 times as valuable as it normally is. Since you have to spend XP in some fashion to create magic items, they are that much rarer, and that much more valuable to the people who made them. Additionally, since the only people who make powerful magic items are going to be powerful mages, they probably got where they are by doing a lot of adventuring, so they're already flush with cash. If they're selling their XP in physical form, it isn't going to be for a pittance. Probably also make this adjustment for the base prices of spellcasting services, just because getting to high level is rarer, and that's just how supply/demand curves work. This probably also affects the demographics-by-level for a given community in drastic ways.

Anyway, all of this would result in PCs who have a great deal of wealth, but have (effectively) the same amount of wealth they normally have for the purposes of purchasing magic items. This means that after they've bought the magic items they think they can afford, the money left over for non-magic-item purchases is (for example) 10 times as much as it normally is. This is more likely to be an amount that tempts players to invest that money into a business or a home base or arming a mercenary force under their command.

[Crake]

It seemed to me that doing this might make it difficult to justify facing the danger and hardship of adventuring. If one can earn as much or more by crafting or getting a job, why not just do that?

Even at 50% xp/treasure, hell, even at like 20%, you're still looking at VASTLY more wealth than crafting or getting a job, assuming you mean the craft skill crafting, and not magic item crafting. If you mean magic item crafting, remember that there's rules in DMG2 for running a magic item shop, and long story short, there's a VERY small market for magic items, just because you can generate 500gp worth of value per day, doesn't mean you'll be able to move 500gp worth of value per day.

[AvatarVecna]

5e kind of does this and its pretty, imo. Since magic items are by default unbuyable and uncraftable, money loses nearly all value. If i cannot covert my loot into power, whats the point of loot? Finding a random +1 orc double axe loses nearly all meaning. If you need to trade say 5 plus 1 weapons and gold to get a plus 2 you want after months of waiting, it seems to make the entire concept of wealth meaningless.

Seconded. Basically all 5e players quickly reach a point where "more money" just doesn't mean anything to them...with one exception that I'll talk about in a minute.


It also hurts your non full casters a lot. It may be overstated how much mundanes need magic items to keep up, but turning money into power is all they have. A caster can change spells, learn some for free at each level, and alter their capabilities drastically overnight.

I don't think it's overstated although I can understand that it's kinda an opinion thing. The opinion I've seen from somebody who is otherwise pretty generally correct is that fighter and the like can keep up specifically via putting optimization efforts into WBLmancy (which they lamented seems to only ever occur to forumites when it comes to discussing artificers).


Without the ability to convert wealth into power and options, your mundane is exactly the same for a very long time. Especially when they start needing magic to stay relevant.

So, the one class in 5e that always cares about money? Wizard. Wizard cares about money because money is more spells in their spellbook. If you have XP gained at 1/10th the rate, and thus gp gained at 10 times the rate, then wizards will have 10 times the money to throw into learning new spells. This is probably another place where the costs could be x10'd (or whatever), since scrolls and high-level wizard spellsbooks are that much rarer? At least, rarer via buying. But if you're rolling for random items, the wizard is gonna end up finding sooooooo many scrolls.

[Efrate]

Scrolls are nice and common on the random charts. But no magic mart likely means no easy access to scrolls, so how many color spray scrolls matter? Especially using dmg charts you are not getting much after a point.

The other big thing coming from something similar in 5e is DR does not exist, and immunity is much rarer. Resistance to something (1/2 damage) is much more common. So if you do not have a magic weapon, you do half damage, but not 0 damage because something has dr 10/magic. You chip in for 5 at a time but at least you are progressing and having an impact.

[LunaticChaos]

You know, everyone is focusing on one response to this sort of thing. But well, there is another response players can pursue.

Biggest problem I see with a high gp, but low XP and random Magic Treasure game is actually the game changing its type of gameplay. If I'm getting low amounts of xp and magic gear that I don't want from adventuring. Then I can't buy what I do want, but I'm getting loads of gp, I'd rather focus on the gp game.

Mercenaries and magic items are the most obvious uses of GP in DnD, but clever players who are given an abundance of gp will turn around and go the Merchant route. Such things will EVENTUALLY open up the ability to buy magic items in addition to giving them power and influence far beyond their slowly improving character level.

If you're doing the low xp, high gp thing for your game I'd suggest reading Cityscape and Power of Faerun unless your players are completely opposed to doing anything other than adventuring.
Looking into Traveler could also be useful as that game loves trading.

Edit: Also as an afterthought. Given the random magic items, there is a chance to breed player resentment between each other and with you. If one player gets something they want (or worse continuously gets things they want because certain things are weighted towards base sorts of builds) but other players are not getting what they want nor have any expedient recourse to get what they want, that tends to be a very unpleasant experience.

[AvatarVecna]

It seemed to me that doing this might make it difficult to justify facing the danger and hardship of adventuring. If one can earn as much or more by crafting or getting a job, why not just do that?

It's still more efficient because adventuring is stupid good at making money.

Let's say XP is advancing at 1/25th the normal speed, and thus so is GP (based on the quotes). That means that by the time a 4-person party reaches 2nd level (after 50 days spent adventuring, with the encounters described in one of my previous posts), they will have acquired 3840 gp (so each person made 960 gp, which is right around where WBL says they should be). 960 gp over the course of 50 days of work is 19.2 gp/day or 134.4 gp/week.

Crafting via the Craft skill...okay, so let's work backwards. Let's say you want to make a profit of 3840 gp over the course of 7 weeks (which is basically 50 days). If you have the Apprentice (Craftsman) feat, then upfront you're paying 7/30ths the market price in materials to try and make the item. And If you're Favored In Guild, not only are you selling for full market value via the guild (since normally, most PCs can maybe sell for half market value), you sell for 105% market price. 21/20 - 7/30 = 49/60. This means to make at least 3840 gp of profit in that time period, the item you were trying to craft needs a market price of approximately 4702.6 gp. That means you that to make this profit in 7 weeks, you need to make 6718 sp of progress per week. The best-case scenario is that you've stacked up Accelerated Crafting high enough to reach DC 82, and you can hit exactly DC 82 every single week for 7 weeks in a row (this could be as low as +72 if you can get 7 nat 20s in a row). The most-likely scenario is that you've got a bonus that can hit the DC even on a nat 1, but you're averaging 10.5 (since you can't take 10 on Craft checks AFAIK?), which would put your bonus at +77, with you always hitting the DC 78 but sometimes getting quite far ahead of that (and you'd end up making weekly progress averaging 6825 sp. So even in a scenario where adventuring makes money waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay slower than it normally does, you'd need at least Craft +62 to even contemplate trying to make money quicker via normal methods. Minimum +62, as a lvl 1 character whose spent three feats already and can't really have magic items that boost skill checks. If you want to be comparable in terms of effort and profit.

And this was making a lot of assumptions in favor of crafting profit - if you don't have those three feats, if you're not a guild member, the profit margin is even harsher and your bonus needs to be much higher. If you're an unaffiliated adventurer looking to settle down at the ripe old level of 1 but you still wanna make lvl 1 adventurer profits off your craft skills, the base item being crafted probably needs to be worth 23040.5 gp on the market, meaning you need at least a +162 (and the aforementioned 7 nat 20s in a row), or +176 if you're not relying on luck even a little bit. But hey, now you've got three feats you could spend to try and wrangle that bonus!

Profession is even worse off. Here, your weekly profit is half your profession check in gp. Now over the course of 7 weeks, you need to consistently average a check result of 1098 - that gives you weekly profit of 549 gp, which adds up to 3843 gp over 7 weeks, just pulling ahead of those adventurers!

The only potential path to risk-free money that makes adventuring give less profit is selling spellcasting services, and even that's a big question mark for most casters. The main issue is gonna be a matter of supply and demand - that is, whether there is somebody with both the desire for the magic you have available and the money to pay for it. You need to make 76.8 gp/day for this to work. You need to essentially be building for this particular profit method - it can't just be something that naturally arises from your adventurer build. A theoretical best-case scenario is something like...an Unseelie Fey/Magic-Blooded/Star Elf Sorcerer 1 who is venerable, put an 18 in Cha, inherited a +5 Cha tome from a dead relative, and took two flaws so they could have Iron Will, Reserves Of Strength, and Spell Thematics. When selling their thematic spells and getting stunned for a few rounds after casting, they'll be casting at CL 5, with 5 cantrips and 6 1st lvl spells. That's a max profit of 425 gp/day, more than 5 times as much as what the adventurer makes. But again, this is assuming the much much slower rate of gold acquisition via adventuring and it's assuming that there's people in your community willing to buy all of your snazzy showoffy spells for 25 gp/50 gp each. Oh yeah and all of this is assuming that PCs don't sell spellcasting services at half price the way they do basically everything else (although if you're trying hard enough, even that can't stop you from turning a profit this way, it just makes it much harder than it would otherwise be).

In general, adventuring is riskier than other ways of making money. But even in a scenario like this, unless you're really abusing the spellcasting services stuff, it's far more lucrative.


Scrolls are nice and common on the random charts. But no magic mart likely means no easy access to scrolls, so how many color spray scrolls matter? Especially using dmg charts you are not getting much after a point.

The other big thing coming from something similar in 5e is DR does not exist, and immunity is much rarer. Resistance to something (1/2 damage) is much more common. So if you do not have a magic weapon, you do half damage, but not 0 damage because something has dr 10/magic. You chip in for 5 at a time but at least you are progressing and having an impact.

Clarifying that my response wasn't really meant to be contradicting what you said as much as building on it. And you're right that random magic item generation can't just give wizards access to whatever scrolls they want, but that it can give them access to an awful lot of scrolls they want just means it's that much more weighted in favor of casters in general (and wizards in particular) then we were already figuring it to be.

[Maat Mons]

Out of curiosity, how much real-life time are you expecting to pass between level-ups? In groups I've played in, between the frequency with which we can have game night, how late at night we're willing to game to, and the amount of time it takes us to resolve combats, I think it takes us on average over a month to hit a new level.

One person threw out the hypothetical case of leveling at 1/25th the normal rate. For my groups, that probably make it take over 2 years of real-life time to hit 2nd level. I've never had any game I've ever been in last that long. So for us such a game would begin and end at 1st level.



What level would your game start at? If it's 1st, you have to bear in mind that that's a very deadly level.

A critical hit from an orc of average (for an orc) Strength wielding a greataxe deals, on average 25.5 damage. That's enough to take a Fighter with 18 Constitution from full hp down to -11, which is to say, dead. A critical hit with a (non-composite) longbow by someone with the Point-Blank Shot feat deals 16.5 damage on average. That would bring a Wizard with 14 Constitution from full hp down to -10. Again, dead.

If you figure that around 1 in 20 hits is a critical hit, a critical hit from a competent enemy has better-than-even odds of being an insta-kill, and a character will typically be targeted by several attacks every battle... your odds of never seeing level 2 because of one unlucky roll are pretty high even in a normal game. And as the number off fights you have to win to get to 2nd level increases, your odds of survival get lower and lower.

Personally, if my co-players tried to bring me back to life with Reincarnate, I'd choose to stay dead. And Raise dead costs over 5,000 gp, which isn't cheap for a 1st-level group,

[AvatarVecna]

Edit: Also as an afterthought. Given the random magic items, there is a chance to breed player resentment between each other and with you. If one player gets something they want (or worse continuously gets things they want because certain things are weighted towards base sorts of builds) but other players are not getting what they want nor have any expedient recourse to get what they want, that tends to be a very unpleasant experience.

I got curious, so I decided to take my calcs on encounter numbers from a previous post and figure out what treasure PCs might get out of those random hoards.

Link to rolls

Coins
107000 cp
26600 sp
7240 gp
280 pp

Gems
1 gem worth 10 gp
3 gem worth 20 gp
2 gem worth 30 gp
1 gem worth 50 gp
1 gem worth 60 gp
3 gem worth 70 gp
1 gem worth 80 gp
1 gem worth 120 gp

Art
1 art object worth 300 gp
1 art object worth 400 gp
1 art object worth 600 gp
1 art object worth 1300 gp
1 art object worth 4000 gp
1 art object worth 8000 gp

Alchemical
3 flasks of Alchemist's Fire
2 flasks of Acid
8 Smokesticks
2 flasks of Holy Water
5 doses of Antitoxin
2 Everburning Torches
3 Tanglefoot Bags

Armor
1 Small Chain Shirt
2 Medium Chain Shirt
2 Medium Breastplate
1 Medium Banded Mail
2 Medium Half-Plate
6 Medium Full Plate
1 Medium MW Heavy Wooden Shield

Weapons
1 MW Greataxe
1 MW Kama
1 MW Heavy Mace
1 MW Scimitar
1 MW Bastard Sword
2 MW Shortsword

1 MW Kukri
1 MW Whip

1 MW Light Crossbow
2 MW Dart
1 MW Composite Shortbow (+1 Str bonus)
2 MW Longbow
2 MW Composite Longbow (+1 Str bonus)
2 MW Composite Longbow (+2 Str bonus)

Tools/Gear
1 Crowbar
2 Small Steel Mirror
1 Spyglass
2 Climber's Kit

Minor Magic Items
1 Heavy Steel Shield +1

Potion of Magic Fang
Potion Of Protection From Arrows (10/magic)

Ring Of The Ram

Arcane Scroll of Hypnotic Pattern (lvl 2/CL 3) and Arcane Mark (lvl 0/CL 1)
Arcane Scroll of Charm Person (lvl 1/CL 1)
Divine Scroll of Resist Energy (lv 2/CL 3)
Divine Scroll of Bless (lvl 1/CL 1) and Cure Light Wounds (lvl 1/CL 1)

Wand of Bull's Strength

Cloak Of Resistance +2

It's quite an amalgamation of gear, and this is what they've got at the cusp of 2nd level assuming you're not screwing with the treasure distribution. I do find it kinda funny how they're just drowning in copper pieces.

[LunaticChaos]

I got curious, so I decided to take my calcs on encounter numbers from a previous post and figure out what treasure PCs might get out of those random hoards.

-Snipping rolls for brevity's sake-

It's quite an amalgamation of gear, and this is what they've got at the cusp of 2nd level assuming you're not screwing with the treasure distribution. I do find it kinda funny how they're just drowning in copper pieces.

It is quite an amalgamation of stuff and an absolutely disgusting amount of wealth at this level with nothing to do with in a typical game.

Though it does also bring up my point. Out of the likely things kept from the magic items, this loot set has 1 item for defensive heavy armor characters, 1 item that benefits the melee characters but needs to be used by the casters, and 2 items that would likely go to either our rogue or wizard/sorcerer.

If I'm looking at the right post of yours, this is going to be around 200 encounters worth of material they've had to gather (likely a bit of an exaggeration of what OP's intent is, but does illustrate things nicely). Given how long the average fight goes, we're looking at 100-200 hours worth of combat, which means if the players are only doing kick-in-the-door type play and going with an average 4 hour session. We're looking at 25-50 sessions of play, or roughly a half a year to nearly a year of weekly games (and lets be honest lot of people are lucky if they get that). And that's just pure combat, if we go with half combat half roleplay that time naturally doubles. Then if we add your typical table shenanigans most groups have you can probably add another 25% of time there.

So we could easily be looking at two years of sessions where only a few people got anything good(-ish) while everyone has gotten obscene amounts of gold but don't REALLY have anything worth doing with it unless you start investing into businesses, mercenaries, and land.

Of course, when I see the OP mention very slow, I'm expecting more 1/5 the normal rate. So the likely actual time we'd be looking at is only 3-5 months. And as a result much less loot and chances for any magic items. And any that do show up will be likely concentrated on one or two players while everyone else has a huge pile of gold and nothing worthwhile to spend it on for a normal game.

So yeah, that's still quite a lot of time for players to start resenting each other, especially if one of those items shows up early. And a lot of time for players to start resenting the DM because they keep getting gold but don't have anything worth doing with it.

On a side note: Good grief, processing all that roll info looks awful.

[AvatarVecna]

Though it does also bring up my point. Out of the likely things kept from the magic items, this loot set has 1 item for defensive heavy armor characters, 1 item that benefits the melee characters but needs to be used by the casters, and 2 items that would likely go to either our rogue or wizard/sorcerer.

I wanna build on this particular point with something that I noticed while rolling all that out. Let's put aside the odds of rolling a magic item at a given character level and just look at what happens when you do:




Minor
Medium
Major
Item


01-04
01-10
01-10
Armor & Shields


05-09
11-20
11-20
Weapons


10-44
21-30
21-25
Potions


45-46
31-40
26-35
Rings


-
41-50
36-45
Rods


47-81
51-65
46-55
Scrolls


-
66-68
56-75
Staffs


82-91
69-83
76-80
Wands


92-100
84-100
81-100
Wondrous




These next tables are used to determine what weapon you got if you rolled a masterwork weapon (via Mundane equipment roll in the loot tables) or a magic weapon (assuming you rolled Weapons on the above table).


WEAPON TYPE DETERMINATION



d%
Weapon Type


01-70
Common Melee Weapon


71-80
Uncommon Weapon


81-100
Common Ranged Weapon



COMMON MELEE WEAPONS



d%
Weapon


01-04
Dagger


05-14
Greataxe


15-24
Greatsword


25-28
Kama


29-41
Longsword


42-45
Light Mace


46-50
Heavy Mace


51-54
Nunchaku


55-57
Quarterstaff


58-61
Rapier


62-66
Scimitar


67-70
Shortspear


71-74
Siangham


75-84
Bastard Sword


85-89
Shortsword


90-100
Dwarven Waraxe



UNCOMMON WEAPONS



d%
Weapon


01-03
Orc Double Axe


04-07
Battleaxe


08-10
Spiked Chain


11-12
Club


13-16
Hand Crossbow


17-19
Repeating Crossbow


20-21
Punching Dagger


22-23
Falchion


24-26
Dire Flail


27-31
Heavy Flail


32-35
Light Flail


36-37
Gauntlet


38-39
Spiked Gauntlet


40-41
Glaive


42-43
Greatclub


44-45
Guisarme


46-48
Balberd


49-51
Halfspear


52-54
Gnome Hooked Hammer


55-56
Light Hammer


57-58
Handaxe


59-61
Kukri


62-64
Lance


65-67
Longspear


68-70
Morningstar


71-72
Net


73-74
Heavy Pick


75-76
Light Pick


77-78
Ranseur


79-80
Sap


81-82
Scythe


83-84
Shuriken


85-86
Sickle


87-89
Two-Bladed Sword


90-91
Trident


92-94
Dwarven Urgrosh


95-97
Warhammer


98-100
Whip





COMMON RANGED WEAPONS



d%
Weapon


01-10
Ammunition


11-15
Throwing Axe


16-25
Heavy Crossbow


26-35
Light Crossbow


36-39
Dart


40-41
Javelin


42-46
Shortbow


47-51
Composite Shortbow (Str +0)


52-56
Composite Shortbow (Str +1)


57-61
Composite Shortbow (Str +2)


62-65
Sling


66-75
Longbow


76-80
Composite Longbow (Str +0)


81-85
Composite Longbow (Str +1)


86-90
Composite Longbow (Str +2)


91-95
Composite Longbow (Str +3)


96-100
Composite Longbow (Str +4)





SCROLL TYPES

d%
Type


01-70
Arcane


71-100
Divine



NUMBER OF SPELLS ON A SCROLL



Scroll Type
Number Of Spells


Minor
1d3


Medium
1d4


Major
1d6






To summarize the dichotomy I'm highlighting:

1) The odds of a given magic item being an arcane scroll are 24.5% (minor, with 1d3 spells), 10.5% (medium, with 1d4 spells), or 7% (major, with 1d6 spells).

2) The odds of a given magic item being a magical version of the weapon you specialize in range from 0.01% (e.g. minor: weapon-->uncommon-->falchion) to 0.91% (major: weapon-->common melee-->longsword).

Now, not every arcane spell in core is a wizard spell, but...it's approaching every arcane spell. And in a normal game, the odds of finding some kind of magic weapon are going to be 5-10%. So if you find enough magic items, you're basically inevitably going to find two magic weapons that nobody wants, and you can trade those in for a magic weapon somebody does want. At the same time, that means that if you didn't roll a major magic item, you have better odds of finding a scroll for the wizard to use than you have to roll a magic weapon of any kind, let alone one generally suited to your playstyle, let alone one you've specifically invested resources into being good with.

This is a point worth mentioning regardless of the thread experience, but it is relevant to the thread because of the things being considered: a game where magic items are obtained either randomly or via disadvantageous bartering is always going to bias lightly in favor of casters in general (and wizards in specific), while biasing against noncasters (and fighter in specific). The ability to perform WBLmancy with your money might not be the "one easy trick for a good fighter" some people claim it to be, but taking away the opportunity to even try is going to hamper them more than anybody else.


On a side note: Good grief, processing all that roll info looks awful.

It's definitely harder processing 200 encounters worth of loot simultaneously, as opposed to just processing 1. :smalltongue:

[Gnaeus]

1) XP is super precious to anyone who wants to level so I doubt a PC would want to spend it...

Let’s say level 5-6. That’s 5000 exp. So if I were willing to drop one level, I could make 125000 GP worth of items. Without any shenanigans, no distilled joy or thought bottles etc. By raw, I would also then get more XP for being a level behind the party. But regardless, I’d HAPPILY drop a level and a feat to have WBL 7 levels above average party level. If I’m a wizard I get the feat for free. So I give up a second and a third level spell every day and I make 12 fully charged wands of my favorite third level spells? Sweet.

[Elkad]

How much is too much? Ten times?

My Item Familiar will be +10 by 8th level (270k gp to spend), since I can sacrifice gold and/or junk items directly to upgrade it with no crafting feats or XP needed. Plus all the other flat cost upgrades.

If the whole party does that, it's OK. If it's one guy with his +10/+10 QuarterRuneStaffOfNecromanticPower, you have a problem.

[Zombimode]

If you remove the ability to (easily) buy magic items, it incentivizes crafting magic items. Crafting requires only money and time.

Actually, crafting requires time and access to "magic supplies" that in turn have a gold cost. You're not directly converting gold pieces/treasure into magic items. Without access to theses supplies you can have all the money in the world but you won't be able to craft a single thing.

In a world where you can't simply buy magic items it raises the question if there even is a stable economy of such supplies.


In other words: if the PCs can't buy magic items with gold, they are unlikely to create them a well.

[LunaticChaos]

To summarize the dichotomy I'm highlighting:

1) The odds of a given magic item being an arcane scroll are 24.5% (minor, with 1d3 spells), 10.5% (medium, with 1d4 spells), or 7% (major, with 1d6 spells).

2) The odds of a given magic item being a magical version of the weapon you specialize in range from 0.01% (e.g. minor: weapon-->uncommon-->falchion) to 0.91% (major: weapon-->common melee-->longsword).

Now, not every arcane spell in core is a wizard spell, but...it's approaching every arcane spell. And in a normal game, the odds of finding some kind of magic weapon are going to be 5-10%. So if you find enough magic items, you're basically inevitably going to find two magic weapons that nobody wants, and you can trade those in for a magic weapon somebody does want. At the same time, that means that if you didn't roll a major magic item, you have better odds of finding a scroll for the wizard to use than you have to roll a magic weapon of any kind, let alone one generally suited to your playstyle, let alone one you've specifically invested resources into being good with.

This is a point worth mentioning regardless of the thread experience, but it is relevant to the thread because of the things being considered: a game where magic items are obtained either randomly or via disadvantageous bartering is always going to bias lightly in favor of casters in general (and wizards in specific), while biasing against noncasters (and fighter in specific). The ability to perform WBLmancy with your money might not be the "one easy trick for a good fighter" some people claim it to be, but taking away the opportunity to even try is going to hamper them more than anybody else.

I will build on this a bit. A game with random item generation doesn't just bias towards casters (and generally Wizards/Sorcerers), it bias' towards UMD rogues too (I say rogues because who else generally actually takes UMD, maybe Warlocks). A lot of minor magic items will have overlap for rogues and wizards/sorcerers as far as who would not only want them but get priority on. The Rings, Wands, Scrolls, and Wondrous Items will generally benefit one of those two party roles. And if you have something like a Beguiler in the party to fill both those roles and the other party members are slanted towards combat oriented builds the problem compounds.
Going with the minor table, 55% of the time a minor magic item shows up, chances are pretty good it'll be something that'll make UMD Rogues or Wizard/Sorcerers happy. Could jump that up to 89% with potions...BUUUUT potions are kinda hit and miss, for every nice potion you can get a Shillelagh too.

Meanwhile, your poor melee or mundane ranged has only about a 9-15% chance to get something they want, as their are some wondrous magic items and rings they'll want in the minor category. But some of them they don't get priority on. But worst case scenario they've got a 9% chance of getting what they want, even less chance if they are doing weapon focus builds. And this is actually likely even less of a chance as armors and weapons can also favor other roles. A +1 Leather Armor is not better than a fighter/Pally's nonmagical Full Plate Armor after all but the rogue will want it.

I do agree that WBLmancy Magimart is not the one-stop solution. It just becomes a major setback that you have to build around. In a game where you just don't get access to expedient and reliable magical items you actually want, I would expect builds that focus on Unarmed combat, Vow of Poverty, UMD, and Spellcasting marathon endurance to shine through.

That is in addition to players rebelling in ways to circumvent the problem or make it a meaningless restriction. Such as the big point of discussion in this thread crafting the items themselves, or going the merchant route which I find more likely given the restrictions on the magimart. Enough money and influence will get you access to the limited market eventually where you can actually get what you want.

[Thurbane]

In terms of ways to (ab)use excessive amounts of gold: I know mercenaries were mentioned, but how about mounts and attack creatures that have listed values?


Griffon eggs are worth 3,500 gp apiece on the open market, while young are worth 7,000 gp each. Professional trainers charge 1,500 gp to rear or train a griffon.

There's a lot of examples of these.

Would they fall under the same category as mercenaries?

[reddir]

I'm seeing a lot of concern about creating magic items...might it be best to say that it just can't be done? Maybe something like original D&D, "lost ancient arts", etc?

Except for scrolls.

Obviously this would remove the Artificer class from the setting.

--------------

Also, there have been suggestions for a cost multiplier for magic items...is this necessary?

I think making the "magic item economy" almost entirely separate from the gp economy might remove such a need. Magic items just can't be gotten for gp, and the best way to get rid of them is to trade them for other more useful magic items.

[reddir]

It's still more efficient because adventuring is stupid good at making money.

Let's say XP is advancing at 1/25th the normal speed, and thus so is GP (based on the quotes). That means that by the time a 4-person party reaches 2nd level (after 50 days spent adventuring, with the encounters described in one of my previous posts), they will have acquired 3840 gp (so each person made 960 gp, which is right around where WBL says they should be). 960 gp over the course of 50 days of work is 19.2 gp/day or 134.4 gp/week.

...

What would you say is the max tolerable divisor for gp gain, to keep adventuring worth the risk?

1/50? = 9.6 gp/day at 1st level?

1/100? = 4.8 gp/day at 1st level?

[icefractal]

I've seen a lot about what shouldn't be a use for gold in this campaign, but not what it should be used for. Even bribery seems like a "sort of" - you can bribe the outer guards who you could probably fight or sneak past pretty easily, but you can't significantly change the course of an adventure that way.

So:
1) What are the things that PC's can and should spend money on?
2) Are those things going to be "on camera" and make a difference to any significant degree?

It's ok if the answer to #2 is "no", but in that case gold is just going to be a cosmetic feature, and the other things you get from a quest (favor / reputation, magic items) will need to carry the entire weight.


Also, wow, I forgot how bad the random magic item charts are. Doesn't matter how rare, there's very little excitement in finding a bunch of scrolls and potions that literally aren't worth the actions to use them, or in finding yet more +1 weapons and armor after everyone is fully equipped. Definitely make up some better charts.



What would you say is the max tolerable divisor for gp gain, to keep adventuring worth the risk?Personally speaking, I'd rather adventure for non-gold-related reasons than adventure for unimpressive amounts of gold.

"We nearly died, but the village has fresh water again." - :smallbiggrin:
"We nearly died, but we got ... enough to buy ale for a week." - :smallyuk:

[reddir]

Re: how much real life time the campaign will run, how often played, etc

At this point I am just trying to flesh out an idea I had. I honestly don't know if, or for how long, it might ever be played.

I assume there would be frequent time skips and "downtime" might include things like skirmishes for hunting meat or putting down dangerous beasts in the area.

[reddir]

I got curious, so I decided to take my calcs on encounter numbers from a previous post and figure out what treasure PCs might get out of those random hoards.
...
It's quite an amalgamation of gear, and this is what they've got at the cusp of 2nd level assuming you're not screwing with the treasure distribution. I do find it kinda funny how they're just drowning in copper pieces.

This is really cool to see, gives me some sense of what to be ready for. Thank you for showing what the results of using those tables might be.

I love the crazy high cp numbers. I kind of want to think of dragons sleeping on copper pieces instead of gold - the story just got embellished over time...copper is soft enough to make sense, but it does corrode...

[Jack_Simth]

And if you're willing to go the super-evil route to make your magic happen, you may as well just abuse the sacrifice rules instead: buy a bunch of chickens for 1 copper each, have your best lore-whore sacrifice them until they nat 20 the Knowledge/Religion check, and turn it into dark craft XP. Wizard 3 maybe has 7 ranks, 3 int, and that's it, so we're looking at DC 30? That'll give 90 XP that can only be used on crafting, that's an item with market price 2250 gp (costing 1125 gp, 90 XP, and 3 days to craft). The way the math works out, 100 sacrifices has a 99.5% chance of you getting a nat 20 (and you can explicitly spam them, since only the best sacrifice for a day gets the reward). That's a single gold piece worth of chickens for 90 XP worth of crafting (instead of 6000 gp worth of Liquid Pain).Book of Vile Darkness, page 26, last sentence in the first paragraph under the "Sacrifice" header:
The main criteria are that the creature be alive and have an intelligence score of 3 or higher
Chickens don't cut it by default, as animals are Int-2 or less.

If you want to spam the sacrifice, you're going to need to go through a rather lot of Fox's Cunning spells, which is rather hard at low levels. Still, a Wizard-3 with full ranks in Knowledge(Religion) and an Int of 18, taking 10 to sacrifice a Chicken affected by Fox's Cunning gets a result of 20, and thus 60 Dark Craft XP (although doing it on a desecrated altar boosts that to 23 and thus 69)...

... assuming that the DM allows "cheating" in that manner to make a simple animal qualify (which I wouldn't generally assume, even though it does meet the rules as written).

[LunaticChaos]

I think making the "magic item economy" almost entirely separate from the gp economy might remove such a need. Magic items just can't be gotten for gp, and the best way to get rid of them is to trade them for other more useful magic items.

You can certainly create a separate economy for magic items, making it absolutely impossible for GP to have any use in gaining magic items. However this completely renders GP worthless to your party at that point, and thus the majority of your possible ways to reward your party without giving them magic items will be all but worthless.

A certain amount of GP is needed for daily needs and the like, but by in large your party is not going to care about it. You can have a dragon's horde worth of gold in front of them and they might pick up a bag's worth to cover their needs. Art, Jewelry, and Gems would be useless unless for spell components. Goods and nonmagical items will be just left where they are as they have no value to the party. Nonstandard rewards like land, buildings, and the like are only going to be marginally interesting as they often exist only to be GP sinks or ways to get more GP

And perhaps further compounding this problem. The Rich and Powerful are logically going to be using this secondary economy as well. A Noble or relatively well off merchant is not going to consider any amount of gold that you give them a real bribe, it will be entirely meaningless to them. And lower class people are only useful to a certain extent. You can DM Fiat it of course, but it will be highly immersion breaking.

Currency only exists at all, real world or in game, as a means to make trading easier. If a currency has no value when trying to attain a highly sought after resource then it will not be used.

[reddir]

In terms of ways to (ab)use excessive amounts of gold: I know mercenaries were mentioned, but how about mounts and attack creatures that have listed values?

<SRD quote>

There's a lot of examples of these.

Would they fall under the same category as mercenaries?

I actually like mounts and trained animals. But I would say it is important to have developed a real bond with the animals/beasts. This would include actually raising them from a very young age, or somehow developing a relationship of great trust if found after they are grown (lots of time and effort either way).

Just buying them is usually not enough to get the best out of them, and they might also be prone to rebel in stressful circumstances like combat.

[reddir]

I've seen a lot about what shouldn't be a use for gold in this campaign, but not what it should be used for. Even bribery seems like a "sort of" - you can bribe the outer guards who you could probably fight or sneak past pretty easily, but you can't significantly change the course of an adventure that way.

So:
1) What are the things that PC's can and should spend money on?
2) Are those things going to be "on camera" and make a difference to any significant degree?

It's ok if the answer to #2 is "no", but in that case gold is just going to be a cosmetic feature, and the other things you get from a quest (favor / reputation, magic items) will need to carry the entire weight.

I had lots of ideas for this but now my mind is all scrambled from focusing on magic items.

I would like gp use to matter, and at least have background gp usage be significant in rp encounters - things like supporting the economy, throwing parties, dressing well or trendy, doing things for the community/city, etc. influencing how NPCs see the characters, or at least what respect the NPCs think they need to give to the characters.

And it is not just coinage, there is also gems and art and such. Making use of jewels and art, either for oneself or one's properties, or using them as gifts for important people, all these can make a difference on the social side.


Also, wow, I forgot how bad the random magic item charts are. Doesn't matter how rare, there's very little excitement in finding a bunch of scrolls and potions that literally aren't worth the actions to use them, or in finding yet more +1 weapons and armor after everyone is fully equipped. Definitely make up some better charts.

I was hoping to stick at least a little to "typical" D&D conventions, hence my thinking of using the charts.

I will have to consider this more carefully it seems.


Personally speaking, I'd rather adventure for non-gold-related reasons than adventure for unimpressive amounts of gold.

"We nearly died, but the village has fresh water again." - :smallbiggrin:
"We nearly died, but we got ... enough to buy ale for a week." - :smallyuk:

Hmm, that would remove the "too much gp" issue altogether...

Wow, this suggestion takes the concept even further from the usual D&D expectations. I like it a lot for story reasons but it is so different that I can barely consider it clearly.

What might work is doing this for the general "everyday" type of encounters but have regular (or reduced by some ratio) treasure for the rarer, more stereotypical, quests.

[Harrow]

This is really cool to see, gives me some sense of what to be ready for. Thank you for showing what the results of using those tables might be.

I love the crazy high cp numbers. I kind of want to think of dragons sleeping on copper pieces instead of gold - the story just got embellished over time...copper is soft enough to make sense, but it does corrode...

I tried running a campaign once where the dragon at the end of the dungeon, who was supposed to be asleep on an enormous pile of treasure, was actually dead on an unreasonable pile of copper. The idea was to make the party fight through a dungeon, make the big reveal, then transition into a more logistics/strategy element as they try to recover as much of the treasure as possible before other looters caught on to their game and started taking it too.

The game pretty much fell apart after the reveal. The total value of the copper pile was such that, if each party member was given a full and even cut, their primary concern would be finding settlements big enough to buy what they wanted rather than if they could afford it. But, a pound of copper is 0.5 gold. My players just couldn't be bothered to figure out how to get any significant amount of it back to town. The pay-off just wasn't worth the hassle to them.

Moral of the story, make sure to talk with your players before a game and make sure you're all on the same page with regards to what kind of game it is you're all playing.

[Thurbane]

To get dragon hoards (of coins specifically) to be anywhere near as large as they look in most module art (or fantasy art in general), you pretty much have to use copper pieces. :smalltongue:

[Efrate]

That why they are reared to be war trained over the course of a year. A war horse does not balk and performs the same in all circumstances barring some kind of debuff. Same with a war trained whatever. That is the entire point of training. Sounds to me like dnd is not the system you want to use.

The point about useless currency stands. If you have a billion gold and the currency is sea shells, your gold is just a soft heavy metal to make something shiny. If the currency is magic items, then gold is worthless.

You trade magic for magic. Over time the economy would standardize so a 1st lvl cl 1 scroll is worth 1 something, and x scrolls equals a +1 sword (47ish), but due to other factors and the ease or lack thereof of transport, the scroll based economy would have an equivalent marker. Like how in the US a dollar is worth X amount of gold as a stand in. Everyone agrees that that marker is worth X amount of something, and that marker becomes your currency.

Which is functionally identical but more complicated to just using gold. Remove all art and gold from treasure tables and just use whatever your marker is, or just keep it to magic or not. But that exchange needs to have at least a guideline so trade can function. So when x magic items worth, or x/2, equal Y, you trade for Y. Which is functionally identical to gold.

If you need to trade more than half value, no one would keep anything. So i trade for a plus 1 sword, and its now worth one eighth of that? Just got screwed on this deal. No one would keep anything if it devalues that quickly, they would find a substitute thing that maintains value and just get rid of the items, which makes magic more common.

OP, you may wish to look at like e6 or something, or find another system. One of the draws of 3.5 is growing stronger and if you mess with the two easiest ways, gaining leveling and spending gold, it will frustrate most players. You are essentially saying I want you all to struggle and a lucky/unlucky roll kill you with no real hope of surviving.

If you want to do low magic grimdark you can, but I am sure there are other systems that do it better. It also hurts non casters severely, the amount of dead levels a non caster gets are insane, so slowing progress and then getting a level with no real benefit would make me want to not play anything but a tier 1 caster. No one else is going to get meaningful power or options for so long it would make me not want to play.

[LunaticChaos]

I had lots of ideas for this but now my mind is all scrambled from focusing on magic items.

I would like gp use to matter, and at least have background gp usage be significant in rp encounters - things like supporting the economy, throwing parties, dressing well or trendy, doing things for the community/city, etc. influencing how NPCs see the characters, or at least what respect the NPCs think they need to give to the characters.

And it is not just coinage, there is also gems and art and such. Making use of jewels and art, either for oneself or one's properties, or using them as gifts for important people, all these can make a difference on the social side.

Now if you're looking for suggestions here. I'd just suggest creating a currency unit that is above Gold and Platinum, then just plug that into the magic item creation formulas instead of GP (Honestly I'd knock the numbers down a bit if this is the path you take, like divide the gold values by 1000 to get the amount of this new currency for magic items). This way, there is a set value to magic items that players can understand. You can set the gold to this new unit's conversion rate to anything you'd like in order to control how easy it is to access magic items via gold.

Alternatively, you could make it so that the only way to purchase these things is through something like Liquid Pain or Ambrosia. Distilled forms of XP. We know how much XP costs in game (5 GP per XP by SRD), but this can be altered. Especially if its in forms that don't cost the Caster their own XP (Which is a much more valuable resource in what you've proposed). And however you decide to represent this resource, it would also be a more controlled market, but not one that's impossible to get into.

Of course EITHER WAY, what is considered valuable will drastically change in setting. So Art and Jewelry and the like follow suit and make use of this currency instead of gold, at least once it hits a certain value. The same for rare materials.


I was hoping to stick at least a little to "typical" D&D conventions, hence my thinking of using the charts.

I will have to consider this more carefully it seems.

Sorry mate, you've long since sailed that ship once you started contemplating significantly lowering XP and making magic items unpurchasable or at least harder to purchase. At least in 3.5


Hmm, that would remove the "too much gp" issue altogether...

Wow, this suggestion takes the concept even further from the usual D&D expectations. I like it a lot for story reasons but it is so different that I can barely consider it clearly.

What might work is doing this for the general "everyday" type of encounters but have regular (or reduced by some ratio) treasure for the rarer, more stereotypical, quests.

Honestly, it just kind of sounds like you want to play the Conan RPG or (if my memory is serving) Thieves' World.

[AvatarVecna]

I'm seeing a lot of concern about creating magic items...might it be best to say that it just can't be done? Maybe something like original D&D, "lost ancient arts", etc?

Except for scrolls.

Obviously this would remove the Artificer class from the setting.

--------------

Also, there have been suggestions for a cost multiplier for magic items...is this necessary?

I think making the "magic item economy" almost entirely separate from the gp economy might remove such a need. Magic items just can't be gotten for gp, and the best way to get rid of them is to trade them for other more useful magic items.

1) I'm not concerned about the ability to create magic items, I'm just saying that it's a good route to go, given the circumstances. I'm not sure why that should be punished.

2) My primary concern is that the way magic item distribution and obtainment is currently set up, it's going to bias against noncasters more than usual.

3) The point of slowing down XP gain tends to be "keeping things realistic" (i.e. "you can't go from lvl 1 to lvl 20 in a month"), and "keeping things realistic" flies in the face of keeping economies separate. That's just...not how economics works.


What would you say is the max tolerable divisor for gp gain, to keep adventuring worth the risk?

1/50? = 9.6 gp/day at 1st level?

1/100? = 4.8 gp/day at 1st level?

First off, I wanna be clear that I don't think it's a problem. Killing scary monsters to steal all the loot they've stolen is just going to be a more efficient way to make money than basically anything else you could possibly be doing, just because gold and gems and minor magic items are so plentiful in hoards such as those. If you're the best lvl 1 farmer there is, you probably have like a +15 without magic items, and you can reliably make 12.75 gp/week. A single adventurer who levels up from 1 to 2 is going to have acquired roughly 960 gp. Normally, leveling like this represents (at most) a week of work, and it gives you the equivalent of more than 75 weeks of work. Adventuring is somewhere in the neighborhood of making money 50 times as quickly as the best lvl 1 farmer. And that's okay.

Secondly, adventuring is normally worth the risk because adventuring largely isn't all that risky. Assuming that [X] is the level of an 8-person party, here's encounter distribution guidelines summarized:



Difficulty
Frequency
CR Range
Example Encounter


Easy
10%
CR<X
1 clone of a party member


Easy If Handled Properly
20%
CR<X (but its tricky)
1 alternate timeline clone of a party member


Challenging
50%
CR=X
2 clones of party members


Very Difficult
15%
X<CR<X+5
3-8 clones of party members


Overpowering
5%
X+4<CR
9+ clones of party members



You may notice that one of these categories (Overwhelming) is literally just "any fight where the PCs have less than 50% chance of winning", and PCs are advised to avoid those encounters and flee whenever possible You may also notice that only a small section of one of these categories (some Very Difficult fights) are even matches between the party and the enemies. Most encounters? Characters have an inherent power advantage, to say nothing of a potential advantage in the Action Economy or the benefits of teamwork and combos. Good tactics and strategy can turn fights that already bias in your favor even easier.

The only real exception is the really low levels, where adventuring is the riskiest because crits exist. A lvl 19 PCs has basically no reason not to go adventuring, since most anything he fights is going to be appropriately leveled in such a way that he's got an inherent power advantage going into the fight. Meanwhile, a lvl 1 PC also has that power advantage, but a lucky crit can take them out permanently. And the longer it takes to level up, the more fights you have to pick to reach lvl 2, which means the more likely it is you're going to accidentally get crit and freaking die. As an example of that:

In a normal game, an Orc is CR 1/2 and gives 25 XP to each party member. You'd have to fight 27 of them to level up. The four of you attacking the orc will kill it the first round, so the orc only gets a single attack and he's gotta make it count. Let's assume greataxe instead of falchion because it's cooler. You've got a 5% chance of threatening a crit, and maybe a 60% chance of confirming, so lets call that a 3% chance of getting a critical hit and dealing 3d12+12 (avg 31.5), which is enough to instantly kill one member of the party no matter who they are or how tough they are. Across 27 attacks, there's a 42% chance this will never occur - better than even chance that a crit just won't happen by the time the party gets to 2nd level. But if, for example, it takes them 5 times as long to level, well now it's 135 fights, and 135 attacks, and a ~1.64% chance that a crit will never occur. Somebody will get crit by an orc and ****ing die, it's just a question of who. Sure the orc will still die, but a party member will be dead. And the odds of even more crits is on the table too.

Once you get past lvl 1, getting insta-ganked by a random crit is far less likely, so PCs would be advised to pick fights in such a way that minimize the enemy's opportunities to crit them (fighting melee-only enemies from ranged, taking advantage of surprise rounds, locking targets down in such a way they can't barely fight back, that kinda stuff). It also means maybe picking fights with enemies so weak that them getting a single crit every now and then can't kill a party member.


Book of Vile Darkness, page 26, last sentence in the first paragraph under the "Sacrifice" header:
Chickens don't cut it by default, as animals are Int-2 or less.

If you want to spam the sacrifice, you're going to need to go through a rather lot of Fox's Cunning spells, which is rather hard at low levels. Still, a Wizard-3 with full ranks in Knowledge(Religion) and an Int of 18, taking 10 to sacrifice a Chicken affected by Fox's Cunning gets a result of 20, and thus 60 Dark Craft XP (although doing it on a desecrated altar boosts that to 23 and thus 69)...

... assuming that the DM allows "cheating" in that manner to make a simple animal qualify (which I wouldn't generally assume, even though it does meet the rules as written).

Ah, that's fair. Makes it harder, but there's probably some fast-breeding creature that's still pretty easy to kill. They wouldn't be a trade good the way chickens are, though.

[reddir]

Thanks everyone who pointed out things I’d missed as well as those who pointed out possible solutions.

Thanks also for sparking some ideas that might play out in this setting.

[Jack_Simth]

Ah, that's fair. Makes it harder, but there's probably some fast-breeding creature that's still pretty easy to kill. They wouldn't be a trade good the way chickens are, though.
Fast breeding creature that's Int-3 or better?
That fits the lore for Goblins, Kobolds, Orcs, et cetera. Of course, you'll have to find them, subdue them, transport them to the sacrificial pits, etcetera, and they're reasonably intelligent tool users that advance by level, so that might get tricky.

[AvatarVecna]

Fast breeding creature that's Int-3 or better?
That fits the lore for Goblins, Kobolds, Orcs, et cetera. Of course, you'll have to find them, subdue them, transport them to the sacrificial pits, etcetera, and they're reasonably intelligent tool users that advance by level, so that might get tricky.

See I was thinking more like getting a breeding chamber made for like...fiendish bats or something. fiendish rats maybe? I think rats breed faster. Fiendish sets Int to 3, so no worries there. Only need a few to start with, and half the reason it's being considered is because of how much time the adventurers have on their hands anyway (and the other half is because we have too much money, which will make getting our hands on just a couple fiendish rats hopefully not too problematic). At some point during the first couple years, we'll reach a point were the number of rats reaching maturity per day is about the same as the number of sacrifice attempts we wanna make per day, and we'll start up the XP machine. That has us with a stable enough breeding population while still getting to do our sacrificing frequently.

Kobolds could work too, I guess? Seems like trouble for the reasons you mentioned.

[King of Nowhere]

Some solutions:
1) money sinks - paternity suits, taxes, various fines, entertainment expenses, travel expenses, property ownership, local schmoozing, etc, etc.
2) no magic-marts - buying magic items is very difficult, they need to be traded for (usually giving up a better magic item unless one is willing to wait a long time for an even trade) or found on adventures.


be careful, because if buying magic items is "very difficult", i can easily foresee the party undertaking quests to find an owner willing to buy. you'll risk running afoul of grod's law. alternatively, you may declare that trading magic items is impossible, but it would make little sense if they keep finding random treasure they want to sell.
as for travel expences and other stuff, that may work at low levels, when the party is high level any expence will not impact significantly on their wealth. or they may just skip the hassle by teleportation.

[Silly Name]

I run a game with no "Magic Mart". This means a few things:

1. Item crafting is allowed. You need a laboratory, and to keep it stocked with magical reagents. Some stuff you can buy, other you may need to gather yourself or through underlings.

2. It's also possible to "commission" items, if you know someone able and willing to. Those people are rare, and they are often in the employ of kings and the like.

3. As an exception, potions are relatively easy to buy and sell, as most large cities will have at least a couple apothecaries, and even smaller settlements may have a cleric or druid who stocks up on potions they deem useful.

4. Liquid Pain/Liquid Joy does not exist.
4b. Any infinite gold/xp loop is banned, along with Gate-chaining and Wish-chaining.

My players spend a lot of money on base-building and diplomacy, which is often the only way to get in contact with the people and creatures that can get them the magic they need.
At high levels they build their own kingdoms, schools, temples, guilds, etc, which is where they "sink" a lot of money.

[gijoemike]

If a PC has 30 to 50 times the wealth of the average person as is being proposed here, and normal NPCs and lords are running off the standard craft and profession rules. They would never need to bribe the gate guards. They would own the gate guards.

With this much extra cash, the PCs will inevitably own the the local city. They could channel a portion of the money into purchasing the local inn and paying a bartender/serving girl. Then do the same with the general store. Pretty soon they would be bankrolling the yearly budget for the guard so the guard has better equipment. Spy/gossip/info networks? The PCs have invested heavily in those too and have them on retainer status. Then they have so much cash they buy land and a title. And each of these would have a trickle of income built in adding to the machine.


Most people here are talking about how craft and profession cannot compare to adventure gains. You are missing the point. It isn't an OR problem with this much extra gold. It is an AND issue. The PCs would hire on and pay the crafters/professionals. A small cut of the profits of said crafters and professionals would go to the business owner( PC ). This would add to the GP making engine.


This doesn't happen in normal games because the PCs can route money to adventuring gear and magic items. Take that way and you have spy masters and entire thieves guilds on retainer because they need something to do with that money. Also the PCs would own the bank.

[Silly Name]

IMHO, PCs becoming local rulers and people of power is neither a bug nor a problem. It's absolutely acceptable for an experienced and famous adventurer to end up in such a position. What method they prefer is up to the player, but I find it silly to imagine characters above level 10 not having some influence over the region they reside in.

It's also good for plot: players react very strongly to threats that menace their stuff. An hostile army wanting to conquer their town, a rival thieves' guild trying to oust the PCs' one... Those things work quite well as plot hooks, in my experience, because players are more invested in what they perceive to be "theirs".

[Efrate]

Depending on how slow leveling is, its not a level 10 pc, its a level 2 or 4 pc. wbl for a lvl 3 pc normally is 2700. If you prohibit magic buying, and just double treasure due to slower levelling after mw gear you have 1000s of gold left. That creates issues, because most nobles will not have those reserves and are around that level range, so why not just take over.

[Silly Name]

Depending on how slow leveling is, its not a level 10 pc, its a level 2 or 4 pc. wbl for a lvl 3 pc normally is 2700. If you prohibit magic buying, and just double treasure due to slower levelling after mw gear you have 1000s of gold left. That creates issues, because most nobles will not have those reserves and are around that level range, so why not just take over.

If the nobles of the setting are so, relatively speaking, "poor"... where did all that PC wealth come from?

[Harrow]

4b. Any infinite gold/xp loop is banned, along with Gate-chaining and Wish-chaining.


I don't have much experience with the system, but I've heard that Pathfinder just eliminated the XP cost to crafting magic items and item crafting feats are still considered a bit niche or situational. Not saying anyone is running their game wrong; infinite loops tend to be hard to balance around even when they don't seem to do anything on their own, because one unintended use can make things get out of hand quick. Just letting people know that if you want XP to be a barrier to crafting, a good deal of actual table play has shown it to be more of a bookkeeping annoyance and filter for less experienced players than it is an actual deterrent.

[Efrate]

Adventuring pays supremely well. Nobles have influence, taxes, etc. but if you run the numbers its not a lot and pcs especially in a game with slower levels but equal or improved treasure will quickly outpace a nobles taxation earnings, even at severe levels of taxation. Not adventuring just does not pay anything close.

A farmer makes 1 cp a week. A craftsman 1 sp. In a year that 5.2 gold or .52 gold.

A town of 10k working adults, half tradesmen half farmers or unskilled labor, generates a total amount of income of only 28600 gp a YEAR. Even at 20% tax the highest DMG gives thats 5720 gold a year in taxes. Assuming that all goes into the pocket of 1 noble and nothing spent on anything for the town, no government salaries etc. That is barely more than double a lvl 3 characters WBL. A single PC at 2x wbl at lvl 3 makes that in what a month max? More likely a week?

The numbers outpace even super wealthy nobles very quickly without magic items to spend it on.

[Silly Name]

My point was more about "where does all that coin come from?"

Wealth by level is wealth. Not total number of coins in your purse. It's the total value of your coin and possessions, both the stuff you carry on yourself and things like land deeds and castles and houses. ​A lot of forms of wealth aren't directly spendable to buy goods and services: you can't pay a craftsman with a 10,000 gp diamond, because the diamond isn't a form of wealth the craftsman has any use for, usually. A 100 gp pearl is good to use as the material component of an Identify spell, but you won't use it to buy a inn. You probably can't use it to bribe the local guard, either, because they can't split it up among themselves.

There probably aren't infinite hoards of gold coins to plunder around the world. You can stop PCs from controlling a region - if you want to stop them - just by assigning forms of wealth that aren't going to accepted as payment but still make them rich and influential.

[Efrate]

Its not raw coin necessarily, but without magic items it probably is. If you are gifted a house worth 1k gp for clearing a quest, I as a player or DM am not about to count that as wbl. Because I assume its understood that wbl is a measure of what you have/need for adventuring, and a house just is not needed.

[AvatarVecna]

My point was more about "where does all that coin come from?"

Wealth by level is wealth. Not total number of coins in your purse. It's the total value of your coin and possessions, both the stuff you carry on yourself and things like land deeds and castles and houses. ​A lot of forms of wealth aren't directly spendable to buy goods and services: you can't pay a craftsman with a 10,000 gp diamond, because the diamond isn't a form of wealth the craftsman has any use for, usually. A 100 gp pearl is good to use as the material component of an Identify spell, but you won't use it to buy a inn. You probably can't use it to bribe the local guard, either, because they can't split it up among themselves.

There probably aren't infinite hoards of gold coins to plunder around the world. You can stop PCs from controlling a region - if you want to stop them - just by assigning forms of wealth that aren't going to accepted as payment but still make them rich and influential.

Most craftsman can't make use of a 10k diamond, but that doesn't mean none of them can. A jewelry maker can most definitely make use of such a thing. An artisan's guild will know the value of such an item. Heck, you could sell it to the church - maybe you're not in a big enough town that there's a local cleric who can cast Resurrection, but go to a big enough community and there will be somebody who could really use that material component. And now you've traded a 10k diamond for 10k worth of coins, which anybody else in town will accept. That's kinda how economy works - you can't hand the players a billion gp in the form of a thousand castles or whatever and then say "nobody can buy castles but this still counts against your WBL" - they're just gonna sell them to the local government. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that they now have far more pure cash then they could ever reasonably spend.

It's also why most methods of getting rid of the magic item economy aren't all that realistic. Supply and demand can dictate price: sure, maybe nobody knows how much it costs to make magic items because making magic items is literally impossible, but they're still physical objects within the world. There's only so many magic swords in the world, and there's lots of people who would want them. Low supply and high demand is going to drive the prices sky-high. What's a reasonable price? Well it depends on just how cool of a magic sword it is, doesn't it? But the people that have them aren't going to want to part with them for pocket change, they're gonna want some serious money.

A 250 gp ring would be roughly equivalent to 6 months of earnings for a hard-working professional (assuming about +10 profession). A house that has 4-10 rooms costs 5000 gp. Your own sailing ship costs 10000 gp. A mansion costs 100k. A castle costs 500k. At what point in there should a particularly snazzy magic sword cost? The given prices are, honestly, probably pretty fair. 200k for a sword that's just short of being an artifact? Sure. Taking out a house loan for a crown that makes you smarter? That does sound pretty cool, might be worth it.

[icefractal]

A farmer makes 1 cp a week. A craftsman 1 sp. In a year that 5.2 gold or .52 gold.I don't think that's true. At that rate, they couldn't even afford food.

By the profession rules, even totally unskilled labor pays 1 sp per day (see Profession, and also the rules for hiring people), and a reasonably competent farmer (4 ranks in Profession: Farmer, Wisdom 10) makes 7 gp per week. Of course there are expenses, but still. IIRC, someone on this board worked out all the math and found that a frugal (but not ascetic) farmer with a helpful family could save up a fair amount of gold.

The rules don't really make a distinction between professions (a skilled farmer makes the same money as a skilled doctor), but even if we assume half or a quarter that earning rate, it's still several SP a day.

[AvatarVecna]

I don't think that's true. At that rate, they couldn't even afford food.

By the profession rules, even totally unskilled labor pays 1 sp per day (see Profession, and also the rules for hiring people), and a reasonably competent farmer (4 ranks in Profession: Farmer, Wisdom 10) makes 7 gp per week. Of course there are expenses, but still. IIRC, someone on this board worked out all the math and found that a frugal (but not ascetic) farmer with a helpful family could save up a fair amount of gold.

The rules don't really make a distinction between professions (a skilled farmer makes the same money as a skilled doctor), but even if we assume half or a quarter that earning rate, it's still several SP a day.

Seconding this. Like...most NPCs don't make a ton of money, sure. Especially by adventurer standards. But they're not nearly as destitute as some people seem to think.

[Thurbane]

Also, barring a feudal system where you are having your crops seized from you, and/or receiving punitive taxes, a farmer, of all people, should not have issues getting food! :smallbiggrin:

[AvatarVecna]

Also, barring a feudal system where you are having your crops seized from you, and/or receiving punitive taxes, a farmer, of all people, should not have issues getting food! :smallbiggrin:

Very slight counterpoint: selling his crops is how he makes money. He can't sell his crops and eat them too. That said, I'm sure that the crops eaten sate his hunger better than whatever other food he could purchase by selling that amount of crops. It's certainly more efficient, but he still sorta has to to pay for his food (in slight opportunity costs).

[Silly Name]

Most craftsman can't make use of a 10k diamond, but that doesn't mean none of them can. A jewelry maker can most definitely make use of such a thing. An artisan's guild will know the value of such an item. Heck, you could sell it to the church - maybe you're not in a big enough town that there's a local cleric who can cast Resurrection, but go to a big enough community and there will be somebody who could really use that material component. And now you've traded a 10k diamond for 10k worth of coins, which anybody else in town will accept. That's kinda how economy works - you can't hand the players a billion gp in the form of a thousand castles or whatever and then say "nobody can buy castles but this still counts against your WBL" - they're just gonna sell them to the local government. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that they now have far more pure cash then they could ever reasonably spend.

If the temple has 10k gold pieces in their coffers and can afford to spend them on a single diamond in the event someone of their ranks needs to cast a Resurrection... Then the PCs likely aren't richer than the temple after having sold them the diamond, because otherwise the temple has just bankrupted itself or at the very least is now in dire need of recouping this expense.
If we want to use slightly realistic economics, the fact the PCs can sell those forms of wealth for coin means that coin is circulating and there's a lot of it around. Which also means there are other very rich people in the world the PC may have to "contend" with, or perhaps those NPCs are their buyers - who certainly don't want to end up unable to pay their servants and business expenses because they bought a bunch of expensive art objects off the adventurers.

Again, if a buyer can afford to pay 10k for a form of non-fungible, non-productive wealth, they are probably pretty rich themselves. Otherwise, they wouldn't buy the thing, and the PCs aren't going to get rich in coin because there are no buyers.

Also, your mileage may vary of course, but as I said my players like base-building and establishing themselves as rulers or leaders. For my players, being given a castle as a reward (including the lands and manpower necessary to maintain it) is perfectly ok because that means they're rich and powerful. And they'll probably spend a lot of money outfitting the guards, improving the castle and their lands.

The local government may also just not buy the castle. Perhaps it was the local government who gave the PCs the castle, ennobling them, and selling it back is both a social faux pas and renouncing a position of power. You don't throw that stuff away just because you want a cooler sword.

[AvatarVecna]

If the temple has 10k gold pieces in their coffers and can afford to spend them on a single diamond in the event someone of their ranks needs to cast a Resurrection... Then the PCs likely aren't richer than the temple after having sold them the diamond, because otherwise the temple has just bankrupted itself or at the very least is now in dire need of recouping this expense.
If we want to use slightly realistic economics, the fact the PCs can sell those forms of wealth for coin means that coin is circulating and there's a lot of it around. Which also means there are other very rich people in the world the PC may have to "contend" with, or perhaps those NPCs are their buyers - who certainly don't want to end up unable to pay their servants and business expenses because they bought a bunch of expensive art objects off the adventurers.

Again, if a buyer can afford to pay 10k for a form of non-fungible, non-productive wealth, they are probably pretty rich themselves. Otherwise, they wouldn't buy the thing, and the PCs aren't going to get rich in coin because there are no buyers.

Also, your mileage may vary of course, but as I said my players like base-building and establishing themselves as rulers or leaders. For my players, being given a castle as a reward (including the lands and manpower necessary to maintain it) is perfectly ok because that means they're rich and powerful. And they'll probably spend a lot of money outfitting the guards, improving the castle and their lands.

The local government may also just not buy the castle. Perhaps it was the local government who gave the PCs the castle, ennobling them, and selling it back is both a social faux pas and renouncing a position of power. You don't throw that stuff away just because you want a cooler sword.

I'm not saying it can make them richer than the church? I don't care about having more wealth than the church does, I just care about having more of my own wealth be in coins that I can use anywhere, as opposed to being tied up in things that I can't convert directly into power.

[Silly Name]

I'm not saying it can make them richer than the church? I don't care about having more wealth than the church does, I just care about having more of my own wealth be in coins that I can use anywhere, as opposed to being tied up in things that I can't convert directly into power.

I was going back to the question of "why doesn't my fabulously wealthy PC who, for whatever reason, can't buy magic items, doesn't instead spend their wealth to buy out the town/region/kingdom/empire?" that was asked before.

Answer: because the PC isn't the only rich person around. The temple may be the one paying the guards, and you aren't going to outbid the guys who can trivially spend 10k gold pieces on a single diamond. All the wealth your PC is accumulating wasn't sitting in a chest in some dungeon waiting to be plundered - well, ok, some of it was probably acquired this way, but do you never get rewards? Retrieve stolen goods? Take on a quest where you don't find a lot of wealth but do get paid for? - so logically other people can compete with the PCs.

If WBL is increased for the PCs, that should affect the whole world economy, meaning people are richer on average too, not just the PCs.

[AvatarVecna]

I was going back to the question of "why doesn't my fabulously wealthy PC who, for whatever reason, can't buy magic items, doesn't instead spend their wealth to buy out the town/region/kingdom/empire?" that was asked before.

Answer: because the PC isn't the only rich person around. The temple may be the one paying the guards, and you aren't going to outbid the guys who can trivially spend 10k gold pieces on a single diamond. All the wealth your PC is accumulating wasn't sitting in a chest in some dungeon waiting to be plundered - well, ok, some of it was probably acquired this way, but do you never get rewards? Retrieve stolen goods? Take on a quest where you don't find a lot of wealth but do get paid for? - so logically other people can compete with the PCs.

If WBL is increased for the PCs, that should affect the whole world economy, meaning people are richer on average too, not just the PCs.

Not quite the scenario that was being pictured. The issue is that it's still a normal D&D world, it just takes about (for example) 10 times as long to level up as usual. No given monster has hoarded any more wealth than a normal version of it does, but like...where before you needed to slay ten young dragons (or whatever) to go from lvl 9 to 10, now you need to slay 100. Their individual hoards aren't bigger, but if you're the only one dealing with them, then by the time you reach lvl 10, you'll be (approximately) 10 times as rich as a normal lvl 10 adventurer. Normally, reaching lvl 10 would mean you have 45000 XP and have accumulated ~49000 gp worth of stuff (which includes coins, gems, magic items, and so on). But in this version of things, reaching lvl 10 means 450000 XP and accumulating ~490000 gp worth of stuff (which includes those same categories).

And that's kinda all it's changing directly. Churches and businesses aren't going out on adventuring sprees because adventuring is more dangerous than ever even if it's still pretty profitable. Governments would still prefer to kill problematic monsters using problematic murderhobos instead of trusthworthy-but-weak government agents. They're clearing more dungeons per level, but they're not clearing more dungeons per day - fights haven't gotten easier, it just takes more of them to level, so it takes longer to reach lvl 2. So the local monster populations aren't being cut down any quicker between the two worlds. Heck, NPC level isn't explicitly a result of gaining XP in the usual fashion, so this change to how fast XP is gained shouldn't even affect how common weak/powerful NPCs are.

The closest it comes to affecting the economy as a whole is that adventurers collectively have more money to spend and they've gotta spend it somewhere, so those funds end up trickling into the community at large. But again, because they're not clearing dungeons any faster than in the normal version of things, the funds trickling in aren't any faster than usual either. Heck, they might be slower! A given party might be clearing a low-level dungeon one month and then a mid-level dungeon the next month, but the way XP has slowed, now they're gonna be clearing low-level dungeons for multiple in-game years.

The world hasn't directly changed except for how much XP it takes to level. And one of the consequences of that change is that PCs who reach a given level will be fabulously wealthy compared to a world where XP wasn't screwed with. At 1/10th XP speed, you'd have parties ending up with nearly double their normal WBL in coins alone, with piles of gems and art and scrolls and alchemical items and magic items on top of that. And all that's changed is how many monsters they needed to kill to get to lvl 2 or 10 or 20.

EDIT: I'll also clarify that unless this occurs to an absurd degree and an absurdly high level, you're still not gonna have enough funds to really compete with the local government. A given metropolis has at least 25000 adults and at least 125 million gp worth of assets floating around. Even with x10 wealth, you'd have to be deep into epic before you're really competing with churches and kings and merchant lords.

[gijoemike]

I was going back to the question of "why doesn't my fabulously wealthy PC who, for whatever reason, can't buy magic items, doesn't instead spend their wealth to buy out the town/region/kingdom/empire?" that was asked before.

Answer: because the PC isn't the only rich person around. The temple may be the one paying the guards, and you aren't going to outbid the guys who can trivially spend 10k gold pieces on a single diamond. All the wealth your PC is accumulating wasn't sitting in a chest in some dungeon waiting to be plundered - well, ok, some of it was probably acquired this way, but do you never get rewards? Retrieve stolen goods? Take on a quest where you don't find a lot of wealth but do get paid for? - so logically other people can compete with the PCs.

If WBL is increased for the PCs, that should affect the whole world economy, meaning people are richer on average too, not just the PCs.

This is completely incorrect based on the premise and questions of the OP. PCs have considerably more wealth per level due to the slow leveling. Only adventurers. No other non adventurer can complete with the PCs. But nothing else changes in a normal D&D world. Nobles and temples don't have anywhere near the cash even a single PC does about level 4. A single PC will absolutely outbid the temple, and local lord, and mayor because they have so much cash on hand. They got paid in gold for job X, found treasure Y, stole/recovered Z goods.

What you are suggesting is that cities/lords/temples are considerably richer than everyone else. If that is the case it is just pointless inflation on D&D prices. And that is specifically NOT what the OP is asking about. The initial problem is the PC's have tons and tons of money. Far more than they should for a given level but the rest of the world hasn't really changed price wise, what issues will that cause?

We are replying that it does cause major issues. Having a lvl 8 PC be a leader and owner of the keep isn't really an issue. But at lvl 3 or lvl 2?

[reddir]

To be clear:
1) The PCs, because they will be lower level longer and therefore going on lower level adventures, will be making significantly _less_ gp compared to PCs in a normal campaign over any given timeframe.
2) I intend to give them many opportunities to spend gp for (hopefully) fun rp reasons.

RP is a big thing for me. It gives reason and purpose for the characters to act, and, I think, makes victory more satisfying (or failure more biting).

I acknowledge that for many gathering up combat potential is itself a form of rp. But I think it is possible for people to enjoy other types of rp too, even if just as an adjunct. Why not try to offer several types of satisfaction, and different ways to use their gp?

[LunaticChaos]

To be clear:
1) The PCs, because they will be lower level longer and therefore going on lower level adventures, will be making significantly _less_ gp compared to PCs in a normal campaign over any given timeframe.
2) I intend to give them many opportunities to spend gp for (hopefully) fun rp reasons.

RP is a big thing for me. It gives reason and purpose for the characters to act, and, I think, makes victory more satisfying (or failure more biting).

I acknowledge that for many gathering up combat potential is itself a form of rp. But I think it is possible for people to enjoy other types of rp too, even if just as an adjunct. Why not try to offer several types of satisfaction, and different ways to use their gp?

Now I might be off base here, but I think this needs to be said given how it sounds. And it sounds like your motivation for lowering the XP amount is to make your players stay at a level where they have to care about commoner problems and local village problems in order to force them to roleplay with them.

If you want your players to RP and enjoy rping you need to make them care both about their characters and about your world. Which is difficult if you plan to keep them at level 1 or 2 for a long time where their character can die easily because of a bad anticlimatic roll. It is also difficult because they're pretty much glorified pest control at that level.

You can give them all the RP uses in the world for all that excess WBL, but if they simply don't care it doesn't matter. Especially when they are much more concerned about being very very fragile.

Now those are not insurmountable to resolve issues of course, but they do need to be addressed.

[AvatarVecna]

It sounds like E6 would do you some good.

[Xervous]

It sounds like E6 would do you some good.

I’ll second the call for E6. Being stuck in fodder levels (1-2) for too long is agonizing and heavily tempting fate for the errant instagib.