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  1. - Top - End - #61
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    As ever, it depends on the game.
    If I'm running a campaign focused on the tactical miniatures combat minigame, then WBL or some modification based on it will probably be baked into the rules.
    If the game has a different focus, then WBL is unlikely to come up.

    And on the other side of the table, the expected amount of loot, and the choice I get in its nature, is one of the factors that determine whether or not I join a campaign.
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by sleepyphoenixx View Post
    Charged and oneshot items are simply a lot cheaper for most effects and i see no reason to equip my NPCs with stuff my players would want - there's magic shops for that and item creation.

    You don't have to go all-in and use only one-shot items, but every permanent magic item you replace with a charged or oneshot one gets you more power for your NPCs out of their wealth and helps keep PC WBL in check.
    How do you justify your npcs actually getting the time to actually use all that single-use items?
    Because applying oil of greater magic weapon/armor, drinking potions and such, all that requires a lot of time. and the effects only last a few minutes, and those consumables are expensive, so you must be very certain that you'll have a fight soon.
    Do your careful balancing act also requires that the npcs are always aware of the pcs coming in advance? or does it entail most of the npcs being fought while unable to actually use their consumables, and thus being basically naked?

    By the way, I do see an extremely good reason to equip my npcs with stuff my players would want: it's stuff the npcs would want too.
    Conversely, I see no reason to give my npcs useless junk that the players would never want. why would those npcs actually buy that stuff? Why would anyone actually make it in the first place?

    All that stuff is very immersion-breaking for me, because it goes against what would make sense in-world, and it's made solely to enforce an arbitrary "balance". I'd much rather have a dm throw disjunction at me, at least that would have good in-world reasons.

    Quote Originally Posted by icefractal View Post
    I feel like maybe we're talking about different situations? If an NPC is really a "two bit thug", then they shouldn't have much in the way or permanent items or consumables.

    Which means that yes, they won't be much of a match for mid+ level PCs. Which is, IMO, as it should be. If a 10th level party ends up in opposition to a normal gang, the gang isn't going to be able to have any chance in a direct fight. Depending on the situation, they could still be tricky to deal with, but Oblivion-style "these highway bandits are 10th level Warblades using Daedric armor" scaling is not going to happen in any game I run, and I'd find it highly unwelcome as a player too.
    who says anything about a gang of street thugs? obviously they won't have much gear and they are not a challenge for a high level party.
    The noblewoman who owns more land that you can see from the top of a mountain on a clear day? the one who's the appointed champion of the empire? She's got the very best that can be bough. She's probably got several sets of the very best that can be bought, just for backup.

    again, the important thing is what kind of stuff it would make sense for the npc to have.
    If my arguments didn't make it clear enough, I am one of those who care deeply about having a self-consistent world that follows internal logic. The world comes first. I try to avoid applying gamist logic to it. Sometimes I can bake the rules of magic specifically to justify some balance, but when there is conflict, the world and its consistency comes first.

    Quote Originally Posted by sleepyphoenixx View Post
    I rather doubt you want to remove items from the game, so i'm not sure what your proposed alternate approach is supposed to be.
    Very simple, give loot as appropriate for the circumstances, without worrying about the party's power level. Have the world be built accordingly and react appropriately. So the pcs are super rich and have the very best loot and this make them powerful? that's ok, because their opponents also have the same kind of resources. if their opponents are large, powerful evil empires or ancient conspiracies who prepared things for centuries, or evil churches with hundreds of mid-level clerics who make a huge profit selling spells - they are basically pharmaceutical corporations, except they don't even have to spend money to produce their drugs - then it is appropriate for those enemies to have access to those resources.
    Last edited by King of Nowhere; 2022-07-05 at 06:51 PM.
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  3. - Top - End - #63
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    I feel like my previous comment got buried in the argument between other poster, so I will expand upon by previous post.

    I take inspiration from old school D&D in how WBL and XP are connected.

    In "old school" D&D, MOST of your XP came from treasure. Enemies gave relatively small amounts of XP, but you got 1 XP per GP of treasure you took from the dungeon. Also, if you were a magic-user capable of item crafting and succeeding at creating a magic item, you gained XP according to the cost of materials that went into the magic item you created. Makes it a lot harder for a level 5 character to wind up with a wealth more appropriate to a level 20 character.

    In 3.5 I keep a tally of the total value of the party's money and "adjusted" gear. (Adjusted gear value is the total value of items I consider usually useful + 1/5 the value of items that are only situationally useful (like a sustaining spoon) and expendable items.)

    If the average adjusted gear value is above the party's level, I will add the necessary xp to the next session's XP reward to level the party up accordingly.

    If the average adjusted gear value is below the party's level, then I make sure to drop more loot as appropriate to "balance the books", so to speak.

    EDIT: Oh, also I see people talking about using magic gear just to make NPCs stronger to challenge the PCs? Why? Just make the NPCs stronger. Don't give the NPC a +1 sword, increase its strength by +2. Are you afraid that it's cheating or something? You're the DM, it's not cheating.
    If I give enemy's a magic item, it's usually with the expectation that the PCs will claim it as their own, with the occasional exception (like giving the leader a magic item or two just to indicate that he was the leader and had access to the best stuff, even if it's stuff I know the PCs won't be interested in.)
    Last edited by gadren; 2022-07-05 at 08:51 PM.
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  4. - Top - End - #64
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    As some have mentioned, too much gold in the game can remove the challenge from the game. The pendulum swings so far in the other direction and the game goes from too hard and the party being unable to handle things that an average adventure says, or thinks, they can handle to being able to challenge the party without total overkill.
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  5. - Top - End - #65
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
    If you feel the need to do this sort of thing on account of WBL, that seems like evidence that WBL is a problem, not a "way to make it work". You shouldn't need to do something special to keep the campaign sane when the PCs fight the Legion of Doom, but WBL inherently means that you do. Carefully designing each NPC warrior-type so that he has an oil of greater magic weapon and greater magic vestment instead of actual gear is just annoying for the PCs.
    Not sure what your point is. I'm not advocating for strict adherance to WBL, I'm advocating for making encounters challenging without blowing up the player's wealth and entering exponential wealth growth as a result. The initial problem stemmed from someone saying that his players were too strong for equal level encounters, and thus they got more gear from the higher level encounters, which thus made them even stronger, thus giving them more gear etc. Even if you throw WBL guidelines out the window, you can see how that would be a problem.

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    By the way, I do see an extremely good reason to equip my npcs with stuff my players would want: it's stuff the npcs would want too.
    Conversely, I see no reason to give my npcs useless junk that the players would never want. why would those npcs actually buy that stuff? Why would anyone actually make it in the first place?
    Whether this is true or not depends on the availability of magic items in your world. An item that an adventurer found may have more value to them than they would get selling it for half price, while still not necessarily being worth them paying full value for. They didn't buy it themselves, they found it, but it's worth more than what they would get fleecing it off. That's not difficult logic to follow.

    Conversely, unless you have a magic item mart super high fantasy setting, not all adventurers are gonna be able to kit themselves out exactly how they want, and will sometimes have to make do with what they can get their hands on.
    Last edited by Crake; 2022-07-06 at 02:30 AM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kazyan View Post
    Playing a wizard the way GitP says wizards should be played requires the equivalent time and effort investment of a university minor. Do you really want to go down this rabbit hole, or are you comfortable with just throwing a souped-up Orb of Fire at the thing?
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  6. - Top - End - #66
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post

    what reason is there to spend any of those GPs on meaningful things like castles or titles of nobility or expensive lodgings?
    It really depends on the party. I don't find owning castles or titles meaningful.

  7. - Top - End - #67
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by Mordante View Post
    It really depends on the party. I don't find owning castles or titles meaningful.
    They can be fun, but that's usually when they're the focus of the campaign.
    Where instead of going on quests the players deal with taking over a castle and handling the problems that arise.

    As an extra when you're busy saving the world or whatever they just feel like a distraction.

  8. - Top - End - #68
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
    What you are describing of Starfinder sounds a good deal more similar to WBL-based gameplay than the lack thereof. The idea that the ship has to come out of a different pool than gear is pretty much exactly attributable to WBL meaning that the "wealth" pile has to go to gear or you don't get what you need to for your level. Vendors screwing you is exactly because the game needs to keep you to WBL. Scaling bonus is a bit like not getting to use higher level gear, but if the bonus scales it completely avoids the need to cash out old weapons, and the need for scaling bonuses at all is just a function of existing math in 3.5 assuming them -- if I was designing a new system there'd just be a flat bonus for "being magic".
    Yeah, but like, if you fight a dozen mooks, they can all be geared to the teeth, because their guns are 5th level guns, and their grenades are 5th level grenades, and you are 7th level, because last years guns are trash and at 10% sale price it feels like you are looting the enemy castle for the spoons and plates for all its worth. Whether your item scales automatically or your WBL is "FIXED" by ensuring that you have exactly this gear at level x, no more no less, is equally a pile of hot garbage. My group found it to be as awful as your system sounds. Or in other words, sufficient reason not to use that system anymore. I homebrewed a better ship system based on PF downtime rules but we ultimately just moved back to 3.PF.

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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by Crake View Post
    Even if you throw WBL guidelines out the window, you can see how that would be a problem.
    Well, yes, which is the problem with WBL. WBL is the proposition that you can get really impressive amounts of power for sufficient amounts of gold. Except that, notionally, you only get enough gold to turn into a level-appropriate amount of power. I don't propose that you throw out the guidelines, I propose that you use a system where you can't break the game simply by showing up at a magic shop with a big enough pile of treasure. Then we can entirely dispense with the idea of needing special encounter designs to avoid exponential wealth growth.

    Quote Originally Posted by Gnaeus View Post
    because last years guns are trash and at 10% sale price it feels like you are looting the enemy castle for the spoons and plates for all its worth.
    Do you not see how that is the literal exact behavior WBL demands of you? If every GP you get is another GP towards your big upgrade, you damn well better pinch every copper and greyhawk everything that's not nailed down. Your options are "the thing you're complaining about" or "disconnect GP from character power", which you are also complaining about. Your preferences do not appear to be coherent.

  10. - Top - End - #70
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by Mordante View Post
    It really depends on the party. I don't find owning castles or titles meaningful.
    This can be an issue, yeah.

    On the one hand, I've had a lot of fun in campaigns like Kingmaker, where that stuff is a focus. On the other hand, if the campaign is about other stuff and/or the character is not someone who'd desire those things, it can end up feeling pointless.

    And that's leaving aside the case where the GM won't let those titles be used for anything important - "Ok, yes, you are the ruler of this province, but you can't just get access to the crypts, you have to go through the secret tunnel and fight the skeletons like how I planned it, because ... reasons" or actively makes them a liability "Your castle is under siege, again!" Which makes them a lot less appealing.


    Quote Originally Posted by sleepyphoenixx
    As an extra when you're busy saving the world or whatever they just feel like a distraction.
    "Save the world" plots create a lot of weirdness with WBL and with expected party strength in general.

    Like, it sort of works when the PCs are the only ones who know the stakes are that high, and have no way to prove it. But otherwise? Why the hell are more people not getting involved? Even if for some reason the PCs are the only ones who can Do The Thing™, they should be flat-out handed / loaned all the gear they could possibly need.

    "Yes, I realize the fate of the world is at stake, and if it's destroyed then my kingdom and its treasury will be gone too, but I simply can't give them this sword for less than 100k!" - something that a character who's incredibly, self-destructively greedy might say, but not really believable as a widespread opinion.
    Last edited by icefractal; 2022-07-06 at 04:18 PM.

  11. - Top - End - #71
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by Crake View Post
    Whether this is true or not depends on the availability of magic items in your world.

    unless you have a magic item mart super high fantasy setting, not all adventurers are gonna be able to kit themselves out exactly how they want
    how many campaigns are there where adventurers cannot trade effectively? I've never been in one.

    Technically, I've only been in one, with a toxic railroading dm who never gave any loot and took away our starting wealth by getting us imprisoned. Three sessions later, the fighter was still figthing with the bone of a prisoner as an improvised club, and I still hadn't had a chance to recover my spellbook and prepare new spells. But I don't count that as a serious campaign


    I've been in a campaign where the DM tried to not have a magic mart.
    the result? we'd look around town, travel to the bigger city, expand our network of contacts, and we managed to still get our loot bought and sold. It just took half a session. It became easier when the wizard got teleportation.
    Gradually we got tired of it, and we handwaved it. "you spend a few days of downtime to sell the loot and find that latest upgrade you were looking for".

    I don't know other people's experience, but it seems to me that the normal assumption would be that buying and selling is freely available, with "freely" defined as "invest some downtime into it". I suppose there are campaigns where the players are not given downtime... well, my only such experience was the railroad I mentioned above.

    P.S. My setting is a high magic world with magic mart, so in my setting it makes

    Quote Originally Posted by gadren View Post
    EDIT: Oh, also I see people talking about using magic gear just to make NPCs stronger to challenge the PCs? Why? Just make the NPCs stronger. Don't give the NPC a +1 sword, increase its strength by +2. Are you afraid that it's cheating or something? You're the DM, it's not cheating.
    Sure, I could make a dude with 30 str and no gear. Nah.
    I pride myself in having a consistent world with a believable setup. This includes having the npcs using the same rules as the pcs. This includes those npcs having good overall stats like the pcs, and having wealth appropriate to who they are. this includes giving a crapton of loot to the party if they do something, in-world, that would warrant getting a crapton of loot. and then addressing them to higher challenges.

    Quote Originally Posted by vasilidor View Post
    As some have mentioned, too much gold in the game can remove the challenge from the game.
    that depends entirely on the challenge. I found that too much gold never removed challenges from my games.
    Becoming demigods with plenty of perks, being worshipped as messiah by a whole race, having every major power in the world seeing you as a savior and owing you favors; that's what removed challenge from my game.
    And when I reached that point, I called the campaign over. It was a good and appropriate ending.

    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
    Except that, notionally, you only get enough gold to turn into a level-appropriate amount of power.
    What is level-appropriate? There is no such thing as level-appropriate. A 10th level fighter wields sword and shield, hits at +15 for 1d8+6 damage, and struggles to face a troll. Another 10th level fighter ubercharges for 200 damage, and one-shots most monsters in the manual. Most of us play at somewhere between those two extremes, but it's different for everyone.

    The dmg makes all kinds of assumptions on power level, stating that if you face level-appropriate encounters according to table A you gain level-appropriate xp according to table B and level-appropriate loot according to table C, and all this will put you within the wbl boundaries of table D, which will give you enough power to keep facing level appropriate encounters.All very neat, but in practice it falls apart as soon as the players start to be a bit creative. I'm not even talking about optimization, I'm talking even just of fighting smart, scouting, preparing.
    And as soon as I realized that - many, many years ago - I threw out of the window all the tables about challenge rating, xp per encounter, loot, and just started to eyeball it. which is a lot more accurate than trying to follow those tables anyway. wbl is just one aspect of it, but really, it's the whole concept of level-appropriate power that wbl and the cr system and xp tables are supposed to uphold.
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  12. - Top - End - #72
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    how many campaigns are there where adventurers cannot trade effectively? I've never been in one.

    Technically, I've only been in one, with a toxic railroading dm who never gave any loot and took away our starting wealth by getting us imprisoned. Three sessions later, the fighter was still figthing with the bone of a prisoner as an improvised club, and I still hadn't had a chance to recover my spellbook and prepare new spells. But I don't count that as a serious campaign


    I've been in a campaign where the DM tried to not have a magic mart.
    the result? we'd look around town, travel to the bigger city, expand our network of contacts, and we managed to still get our loot bought and sold. It just took half a session. It became easier when the wizard got teleportation.
    Gradually we got tired of it, and we handwaved it. "you spend a few days of downtime to sell the loot and find that latest upgrade you were looking for".

    I don't know other people's experience, but it seems to me that the normal assumption would be that buying and selling is freely available, with "freely" defined as "invest some downtime into it". I suppose there are campaigns where the players are not given downtime... well, my only such experience was the railroad I mentioned above.
    I personally only run magic marts in certain eras of my campaign setting, and those eras I've only run a handful of times at most. My most commonly played games are in lower magic times, with then again another handful in "magic is prohibited and will get you burned at the stake" dark ages. Players definitely get magic items, and they can readily SELL magic items, but generally, if they want to cherry pick their gear, they'll need to craft it, as they most certainly don't have access to freely trade gear, unless they're like, SUPER high level and get access to some of the high magic planar metropolises. Until that point, they generally make do with what they have, and trade what they can for upgrades when it's worth the trade.

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    P.S. My setting is a high magic world with magic mart, so in my setting it makes
    Right, but as I said, it depends on the campaign. Not every campaign setting is a high magic world with a magic mart. I understand SOME are, but in my experience, that's not at all the norm. Players and DMs alike that I've played with have found high magic worlds largely unentertaining for long form campaigns. They enjoy them in the short term, seeing all the novelty, but then quickly get bored, and find it hard to reconcile low level problems with "why can't someone just wave their hand and solve this with magic".
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kazyan View Post
    Playing a wizard the way GitP says wizards should be played requires the equivalent time and effort investment of a university minor. Do you really want to go down this rabbit hole, or are you comfortable with just throwing a souped-up Orb of Fire at the thing?
    Quote Originally Posted by atemu1234 View Post
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by Crake View Post
    Right, but as I said, it depends on the campaign. Not every campaign setting is a high magic world with a magic mart. I understand SOME are, but in my experience, that's not at all the norm. Players and DMs alike that I've played with have found high magic worlds largely unentertaining for long form campaigns. They enjoy them in the short term, seeing all the novelty, but then quickly get bored, and find it hard to reconcile low level problems with "why can't someone just wave their hand and solve this with magic".
    [going OT, but by now the main discussion is mostly over] Yes, that's a major difficulty in finding plots in such worlds. However, magic cannot do anything or be anywhere. I had my party spend most of the low levels as pest exterminators or detectives for hire. I've made a key point of worldbuilding to establish stuff that magic can't do, or that would be too expensive and not cost-effective.

    Conversely, I found that the problem with low magic worlds are that they break to easily. as soon as they get some power, the party become basically demigods, because nobody has the magic to counter what they do. Why bother with money when you can passwall into a bank vault? in a high magic world, a bank would be protected against such forms of intrusion.
    Indeed, the whole magic mart in my world started as the most important merchants (who were still limited to relatively basic stuff at the time) piled together their money to build a super safe extradimensional storehouse so they could keep high level items without being robbed. they got monopoly on such trade, which also explains why you always get fixed, non-negotiable prices.
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    Conversely, I found that the problem with low magic worlds are that they break to easily. as soon as they get some power, the party become basically demigods, because nobody has the magic to counter what they do. Why bother with money when you can passwall into a bank vault? in a high magic world, a bank would be protected against such forms of intrusion.
    See, the thing is though, I've found that by the time players reach those levels, they do basically become demigods, but as a parallel, they also transcend those mortal petty needs. If there's no magic mart to spend that gold on, then whats the point of stealing all that gold from the vault anyway? If they have sufficient magic, they can conjure anything mundane they want with little effort, and if they want something magical, then the people they would be trying to steal from would be on par with their abilities anyway, so it would still pose a challenge, y'know?

    Basically, anything that is trivial for the players to beat, also provides trivial benefits to them, so it becomes a pointless endeavor, unless their goal is just to break things, in which case they become the villains, and other heros will rise up to defeat them.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kazyan View Post
    Playing a wizard the way GitP says wizards should be played requires the equivalent time and effort investment of a university minor. Do you really want to go down this rabbit hole, or are you comfortable with just throwing a souped-up Orb of Fire at the thing?
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    I have to agree with Crake pretty much on everything. Sure, high magic is fun for a minute but it comes with a lot of issues.

    Let's face it. You got a small town or city under siege. If they got a magic mart, then they got a caster that clearly outclasses the party making them unnecessary. Infrastructure is handled by magic, food, material gathering and moving, communication, all kinds of quest elements already moot before you roll for ability scores. This world needs your character much less than you think.

    I have to wonder where this whole "game isn't fun unless I can get my ideal set of gear tailored to me on demand at a magic mart" mentality comes from. Being old school, loot was random. You randomly got good stuff or dumb stuff, but it was what it was. It was like a side quest to trade magic items and get upgraded, but it was more like I'm looking for a specific but standard item or just something better than we got. It made the new gear more appreciated IMO.

    Let's also consider that the game world and core rules are assuming you want to play Conan and Merlin, not "Superpower Anime Ninja Wizardlord Protagonist with a ridiculously oversized +12 Vorpal Deathblade of Ultimate Doom". I don't see an issue with a group of 2nd level characters having to use their heads to defeat a horde of trolls. Or is it that people think that "well the party is 5th level now we should be no effort slaughtering Pit Fiends and looking for a nice Godly Realm location for my Divine Ascension next level"?

    I love that the Theoretical Optimization is technically there and can be enjoyed for the though exercise, but I hate that so many seem to expect that as a standard expectation in real games.
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by KoDT69 View Post
    I have to agree with Crake pretty much on everything. Sure, high magic is fun for a minute but it comes with a lot of issues.

    Let's face it. You got a small town or city under siege. If they got a magic mart, then they got a caster that clearly outclasses the party making them unnecessary. Infrastructure is handled by magic, food, material gathering and moving, communication, all kinds of quest elements already moot before you roll for ability scores. This world needs your character much less than you think.
    The problem is not in high magic. the problem is in playing high magic and trying to have the same plots you would have in low magic. Of course those plots wouldn't work. Just the same as a story set in the middle age and one set in the modern age would have different plots. You may as well try to tell the story of a knight charging on horseback at the enemy in the modern age, and complain that the modern age doesn't work for a story.

    In high magic, you don't have a small town under siege by something that a 5th level party can defeat on their own. frankly, considering that a small town is still likely to have some 5th level characters, the whole idea of the siege falls apart. and any city is going to have some high level people in it, so "there are npcs outclassing the party" is true in low magic as well as in high magic. This has to do with level distribution, not with magic level, and not even with expected gear.
    And still, there is this little besieged town, there will be a capital with some high level people in it, or an army. there will be some high level people around. if there are no high level people around, then it's now low magic, it's low power, which is an entirely different concept. Then you are probably playing E6. Unless you are playing with the party being the only high level people around, but in that case why bother with a campaign world that cannot meaningfully interact with them?

    Also, a magic mart does not mean that your small town will have a guild of 20th level casters making high level items. doesn't have to work that way.
    in my world, the magic mart means that there is a merchant union with a big extradimensional storehouse. that storehouse can be accessed by a dozen portals in the world's most important cities. A smaller town may have an office, without any magic except some form of communication, and a mundane employee. you make an order to the employee, the communication gets passed, your item will be delivered, your sold loot will be taken to the warehouse.
    There are a handful of high level casters making high level items. It's just that those requests are handled in an organized fashion.
    I mean, it's not different from the airplane industry. We have airplanes for sale. If you have the money, you can go to a specialized shop and buy an airplane, or have one commissioned. Doesn't mean there is a "planemart" with a major plane factory in every small town.

    Further, high level caster does not mean battle-ready. I assume that in a high magic world there are lots of casters around, most of them crafting items or selling spells, but very few of those would be battle-ready. Reasons for it include
    - casters are nerds. they tend to be in poor physical shape, i.e. low constitution, which coupled with low hit die, means they will die to a sneeze
    - casters are nerds. most of them do not want to fight in a battle. they want to study and discover stuff. they may not even have bothered to learn combat spells in the first place.
    - casters are scientists, engineers, high-end professionals. some of them are soldiers, but most are not. they are not trained to be soldiers.
    So, the average caster, in an actual fight, would panick and be confused and don't know what to do. he'd probably cast a fireball at a random enemy. or he'd get killed before he get to act. or he'd run away as soon as charged. even casters specifically trained for combat may often lack actual combat experience; and it's a lot harder to train a caster for combat. a martial can get a practice sword and spar in what's an accurate simulation of actual combat; a wizard can't really practice casting banshee's wail at people.
    there are fighting mages, of course, the pcs among them. but they are a minority.

    Let's also consider that the game world and core rules are assuming you want to play Conan and Merlin, not "Superpower Anime Ninja Wizardlord Protagonist with a ridiculously oversized +12 Vorpal Deathblade of Ultimate Doom".
    The rules assume a lot of stuff. If the d&d community only played along what the game designers supposed you would do, this game would have been dead a decade ago.
    Last edited by King of Nowhere; 2022-07-08 at 03:03 AM.
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    @King of Nowhere
    Ok so my example wasn't exactly right, but I agree with the point that a low level plot falls apart in a high magic setting.
    My actual point is that the PC's are supposed to be special, even if slightly. If they go to a small village, sure there might be an NPC or 3 that is higher level, but if 40% of Tiny Farm Town's population are higher level casters than the party, it just eliminated the need for adventurers to be there. Sure casters are nerds and don't wanna fight. Some maybe, but not all. That wouldn't make sense either. You'd think that some of those nerds would be smart enough to cast flight and rain fire on the unsuspecting Orc tribe, or summon stuff to handle it, or even craft constructs as town guards. They never have to be in harm's way. I'm just saying that for some things to make sense, there's a limit.
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    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    The problem is not in high magic. the problem is in playing high magic and trying to have the same plots you would have in low magic. Of course those plots wouldn't work. Just the same as a story set in the middle age and one set in the modern age would have different plots. You may as well try to tell the story of a knight charging on horseback at the enemy in the modern age, and complain that the modern age doesn't work for a story.
    I'd disagree. Modern doesn't particularly correlate well with high magic. High magic would probably be more analogous to sci-fi. And sure, you could probably find SOME way to make level 1 adventurers fit into a setting like that, but it would likely end up vastly different than what the majority of dnd players come to a fantasy table looking to experience. It would end up closer to a sci-fi game, but just with the science replaced by magic.

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    In high magic, you don't have a small town under siege by something that a 5th level party can defeat on their own. frankly, considering that a small town is still likely to have some 5th level characters, the whole idea of the siege falls apart. and any city is going to have some high level people in it, so "there are npcs outclassing the party" is true in low magic as well as in high magic. This has to do with level distribution, not with magic level, and not even with expected gear.
    A hamlet has a -2, and a thorp has a -3 modifier to it's local's level rolls. Good chance there's nobody in the hamlet above level 2 or 3 in either of those, and even if there are, they are described in the DMG as typically being the ones in positions of power, so like, the highest level fighter would be captain of the guard, with the highest level warrior as his lieutenant. Not exactly free to go exploring or adventuring to stop some extant threat, when they need to act as local law enforcement. Or, yknow, if the players start off in the village, THEY may very well be the characters of that community that are the highest level, or perhaps apprentice to those highest level characters.

    Main thing you gotta keep in mind though is the part about the NPCs having duties that stop them from being adventurers. Just because a 5th level character is there in the city, doesn't mean that they have the freedom to go about adventuring.

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    And still, there is this little besieged town, there will be a capital with some high level people in it, or an army. there will be some high level people around. if there are no high level people around, then it's now low magic, it's low power, which is an entirely different concept. Then you are probably playing E6. Unless you are playing with the party being the only high level people around, but in that case why bother with a campaign world that cannot meaningfully interact with them?
    And herin lies the problem. Twofold to begin with. Firstly is the discussion of high/low magic. I like to break it down into three categories. Ceiling, presence, and availability. Ceiling is the highest level of magic that exists in the setting. For pretty much every setting, this will be epic+ simply with the inclusion of gods, angels, demons, and planar affairs, but not necessarily true across the board. Presence is how present magic is in the setting at a fundamental level. Are magical materials naturally commonly occuring, are magical monsters found practically everywhere and anywhere, etc. Finally availability. How easy is magic to access for the common person. Are there magical academies where anyone can learn to cast spells, are the streets lined with magical lanterns, are the toilets enchanted with prestidigitation to self-clean, so on.

    Most people, when discussing high or low magic, are almost exclusively referring to the availability of magic in the setting. Just because high level caster NPCs can and do exist, they still consider the setting low magic if the availability of magic to the populus is low.

    Now, this brings me to the second problem. High magic availability would indeed render the above scenario moot, because the town could call in reinforcements with ease, a simple sending spell would have you covered, and sending stones are cheap as chips, you could easily set up an emergency network of sending stones. On the other hand, if magical availabiltiy is LOW, even if there's a 12th level wizard that advises the king, he isn't made aware of the issue, because if the town is "under seige" (i have to assume you're using this in a loose sense, not an actual army-based siege), then they can't get a message out at all. Or maybe they do manage to get a message out, but the players are the ones who are sent to investigate, because the 12th level wizard and his two 6th level apprentices are busy with more important matters than a small village experiencing some issues that are, in their minds, probably just being blown out of proportion.

    See how this all still works even with the presence of high level magic, but with the magic not being widely available and kept in reserve for say, when the rival nation's mage decides to try and pull a saruman on the nation's king. If magic was highly available everywhere, then communication isn't an issue, travel isn't an issue, and information isn't an issue.

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    Further, high level caster does not mean battle-ready. I assume that in a high magic world there are lots of casters around, most of them crafting items or selling spells, but very few of those would be battle-ready. Reasons for it include
    - casters are nerds. they tend to be in poor physical shape, i.e. low constitution, which coupled with low hit die, means they will die to a sneeze
    - casters are nerds. most of them do not want to fight in a battle. they want to study and discover stuff. they may not even have bothered to learn combat spells in the first place.
    - casters are scientists, engineers, high-end professionals. some of them are soldiers, but most are not. they are not trained to be soldiers.
    So, the average caster, in an actual fight, would panick and be confused and don't know what to do. he'd probably cast a fireball at a random enemy. or he'd get killed before he get to act. or he'd run away as soon as charged. even casters specifically trained for combat may often lack actual combat experience; and it's a lot harder to train a caster for combat. a martial can get a practice sword and spar in what's an accurate simulation of actual combat; a wizard can't really practice casting banshee's wail at people.
    there are fighting mages, of course, the pcs among them. but they are a minority.
    Right, but the thing is, a) casters can prepare different spells on a daily basis, and in a highly available magic world, there's no reason local casters wouldn't share their spellbooks via some sort of internet-like system the same way engineers and scientists share their papers freely with one another online, and b) you don't need to enter into a fight to trivialise it.

    You don't need to get into a fight to be able to cast divination spells for local law enforcement, or hell, even cast divination spells for REMOTE law enfocement, and communicate vial scrying and message or some other system. You don't need to fight to construct golems for local defense, you don't need to fight to be able to cast create food and water (or even just goodberry) to completely negate the need for farming, and push the world into a post-scarcity society. Again, you end up with a society more akin to startrek than anything else. Like, sure, you can have good stories in such a setting, but it's a massive tonal shift that most people don't come to dungeons and dragons to experience.

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    Also, a magic mart does not mean that your small town will have a guild of 20th level casters making high level items. doesn't have to work that way.
    in my world, the magic mart means that there is a merchant union with a big extradimensional storehouse. that storehouse can be accessed by a dozen portals in the world's most important cities. A smaller town may have an office, without any magic except some form of communication, and a mundane employee. you make an order to the employee, the communication gets passed, your item will be delivered, your sold loot will be taken to the warehouse.
    There are a handful of high level casters making high level items. It's just that those requests are handled in an organized fashion.
    I mean, it's not different from the airplane industry. We have airplanes for sale. If you have the money, you can go to a specialized shop and buy an airplane, or have one commissioned. Doesn't mean there is a "planemart" with a major plane factory in every small town.
    Not sure what this point is meant to prove. If practically anyone anywhere can get their hands on any sort of gear, provided they can pay for it, then the end result is the same. Also worth noting that in such a society, gold would naturally cease to be a currency, because magic makes it so trivial to procure. You would need something far less readily generated as a currency. In my high-magic eras, it's experience. People trade their experiences for things they want, and it ends up with consumers perpetually at level 1, where they can generate the freshest experiences, while artisans end up at high levels crafting items for consumers, and using the profit experience to build what they want. Basically cities become giant XP farms for the handful of powerful spellcasters that run them, but the mass populus gets to live largely carefree, utopian lives.

    The only way I could really make an adventure work in that era was to have the players stumble across an ancient secret that made them want to tear the whole system down, and they had to be very careful about taking steps without arousing suspicion until they were powerful enough to protect themselves.

    In the end though, I'm not at all saying any one playstyle is wrong or bad, play how you want, but just don't conflate your experiences of having the ability to cherry pick your equipment with the norm. For the most part, nobody knows what the norm is, and we all have different anecdotal experiences, but considering the default assumption of 5e as being "no magical items are buyable or tradable at all", I think it's safe to say that the majority lean toward lower magical availability, even if the world does have a high magical ceiling and presence in the form of monsters and magical locations.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kazyan View Post
    Playing a wizard the way GitP says wizards should be played requires the equivalent time and effort investment of a university minor. Do you really want to go down this rabbit hole, or are you comfortable with just throwing a souped-up Orb of Fire at the thing?
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by Crake View Post
    In the end though, I'm not at all saying any one playstyle is wrong or bad, play how you want, but just don't conflate your experiences of having the ability to cherry pick your equipment with the norm. For the most part, nobody knows what the norm is, and we all have different anecdotal experiences, but considering the default assumption of 5e as being "no magical items are buyable or tradable at all", I think it's safe to say that the majority lean toward lower magical availability, even if the world does have a high magical ceiling and presence in the form of monsters and magical locations.
    I don't know about 5e but being able to cherry pick your equipment is explicitly the assumed norm in 3.5:
    Quote Originally Posted by MIC p.231
    That’s not to say that you can’t apply occasional constraints
    to how and when magic items can be purchased, only that the
    constraints should be reasonable and shouldn’t prevent players
    from equipping their characters fairly. For instance, a character
    seeking a magic item should be in a community whose gold piece
    limit is equal to or greater than the cost of the desired item (see
    Table 6–10: Community GP Limits). You might also choose to
    limit particular items for campaign story reasons—maybe the
    knowledge of how to create certain items is a closely guarded
    secret of a particular group, or even forgotten to all.
    In general, though, you should allow characters with suffi cient
    funds to equip themselves as they desire.
    The DMG has a similar passage iirc.

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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    I have paid attention to WBL, examined it from several angles, and tracked it more or less obsessively through multiple campaigns. My general observations are:

    1. WBL is less important that Max Item Value Per Level
    This is highlighted by the table in the Magic Item Compendium which effectively reduces the "cap" from half your WBL on a single item to half the wealth gained at a level on a single item. While this does not seem all that significant it has a major effect on the availability of certain items. The most notable example would be that a +1 weapon is a 6th level item and would not be expected to show up as treasure for any party until they are 5th level.

    2. Not all magics are of equal relevance
    This is highlighted by the Vow of Poverty feat and the automatic bonuses it gives for not owning any magic items. This effectively means that there is a theoretical design concept that magic items that do anything other than provide those particular bonuses are irrelevant to the point of being replaceable by some bonus feats. That leaves those items effectively overpriced compared to items that provide the primary bonuses.

    3. Players, especially optimizers, hate consumables
    Meanwhile, RAW expects them to be used and replaced constantly. This has a distorting effect on the system when players avoid spending anything on consumables, stockpiling any they find, and pouring everything into the permanent items that provide primary bonuses.

    4. Wizard spellbooks are WBL
    They really are. Especially with certain wizard optimization schemes. Wizard power is defined by having a spell for "everything" and the way they get that is by knowing lots of spells. Of course, no player would want to give up on a +6 headband of intellect in order to have another 30-40 spells in his spellbook, and would vehemently object if told he had to choose between the two. As a result, few players or DMs even consider trying to count a spellbook as WBL.

    5. The designers know this but cannot help themselves
    Look at published adventures. The treasure makes a joke of the original WBL guideline never mind the MIC IL revision. They cannot help themselves. Part of this is with good reason - it is what players expect. (This has been true since AD&D days. There was a section on it the DMG which was pretty much ignored in all the modules.) Ultimately, they had to rewrite the entire system to "fix" it. Pathfinder ultimately went the same route as well.

    My conclusions from this are:
    Generally, the more PC wealth is limited to the revised item level system in the MIC, the longer the game remains stable. Really obsessive attention can keep it reasonably stable up to 15th level, at which point the raw power level starts collapsing it. (Restricting optimization has a similar effect but is much less welcome and so less controllable.)
    However, this is primarily limited to the "core" bonuses - attack, damage, saves, armor bonuses (including deflection and natural armor), energy resistance, and stat boosters, with skill boosters added depending on campaign. Most other magical abilities can be tossed about with more or less impunity. I have not heavily tested it, but I expect most item costs could be halved across the board with the cost for non-combat effects quartered, up to about double the WBL though still staying within the MIC IL guideline.
    Without any such limit, players will generally focus on the "core" bonuses, and the power level is pretty much guaranteed to destabilize by 5th level.

    Should you be this obsessive?
    That is up to individual DMs and their players.
    Some will appreciate the extended stability while others will frenzy not getting their magic weapon by the 3rd encounter and buying a stat boost item at 2nd level. And it has a heavy time and bookkeeping cost for the DM.
    I have been obsessively obsessive and casually casual. (And watched the chaos of organized play.) My preference is a slight lean to the obsessive side but not going overboard. However, I have players who are not high-end optimizers, and so it does not matter as much. That suggests to me that the more the players optimize, the stricter you should be about IL limits if you want extended stability.
    Of course, if you want over the top, optimized madness then do not merely ignore it, but use this as a guide to deliberately breaking it.

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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by sleepyphoenixx View Post
    I don't know about 5e but being able to cherry pick your equipment is explicitly the assumed norm in 3.5:


    The DMG has a similar passage iirc.
    Oh, I'm quite aware of that, but I'm talking about in practise, not what the game wants to assume.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kazyan View Post
    Playing a wizard the way GitP says wizards should be played requires the equivalent time and effort investment of a university minor. Do you really want to go down this rabbit hole, or are you comfortable with just throwing a souped-up Orb of Fire at the thing?
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    Quote Originally Posted by Crake View Post
    I'd disagree. Modern doesn't particularly correlate well with high magic. High magic would probably be more analogous to sci-fi. And sure, you could probably find SOME way to make level 1 adventurers fit into a setting like that, but it would likely end up vastly different than what the majority of dnd players come to a fantasy table looking to experience. It would end up closer to a sci-fi game, but just with the science replaced by magic.
    wasn't talking about d&d setting, but about the general claim that magic makes plots moot. The example I had in mind would be to claim that the current age makes cime mysteries moot, because dna tests and fingerprinting trivialize the mystery. But it's not true. You can easily devise stories where there are no dna samples, and anyone out to commit a crime will know about those things and take precautions anyway. You have to adapt your plot to what can and cannot be done in the world.
    And this is also how you tackle high magic.

    On the other hand, if magical availabiltiy is LOW, even if there's a 12th level wizard that advises the king, he isn't made aware of the issue, because if the town is "under seige" (i have to assume you're using this in a loose sense, not an actual army-based siege), then they can't get a message out at all. Or maybe they do manage to get a message out, but the players are the ones who are sent to investigate, because the 12th level wizard and his two 6th level apprentices are busy with more important matters than a small village experiencing some issues that are, in their minds, probably just being blown out of proportion.

    See how this all still works even with the presence of high level magic, but with the magic not being widely available and kept in reserve for say, when the rival nation's mage decides to try and pull a saruman on the nation's king. If magic was highly available everywhere, then communication isn't an issue, travel isn't an issue, and information isn't an issue.
    This also works in high magic well enough. You still want to keep your strongest people in reserve. And you still want to send somebody on the ground to perform and investigation and give a report first, and this someone may very well be the party.

    Right, but the thing is, a) casters can prepare different spells on a daily basis, and in a highly available magic world, there's no reason local casters wouldn't share their spellbooks via some sort of internet-like system the same way engineers and scientists share their papers freely with one another online, and b) you don't need to enter into a fight to trivialise it.

    You don't need to get into a fight to be able to cast divination spells for local law enforcement, or hell, even cast divination spells for REMOTE law enfocement, and communicate vial scrying and message or some other system. You don't need to fight to construct golems for local defense,
    yes, and that's accounted for in the worldbuilding. It does not trivialize fights or adventures, if you plan for them accordingly.
    Ok, you can cast divination spells, but in my experience those are nowhere near as effective as people claim. So the assassin was hired by someone with a mask and a hood. How do you find out the identity of this guy with divination? There are those spells that let you contact the gods, but the gods don't have to know everything. In fact, with a whole world to cover, they are probably ignorant on most events. Also, a god can block other gods from seeing the stuff that he really wants secreted.

    I generally start an adventure - at least starting from the mid levels - by telling the party what the diviners have already ascertained. which is a bunch of information. It doesn't have to trivialize the adventure, in fact it can be a convenient way to drop plot points or clues.

    as for golem armies, those are a thing in my campaign world. however, golems have terrible perception and are not suited to, for example, differentiate a civilian from a hostile. They are great in battle, especially when you strap a cannon on their back, but they are not suited to policing the roads or go parlay with that hostile goblin tribe.

    All that stuff is just part of the way the world works. Look, in our own world we have technology to trivialize a bunch of problems, but we've still got problems that people must solve.


    you don't need to fight to be able to cast create food and water (or even just goodberry) to completely negate the need for farming, and push the world into a post-scarcity society.Also worth noting that in such a society, gold would naturally cease to be a currency, because magic makes it so trivial to procure.
    ah, those are not exactly high-magic assumptions, those are RAW assumptions. Sure, if magic works just like RAW says, you get a tippyverse.
    Most settings follow different premises. Myself, I found a simple principle suffices: "magic cannot create something permanently without paying some sort of price". It's an energy conservation principle, or perhaps equivalent exchange. In any case, it fixes all the magical economy. No more infinite loops of anything. No more free resources with wall of iron or wall of salt; if you want those resources to be actually permanent, you've got to pay with xp, or with some other component. Sure, you can create magic food, but that food is going to evaporate, molecule after molecule, in a few weeks to a few months; it will sustain you in a pinch, but you still need to take real meals regularly.
    Other dm may use different limitations - dms that are bad at worldbuilding just ignore those issues, but you get similar issues in low magic too.

    My point is that just because you have a high magic world, it does not mean that world can actually do X and Y just because there is a printed spell for it.

    Not sure what this point is meant to prove. If practically anyone anywhere can get their hands on any sort of gear, provided they can pay for it, then the end result is the same.
    My point is that the general concept pulled by those against the "magicmart" - the idea that "oh, but magic is rare, so you don't find it in shops" - is not accurate. It doesn't matter how rare magic is, with connections you can buy it. Just like planes are rare, and you don't find them in shops, but you still can buy a plane if you have money and connection and know where to look. "but in this setting magic is illegal", so are drugs, and yet you can buy them if you know where to look.
    Adventurers are, by definition, powerful, rich and well connected. They should be able to spend some downtime to find intermediaries and interested people and buy/sell magic items. Perhaps with restrictions, but they should still be able to buy/sell most stuff. Just like someone with money and connection would be able to buy and sell most planes - perhaps you won't find a concorde because it's out of production and only 20 were made, well, probably if you offer enough cash you can still get your hands on one.
    So it's not a matter of low magic or high magic. If magic exhists, and there are more than a dozen people in the whole world dabbling in it, then there will be someone buying and selling, and there will be some kind of market.

    do notice that even in a high magic campaign, I still denied some of the higher level stuff by claiming "sorry, the merchant union is out of stock on this". When the players got wealthy enough to buy wishes, I rolled a couple of dice to determine how many would be for sale in the whole world.

    Again, you end up with a society more akin to startrek than anything else. Like, sure, you can have good stories in such a setting, but it's a massive tonal shift that most people don't come to dungeons and dragons to experience.
    Yes, you get different adventures from the standard fantasy, and yes, it may put off a few players. Others may appreciate them for their originality, for not being "the same old thing".

    I am not arguing that high magic is better or anything. I started from the premise that high magic breaks the game, and I am refuting that claim by saying it's just a different kind of game, and it works perfectly well if one only takes some premises and follows them consistently.
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    Default Re: How many people actually pay attention to whealt by level?

    @King of Nowhere you said the following:
    'My point is that just because you have a high magic world, it does not mean that world can actually do X and Y just because there is a printed spell for it."

    This is patently false in the context you're putting it in. The actual assumption with extra-planar magic mart is that you'll be able to get anything. How you are doing it in your games is cool and all, but you ARE putting in limits to deal with power scale. You can't really say the concept is fine then include a list of changes that nobody else is going to use as justification. If there is a spell X, it specifically DOES do Y by default.
    Quote Originally Posted by McMindflayer View Post
    Of course, this still doesn't answer the question... "How does it POOP?"
    Quote Originally Posted by TheFurith View Post
    I roll a swim check on the street. Why not, right? Through a series of rolls I rob a bunch of people of 75g. I didn't actually notice their existence but I swam over there and did it anyway because this guy couldn't make sense if he tried.

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