Wish Economy

[DSMatticus]

The D&D economy does not have bank notes because it does not have bank notes. Feel free to name all the setting that include them, forgery checks that reference them, spells that interact with them, so forth and so on.

Until then, I don't care about your theoretical, "we can get rid of the weight problem by adding bank notes to D&D..." We can also get rid of the weight problem by not using literal tons of precious metals as high-level currency. If you're going to propose changes to the D&D economy to make it work, let's make them good changes. And solving the weight problem solves absolutely none of the others.

It is also very debatable whether or not D&D corresponds to the period of history you reference - it is probably even earlier than that.

The number of people interested in old, out of date crap (unless you can really throw in a collector's angle to the whole thing) is highly limited and generally not enough for the location you are currently in.

Okay, for one, this old furniture has a history. There are legends associated to it. It is seriously something somebody will put in their den and boast about to their peers. People with lots of disposable income collect antiques as signs of status now, and the antiques aren't guarded by fucking manticores. Adding difficulty of acquisition will add value to the item, not strip it away, because it makes the item seem even more impressive to have. "Oh my, that must have been terribly difficult and expensive to acquire!" "Why yes, it was. It cost me fifty men, but well worth the effort, wouldn't you say?" (Even if in reality, he just bought it off some adventurers. It's a status symbol to have disposable income.) There are buyers. They are rich nobles.

Also, this exact consideration breaks the standard gold economy, because it completely fails to provide any reason for why wizards are making +10 swords to sell them for gold when they can make the same profit per day making +1 swords, and have a greater customer base doing it. So insofar as this argument hurts the idea of greyhawking antique furniture, it absolutely destroys the "gold at every tier!" economy, leaving nothing but a smoldering ruin, because nobody makes +10 swords for gold. But there does have to be something they want for that +10 sword, what could it be?

(And to be even meaner, always have the DM send you to giant's castles ... it's harder to grab the furniture and no one wants to buy the shit.)

And you can't use Drow equipment.

Gygaxian dickery is never a solution for anything. If there's any shit that needs to get cut out of D&D, it's Gygax's "it's okay to be an asshole, because you're the boss and powertrips are awesome." You are not here to be 'mean' to your PC's and set up the world to stop them at every turn.

that for every attempt at forgery there must exist a near equal method to foil that attempt

Again, your solution is a bullshit Gygaxian counter.

DM: You came up with a clever idea, hm? Well it doesn't work.

PC: If it never works, why do the fucking rules for it exist anyway? God damn, fuck this game.

Stop it. Do not emulate Gygax. Those are non-lessons. Those are anti-lessons. Those are examples of what not to do. Gygax liked to punish players for outsmarting him, and that's just bad gaming.

[Username17]

The ability to have “as much as you can carry” of any material you want makes all of those materials essentially “worthless” to you, but it doesn't particularly give you access to enough to upend or even seriously impact the lives of everyone. All the gold you can carry is still just a few hundred pounds of gold (mere tens of thousands of gp). All the food you can carry is only a few days worth of food.

In the absence of strongly recognized property law or even an expectably immortal government to enforce property law, you can really only “own” what you can personally carry, defend, or hide. And even that's not really “ownership”, that's just “possession”. It is not only imaginable but in fact trivially easy for someone to have so much of a resource that there is no conceivable benefit to possessing any more of it while still not having enough to effect meaningful change upon the world.

-Username17

[tzor]

The D&D economy does not have bank notes because it does not have bank notes. Feel free to name all the setting that include them, forgery checks that reference them, spells that interact with them, so forth and so on.

First and foremost, name any D&D setting whose economic model isn't horse manure wrapped in thin gold foil. Come to think of it, name any D&D setting that uses the wish economy. Yes, D&D settings SUCK, get used to it. If you want a good setting you are going to have to roll your own.

With that said. I am not sure, but I don't think that the "diamond in amber gludich" in the Nehwon campaign setting actually used a diamond of the value of the coin. This "coin" was minted exclusivly for the Overlord and had a very limited production supply. It was literally the Overlord's bank note. (Remember a bank note does not have to be a piece of paper; it is only a device redeemable for gold from a specific party.)

that for every attempt at forgery there must exist a near equal method to foil that attempt

Again, your solution is a bullshit Gygaxian counter.

DM: You came up with a clever idea, hm? Well it doesn't work.

PC: If it never works, why do the fucking rules for it exist anyway? God damn, fuck this game.

Stop it. Do not emulate Gygax. Those are non-lessons. Those are anti-lessons. Those are examples of what not to do. Gygax liked to punish players for outsmarting him, and that's just bad gaming.

I'm not Gygaxing. My argument is that for every wizard who comes up with a clever idea, another wizard will study that clever idea and come up with a counter. Gygax basically hand waved "No" on anything he thought game breaking. I'm always for people coming up with clever ideas, but sometimes a clever idea works once or twice. If everyone uses that idea, then it's going to be countered one way or the other.

You could literally make, for example, Promosory Note, a 9th level spell, maintained by the highest wizards in the guild. You could do a lot of things, just like modern government bank notes have been doing more and more to prevent forgery.

[LR]

All this talk about how magic shouldn't interfere with the economy is insanity. Fantasy has geese that lay golden eggs, golden rings that duplicate themselves, and fairies who can spin straw into gold. Why would we ever deny these things in favor of maintaining a "realistic" medieval economy?

Why do you have magic shops in your game?

Magic shops are cool. Why don't you have any in your game? The image of a witch cackling as she brews up a potion for some unrequited lover is too good to pass up.

[tzor]

All this talk about how magic shouldn't interfere with the economy is insanity. Fantasy has geese that lay golden eggs, golden rings that duplicate themselves, and fairies who can spin straw into gold. Why would we ever deny these things in favor of maintaining a "realistic" medieval economy?

The general problem is that even in the fantasy literature, (but especially in the general fantasy role playing genre) we only read about the micro-economy. We assume these gold creatures (and you forgot about good old Midas) are creating gold ex-nilho, but what if they were not? What if for every egg laid by the goose, the amount of gold in everyone's posession decreased by the weight of an egg? Who would have noticed? Who would have cared? And while this is wealth distribution most vile it's not an increase in the normal supply of gold.

The same is true for the wish economy; we assume that there is no downside because we choose not to. And so the economy goes to hell in a handbasket (wait, that is a downside) and we cry and complain.

In that same fantasy literature, every wish is a two edged sword and the goose that lays the golden eggs brings more woe and weal. And that guy who spins straw into gold is just a grumpy old fart.

[K]

I can see it now:

Player: Oh crap, I only have a Mirror of Life Trapping. Can you give me change in Wands of Wonder? How about Bronze Griffons and a Cloak of Arachania? What, you only have a Ring of Protection +2? How do you even do business?

Why do you have magic shops in your game?

Try to keep up. Your idea has turned every character who might buy or sell magic items into a magic item shop. That's the result of being forced to keep your wealth in magic item form. It's the only way they can make change.

Replacing an unworkable form of currency with an equally unworkable one is not a solution. Making every player a Magic Mart is worse than the 4 million tons of gold because at least the math and personal character sheet record-keeping is kept to one notation.

I don't give a shit whether you keep your pocket change in Wands of Wonder or giant fucking rubies or Angel Tears/Souls/whatever (as you yourself have suggested for the Wish economy). But the point is that Wands and Tears are not worth infinite gold (if you want to buy one) and zero gold (if you want to sell one) at the same time, which is just stupid.

If you don't tier the economy, people Greyhawk. If you can't understand that, maybe you shouldn't be in this conversation.

It makes perfect sense that there are going to be trade goods that people in a medieval/Renaissance economy won't accept in exchange for goods and services. It's like if I tried to pay back $20 I owed you by bringing you a bunch of oranges. There is no reason to expect that there is any number of oranges that you'd accept as payment.

[K]

Additionally,

So you have 600 year old furniture that you "make whole"

Who are you selling it to? It's completely out of style, AND it looks so new, it looks like a knock off.

Why would I buy this shit, other than at bargain basement IKEA prices?

DnD doesn't deal with real-life economics such as being able to find buyers and sellers. It posits that you can resell anything at half their value because those are cut-rate prices and there is always someone who will buy at a drastic bargain. The very idea that fashion would even be handled by the game is preposterous.... otherwise you'd never be able to sell jewelery or magic cloaks.

This means it doesn't matter that you get full price. The reseller can sell top-end furniture at 60% and still make a profit. I expect quite a few people would like high-end and very cheap furniture regardless of fashion (see IKEA).

[hogarth]

If you don't tier the economy, people Greyhawk. If you can't understand that, maybe you shouldn't be in this conversation.

Read my previous comment re: "Greyhawking". Try to keep up.

It makes perfect sense that there are going to be trade goods that people in a medieval/Renaissance economy won't accept in exchange for goods and services. It's like if I tried to pay back $20 I owed you by bringing you a bunch of oranges. There is no reason to expect that there is any number of oranges that you'd accept as payment.

I absolutely 100% agree with that. But that does not mean that there is no one in the world who wants both oranges and money at the same time; that's the stupid leap of faith that the "Wish economy" expects you to swallow.

[K]

If you don't tier the economy, people Greyhawk. If you can't understand that, maybe you shouldn't be in this conversation.

Read my previous comment re: "Greyhawking". Try to keep up.

You obviously don't understand the psychology of Greyhawking.

If there is wealth to be gained, even small amounts of wealth relative to their own wealth, people will do it because even small amounts of wealth translates to power.

So it doesn't matter that a +3 sword costs 80 million gold as long as 300 gold can buy a potion that can be even minimally useful at all. People will Greyhawk because they see not doing it as a missed chance at that potion.

Now, if a 20th level character couldn't regain HPs at all from a potion of Cure Light Wounds, the situation would be different, but then you'd be tiering the magic items and ruining verisimilitude even more.

It makes perfect sense that there are going to be trade goods that people in a medieval/Renaissance economy won't accept in exchange for goods and services. It's like if I tried to pay back $20 I owed you by bringing you a bunch of oranges. There is no reason to expect that there is any number of oranges that you'd accept as payment.

I absolutely 100% agree with that. But that does not mean that there is no one in the world who wants both oranges and money at the same time; that's the stupid leap of faith that the "Wish economy" expects you to swallow.

The Wish economy posits that there is no one that wants oranges and money as a "normal" economic transaction. There might be people who would trade magic items for gold, but it'd be just as common as trading a high-end magic item for a bag a turnips.

This means that there is no fixed rates since it's tantamount to theft by one party.

[LR]

In that same fantasy literature, every wish is a two edged sword and the goose that lays the golden eggs brings more woe and weal. And that guy who spins straw into gold is just a grumpy old fart.

And in all those stories, there exists a way to get away scot-free. Don't kill the goose, guess the guy's name, and don't burn the ring as a misguided familial gesture.

Why should I be an asshole when I can arrange the economy so that the characters can have enough golden eggs to be wealthy forever without breaking anything?

[violence in the media]

Regarding the you-can-buy-anything-with-enough-gold assertion, assuming the Wish Economy, I'm wondering what dire situation you're in that requires you to trade your +6 headband for the gold you'd be offered for it? How much gold are we talking about here, and why are you barred from any of the zillion other ways of acquiring it that don't involve trading away a useful magical item?

Another example. Assume our world, much as it is, except you come into possession of a Mirror of Mental Prowess. How much money would someone have to offer you for you to sell it to them? We can assume for the moment that your hypothetical buyer won't just have you killed and take it.

[hogarth]

Regarding the you-can-buy-anything-with-enough-gold assertion, assuming the Wish Economy, I'm wondering what dire situation you're in that requires you to trade your +6 headband for the gold you'd be offered for it?

King Bob is an adventurer and while he was out killing some fools, he found two headbands. He doesn't need two and he needs money to build a new fortress. Same with Bishop Betty who wants to build a cathedral.

[violence in the media]

Why would they equip potential rivals in that manner? You have Bob, who is king, and Betty, who is bishop, AND both of whom are badass enough to casually slay fools in the proximity of +6 headbands. Again, WTF do they need the money generated from the headband sale for that they can't get in easier ways? Betty somehow forget all of her calling or plane shifting spells? Bob can't pull some sort of "build me a castle, peons, and I'll pay you with your continued existence" Intimidate check?

[Doom]

Maybe they need to hire 100,000 men to build a massive wall all along the border of their kingdom, hire another 10,000 men to build a city, set up worldwide trade routes for lobster dainties, and build a 1000 boats.

There's no way a +6 headband will help much with all that, and Intimidate only goes so far, too. Kings sometimes need to do more than just be personal badasses and scare a few individuals.

[DSMatticus]

How much money would someone have to offer you for you to sell it to them? We can assume for the moment that your hypothetical buyer won't just have you killed and take it.

Any arbitrary value you decide on. Nothing stops you from trading down, at all. People will think you're being an idiot for giving up a chance to trade for pure planar mumbo jumbo instead, but you can do it. And at that point, it's any arbitrary value you and the buyer can decide. We can even add a "higher-tier -> lower tier" currency conversion rate, if you so desire (it will be a huge number).

The only problem is that if you let turnips translate into character power (i.e. gold pieces into ever better and better magic items), people will look at that turnip and think, "should I really eat this? It doesn't give me any mechanical benefit, but a +3 sword would... I should save up."

And this is just obvious: if you let players trade gold for power, every gold they spend on 'not power' is a trap.

world who wants both oranges and money at the same time; that's the stupid leap of faith that the "Wish economy" expects you to swallow.

Yeah, except not, because the wish economy gives you access to infinite oranges at that exact moment. People who have the access to higher-level money just have infinite oranges. They don't have to deal with oranges anymore, because they can acquire more oranges and anything oranges can buy on a whim.

And even if it didn't, this is a blatant falsehood. Even if you could not magically generate mundane wealth at a ridiculous rate, it's completely fine for the players to still want gold and also want higher-level currency. The gold goes towards whatever fun shit they want, and the higher-level currency goes towards making them stronger.

See the difference? Now we have players 'wasting money,' because there is nothing to do with that money that makes them more powerful. And this is better, because high-level PC's stop living like beggars in order to get better at stabbing things.

If you want a good setting you are going to have to roll your own.

That is completely what I said - and adding bank note solves one problem of many (weight), while the wish economy gets high level PC's to stop greyhawking and living like beggars in exchange for magic items (solving pretty much all of the problems described in one fell swoop).

In light of that, one solution seems to be fixing a lot more than the other.

[Spike]

At some point designing and implementing a Wish Economy that makes rational sense HAS to be harder than just figuring out a way to keep people from turning every scrap of coin into measurable increases in personal power.


Of course, I'm on someone's ignore list for pointing out that the only way greyhawking or even 'infinite gold wishing' really works is if you MTP the god damn process.

Simultaniously allowing people to hand-wave the logistics of dismantling an entire castle (regardless of the material its made of) and selling every brick for maximum profit is fair, but game breaking, and not handwaving it solves the problem but is, apparently, Gygaxian, and therefor wrong.


Thus the only viable solution is, once again, to assign some sort of value to new forms of currency, such as souls or 'raw chaos'.

Really?

I offer a simpler solution that keeps players from, at least, stealing all the turnips for another potion of healing: Stop using WBL to hand out loot. Once they realize that the (even largely handwaved) effort of stealing and selling all those bushels of turnips that it takes to squeeze out one more magic item is significantly greater than the effort it would take to do something more productive (earning gold AND XP), they'll stop stealing fucking turnips. And since the GM is no longer consulting a chart about how much cool shit he can put into the dungeon, he can sprinkle around a few extra consumables as well.

Solution two is to get rid of the entire magic item market idea, but that's just silly...

[DSMatticus]

greyhawking or even 'infinite gold wishing' really works is if you MTP the god damn process

Yeah, timeskips are not MTP. Do you make characters declare the bathroom breaks their characters take? No. Are you playing MTP? No.

Greyhawking is iffy, because trying to sell a palace made out of obsidian might be difficult. Might.

Infinite gold wishing just plain works, and is completely riskless, and there's no reason to do anything but timeskip it.

Simultaniously allowing people to hand-wave the logistics of dismantling an entire castle (regardless of the material its made of) and selling every brick for maximum profit is fair

This is cheap, easy, and every brick is actually sold for 50% profit. You can even haggle me down to 25%, because castles are huge and that is a lot to sell and make money on. The costs of labor are fairly cheap, on the other hand, especially if you have magic at hand. Or a bag of holding.

Stop using WBL to hand out loot.

This does nothing to address the problem. We don't give a fuck about WBL, it's an arbitrary set of numbers. What we care about is that gold -> character power, and as long as gold -> character power, people are going to have a really hard time spending gold on anything but character power. It doesn't matter how much gold they have, until you give them every magic item they're ever dreamed of and they have no magic items left to buy.

So yes, this is a solution if you break WBL by handing out full magical equipment at level 1. Players will stop trying to greyhawk everything if you do that. You're totally right. Yet somehow, I think this is a bad idea...

[fectin]

I offer a simpler solution that keeps players from, at least, stealing all the turnips for another potion of healing: Stop using WBL to hand out loot. Once they realize that the (even largely handwaved) effort of stealing and selling all those bushels of turnips that it takes to squeeze out one more magic item is significantly greater than the effort it would take to do something more productive (earning gold AND XP), they'll stop stealing fucking turnips. And since the GM is no longer consulting a chart about how much cool shit he can put into the dungeon, he can sprinkle around a few extra consumables as well.

Okay. That's true and coherent, but still not good enough. There are still many, many ways for them to get "as much gold as they want", and some magic items are awsome enough that if you let players have as many as they want of anything they want, the game mechanics fail (q.v. ioun stones).

Your underlying problem is that you want a way for the characters to have arbitrarily huge amounts of mundane wealth (good), limited amounts of magical power(neccesary), and have mundane weath be exchangeable for magical power (meh). One of these three goals has to give, and the "exchangeable" one is kind of doofy to start with.

[fectin]

Infinite gold wishing just plain works, and is completely riskless, and there's no reason to do anything but timeskip it.

That's not true. It's just that all the risks are external to the game (DM Dickery) or plot based (this particular efreet is wierd in a plot-generating way). That's the same risks as every other mundane action though (DM Dickery has a new Random Food Poisoning chart; waitress is secretly an assassin, etc.).

[DSMatticus]

I suppose that's true, Fectin, but if your DM decides every mundane action is an obstacle to be overcome, there are probably other problems to address before fixing the economy.

[Spike]

Yeah, timeskips are not MTP. Do you make characters declare the bathroom breaks their characters take? No. Are you playing MTP? No.

If you want to split hairs on definitions, fine, I won't use MTP. But I'm not just talking about time skipping. Finding people interested in buying your used bricks or stolen turnips, at any given value, is a process that is quickly handwaved, or if I (or any GM) actually makes you go through the process is viewed as cruelly Gygaxian... and yet, everyone seems to agree that stealing every turnip in Turnipistan, or completely dismantling the badguy's lair for bricks is wrong, ergo we have to make a new, higher level, economy.

Greyhawking is iffy, because trying to sell a palace made out of obsidian might be difficult. Might.

Dismantling the palace of obsidian to sell the obsidian is possible, but it should be as stupid a means of making money as it would be in real life. The bulk value of the obsidian is presumably less than the value of the obsidian in the form of a castle... and that's just on the spot. Then there is transporting the obsidian, finding buyers and so forth. The last time I argued this it was a trap with 1 million gp in iron balls. If you are willing to hire every peasant in the kingdom to transport, netted you something like 65-70% of the value of the iron (1 million GP) over ten fucking years. Hand wave away the ten years and you give players every reason in the world to take ten years... when in a proper game they SHOULD reasonably expect to make as much gold far faster and easier than keeping local wars and market deflation...etc... from further cutting into their slim profit margin.

The solution offered was magic, of course, and again with hand waving problems. Dumping ten million pounds of iron (if I recall its value correctly) into a warhouse by use of a few well prepared gate scrolls, or hand waving 'chain bound demons' to haul it to market by means of 150,000 teleports a day over three months (or however it worked out...) are all processes using time and resources, and still don't solve every problem.

Again, it not FUN to play that out. So? Everyone agrees that the iron ball trap (or the Obsidian Castle) isn't there so that players can get another +10 Sword a peice), and that trying to spend a arbitrary amount of handwaved time and effort (magical or otherwise) is actually the problem, not that castles can totally be ripped apart for wealth.

I mean, hell, I can swing by any office building in the city and steal miles of copper wires and optic fiber lines, and totally sell that shit for enough money to make my own gaming company. In the real world, however, I can't just hand wave away the difficulties. So, yeah, handwaving away difficulties is, to my mind, Magic Tea Party gaming. Doing that (regardless of the label) and then complaining about the results to the point of creating new rulesets and economies to make it pointless, is compounding stupidities.

Infinite gold wishing just plain works, and is completely riskless, and there's no reason to do anything but timeskip it.

Depending on the method, but even here we have some room to talk turkey. If its Efreets (greater only), then you have a limited number of wishes a day, and what is to stop the Efreet in question, after any arbitrarily large number of days to say 'you know what, mr. Wizard, its been real, but I am out of shit I could conceivably wish for and frankly I'm getting tired of reporting to work every day so you can get a few more piles of gold. Summon an earth elemental or something to mine that shit for you from the Elemental Plane of Earth, I'm outta here!"

So you summon another Efreeti, whatever, you only need twenty of the fuckers a day to get your 1 million GP a day income (offered earlier in the thread). Of course, after a couple of days the GM is fully within his bounds to have the King of the Efreeti (or whatever epically bad-ass NPC you want to make up) take offense to this use of his most powerful servants and suddenly cut off the supply.

No, that's not being particularly Gygaxian either, that's making character actions actually matter in the world around them, and potentially adventure fodder as they marshal their own bad-assness to go whup his ass until they can start up their wish factories once more.

Rather long for your one line so I might have drifted a bit.

This is cheap, easy, and every brick is actually sold for 50% profit. You can even haggle me down to 25%, because castles are huge and that is a lot to sell and make money on. The costs of labor are fairly cheap, on the other hand, especially if you have magic at hand. Or a bag of holding.

Actually, I ran the numbers for... K I think it was... whomever it was that ignored me... and they aren't really that spectacular (and here we are talking about actual Iron Balls, a 'real' commodity in D&D, not 'bricks'.

They really aren't that good. Bricks are worse. At the sheer scale we are talking about, bags of holding aren't cost efficient enough to actually matter (peasants carrying iron balls needed somewhere around three years of hauling to pay off just the bags they used!).

Without trying to look it up, because, seriously! I'd rate a brick at somewhere around 1 CP, and give it a ballpark weight of 1 lb. A peasant laborer carrying bricks to market can move, say, 50 lbs a trip (and unless your castle is IN TOWN, you are going to take more than one day of traveling, not several trips a day). Without any mark-down at all for used bricks if the trip takes more than a few days then no amount of labor will actually make you any money selling that castle. (The numbers for carts and horses is a bit sketchier to work out, but at least for iron balls it didn't work out for any real increase in profit, just time spent...handwaved, so who cares?)

This does nothing to address the problem. We don't give a fuck about WBL, it's an arbitrary set of numbers. What we care about is that gold -> character power, and as long as gold -> character power, people are going to have a really hard time spending gold on anything but character power. It doesn't matter how much gold they have, until you give them every magic item they're ever dreamed of and they have no magic items left to but.

I don't know about YOU, but WBL is referenced all the time... in this thread even, as a proximate cause of greyhawking. If players know there is only X amount of loot available in a dungeon, then they will squeeze every fucking copper piece out of that dungeon before moving to the next one, playing against WBL. Hell, I've played with a WBL GM, and you can damn betcha I looked for ways to make extra gold on the side... including abusing crafting rules and downtime, etc.

If the GM was more lenient about loot, I'd have been less obnoxious about trying to sqeeze a few more GP out of whatever it was I was doing to fund my Cool Shit.

So yes: As far as I can read 'We' DO give a fuck about WBL as something other than an 'arbitrary number'.

So yes, this is a solution if you break WBL by handing out full magical equipment at level 1. Players will stop trying to greyhawk everything if you do that. You're totally right. Yet somehow, I think this is a bad idea...

Of course, I also advocate removing magic item marts. To an extent wealth can translate into power, certainly, but there should be limits. If a +10 magic sword is the bad ass weapon it should be (and every swinging dick wants one... yeah, yeah, I know, fighters don't get nice things, and +10 swords therefore objectively suck...), I don't see why anyone just casually churns them out for sale on the marketplace in return for Gold (or, for that matter, Souls, Raw Chaos or whatever other arbitrary method of 'higher level economy) you want to have.

Thus, no amount of Wealth, regardless of the form or even 'tier' it takes will get you one.

No, you either do some 'research' and find one of a tiny handful of known weapons of that power (or whatever) then go kill whatever fucker has it and take it from them (ADVENTURE!) or you find the only legendary smith in the world who can make them and convince him to make one for you... and it happens that he's got something you can do for him (ADVENTURE!)...

And, to be honest, my experiences with my players is that they actually would rather keep a slightly inferior widget taken as 'party treasure' from some NPC than a custom made widget they bought with their gold anyway.

But the Den isn't really the place to point that out.



Call me crazy if you like, but I just feel that there is a sweet spot between allowing players to be creative and clever with the game and allowing to run roughshod over everything by stealing the doors out of a castle pro forma. I do logistics for a living, so maybe I'm too sensitive to the problems involved with moving massive quantities of shit around. Of course, I also think its the GM's JOB to provide obstacles and difficulties for the players, not to hand them everything they want just because they 'have a plan'... and handwaving often becomes just that.

[Spike]

Okay. That's true and coherent, but still not good enough. There are still many, many ways for them to get "as much gold as they want", and some magic items are awsome enough that if you let players have as many as they want of anything they want, the game mechanics fail (q.v. ioun stones).

Thank you for taking me at face value, unlike some posters here.

To be honest, this sort of issue is only a real problem in D&D, and maybe Shadowrun.

I personally think the problem is the direct correlation of wealth with power. GURPS, for example, lets you start as filthy rich as you want... and actually makes it relatively unattractive to do so because you are trading real game power (character points) for a marginal imaginary object (in game wealth)... just for example.

Your underlying problem is that you want a way for the characters to have arbitrarily huge amounts of mundane wealth (good), limited amounts of magical power(neccesary), and have mundane weath be exchangeable for magical power (meh). One of these three goals has to give, and the "exchangeable" one is kind of doofy to start with.

Actually I DON"T want them to be able to exchange gold for magic power, at least not on the scale that is taken as a given in D&D. THAT is the problem. WBL as a guide is problematic in its own right, as I've learned first hand playing with a strict WBL GM. Great, but my Cleric is willing to trade power (gold) for a Cathedral (and I could do it because I was still the most effective player in the group), but since my gold income was tied to my 'this much gear, no more' loot availability, stealing farmer joe's turnips started to become a really attractive option to fund things that should have been simple at that level of the game!

In short, WBL can aggravate the economic issue and vice versa, but they are actually separate problems. They just tend to lead to the same sort of player shenanigans we have been discussing.

[fectin]

I suppose that's true, Fectin, but if your DM decides every mundane action is an obstacle to be overcome, there are probably other problems to address before fixing the economy.

As much fun as nitpicking is, I actually had a point there too (which I failed to make).
Tzor (and others) have pointed out that you can keep your players from taking advantage of wish by dicking them over. That's true, you can. You can also keep your PCs from e.g. going to restaurants in exactly the same way. Sometimes, it can be cool (the first waitress assassin). If warfarin-laced enchiladas become a basic part of the setting though, that's abusive. If you like screwing with characers in that way, go drown some Sims instead of MCing.

[DSMatticus]

Nah fectin, you didn't fail to make it. I picked up on it and was trying to agree - I just meant if that's happening reliably enough to be a solution to the 'problem' of greyhawking and wishing, then something else is wrong (the DM).

The bulk value of the obsidian is presumably less than the value of the obsidian in the form of a castle...

Then sell the castle. Or sell the obsidian. This is a world where creatures have infinite greater teleports and bags of holding are cheap and carry lots. It's not difficult. Players will ask you to handwave away more time if you let them use the magic item crafting rules.

and that trying to spend a arbitrary amount of handwaved time and effort (magical or otherwise) is actually the problem, ...

Close, but not quite - the problem is not the former. If characters want to and will live long enough to handwave away ten boring years playing merchant, and they all agree to, are you going to say "if you want to do it, you have to roleplay it out?" That's just being dickish - admittably, some problems might occur over those 10 years that are worth covering, but covering the minutia is not fun and using that as a way to try and discourage it is not a solution. You make broad, sweeping rolls covering years or months at a time and be done with it.

If players say, "let's part ways, and meet again ten years thus for the ten year reunion of the Fighting Mongooses!" are you going to say, "that's a problem?" No. That's just... roleplaying a strange situation. There is no problem with that, whatsoever.

...not that castles can totally be ripped apart for wealth

This was never the problem and no one claimed it was. Here is the actual problem: that castles can be ripped apart for character power. A level 5 character with a +5 sword is more powerful than a level 5 character with a +1 sword. If ripping apart a castle could only buy you another castle, that would be redundant and nobody would care. If ripping apart a castle gives you a further +2 bonus to attack rolls, they will dismantle the castle. Or rob their own mother. Or do anything they can think of to get money. Because it makes them more powerful and everybody is trying to be as kickass as they can be.

Putting a stop to "one way of generating wealth" is treating the symptom, not the disease. It is useless and a waste of our time. The simple fact remains that as long as +10 swords have a price listed in gold, nobody is going to spend gold whimsically. It'd be the same as saying, "sure, I'll piss away 1000 XP for a castle full of beer and prostitutes."

its been real, but I am out of shit I could conceivably wish for

No. Efreeti have plenty of things they can and will wish for. They are super geniuses playing the game outsiders play, and wishes are powerful. High-level characters are rare, so they are probably not summoned frequently.

King of the Efreeti (or whatever epically bad-ass NPC you want to make up) take offense to this use of his most powerful servants and suddenly cut off the supply.

Uhh, why? "You there, puny human! We grow tired of this mutually beneficial relationship. Be gone with you."

that's making character actions actually matter in the world around them

No, it's making an intelligent creature behave stupidly because it puts a stop to something that breaks the system. Have a god show up and wag his finger - it's about as reasonable.

The wish scheme is mutually beneficial, and the PC's are guaranteed to never oppose the efreetis as long as they depend on them for wishes. It is both a promise of power and safety. The efreeti's love it.

Actually I DON"T want them to be able to exchange gold for magic power, at least not on the scale that is taken as a given in D&D. THAT is the problem. WBL ...

Stop. Gold -> Magic Power and WBL are completely different things.

Gold -> Magic Power is an effect of having magic items with values listed in gold pieces that you can go out and buy from ye olde magic shop. WBL is a suggested guideline for how much gold a character should have so you can limit their magic power. Getting rid of WBL, changing WBL, breaking WBL, does absolutely nothing to change the fact that gold -> magic power.

Example: The WBL for level 5 is, I can't remember, let's say 25k. Let's say you give the character 25k exactly. You are following WBL. If he spends any of that 25k on anything but magic power (like a house), he is not as powerful as he could be by spending it on magic items.

Example: The WBL for level 5 is still 25k, but let's give the character 50k. You are not following WBL. Still, if he spends any of that 50k on anything but magic power (like a bigger house), he is not as powerful as he could be.

Whether or not you follow WBL, this problem stays exactly the same - if gold can be converted to power OR nonpower, why would you ever convert it to nonpower? And that is a problem that is completely and wholly separate from WBL.

[violence in the media]

Depending on the method, but even here we have some room to talk turkey. If its Efreets (greater only), then you have a limited number of wishes a day, and what is to stop the Efreet in question, after any arbitrarily large number of days to say 'you know what, mr. Wizard, its been real, but I am out of shit I could conceivably wish for and frankly I'm getting tired of reporting to work every day so you can get a few more piles of gold. Summon an earth elemental or something to mine that shit for you from the Elemental Plane of Earth, I'm outta here!"

So you summon another Efreeti, whatever, you only need twenty of the fuckers a day to get your 1 million GP a day income (offered earlier in the thread). Of course, after a couple of days the GM is fully within his bounds to have the King of the Efreeti (or whatever epically bad-ass NPC you want to make up) take offense to this use of his most powerful servants and suddenly cut off the supply.

What causes problems in this sort of situation is the infinite nature of the planes and the creatures that populate them. Lots of named individuals and locations are presumed to be unique in the cosmos--nobody argues that there are infinite copies of the City of Brass or multiple Asmodeuses, for instance--but faceless schmucks are in endless supply.

Assuming he even cares, the chances of you summoning an efreeti that the Sultan even hears about is so remote that you're well within rights to figure it will never happen. The Gygaxian dickery crops up when this astronomically long shot occurrence becomes an inevitable event. It's not like a gamble or risk is ever proposed ahead of time by the MC. "Look, every efreeti you summon I'm going to roll a d100. If I roll an 1, I'm going to fuck with you somehow related to all this efreeti binding. Deal?" No, it's usually just straight to monkey-wrenches and sodomy.

It's not just efreeti either, as you can apply this conflict to metal deposits on the plane of Earth, gem harvesting in Celestia (IIRC?), or any other resource gathering operation conducted on the planes. The characters can use their abilities to scout for gold deposits and avoid conflict for as long as they need to to find an unguarded vein. They get in, get the gold they're looking for, and get out. Probably to get back to the "real" adventuring you want them to do. Punishing the players by making them sit there and roll dice and listen to your umpteenth description of Dao soldiers until they give up and abandon the endeavor, or the game, is another Gygaxian dick move.