DSMatticus wrote:
No, because that makes low-level characters ridiculously fucking wealthy. And that, in turn, makes high-level characters off the charts by three miles. A +5 sword may have the sum value of entire metropolises. Plural. Which is batshit.
Wealthy compared to who? The first thing you've got to realize is that a lot of concepts like pirate captain don't even survive to mid levels. Sailing a ship isn't something you're going to be doing once you hit level 9 and beyond. So you better be able to afford that ship at relatively low levels if you want to do piracy. And no, it's not a solution to say people can afford ships once they're in the wish economy, because the wish economy doesn't have pirates. There's no point in robbing ships filled with gold if you can shit the stuff out for free.
Ships need to be much cheaper than they are now.
Your solution is to, "make mundane things cheaper compared to magic things," but that just makes magic things ridiculously more valuable than their bonuses warrant. And it still doesn't fix the issue: they can convert those things into some sort of magical trinket.
If the conversion rate isn't worth it, it doens't matter. The fact that you can convert mundane goods into pocket change just isn't a big deal. I'm really not sure why you're making a big deal about that.
Oh my god, you broke the WBL because you have 6246 gp instead of 6000. I can't even say I care.
The wish economy fixes this.
1) You can't buy anything magic over 15k with gold, and
2) You get anything magic below 15k for free.
The net result is that players don't care about turning castles into potions anymore. They have as many potions as they could ever use, for free. So they can throw that money at whatever mundane crap they had in mind. And that mundane crap can be fun. It can be roleplaying related. It can be character building.
The net result is that players don't care period.
The problem is that now there's no actual incentive to do any of that? Why own a ship if you can teleport? Why own a business if you don't care about gold? Why have a castle if it just means you enemies know where to go to kill you?
The big failure of the Wish Economy is that it gives you no good reason to interact with it. The problem with limitless gold is that it becomes valueless gold. Anything I can buy I could just wish for in less time than it'd take me to go to market and shop for it and the sim city I've made has no value because everything is free.
Got a throne of gold? Nobody gives a shit, it's not expensive, it's free. Might as well be made of cheap wood.
If you aren't willing to break the "gold -> upgrade your sword, more gold -> upgrade your sword some more, more more gold -> upgrade your sword some more more" cycle, then you will never fix the problem. Not by making it 'harder' to upgrade your sword, not by anything. You have to break that cycle. The wish economy does.
It breaks the cycle by fucking the swordsman in the ass, because now he can't buy a magic item anymore. Fighters need to buy magic items because they can't make them. This is D&D, magic items aren't optional. You need them to compete.
And if you go to planar currency, I really don't even see why you can't break the planar currency economy just as easily. If you need souls, you can very well harvest those. If astral diamonds come from mines, you can have astral diamond mines. Planar currency has to come from somewhere too.