("Chain") Binding Efreeti and "The Wish Economy" [D&D 3.5]

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 12:03 am

Cyberzombie wrote:
DSMatticus wrote: You cannot buy experience with gold.
Sure you can. Just buy some monsters/mercenaries to fight in a controlled fashion.

"Beg the DM to let you define what is and isn't an encounter and what is and isn't overcoming it" is not called "buying experience." It's called "hoping your DM is a moron."

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 1:18 am

this article has rules for transferring XP costs. Just dominate someone into paying.

Alternatively, you can buy ambrosia. It's expensive, but it has a GP price.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 1:23 am

Don't forget about everyone's favorite cheat, the Thought Bottle!

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 1:36 am

Implicit in the assumptions of the Wish economy is the idea that Souls and Pain and Chaos are valuable as an exchange precisely because they are what is used to create powerful magic items. It therefore follows that gold cannot be.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 1:45 am

DSMatticus wrote:
Cyberzombie wrote:
DSMatticus wrote: You cannot buy experience with gold.
Sure you can. Just buy some monsters/mercenaries to fight in a controlled fashion.
"Beg the DM to let you define what is and isn't an encounter and what is and isn't overcoming it" is not called "buying experience." It's called "hoping your DM is a moron."

Err... it's called "training".

I pay you 50 gold a week to spar with me once a day so I get better.

That's not moronic that's... well. Reality.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 7:50 am

TiaC wrote:
tussock wrote:You can have a Wish economy without infinite Gold just as you can have a Gold economy without infinite Turnips.
It's just that the economies cannot be completely separate if whether or not you do have infinite gold still matters in the Wish economy. If you can pay a bunch of gold to hire people to steal a wish, there is now an exchange rate.

I missed this the first time around, but it's sort of important: you do not know what the wish economy is. The currency of the wish economy is not wishes. The wish economy is actually the post-wish economy. If Bob wants to buy something from Steve, and Steve has quick and reliable access to the wish spell, Bob will not be able to buy that something with something Steve could just wish for instead. In 3.Tome, a (free) wish can produce 25k worth of mundane wealth or a magic item of 15k value or less. So if you tried to buy Steve's +5 sword (cannot be wished for) with 50,000 gold pieces (two wishes), Steve would laugh in your face.

The wish economy happens without wish. Every casting of wall of iron is a fucking fortune. Planeshift will take you to places where the local scenery is practically and sometimes literally made out of money. Acquiring infinite mundane wealth is really fucking easy for characters of a certain level, and so those characters will not sell you things in exchange for sums of mundane wealth.

TiaC wrote:this article has rules for transferring XP costs. Just dominate someone into paying.

Alternatively, you can buy ambrosia. It's expensive, but it has a GP price.

An obviously abusable web enhancement no DM ever uses and most probably don't even know about wouldn't even fly at a 3.5 table, let alone a 3.Tome table or a table using the wish economy. As for ambrosia, under 3.Tome ambrosia would be a magical currency and would be one of the things you could not wish for and would not be purchasable with gold.

But even if you could abuse that web enhancement or wish for ambrosia (or there's an infinite supply of it readily available for gold because raisins), then that means:
1) characters who have access to wish no longer pay experience to make any magic items (which pretty much happens anyway), and
2) characters who have access to wish do not care how much ambrosia you have and will not sell you things for ambrosia, and
3) characters who have access to wish still do not care how much gold you have and will not sell you things for gold.

That in no way bridges the economies; people still won't let you buy their +5 sword for 50,000 gp, 50,000 gp worth of ambrosia, or twenty-five +1 swords.

TheFlatline wrote:
DSMatticus wrote:
Cyberzombie wrote:
Sure you can. Just buy some monsters/mercenaries to fight in a controlled fashion.
"Beg the DM to let you define what is and isn't an encounter and what is and isn't overcoming it" is not called "buying experience." It's called "hoping your DM is a moron."
Err... it's called "training".

I pay you 50 gold a week to spar with me once a day so I get better.

That's not moronic that's... well. Reality.

Reality is not sparring with your friend until you can take a ballista bolt in the face and keep standing. Reality is not challenging your friend to competitive finger-wringling until you stop time. Reality isn't even going to karate class every day for a year or two and turning into Bruce Lee the level 20 God of Karate. Your idea of how training works is definitely moronic, and not at all like reality. Hint: the way PC's in D&D gain experience is absolutely nothing like what happens to people who train at things, and if you manage to convince your DM that player-manufactured challenges are worth experience, your character's advancement will still look absolutely nothing like what happens to people who train at things. Shame on you for making a realism argument, but double shame on you for making a superbly shitty one.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 8:28 am

DSMatticus wrote:
TiaC wrote:
tussock wrote:You can have a Wish economy without infinite Gold just as you can have a Gold economy without infinite Turnips.
It's just that the economies cannot be completely separate if whether or not you do have infinite gold still matters in the Wish economy. If you can pay a bunch of gold to hire people to steal a wish, there is now an exchange rate.
I missed this the first time around, but it's sort of important: you do not know what the wish economy is. The currency of the wish economy is not wishes. The wish economy is actually the post-wish economy. If Bob wants to buy something from Steve, and Steve has quick and reliable access to the wish spell, Bob will not be able to buy that something with something Steve could just wish for instead. In 3.Tome, a (free) wish can produce 25k worth of mundane wealth or a magic item of 15k value or less. So if you tried to buy Steve's +5 sword (cannot be wished for) with 50,000 gold pieces (two wishes), Steve would laugh in your face.

The wish economy happens without wish. Every casting of wall of iron is a fucking fortune. Planeshift will take you to places where the local scenery is practically and sometimes literally made out of money. Acquiring infinite mundane wealth is really fucking easy for characters of a certain level, and so those characters will not sell you things in exchange for sums of mundane wealth.

That was a case of me not saying what I meant, sorry. I meant that if Magical Currencies™ can be stolen by an army paid in gold then there is a problem. So, it would seem that characters with Magical Currencies™ must be immune to theft or death from those without?

As to Buying XP, I just noticed that taking item creation feats at low level is risky as it allows someone to dominate you into crafting for them.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 9:07 am

TiaC wrote:I meant that if Magical Currencies™ can be stolen by an army paid in gold then there is a problem. So, it would seem that characters with Magical Currencies™ must be immune to theft or death from those without?

If an army paid in gold has the ability to reliably murder people in the wish economy and take their things, then giving the spoils of war to someone else in exchange for gold is exactly as stupid as the person they are robbing selling those things to you in exchange for gold. You're in the wish economy once you have those things in your hands, and the people you're dealing with will trade you serious magic items for what you have in your hands and throw even larger piles of gold on top because it costs them nothing.

If you find a peasant with a +5 sword, you could pay some particularly shady hobo to slit his throat in his sleep and steal it for you. But peasants with +5 swords aren't renewable resources, and you cannot hire hobos to scour the world for peasants with +5 swords and bring them to you.

If there's nothing reliable about it, it's just called an adventure. You take your characters and your hired lackeys and you raid the Tower of Doom and if you don't all die you get a pile of wish economy goods. And then you do it again next session at the Tower of Slightly More Foreboding Doom. That is not an economic transaction. That is stabbing people in the face and taking their things.

There's no problem anywhere here. Any-fucking-where. It's a great big nothing.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 4:58 pm

DSMatticus wrote: Reality is not sparring with your friend until you can take a ballista bolt in the face and keep standing. Reality is not challenging your friend to competitive finger-wringling until you stop time. Reality isn't even going to karate class every day for a year or two and turning into Bruce Lee the level 20 God of Karate. Your idea of how training works is definitely moronic, and not at all like reality. Hint: the way PC's in D&D gain experience is absolutely nothing like what happens to people who train at things, and if you manage to convince your DM that player-manufactured challenges are worth experience, your character's advancement will still look absolutely nothing like what happens to people who train at things. Shame on you for making a realism argument, but double shame on you for making a superbly shitty one.

Now you're basically complaining that the game mechanics are unrealistic.

I don't think anyone assumed that they were.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 8:28 pm

hyzmarca wrote:
DSMatticus wrote: Reality is not sparring with your friend until you can take a ballista bolt in the face and keep standing. Reality is not challenging your friend to competitive finger-wringling until you stop time. Reality isn't even going to karate class every day for a year or two and turning into Bruce Lee the level 20 God of Karate. Your idea of how training works is definitely moronic, and not at all like reality. Hint: the way PC's in D&D gain experience is absolutely nothing like what happens to people who train at things, and if you manage to convince your DM that player-manufactured challenges are worth experience, your character's advancement will still look absolutely nothing like what happens to people who train at things. Shame on you for making a realism argument, but double shame on you for making a superbly shitty one.
Now you're basically complaining that the game mechanics are unrealistic.

I don't think anyone assumed that they were.

Wat? Flatline argued that you should totally be able to beat up your friends in the woods for XP because in the world of raelizarm that would be called training. In D&D, beating up your friends in the woods once a day for a year or two would make you level 20. In the real world, you'd still be absolutely destroyed by any genuine professional in the field of beating people up. It's really not even a matter of time; getting better at things requires access to resources and expertise, a significantly larger time investment, and quite a bit of luck.

D&D advancement works absolutely nothing like training, and arguing that something should constitute D&D advancement because it looks like training is just stupid.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 9:01 pm

Wat? So you think anyone can't get better at anything unless trained by an expert? Where does the first expert in any field come from?

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 9:22 pm

Hicks wrote:Wat? So you think anyone can't get better at anything unless trained by an expert? Where does the first expert in any field come from?

Of course the FIRST expert gets that way by killing giants and dragons. THEN they can train other people to become experts...

But in all seriousness, it's possible to master a subject through trial and error, but it takes much longer than being trained (and not everyone that can learn something by training can hope to master it without). Most of us learned to read by being taught and practicing it - very few of us would have invented writing if we hadn't been introduced to it.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 9:25 pm

Hicks wrote:Wat? So you think anyone can't get better at anything unless trained by an expert? Where does the first expert in any field come from?

Are you being deliberately fucking stupid? Are you really just going to torturously force me to address minor quibbles that won't change the fucking argument at all because... trollolol?

Simple question: you take two diseased, malnourished hobos with no past experience, no training equipment, no trainers, and nothing but booze and bacon, and have them beat eachother up once a day in the woods for two years straight. They coincidentally alternate victories (not arranged, just very lucky). At the end of this period, should they both come out some of the best MMA fighters in the world? Because the D&D advancement rules (if you rule that defeating eachother was a challenge worth experience) will have pushed both of them up to level fucking 20. They are MMA gods. If the fact that those two hobos are MMA gods clashes with your expectations of what training is and how it works, you have conceded the point that D&D advancement looks nothing like training and Flatline was stupid to argue that beating up your friends in the woods should count as D&D advancement because it looks like training.

And the fact that occasionally people consume time and resources and shit out new knowledge (or in some very lucky cases, shit out lots of new knowledge) does not change that at all. Discovery and training are in no way the same thing, and the fact that occasionally people discover things does not mean you can shove people in the woods with nothing but booze and bacon and get them to reliably rediscover those things.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:32 pm

I wanted you to address the part that made no sense; the whole notion of modern society would not exist if one could never surpass their teacher. Incremental and iterative improvement is totally a real thing that allows me to bitch at you over semantics on a hand sized computer instead of nothing at all because we never figured out fire without a pre-existing expert and died off 10,000 years ago in the last ice age.

Cyberzombie · Post by **Cyberzombie** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:36 pm

DSMatticus wrote: The wish economy happens without wish. Every casting of wall of iron is a fucking fortune. Planeshift will take you to places where the local scenery is practically and sometimes literally made out of money. Acquiring infinite mundane wealth is really fucking easy for characters of a certain level, and so those characters will not sell you things in exchange for sums of mundane wealth.

Are these planes of infinite treasure actually covered anywhere in 3E? I don't recall reading about those in the manual of the planes, but maybe I glossed over it.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Tue Feb 18, 2014 12:33 am

Cyberzombie wrote:Are these planes of infinite treasure actually covered anywhere in 3E? I don't recall reading about those in the manual of the planes, but maybe I glossed over it.

Plane of Earth/Mineral, where elementals can swim and grab gemstones as easily as you might forage mushrooms.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Tue Feb 18, 2014 12:34 am

The plane of earth is described as having a higher incidence of gemstones, precious metals, and other valuable stuff than the prime material. "Characters of a certain level" usually means having access to planar binding to recruit some earth elementals to dig up some cash for you.