Arguments in favor of 4th Edition

[Fuchs]

Exactly, Murtak. I am rather sick of all the "+x to Y" items, all they do is add numbers - usually just balancing them out so you don't get worse.

[Draco_Argentum]

But by definition, you can't have cities out of valuable material and have a coherent economy. You can go and say that gold has no value, but that's a house rule. Even 3E doesn't do that. Because 3E damn well says you can trade gold for powerful magic items.

I don't recall saying 3e's economy worked. Mostly because it doesn't. 2e is defensible and the wish economy works for mundane wealth. It falls right on its face the second someone decides to fill castle moats in the Abyss with congealed hatred.

I kinda liked Exalted's resource levels. When you're at 3 dots looting 1 dot stuff won't increase your wealth at all so there isn't an incentive to do it. This is realistic enough to pass WSoD checks. Of course the actual limiter on magic items in Exalted is that its a 2e economy, cash won't buy any magic item you care about.

[Parthenon]

I personally prefer up front asking ("Hey, DM, I want that thing here (shows book). Can you make that available?") to trying to buy something, and having the DM throw some hurdles up ("Trader hasn't it in stock... NPC wizard can't build it... NPC Archwizard was creating it, but then he had to save the world... courier with itme was robbed" etc.) instead of vetoing it outright.

Can you clarify this please?

Do you mean that when you say to the DM that you want a , a, an Earring of +5 Listen, that the DM

- nods his head and smiles, then in game comes up with reasons why your choices fail

- outside the game the DM explains why they're not comfortable with that item, hints a lot that your actions will fail, and if you do try in-game to get it different thing happen to stop it.

For some reason I understood what you said to be the first, which I have a problem with because then I wouldn't know whether trying to get the item failed because of a random plot element, a plot point interacting with stuff in a weird way or the DM not allowing the action. I would be tempted to try again in case it was a random coincidence.

The main differences between vetoing it and stopping it in-game with or without and explanation is that on one hand, actions and time are wasted which can build up resentment for not just telling the player its not allowed, and on the other hand building up resentment for not allowing things in the rules.

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So how did the 2e wealth system work? Was it just random items on quests and thats it?

[Amra]

As for claiming that there's no reason to play if you can't buy magical loot with big chunks of gold... Well, I'm just bloody stunned, is all. WTF?!

Being rich is fun, because money does, or can, equal power without breaking the game. It doesn't have to equal "power in terms of magical items and big equipment bonuses". What it does instead is buy you big comfy houses, secure you a seat on the Merchant's Guild non-executive committee that secretly runs the city, turns into bribes to make public offcials look the other way while you do dodgy deals and puts Lord Wotshisname's personal guard in your pocket without him knowing it. Alternatively, it builds you schools and hospitals, it funds housing for the poor and needy and it lets you buy slaves in order to set them free.

Whatever floats your boat.

All of that is separate from buying you class features, which is effectively what happens by default in 3E and makes us sad. However, even that scenario is better than the retarded idea that the gold in the King's strongroom is just a non-interactive texture map.

There's no reason why great piles of loot couldn't buy you fame and power without making a jot of difference to the numbers on your character sheet. It should be equally possible to play - and enjoy playing - a character who is avowed to ascetic poverty For Great Justice and a character who wants to be as rich as Croesus, For Equally Great Justice, and have that not matter except in their approach to life.

2E, for all the many [1] things it did badly, dissociated gold pieces from mechanical advantage because you just couldn't buy magical items. For no good reason, admittedly, but you couldn't. Where that sucked was in the fact that encounters made the assumption that you had certain items when there was absolutely no way in-character to guarantee that. However, it had its merits; namely that wealth did what wealth should do and make you able to buy castles and expensive hookers and shit.

In 3E, rather than strip item-power assumptions out of encounters - which would have been a sensible thing to do - they decided that you were not only *able* but *required* to spend huge sums of gold on magical gear. If you got more gold than you were supposed to, you could be more powerful than you were supposed to be, which was stupid. However, all was not lost because you could still buy castles and expensive hookers and shit.

In 4E, there is no wealth. You can't steal anything without killing the people who've got it, and when you've killed them they don't have it for you to steal any more. The designers, rather than realising the mistake that was made between 2E and 3E, decided to complete the slide into crazy and to make wealth *explicitly* equivalent to power whilst eliminating the other kind of wealth entirely, except as a property of NPC's. Any gold you accrue is utterly meaningless because you are 100% obliged to spend it on maintaining your class features or you gradually fall further and further behind the power curve to an even more extreme degree than in 3E.

And now, because you can't melt the gold throne, loot the strongroom or steal the magical weapons from the bad guys (because they don't exist and therefore vanish when the bad guys die), you can't even buy castles and expensive hookers and shit.

In a world where people are prepared to pay money for a chain-mail shirt, you should be able to get money if you have a pile of chain-mail shirts. You can piss and whine all you like about how it isn't heroic behaviour, but the solution to that isn't to make the chain-mail shirts unsaleable for no fucking reason, it's to make the money that you get not matter in terms of the numbers on your character sheet.

And yes, I would absolutely still want to play.

[1] many, many, many, many, many, if you prefer

[Amra]

"Wealth=Power" only can break the game if you can freely buy magic items.

Most of the games I've played in, magical items are only freely available up to a certain power level. On the one hand, it keeps a lid on craziness but on the other hand it's back to DM fiat, which means we're playing Magical Princess Tea Party again with respect to magical items.

Why can't there be guidelines as to how much/many magical items a character should have at a given level and wealth does not translate into power? Or better yet, if everyone is supposed to have a Ring of Protection +3 at level 10, why don't we just erase all Rings of Protection from the game and hand out a +3 bonus to all resists to everyone at level 10?

There's no particular reason why we couldn't. A lot of people here have been saying for ages that removing magical item effects that are mandatory *anyway* would be a highly desirable thing to do. Warrior classes should just get AC bonuses and whatever plusses to hit they require handed out every level. Everyone's saving throws should just damn well scale to stay on the RNG without rings and whatnot. Lose the flat bonuses, period, because they're not interesting and we don't even care.

Magical items can still do cool stuff without being fucking mandatory just in order for you to do your damn job. Magical items should, in fact, only do cool stuff. In my opinion, naturally.

[Fuchs]

I personally prefer up front asking ("Hey, DM, I want that thing here (shows book). Can you make that available?") to trying to buy something, and having the DM throw some hurdles up ("Trader hasn't it in stock... NPC wizard can't build it... NPC Archwizard was creating it, but then he had to save the world... courier with itme was robbed" etc.) instead of vetoing it outright.

Can you clarify this please?

Do you mean that when you say to the DM that you want a , a, an Earring of +5 Listen, that the DM

- nods his head and smiles, then in game comes up with reasons why your choices fail

- outside the game the DM explains why they're not comfortable with that item, hints a lot that your actions will fail, and if you do try in-game to get it different thing happen to stop it.

I mean I ask the GM for an item, and he either tells me why he doesn't want it in game, or makes up a way to get it - be it looting it, finding it, getting it as a gift, buying it, winning it as a prize, or whatever looks fun.

[Fuchs]

Magical items can still do cool stuff without being fucking mandatory just in order for you to do your damn job. Magical items should, in fact, only do cool stuff. In my opinion, naturally.

Mine as well. Magical items should offer more options, not (just) more numbers to the usual rolls.

[Amra]

Exactly. When Grognash Gore-Drinker pits his mighty magical battleaxe Soulcleaver against Xom the Quick's magical rapier the Razor of Karn, +3 to hit and damage on either side just doesn't get the pulse racing

[violence in the media]

So, coming back to the idea of wealth, how much personal potency should wealth grant? I think it should grant some measure of advantage, otherwise why would anyone bother with it? If fighting naked with your fists is just as effective as being decked out in plate with a greatsword, who is going to opt for the plate?

Some additional ways to think about this:

Two characters are of the same class and level, but one has twice the money of the other. How much more powerful is the one with twice the money?

Even knowing that armies are bullshit in D&D land, if you have 1000 Knights with plate, horse, and lance, how many peasant conscripts would be a relatively even fight for them? Assuming the knights and the peasants are actually the same level.

Where should monks and other equipmentless classes fit into this paradigm?

[Cielingcat]

I think wealth should make you more powerful, with a cap on its effectiveness. Having a ton of gold to buy full plate and the best weapons should make you better than someone without it, but you shouldn't be able to buy your way into sweet magical loot to make yourself win at everything.

I like the way WHFRP does it, where money buys you Best quality weapons and armor but magical items don't even have prices.

[Fuchs]

I think a knight (the mounted plated warrior type, not the social rank type) shouldn't be the same level as a conscript, a knight should be a higher level representing all that combat training that made him a knight.

[Username17]

So, coming back to the idea of wealth, how much personal potency should wealth grant? I think it should grant some measure of advantage, otherwise why would anyone bother with it? If fighting naked with your fists is just as effective as being decked out in plate with a greatsword, who is going to opt for the plate?

Probably the best idea here is that the benefits of wealth are extremely stark for a while and then essentially stop. So having plate and shield should make you very superior to a peasant with a stick. But owning a room full of fire opals should not make you appreciably better than the guy without.

Basically, the adventure where you're naked for whatever reason needs to be playable and cause players to feel genuinely naked without their gear. But it shouldn't permanently fuck them by setting their "GP" down to first level. The reason we call it Mordenkainen's Game Disjunction is because players can't really recover from having their equipment destroyed. That has to stop.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

Consider what the PCs would ask fir as a reward for doing a job, then you know what your wealth will buy you with regards to combat power.

[Amra]

So, coming back to the idea of wealth, how much personal potency should wealth grant? I think it should grant some measure of advantage, otherwise why would anyone bother with it? If fighting naked with your fists is just as effective as being decked out in plate with a greatsword, who is going to opt for the plate?

But that's a spurious argument. Fighting naked with your fists *is* (or at least, should be) just as effective as being decked out with plate and a greatsword if you trained in fighting-naked-with-your-fists-style, but you're going to suck at it if you trained in being-decked-out-in-plate-and-greatsword style.

The naked guy might have tons of money, but he spends it all on castles and shit, whilst the greatsword guy needs a minimum level of equipment to do his job, and that's fine when the minimum levels are something you can earn with relative ease and are amounts of gold that won't make your abacus explode.

It's quite easy to envisage a game world in which *some* wealth is required, but *more* does not help. In fact, 2E did exactly that. At low levels, scrimping and saving for the good armour and weapons was exactly what melee characters did, but once they'd got it all there wasn't anywhere left to go because you simply couldn't buy magical loot. Nobody ever explained where all the crazy toys came from, but they were a good reason to go adventuring; it was the only way to get them.

Once you'd got enough money for all the mundane equipment you'd ever need, you basically hoarded the rest against the day you could take a mortgage out on that castle and fill it with hirelings and men-at-arms to make you feel big in the pants and for no other reason.

Hell, the real world works that way up to a point. Take one CAD specialist with a piece-of-shit, slow-ass machine that breaks all the time (or just paper and pencils) and another equally skilled guy with state-of-the-art computing goodness at his fingertips and guess who's going to turn out work the quickest and get the contracts? But no amount *more* money is ever going to make the guy with the fancy computer any better because he already has the best available. The only way he'll improve is by practising his art. The ton of extra money he's making compared to the other guy is getting spent on a better lifestyle.

I don't even know why that was the example that occurred to me, but you can draw truckloads of parallels without breaking a sweat. It's when there's no ceiling (to all intents and purposes) on how much better you can get with ever-increasing amounts of cash that the crazy really sets in.

Crap, 3E would be better if every single character could just will a full suite of level-appropriate equipment (that nobody else can use) into existence by spending 24 hours thinking really hard. That way, getting all your equipment removed doesn't destroy your viability as a character, just inconveniences you for a bit. You can never own or use more gear than your WBL allows and you can only replace any of it by destroying the old stuff and concentrating the new thing into existence.

Note that I'm not putting that forward as a serious suggestion, but you'd just as fucking well do that and save everybody the jumping-through-hoops they have to do just to stay on the curve.

[Roy]

Ok, so ignoring various instances of Cataclysmic Fail and such...

There are over four hundred mother fucking posts in this mother fucking thread.

The title is 'Arguments in favor of 4th edition'.

Has any fucking one actually presented any arguments at all in favor of it? Maybe I'm missing something, but I have yet to see so much as a single person succeed at the original topic... which is likely why it derailed to whining about me, then derailed again to discuss wealth as fluff text.

Ignoring the fact that the Den usually takes a lackadaisical if not dismissive attitude towards fluff what with the Magical Tea Party to describe everything outside the rule set and is now suddenly all for it... what the fuckity fuck?

Have I entered the Twilight Zone, or perhaps Bizarro world?

[Gelare]

Out of curiosity, what would happen (in 3.5) if we just gave people all the bonuses we think they're supposed to have all the time? As in,

Congratulations, an adventurer is you. This means you get:

Greater Magic Weapon with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Greater Magic Vestment with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Barkskin with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Shield of Faith with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;

Obviously this would make it so actually casting those spells are only useful for buffing people who are lower level than you, but what else? Benefits, drawbacks?

[Roy]

Out of curiosity, what would happen (in 3.5) if we just gave people all the bonuses we think they're supposed to have all the time? As in,

Congratulations, an adventurer is you. This means you get:

Greater Magic Weapon with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Greater Magic Vestment with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Barkskin with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Shield of Faith with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;

Obviously this would make it so actually casting those spells are only useful for buffing people who are lower level than you, but what else? Benefits, drawbacks?

In which case, weapons would be fine... there is no such thing as Greater Magic Vestment, but the normal version works and the other stuff. You'd still be auto hit, because you don't have nearly enough AC to actually matter.

And while normally, having Magic Vestment whenever needed isn't a big deal, and having Barkskin when needed later isn't either as it lasts a while as well, SoF is normally only a minute a level.

If you raised the max base enchantment on armor/shields/natural armor amulets/deflection rings to 10, and in the former two cases raised the max total enchantments to 10, but kept max special properties at 9 (so basically you cap at +5 special properties armor instead of +1 special properties armor) then set all the values granted by those spells to 1/2 CLs, max 10 then you'd get somewhere. As then you'd have +10 armor, shields, natural armor, and deflection... giving you 20 more AC, and 15 more touch AC (with Ghost Ward) thus allowing you to actually get on the RNG.

[Kaelik]

Out of curiosity, what would happen (in 3.5) if we just gave people all the bonuses we think they're supposed to have all the time? As in,

Congratulations, an adventurer is you. This means you get:

Greater Magic Weapon with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Greater Magic Vestment with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Barkskin with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;
Shield of Faith with a caster level equal to your character level, all the time;

Obviously this would make it so actually casting those spells are only useful for buffing people who are lower level than you, but what else? Benefits, drawbacks?

Also, you want scaling resistance and stat. Though the stat could be just stealing the VoP system.

[Psychic Robot]

Easy solution to "wealth is power": give everyone automatic bonuses at certain levels that give them the same power as magic items. Basically, turn Vow of Poverty into an automatic thing. Let the PCs invest their wealth in caravans, trade markets, plots of land, keeps, hirelings, that sort of thing. Have them raise and train armies. Encourage interesting magic items, like folding boats and bag o' tricks and that sort of thing.

[RandomCasualty2]

4th edition removes some stories from the game. 3rd requires everyone to look away whenever someone offers them power for money. And 2nd edition wealth ... just works.

Even 2nd edition had problems. Like the question of why +1 swords exist at all. It was a fucking pain in the ass to craft items in 2E. And after you were done, it cost you a permanent con point, and you had to be high level to even try. So I always wondered why people would bother even making lesser magic items. For all the shit you had to do to make a +1 sword most of the time ti just wasn't worth it. So the magic item generation system really prevented any kind of magic item economy, but it also really made you question how people would make items at all, because it was just deliberately difficult as hell where you had to collect ridiculous hypothetical components like "the breath of a shadow" or something.

And it's actually relatively easy to convert 4E into a 2E style economy if you want. It works like this:
-You can't buy residuum.
-Magic item creation ritual only works with residuum.
-People trade magic items only for other magic items or for residuum.

Those three house rules basically are all you need to change 4E around. technically I'm not even sure if not being able to buy residuum is even a house rule, but I put it in there anyway.

Changing 3E is a bit harder, because even if you go with the wish economy, there's still nothing stopping item crafters from infinite crafting with infinite gold.

Also, I am all for just eliminating bonus items that do nothing but keep you competitive for your level and are a cheap bonus the DM can toss your way so you've felt like you've gained something (but really didn't in a relative sense).

[Doom]

It was hard for *wizards* to make +1 swords (or most any other magic item), but it was implied that magic weapons could be crafted (NPC style) in other ways.

[Murtak]

4th edition removes some stories from the game. 3rd requires everyone to look away whenever someone offers them power for money. And 2nd edition wealth ... just works.

Even 2nd edition had problems. Like the question of why +1 swords exist at all. It was a fucking pain in the ass to craft items in 2E.

I never claimed the item system made any sense. The wealth system does though. As for crafting items, I would suggest a system where your DM hands out the basics of an item, be it a powerful soul or some super hard dragon scales and the players can then enchant the scales with spells or merge the soul with a blade or something. Basically a a DM controlled influx of items where magic items don't hand out superior numbers but more abilities.

Basically, yes, crafting items in 2nd sucks and 3rd has at least decent rules for the actual crafting process. But in 2nd you can allow players to get a billion platinum pieces and in 3rd you can not - and thus the 2nd edition wealth system is vastly superior.

[Gelare]

We've been talking about how adventurers in the D&D world have goals that extend beyond adding +1 to their character sheet - building a wizard's tower, founding a bardic college, stopping famine and disease in a town or whatever. The way to accomplish some of these goals is to take the solid gold throne the bad guy was sitting on, put it in a hole, carry it back to town, and melt it into bars that you can use to pay for things. Does anyone have any guidelines or any source of guidelines that can tell us roughly how much these things are supposed to cost? How many thrones do I have to melt down before I can build a swimming pool and summoning chamber in my tower?

[Lich-Loved]

Does anyone have any guidelines or any source of guidelines that can tell us roughly how much these things are supposed to cost? How many thrones do I have to melt down before I can build a swimming pool and summoning chamber in my tower?

Well, the Stronghold Builders Guide for 3.0 attempted to do this with varying degrees of "don't look under the covers". I own it and have used it in game and if you are not too picky, it does an OK job for the more mundane construction projects. It can be used to build floating/crawling/teleporting/invisible/whatever castles but the farther you go the weirder it gets in terms of "yes this is a plausible explanation of how I built my castle".

Building a castle of whatever type follows the receipe: Take 1 part 3.x economy, 1 part legos and 1 part "magic happens here" and blend to a froth. Consume.

[Gelare]

Heh, yeah, I've looked at the Stronghold Builder's Guide a little bit, but I don't have any indication of whether it's actually any good (or useful). I also don't recall how much the Book of Gears had to say on this subject.