Arguments in favor of 4th Edition

[CatharzGodfoot]

The Book of Gears is (ironically) in limbo, so you probably won't find much help there. The best guide is probably the cost of making magic items, the cost of getting people to cast spells, and the cost of labor. The stronghold builder's guidebook probably covers the first and last, and the second is in the DMG.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The Stronghold Builder's Guide sucks ass through a straw. Everything is ridiculously overpriced and spells that are free like Wall of Iron or Wall of Stone now have a price tag attached to them if you actually want to use them to build a fortress.

Unless you have a ton of gold and you're playing at really low level or low-magic, don't get that book. It actually becomes harder to make a sweet stronghold if you own it.

[Avoraciopoctules]

The Stronghold Builder's Guide has ridiculously high pricing for buildings. Here's an excerpt: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20020503e

The "Cheap Keep" costs 70,000 GP. Think what else someone could do with that money. If you do use the book, you probably want to either come up with better pricing for strongholds or find some ridiculously effective way at producing piles of money exponentially more than your expected character wealth.

EDIT: Lago posted before me. I agree with him.

[Lich-Loved]

The Stronghold Builder's Guide sucks ass through a straw. Everything is ridiculously overpriced and spells that are free like Wall of Iron or Wall of Stone now have a price tag attached to them if you actually want to use them to build a fortress

Well, the spell is only free if you assume you play a caster that will cast it repeatedly and you want to spend your days casting the spell rather than going out and earning phat loot. So, even if the caster is you, the spells cost you the opportunity cost of not casting them and doing something else with your time. If you hire someone else to do it, then you have to pay more, naturally, since you need to cover their costs and opportunity cost as well.

Now I am not saying that the game adequately reflects these costs, only that nothing is free, even if it looks free.

[Gelare]

Now I am not saying that the game adequately reflects these costs, only that nothing is free, even if it looks free.

*nod* As Frank has said, casting Wall of Iron all day every day isn't instant infinite wealth, it's just a job. You can, of course, cast it yourself, and I vaguely remember the SBG giving you some kind of cost reduction for doing so, but really, it does still cost something.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Now I am not saying that the game adequately reflects these costs, only that nothing is free, even if it looks free.

*nod* As Frank has said, casting Wall of Iron all day every day isn't instant infinite wealth, it's just a job. You can, of course, cast it yourself, and I vaguely remember the SBG giving you some kind of cost reduction for doing so, but really, it does still cost something.

Based on what I can find in the WotC web enhancement, they at least mention time cost due to time spent supporting builders to reduce expenses.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Why the hell would you want some useless builders, anyfukken way?

You're a wizard who has access to the fabricate, wall of stone, and wall of iron spells. As long as you're next to a forest or have a hell of a lot of wood, any part of the castle except for the actual staffing you can do your own goddamn self.

What could a team of pissants 3rd level expert possibly do that you couldn't do your own self? You don't save on time, you don't save on expertise, you definitely don't save on resources. Why in the name of holy fuck would you want to spend ridiculous amounts of money so that you can do a project slower and shittier than you can do yourself?

You wouldn't, of course, the only reason why you would is because you've bought that worthless Stronghold Builder's Guide and you either A) want to get some use out of it or B) are using it as some kind of stealth errata where using a wall of stone to trap an enemy is free but using it to make... a wall suddenly costs thousands of gold pieces.

That book is sheer poison. It fucks over people who want a fantasy-appropriate roleplaying benefit for no goddamn reason whatsoever. I wish it was never printed.

[virgil]

What's interesting is that the lyre of building is explicitly stated in the Stronghold Builder's Guide as an item that completely replaces the workforce; and implied that a competent micromanaging necromancer could do the same with a bunch of undead.

[CatharzGodfoot]

The "Cheap Keep" costs 70,000 GP. Think what else someone could do with that money.

Instant fortress: 55,000 gp.
1,875 donkeys: 15,000 gp.

Laughing your ass off at the guy with the immobile, non-adamantine tower: priceless.

...stealth errata where using a wall of stone to trap an enemy is free but using it to make... a wall suddenly costs thousands of gold pieces.

Isn't that the cost of having someone else cast the spell for you?

[virgil]

Except that solo-casting wall of stone gives a mere discount of 15% (50% at level 12, free at level 16+)...ONLY on hewn stone walls, which cost 6000gp per space. It doesn't give you a single copper piece in savings if you want to build, say, masonry walls.

Then there's the basic bedroom: twp low frame straw beds with burlap blankets, two rough benches, two chest of drawers, and two mirrors. That costs 700gp, and fabricate will cut these costs by a whole 35 gold. Getting yourself free labour will reduce the cost a further 210gp (?!). Therefore, the actual material of two metal dinner plates, some straw, and a bunch of rags costs 455gp.

Remember traps? I ranted close to a year back on their prices, citing the open pit trap; because somehow a freakin' hole in the ground costs almost a thousand gold (gold plated shovels that are promptly given to the rust monster?). The stronghold suffers from the same process here, money is effectively being fed into the aether.

EDIT: Here's a hint on how bad the book is for mundane construction. My DM (the one I & A_Cynic complained loudly on a thread) let me build my tower for free; on the condition that I actually keep track of what needed to be done. I don't mind the concept of playing Logistics, so I actually did the math to know exactly how many of each spell I needed to cast (checked the circumference and thickness of the outer walls for volume, support beam approximations, etc). Took about a month of solid casting (with a little druid help), but I got my five story iron tower that looked roughly like this...

I already had a basement for the place, which served as a double entendre (nether regions). With permanent image, I blanketed the entire inside of the tower to give the distinct impression of vast empty space. Since the illusion is stationary unless I actively readjust, any moved furniture basically looks like it appears out of nowhere and just sits there (same goes for me). This had the added benefit of fooling any attempts at scrying ('where the hell is empty space and how do I know which part to teleport to?!').

I was planning on enchanting the outer walls so they would be as hard as adamantine, and once I hit 16th level, it was going to be hit with my homebrew animate object spell so I could cast overland flight on it and get myself a mobile torso tower.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Why the shit would you want masonry or hewn stone though if you have wall of stone?

The whole fucking point of building walls in that way is not because they're harder or more durable (because they're not) but because you'll rarely find a ring of stone where you want it. See, if you want a stone fort on top of a hill, you need to bring the rocks up there and then shape and reassemble them. But using wall of stone completely obviates this need in the first fukken place.

I even looked in the DMG. Regular unworked stone doesn't have any hardness or hit point difference (controlling for thickness) from the other two types in the book. So there isn't even a game mechanical advantage towards throwing your money down the well this way. I mean, what could the mason have possibly said to the wizard to justify this?

Wizard: It's been a month of grueling 5 minute workdays but I finally put up the stone for castle walls and keep.

Mason: Okay, now that we've done that, we need to hire crap-covered peasants to grab some hammer and smash the wall into little pieces.

Wizard: Why in the ass would I do that?

Mason: So you could assemble the pieces back into a wall again. Duh.

Wizard: Why? The wall is already there just where I want it. Is this about the pretty designs in the stone? I have a cleric buddy who knows 'shape stone'. We can put pretty unicorns or roses or whatever the fuck you want on the castle.

Mason: It'll cost 6000 gold pieces to tear down this useless circle of stone you put up and put in some nice hewn stone.

Wizard; That can't be right. The goddamn stone is free. Why does it cost that much.

Mason: Because creating stone from nothing in exactly in the place and shape you want it only accounts for 15% of the actual creation of a stone wall.

[RandomCasualty2]

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.

Yeah, I mean the problem is that the crafting system and the wealth system are linked. If you make crafting hard then the wealth system is much easier, because you can explain away why people don't buy/sell magic items. If crafting is easy, then there's no reason to explain why the magic item factory doesn't exist because if magic item creation is easy and any component of magic item creation can be bought using gold, then there's no reason magic items shouldn't be sold as well.

And I don't think there's any way around that. Even the wish economy had that problem. It prevented people from buying items, but at the same time, it was an item crafter's wet dream because you had infinite gold and could craft as much as you wanted.

[Murtak]

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.

Yeah, I mean the problem is that the crafting system and the wealth system are linked. If you make crafting hard then the wealth system is much easier, because you can explain away why people don't buy/sell magic items. If crafting is easy, then there's no reason to explain why the magic item factory doesn't exist

I disagree. You do need to ensure that not everyone can make magic items if you still want to have farmers, that much is true. But the issue with 2nd edition magic item creation was not that making magic items is hard, the issue was the system was crap and there were no guidelines as to which or how many magic items a party of level x was supposed to have.

You can have all of the above without any issues, but you may not link magic item creation to mundane wealth.

[Username17]

Why the hell would you want some useless builders, anyfukken way?

You're a wizard who has access to the fabricate, wall of stone, and wall of iron spells. As long as you're next to a forest or have a hell of a lot of wood, any part of the castle except for the actual staffing you can do your own goddamn self.

Fabricate is actually really disappointing for that purpose. When used on minerals, it only does your level in cubic feet per casting. That's impressive, especially if you're making swords or something, but it's not really that structural if you're trying to make a castle.

-Username17

[Amra]

There were loads of spells in 2nd Edition that allowed you to more-or-less do this shit for free. If memory serves, it was the Drawmij series of spells in one of the Greyhawk books; you could summon an army of really souped-up Unseen Servants that were craftsmen of various types and get them working on your behalf. I had a character who had to do exactly that to help rebuild parts of a city that got seriously damaged when somebody sent some uber-earth-elemental type beings after him.

Of course, you've then got the problem of why there are real craftsmen at all if wizards can do all that with a couple of low-level spells, but whatever.

Still, I do think that teen-levels wizards should be able to throw up their Towers of Doom without worrying about it too much; and certainly not at the expense of keeping on the curve in terms of level-appropriate equipment. Heck, teen-level warrior types should be able to have their Strongholds of Might as well. D&D has long been an exercise in trying to commoditise magic whilst at the same time trying to ensure that player characters who wield magic don't derive any mechanical benefit from the process, and they've missed the obvious solution every time

[Roy]

Why the hell would you want some useless builders, anyfukken way?

You're a wizard who has access to the fabricate, wall of stone, and wall of iron spells. As long as you're next to a forest or have a hell of a lot of wood, any part of the castle except for the actual staffing you can do your own goddamn self.

What could a team of pissants 3rd level expert possibly do that you couldn't do your own self? You don't save on time, you don't save on expertise, you definitely don't save on resources. Why in the name of holy fuck would you want to spend ridiculous amounts of money so that you can do a project slower and shittier than you can do yourself?

You wouldn't, of course, the only reason why you would is because you've bought that worthless Stronghold Builder's Guide and you either A) want to get some use out of it or B) are using it as some kind of stealth errata where using a wall of stone to trap an enemy is free but using it to make... a wall suddenly costs thousands of gold pieces.

That book is sheer poison. It fucks over people who want a fantasy-appropriate roleplaying benefit for no goddamn reason whatsoever. I wish it was never printed.

Exactly why that book fails. You can just take a month off and cast walls and fabricate a bunch of times to make and furnish the place for free. Why would this take a huge bite out of the shiny magic item fund again?

[RandomCasualty2]

I disagree. You do need to ensure that not everyone can make magic items if you still want to have farmers, that much is true. But the issue with 2nd edition magic item creation was not that making magic items is hard, the issue was the system was crap and there were no guidelines as to which or how many magic items a party of level x was supposed to have.

You can have all of the above without any issues, but you may not link magic item creation to mundane wealth.

The fact that making magic items is hard is what put it into the "too priceless to trade for gold" category. If you can conjure magic items just by putting gold in a jar like 3E or 4E, there's just no reason why creating magic items wouldn't be a job. You can do it without leaving the city, and in 4E, you can actually do it in an hours time, so it's not even taking up an archmage's time. So there's literally no reason why you couldn't bring a bunch of gold to a powerful wizard and ask him to craft you something.

On the other hand, if magic item creation is difficult as hell and especially if it costs a permanent resource (like 2E charged you a wizard's con points), then the magic item trade just isn't going to happen.

However, once you start making it easy to create magic items, the link between mundane wealth and magic item creation becomes impossible to avoid.

[Murtak]

If you can conjure magic items just by putting gold in a jar like 3E or 4E, there's just no reason why creating magic items wouldn't be a job.

You can have all of the above without any issues, but you may not link magic item creation to mundane wealth.

Why do you come back to "not hard = bunch of gold"? "Not hard" can just as well be "loss one of level", "put in a season's worth of effort" or "sacrifice a demon's soul".

But more importantly my point wasn't that magic item creation should not be hard - that is a matter of preference. It should be sensible though and that means a more powerful item has to be appreciatively harder to make, that not only wizards can make magic items and so on. Though I would wager that this is less of an issue when there are no more numeric bonus items.

[violence in the media]

What if, and I say this knowing full well how stupid this may be, the results of magical item creation were partially random?

Taking the suggestion from above, making most magic items takes a season's worth of effort. You choose the item you're making (a suit of plate armor or a magic ring) but you have no control over what properties or bonuses it generates. You might get +1 Plate of silent moves, you might get +5 Plate of invulnerability. Maybe you could chuck numeric bonuses entirely and just get random armor or cloak or ring properties.

Players and NPCs are still able to craft items. Though, without any sort of customization, there's an incentive to quest for items, as the DM can fiat up some legends and adventures for an item that would be just perfect for your character. Magic item trade can still exist, but with only 4 items per wizard per year, it becomes a situation where each magical merchant maybe only has a dozen (if that) items of random assortment available for purchase.

Now, none of this addresses the need of magic items, but whatever. That's something to be tackled in another argument.

[Fuchs]

What about a "items become magical through heroic (as in impressive/special, not as in "goodly") deeds" approach?

PCs as adventurers would create the level-appropriate magical gear through adventuring. After their heroic fight against the shadow that was terrorizing the village the blade of the fighter might have become a ghost touch weapon, for example, and after the daring escape from a burning castle the rogue's boots might become boots of fire resistance.

Mechanically one could hand out "enhancement points" per level, which the players could spend to make things magical, or boost already magical items.

There would be problems with regards to lost gear, and looted relics.

[Parthenon]

I don't like Fuchs' idea much. A lot of campaigns have varying monsters- undead one time, animals the next, then giants, then the gates of hell, etc. If all your equipment helped against the previous enemies then it doesn't actually help your current situation, and so is useless except for the basic +X to Y.

[Fuchs]

It doesn't mean you have to follow such a theme, you'd get free points to spend per level as the player wanted.

[RandomCasualty2]

What about a "items become magical through heroic (as in impressive/special, not as in "goodly") deeds" approach?

That's an interesting idea. But I've never really found a way to implement it well enough mechanically. Because really you'd want to tend to give people bonuses based on what the item did, yet a lot of PCs may not want to take dragonbane and instead would rather just spend it on something more universally useful.

I was thinking perhaps you could get a list of abilities to choose from. One might be based on your class or high ability scores. Dex based classes/characters would get dexterity style abilities. Strength based characters would get weapons and items that can do feats of strength, and so on.

But still I was never able to really write out such a system to the point I liked it. I did at one point try to magic teaparty a system like that. But it was a pain since it constantly involved PCs asking me to approve various item bonuses.

[Fuchs]

Well, I'd not limit the item properties to "obvious" ones. There is a PC in one of the campains I DM who has a sword that has one enhancement bonus per level (max +5 for damage/to hit) in a swordmaster prestige class he has, freely chosen by the player. It works rather well.

We do not have many significant magic items though, mostly a few major items (weapons usually) and the rest is minor stuff.

[Murtak]

What about a "items become magical through heroic (as in impressive/special, not as in "goodly") deeds" approach?

PCs as adventurers would create the level-appropriate magical gear through adventuring. After their heroic fight against the shadow that was terrorizing the village the blade of the fighter might have become a ghost touch weapon, for example, and after the daring escape from a burning castle the rogue's boots might become boots of fire resistance.

Mechanically one could hand out "enhancement points" per level, which the players could spend to make things magical, or boost already magical items.

I think this would work well with a minor modification:
When allocating new bonuses the player must have a reason to take the new power. Recent deeds qualify, as do quests and special ingredients. So after defeating a basilisk you qualify for Stoning Protection, after stealing a set of dragon scales from a merchant you can make your own set of armor of energy protection or fortification and after trading the Ruby of Kaz for the soul of a Demon you can have your very own sword of destruction.