DSMatticus wrote:
That costs experience and time. Currently, anyway. You can't wave your hands and get major magic items out of thin air. Gold was never the limit, people cared about experience.
Not sure about the games you've been playing, but in my games the XP cost was always a drop in a bucket, and the system actually made sure you caught up anyway by paying low level characters more XP.
XP was really never a huge issue.
1) Mundane items like turnips, cows, weapons and armor, stables, and castles are purchased with gold.
2) Super powerful magic items like +10 swords and +10 armor are purchased with gold.
3) It stops people from taking mundane items and turning them into super powerful magic items.
Spoiler: there's a contradiction there. An obvious one. Like, super hilariously fucking obvious. As in, you literally cannot accomplish all three of those goals at once, it is mathematically impossible.
Well, you can't produce 3, as it's written, but it's not a goal you even need to meet. There is some huge amount of turnips and cows that would buy you a +10 sword, but it should be such a massive number that you don't even care. It might as well be infinity because it's not a feasable goal. There's a finite number of hours I could work at Walmart to afford an F-15 fighter jet too, but it probably won't be within my lifetime and would be so inefficient it's not really considered possible. It's just not a big deal.
Not to mention that in a D&D economy, unlike the modern economy, when you start stockpiling you open yourself up to theft. So if for whatever reason, Tom the turnip merchant started saving up a ton of his profits by living like a miser, someone is going to hear about his stash of 500 gold and gank him for it. That's what bandits and robbers do.
And no, changing the scale is not a solution. Multiplying the cost for magic items by 10 doesn't actually fix anything, it just means either A) the players get less when they finally break your stupid economy, or B) players have to do more before they break it. Either way, they can still break it pretty much anytime they want.
Basically my solution would be taking trade goods, like iron, stone, etc. and put them in copper peices. Jewelry and such would net you 1- 100gp. Castles and keeps would be around 5000. Magic item prices would probably start around 1000-10000 for the weakest crap and tier steeply into the multi-millions or even billions.
We've had this discussion. It requires these three things to hold true.
1) The people who design the D&D economy do the math rigorously such that WBL is not broken.
2) The people who design D&D adventures consider every possible avenue that players may profit off their adventure, and balance it all to within WBL.
3) The people who DM are super-geniuses who account for every move their players might make beforehand, and balance it all by WBL.
It doesn't actively take a super genius, just some care (and a little Gygaxian mentality). If you want a super hardened door, then have it just operate as such while within the confines of the area it's in via some protective ritual of hardening (which you could very well just include in your spell lists if you want). Honestly though, I always found the adamantine door a silly example anyway because players could just hack through the wall, or probably could damage an adamantine door regardless with a power attack. 3Es object damage rules were so lax, you couldn't ever create an indestructible material.
If you can't tell the problem here, I'll point it out to you: it requires that everyone involved have prophetic foresight. I don't know about you, but I like systems that don't break down the second a writer or a DM fails to be omniscient. Your 'simple solution' is 'be able to 100% predict everything the players will do, and do rigorous, flawless mathematics to get it to a value within WBL.' Good luck with that, I'm going to try a different approach. Something humanly possible.
You don't need to be 100% spot on with your WBL, that's silly. We're talking ballpark values. If you're off 10% one way, it's not even going to matter much. And you just set up your pricing table such that structures, art items and decorations aren't worth all that much. It's not that they can't take that statue of the dwarf king and sell it, it's just that the thing is hardly worth anything compared to the regular treasure they're getting. Greyhawking may net them only a 1 or 2% increase in their profits to the point that most PCs won't even bother with the aggravation.
The other easy way to handle economic breaking tactics like that is the same way MMOs do, namely to make the player go through a bunch of tedium to get it done. You make him record each and everything he's taking from the dungeon then you worry about pricing it and selling it individually. After wasting 4 hours to make 50 gold, a bunch of players may just decide it's not a worthy investment of their time and they could have knocked over another ogre fortress to gain another 4000 gold in the same time.
K wrote:
On a third note, the problem with castles is not that they are too expensive in standard DnD. The problem is that paying in gold at all for a castle in DnD is less magical power for your character regardless of the scale of magic items. In that same vein, sleeping in inns and paying for food is a drain on your character power, so players in standard DnD don't do it.
That doesn't hold true though. MMOs follow the same basic rules, but people in MMOs do end up fucking around and buying a bunch of booze to get drunk or basically throwing away EVE spaceships on mock battles or what not. If the price is negligible enough, PCs will buy some luxuries.
