New Edition of Rules

[Username17]

1201465838[/unixtime]]Um... were there any mages with heavy armor? (Serious question!)

Yes.
You can also think back to
Oberon,
Angmar,
D&D Clerics,
Warmachine Warcasters,
Chronomancers, etc.



Traditionally, in D&D the heavy armor spellcasters use "divine magic" but that actually means fuck all.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

1201451581[/unixtime]]
The answer: it depends. If characters are supposed to care a lot about the turnip economy at low level, then it is a 4th wall violation if the heavy armor guys get to start with heavy plates of steel while the team is trying to pile sticks together to trade for a lesser number of advanced sticks.

I'm not a particular fan of the turnip economy. It causes strip mining dungeons and stingy heroes. I'd rather there not be a mechanical encouragement for looting everything. I'd also rather it if a paladin could be generous to the poor without the player knowing its making their character less powerful.

[Crissa]

I don't mind races 'switching out' abilities.

Mechanically, it could just mean that one ability trumps the other, and any abilities based on the lower ability wouldn't be available for the moment.

Sort of how using your fine manipulators (fingers) is trumped when you're using gauntlets.

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm not a particular fan of the turnip economy. It causes strip mining dungeons and stingy heroes. I'd rather there not be a mechanical encouragement for looting everything. I'd also rather it if a paladin could be generous to the poor without the player knowing its making their character less powerful.

The economy levels have nothing to do with detailed vs abstract record-keeping. You can totally have wealth levels in the Turnip economy be 'Fed,' 'Well-fed,' and 'Hungry.' The Well-fed guy is the Blacksmith's son, so he gets to have heavy armor (for the Turnip economy) and have bread to share with Hungry people.

[Koumei]

Yeah. It also leads to really stupid shit.

[JonSetanta]

Switching racial abilities?
The Pokemon "evolutionary" process.
Digimon.
Hell, various fiends such as Baatezu or Tanar'ri, or even Celestials such as the Archons.
I believe some Slaad evolve too.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Obviously you don't Want the "turnip economy" sticking around. It's fun until you start dealing with bigger threats than a small bear or a few angry villagers.

[Koumei]

1201492792[/unixtime]]
I believe some Slaad evolve too.

Green --> Grey --> Death --> White --> Black

Unless you press B, of course.

[RandomCasualty]

1201470351[/unixtime]]
I think Elric of Melnibone wears heavy armor in his naval battles, but that might just be in the art.

Yeah the Elric series was actually full of mages with magical armor. Though granted their kind of wizardry was all pretty much rituals (mostly summons). You rarely saw one of them casting spells in combat. Generally combat was with swords.

[Crissa]

It needn't be evolutionary, unless you get wings from a stone or some weirdness. But it's magic, you can have whatever explaination you want. 'You can control X things' 'You can power X things' 'You only have X hands/attention/foci' 'You change colors'

Sheesh.

-Crissa

[Username17]

The question of abstract vs. itemized wealth is distinct but intertwined with the question of turnip economics vs. silver economics vs. mana economics.

Now a serious problem that itemized wealth can have is the idea of "trading down." That is, a +5 suit of armor costs more than a +3 suit of armor and a +3 shield. So a rational player character would be expected to trade memorable and powerful items for a smaller pile of faceless utilitarian goods. That's actually realistic, in that in the real world people are better off with having standardization, interchangable parts, and well technology. But it makes a poor story. For all its real impact, the T-34 doesn't make as good a story as the King Tiger.

A serious advantage of the itemized economy is that you can get a sense of accomplishment by finding individual things. A silver bell, a couple of gold coins, an ivory stick - these have value and finding them is meaningful in an itemized universe. In a wealth abstract world, it may or may not be. Finding or leaving that pile of gold may have literally zero impact on your character.

But back to trade down. Having characters come in with heavy armor or any other single big-ticket item when they live at an itemized stage where there are a lot of turnip economy (or cheap gold economy) items that they want and don't have leads to players being tempted to take their signature items and trade them for ten foot poles, back packs, and barrels of fish.

---

Not an insoluable problem, but one which must be kept in mind.

-Username17

[Cielingcat]

1201471213[/unixtime]]

1201465838[/unixtime]]Um... were there any mages with heavy armor? (Serious question!)

Urza.

Also Barrin.

[RandomCasualty]

1201525151[/unixtime]]
A serious advantage of the itemized economy is that you can get a sense of accomplishment by finding individual things. A silver bell, a couple of gold coins, an ivory stick - these have value and finding them is meaningful in an itemized universe. In a wealth abstract world, it may or may not be. Finding or leaving that pile of gold may have literally zero impact on your character.

Personally i like the idea of small wealth units. Basically the small stuff, like inn rooms and so on, are effectively free unless you're totally out of wealth units. But so long as you have one unit you can afford to pay for that stuff. We could say one wealth unit lets you live for a year or something. Minor coins aren't counted.

As far as treasure, you collect that in wealth units, a chest containing gold and gems may contain 3 wealth units. We never really state how many coins are in there, and it doesn't matter. Smaller token amounts of gold, like how much you get from emptying the pickpocket's belt pouch probably don't even factor in the radar for wealth units, so taking them or not taking them is a flavor thing.

It prevents people from going through pointless looting, taking everything that isn't nailed down, because you're not counting individual gold or copper pieces anymore.

[Draco_Argentum]

Only if the gold plate on the walls is worth zero wealth units. This seems kinda odd.

If you're in heavy armour then your armour should be so awesome from a cost/benefit stand point that there is no group of items you'd be willing to trade it for. This is easier if you enforce the standard PCs sell at half price thing.

[Daiba]

1201608169[/unixtime]]Only if the gold plate on the walls is worth zero wealth units. This seems kinda odd.

I've developed a dislike for abstract wealth systems, but I think the idea is to make it so that accumulating wealth units stops helping you after you have some set number of them already.

If you're in heavy armour then your armour should be so awesome from a cost/benefit stand point that there is no group of items you'd be willing to trade it for. This is easier if you enforce the standard PCs sell at half price thing.

I never really liked the whole sell at half price thing. It's a medieval barter economy - there isn't some huge industrial complex producing suits of slightly superior full-plate every year for the same cost. Used items just don't depreciate in value as much as they do now. The "as soon as you ride that horse off the lot, it's worth half as much" scheme is bullshit (unless you've just been sold a lame horse).

You don't pawn a Hanzo sword because you are a warrior, and beyond the sentimental value the sword is part of what makes you a badass. If some random schlub got his hands on one, it would be up on ebay in half a minute. As long as characters starting with big ticket items absolutely need them to be effective in combat, selling that item will be pretty rare.

[Username17]

Oddly enough, the Diablo system prevents, or at least limits looting. With a maximum amount of wealth a character can run around with, picking up more wealth is a waste of time. In a world without banking, it's actually pretty reasonable.

So imagine for the moment that you have a limit to the number of wealth units you can carry around. And those wealth units can be turni economy wealth units, or they can be silver wealth units, or gem wealth units, or whatever. And if you are in a place which will take your bigger wealth units you can live off of them at a higher standard for a longer period.

Which means that people will be strongly tempted to take various chump trade goods with them so that they can survive in the hinterlands. And opal bridges don't get chopped up by greedy PCs.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

I don't know. Carrying capacity has never really been muhc of a problem in D&D, so I doubt the Diablo system would work well in pencil and paper. When you've got anything like shrink item or bags of holding, how much you can carry becomes moot.

Plus it gets far too much into logistical concerns for my taste. I really don't want the PCs spending an hour calculating how many pack mules and saddlebags they'll need to carry the entire opal bridge.

[Fwib]

At the higher end of the game, you could have a rule which doesn't let you own more magic items than you are heroic - for whatever reason related to how magic works - maybe items bond to the possessor, and if you have too many bonds, your mind blows up and you die.

Determining how many items would be allowed, and of what power, or if you get a save, or so many days to transfer an item to someone else etc etc, to get the system to work how you want it, that I am not sure about.

Thoughts?

[Shatner]

Let me know if this sounds correct:

It sounds like you are trying to simplify the way wealth is measured. No character at any level needs to worry about the cost of things on the copper-piece level. Effectively having some non-zero number of gold coins in your pocket indicates that you can just make whatever copper piece transactions you want without tracking them because you have entered the gold piece economy which basically grants you unlimited access to the copper economy. And once you are bartering with platinum, gemstones, magic items and planar currencies then you can pretty much throw away the ledger on silver and gold piece transactions as well.

Therefore you measure purchasing power in more levels of fewer units than in standard DnD: turnip-level wealth units, gold-level wealth units, magic-level wealth units, epic-level wealth units and so on. Then you have it where no level currency converts to another level. You can basically pull an unlimited number of turnip-units out of a single gold-unit making the accumulation of turnip-units meaningless once you’ve hit the gold-level economy. And no matter how much gold-level currency you are carrying around, the people on the magic-level will not care enough to sell you something. You’ve simplified the system so much that the inefficient conversion process renders looting below your current wealth level as pointless. If the party, for whatever reason, wants to hire 1,000 commoners who each cost some number of turnip-units, the DM states that quantities of that size are actually bought in gold or magic-level units. And here we start getting into problems.

It’s okay to make candlewicks cost apples, swords cost oranges and magic armor and supernatural mounts cost coconuts to intentionally defy comparison. But if you ever have to equate the cost of a LOT of swords to some number of Pegasus mounts then you have just made a cross-level conversion number and the intent of the system is undermined. Put another way, the DM either makes up a number of magic-units every time the party needs to buy three miles of rope (which may or may not be “fair” and neither the DM nor the party have any way to gauge that fairness) or the high-level party suddenly finds value in stealing the gold-leaf off the mansion walls because eat sheet is now worth precisely 6,000ft of silk rope.

How do you reconcile this?

[Shatner]

1201641679[/unixtime]]At the higher end of the game, you could have a rule which doesn't let you own more magic items than you are heroic - for whatever reason related to how magic works - maybe items bond to the possessor, and if you have too many bonds, your mind blows up and you die.

Determining how many items would be allowed, and of what power, or if you get a save, or so many days to transfer an item to someone else etc etc, to get the system to work how you want it, that I am not sure about.

Thoughts?

This just makes the PCs try a little harder and they start carrying golf bags of magic gear. If a PC can only have one Ioun Stone attached at any given time then they’ll carry a bag full of each variety and set the currently-useful one in orbit around them when the situation calls for it. If a PC can only carry two magic swords on their person at a time then the monk becomes the fighters caddy and they swap out when facing the Ice Beast of the Dauntless Wastes or the Fire Vampires of the Obsidian Crags.

The only way I could imagine to force the PCs to stick with a finite amount of equipment during a day is to have each item take up one generic item-slot of the PC’s from noon of one day ‘til noon of the next, allow no slot exchanges any other time and put a hard cap on the max number of slots (which can slide based on level or have more powerful items require more slots). Still, this increases bookkeeping and there are still some edge cases the PCs can exploit (having the teleport assault at 11:59 so they can double use their item slots or whatever). If you expand the slot-refresh interval to “once per level up” then the PC gains nothing from additional item-salvage and it reduces the amount of accounting to virtually none but then you make the PCs very rigid in their equipment assignments, screwing the classes that change equipment frequently (fighters) and not impeding the classes that don’t (wizards).

That's bad.

[Username17]

If level appropriate gear is actually unpurchasable or essentially free, looting mostly goes away.

No one loots in detective stories, because anyone who wants one already has a "gun" which is as good as weapons get for player characters. It is an undeniably functional rubric.

If you're at the stage where you're grabbing gold and you want to fill out a limited number of magic economy stuff and the rest of your equipment costs pieces of copper, then looting is limited. People grab gold only because it's cool, not because their character needs it in any particular fashion.

-Username17

[SphereOfFeetMan]

I would like to virtually eliminate magic items and have those powers be absorbed into class abilities.

Fighters are dependant upon magic items and sorcerers aren't. This disparity is present more or less across most classes. If the Fighter doesn't get the exotic magic weapon/armor/shield he specializes in, he is basically fucked. If you have 4 party members, each with ~13 slots, it just gets stupid from a bookkeeping perspective, and trying to keep things fair.

So in 3.x terms, this is what I would change: All bonus items are incorporated into your character level. Woundrous items and the like become spell-like or supernatural abilities or whatever.

If the Dm wanted to introduce a magic item, it would basically be a plot device, or a specific addition to a specific pc. Much like artifacts are now.

If you wanted pcs to respect the scenery, make a gold-hoarding substitute. Maybe some quasi-magical stones, rupees, or whatever. There would be 3 economies: turnip, rupee, and high level (souls, essence, plot devices, etc.). Magic items wouldn't be in the economy at all b/c they would be exceedingly rare.

Alternately, there would just be a barter economy. This would be easiest b/c you can just say for whatever reason that no group of people wants to spend anything on chips of the diamond fortress.

[JonSetanta]

1201559508[/unixtime]]
Also Barrin.

Ah, right right. On that note, many MTG casters wear armor, but the most prevalent I saw was during the Urza saga/cycle.

[Cielingcat]

Well, really only Barrin wore armor, and only because it was fvcking power armor. Urza and pals were Planeswalkers in the Weatherlight sense, as opposed to the old pre-revision 'Walkers, so they just did whatever they felt like; armor wouldn't even have helped them if it was anything short of Urza's magic stuff. But Magic never really cared about the items people used, save for special artifacts.

I think the question of armor should be one of "do you want your character to wear armor?" instead of "is it beneficial for your character to wear armor?" Having armor benefit mooks is fine, but heroes should be able to run around half-naked or in full plate and not really care.

[CatharzGodfoot]

1201636927[/unixtime]]I don't know. Carrying capacity has never really been muhc of a problem in D&D, so I doubt the Diablo system would work well in pencil and paper. When you've got anything like shrink item or bags of holding, how much you can carry becomes moot.

So long as spells like shrink item and items like bags of holding are appropriately adjusted, such things need never be a problem.

Say shrink item creates a magical token bracelet, but will only shrink items you can wield comfortably in both hands ('of item size one greater than your own' in D&Dese). If you cast it a second time, the old bracelet goes 'poof' and everything resizes (and you get a new bracelet).
Removing or adding an item takes an action, and casting the spell takes 10 minutes.

So you can abuse it by changing your size, or starting out really big. However, if you could already just pick up the opal bridge in two hands, you haven't gained any orders of magnitude (unless that bracelet holds a lot of charms).

'Ok everyone, time to teleport. Get in the bag!'

Bags of holding just lead to stupid stories in D&D. You can fix that at the Bag-end or the transportation-end. Some solutions may help with the economic issues, others will not.

1201646245[/unixtime]]I would like to virtually eliminate magic items and have those powers be absorbed into class abilities.

Maybe "class abilities" are the wrong words. "Inherent to the character" is a little more comfortable.

The easiest solution to worn ('slotted') items is certainly that, with the caveat that the item you use is the specific one you are using (and it has to be the right general kind of item). And these items are continuous/unlimited use in non-combat time.

Everyone carrying cure potions is a longstanding tradition of D&D. Therefore, almost everyone should get that for free. Other unslotted, 'charged' items are a different story. In general, I'd lean towards the degenerate state of 'everyone has as much potion as they want; not everyone knows how to use it'. Your cure potion has a lot of sips in that little bottle.

Characters in the know will have little bottles of other things like fish mail, dragon breath, and elf eyes. If you don't know how to use it, you get the dosage wrong and roll on some table of minor 'wild' effects. The right effect should be right out.

Other items like tree tokens seem harder. I think you're on the right track, though. Nobody really knows if the tanuki is using a magic leaf or not when he throws it down and a giant oak grows.