Why do "Retro" games sabotage themselves?

[Prak]

I started mocking up something like this for Midgard, since now I'm thinking about it.

I'm looking at it for the runescribing magic system, but the basic idea is "Here's a list of Components (runes). Each has a set of possible effects. Put (etch) a Component (rune) into your item, and put in a Power Point*. Roll your skill, basic success lets you roll once, and each tier higher allows you to roll another effect and choose one. Spend extra Power Points to get extra effects. Multiple Components can be put in for multiple random effects."

*Renewable resource, refills at start of each day.

I'm looking at a system for making temp items, they give their effect for a number of minutes equal to the creator's level, and can be refreshed by spending Power Points again. To make a permanent item, I'm looking at something like Tome's necromantic feats where you spend some cash and some down time and get a magic item that functions continuously. You can put multiple components in, and I want bindrunes to be a thing, where you combine runes, which should modify the tables. I'm thinking maybe each Component has a set of Effects, Targets and Modifications, maybe also Minor Effects for things like "Glows in Presence of Orcs" or "Turns Flowers to Stone" or whatever.

Thoughts on a system like this? (Kaelik, I know you think it's dumb.)

[violence in the media]

Obviously there's a huge tradeoff in how much "cool stuff" you can get into the charts versus how long it takes to generate these things. In this world of mobile phones and webpages with dumb superhero generators and shit, I would think that you could thread that needle by making it a computer program that spits out all the crazy bullshit and has whatever vanishingly tiny chances of giving you really anomalous results you want. If you phrase artifice skill successes and special recipe items as "you may replace one of the slots on the final object with XXX" then you wouldn't even have to have a difficult menu to navigate to get things started.

-Username17

I don't necessarily have the skill set required to do this, but I was assuming that the system I proposed would be best expressed as a program or app. Ideally, this system would not require itself to be operable by hand with dice and sheets of scrap paper.

I think the random tables might work better if they were keyed to the components used in the enchantment and not the item. e.g. It would be more important to have a Giant's Spleen if you wanted to make an item that boosted strength than it would be to have the item be a belt or hammer. This would be very "Form follows Function" and you'd describe what the item looked like after you knew what it did. So your sword or cloak might wind up embossed with vines, shimmer like fish scales, or emit small puffs of smoke.

On the other hand, one could make a credible argument for the item's final form having influence over the abilities it can have, in some sort of mystical association manner, and arrange things that way. This way your boot items trend towards movement powers, tridents link to the sea in various ways, and so on.

I don't know what (if any) prerequisites you'd want to put on the ability to create magic items in this manner. Whether you need Feats, Skills, a workshop, gold, XP, or time is arguable.

For the magic item generator itself, I'm imagining a bunch of drop down menus. Something like this:

I am making a magical tinderbox. (This would be so the program simply spits out the basic game rules associated with whatever item you selected.)

I am expending the following components in the enchanting process:
Fairy Dust
Ghoul Teeth
Bottled Lightning
Lucky Clover
Human Sacrifice

I am making the item under the following (in)auspicious conditions:
Full Moon
Solstice
People trying to interrupt ritual

CREATE ITEM!

Then the program generates all the random numbers and table cross-references necessary and spits out the item's final stats and powers.

[Prak]

The numbers should probably be dependent on level, rather than random, but that's basically the sort of thing I'm thinking of with the runes for Midgard and have been talking about. I like the inclusion of conditions.

[Kaelik]

And there will tautologically be some place you can set the slider where both systems would be used "enough" to fit whatever design goals you have.

Sure Frank, let me file this next to diplomacy in my drawer, after all, it's so easy to create a system that simulates the the entire complex interactions of supply and demand across millions of people instead of just setting an arbitrary ratio that applies to all items, and therefore results in people only ever buying one or two items, and it's so easy to get your system to be a fair choice between those two things. So I'll just put this thread in the drawer, and I'll pull it out when you (or anyone) make(s) such a system, or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

[tussock]

Stuff.

[*]9 alignment teams does need some patching vs the whole AD&D model, and you're right that the modern game can just do without the genocide aspect, my bad.

But it's a bloody good shorthand for who's fighting who, and who everyone's expected to ally with, is my point. Rather than that whole "Dorfs are often generous but inflexible" thing from 3e where we need a bunch of extra text to give us any playable information at all about what Dorfs will do when the PCs try to work with them.


[*]I really don't know why you'd think DR 10/unobtainium is better than immunity. They're both telling a story about why the townsfolk needed some PCs to solve their problems for them in the first place, and immunity actually works for that. They're both also perfectly good at trolling the Fighters who are lacking the right widget and the combat system needs workarounds either way.


[*]XP for treasure is the less-stupid version of wealth-by-level (AKA, level-by-wealth, still stops the DM keeping all the treasure away from your level 6 Fighter), but I would add that the "magic item power up" currency and the "being a lord in a castle" currency be separate if you want players to have both. Again, you have to leave the bad bits behind. AD&D did so by forbidding the purchase of magical power, so all you could buy was armies, griffons, castles, and stuff, but you could go the other way and forbid buying land and armies like the real world, or have both in separate currencies like the wish economy. So sometimes you pull up a 100gp gem and sometimes you earn a reward of a land title but they both give you XP on a scale that killing badgers doesn't.


[*]I absolutely assume that you should stop scaling the game at some point. There should be things that are as tough as things get, and you should eventually beat them, become a God, and retire. It should probably take under 200 hours to reach. D&D's basic mechanical structure cannot work forever, and 3e falls wildly apart after it laps the RNG the first time, so just accept that and provide an end game for it.

While I choose to say that the final boss makes saves, and so do the PCs who are supposed to take it on, you could also say the opposite and go all glass cannon instead. The important thing is everything gets designed around that knowledge. Capping both so it stops at 15% or 30% fails instead of 5% fails is valid, but not to my taste for high level play.

I emphasise that characters reaching their basic caps and diversifying from there is totally what we want to see from high level characters. Yes people will also optimise their build path for that, but people enjoy doing so and it is not a problem.

If you are willing to commit ten minutes to picking a lock, you may not be able to pick every lock, but it vastly expands what you can pick.

[*]So for one, I don't care if it takes 2 minutes or 10 minutes. I'm not tracking minutes, as it's boring and pointless. For two, even if you are: the one skill check can just tell you how many minutes it takes, and if it fails, all at once. Even if you want to roll a couple of dice for that to make it easy to read the output. I'm excluding the kinda of game play where there's exactly 3 minutes until the room fills with water and you're making a check every 30 seconds or whatever, but I'm happy with that choice.


[*]Spacetime-keeping. It's just easier if you chunk it all appropriately. If all the spells that work on the scale of dungeon crawling work on the same basic small-number time and distance system as dungeon crawling, it's easy to use and so it gets used. Not adding minutes and rounds and 5'-squares and shit over hours.

Like the stone encumbrance thing from wherever. People actually use numbers that add up to around 12, and the effects of encumbrance are even interesting at times, it's just too hard to use with pounds. Yes, I said basic math was hard, like THAC0, get over it.

Dungeons can just happen in rooms and turns, getting lost outdoors in miles and days, and town management tasks in hides and months, so the rules for modifying any of that work in the same scale-appropriate units. Yes, that means different stats for the wand of fireballs when you use it in the mass combat engine, because all we really care about is an output for effects on our tax-base for the year like the rest of that system. No one is actually counting individual deaths at that point.

[Username17]

And there will tautologically be some place you can set the slider where both systems would be used "enough" to fit whatever design goals you have.

Sure Frank, let me file this next to diplomacy in my drawer, after all, it's so easy to create a system that simulates the the entire complex interactions of supply and demand across millions of people instead of just setting an arbitrary ratio that applies to all items, and therefore results in people only ever buying one or two items, and it's so easy to get your system to be a fair choice between those two things. So I'll just put this thread in the drawer, and I'll pull it out when you (or anyone) make(s) such a system, or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

How about you take it out of the drawer, since people have been able to buy closed Magic: the Gathering packs and visible cards out of opened packs for over twenty years. Or people in Final Fantasy XI have been able to craft things that have a chance of having bonus abilities or buy pre-crafted items whose possession or lack of bonuses are known since Bush II's first term.

The thing you are saying is impossible and will never ever happen for as long as we live is something that already does happen. It's totally ubiquitous, and there are examples of games that use that sort of thing that are old enough to vote. You're just the man shouting at a 747 saying that it'll never fly because it's made of metal. There are decades of examples and evidence that what you're saying is completely wrong. Shut up and eat your damn crow.

-Username17

[TiaC]

And there will tautologically be some place you can set the slider where both systems would be used "enough" to fit whatever design goals you have.

Sure Frank, let me file this next to diplomacy in my drawer, after all, it's so easy to create a system that simulates the the entire complex interactions of supply and demand across millions of people instead of just setting an arbitrary ratio that applies to all items, and therefore results in people only ever buying one or two items, and it's so easy to get your system to be a fair choice between those two things. So I'll just put this thread in the drawer, and I'll pull it out when you (or anyone) make(s) such a system, or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

How about you take it out of the drawer, since people have been able to buy closed Magic: the Gathering packs and visible cards out of opened packs for over twenty years.

This example does not actually refute his point. His point is that actual markets are balanced by thousands of actors acting until equilibrium is reached. However, if want to include prices for both crafting and finished items in your book, you will need an unfeasible amount of playtesting to balance it. In addition, where you put that slider will likely have to vary across different item types, leading to added complexity.

There are other issues as well. In video games, it's my experience that people only really start to care about the minor adds of the crafting minigame when they are approaching the level cap and marginal improvement is becoming more difficult. However, D&D-like games play very differently from this. Any item you get will be obsolete before too long, so there's no point in paying a premium for that last +1.

[Prak]

No, not really. There are people for whom "making stuff" is a payout, one that can even compensate for a shitty class. I'm one of those people. There are people for whom "lets see what the dice gods give us!" is a payout, I've gamed with a group full of them. There are people who just love immersive fiddly-bits. These are all people who will make items rather than just plane hopping markets to find exactly the thing they want. You need enough play testing that one method is not significantly more powerful than the other, not enough play testing to rewrite the human species into perfect rational actors.

[ishy]

You need enough play testing that one method is not significantly more powerful than the other, not enough play testing to rewrite the human species into perfect rational actors.

This. RPGs don't need good rules, because people aren't rational anyway.

[Username17]

This example does not actually refute his point. His point is that actual markets are balanced by thousands of actors acting until equilibrium is reached. However, if want to include prices for both crafting and finished items in your book, you will need an unfeasible amount of playtesting to balance it. In addition, where you put that slider will likely have to vary across different item types, leading to added complexity.

Like Kaelik, everything you are saying on this subject is dumb and wrong.

Balancing the cost of random unopened boxes versus propened boxes is in fact very easy. You multiply the value of all the potential box contents by their frequencies and add them together to get your average value for an unopened box. Then you give a discount/cost increase based on how a couple of your friends feel about the risks involved such that at least one of your friends takes the unopened box and at least one of your friends holds out for pre-opened contents they are comfortable with. It's that fucking easy. It takes less than 15 minutes total.

The hard part is setting cost of the "opened" products in the first place. Putting a ring of fire resistance, a dragon slaying sword, a slightly better dragon slaying sword, and boots of flying into the same currency is in fact incredibly difficult. Recall that 3rd edition made a mathematically elegant system for evaluating the costs of magic items, and it is completely shit and in all ways worse than just asking people to assign prices by gut check.

You guys are mouth breathing retards. You're saying the easy part is nigh impossible, while hand waving the really hard part off as if it was easy.

There are other issues as well. In video games, it's my experience that people only really start to care about the minor adds of the crafting minigame when they are approaching the level cap and marginal improvement is becoming more difficult. However, D&D-like games play very differently from this. Any item you get will be obsolete before too long, so there's no point in paying a premium for that last +1.

Like the other things you were saying, this is stupid and wrong. A long running D&D game generally spans 6-8 levels on the outside. This in turn generally means that a sword gets replaced two or three times total. Obviously paying a premium of some kind for a substantial bonus that lasts for a third of the game is a thing which would at times be worth it. Even in Shadowrun games that last for years, player characters rarely upgrade their speed enhancers or power foci more than once or twice.

RPGs don't have the same logarithmic progression that MMOs and TCGs have. They are generally reasonably linear, with an end in sight when the other players leave for summer vacation or new work schedules mean that people can't game on Tuesdays any more. What they do have is the promise of eternity, which means that you have to arrange your incentives carefully to coax players to spend "permanent" resources at all.

This is a different discussion altogether, but what it shares with your first paragraph is that you are conflating the hard problem and the easy problem. The hard problem is getting players to use their damn wands of fireballs rather than hording them forever waiting for a rainy day that will never come. The easy problem is setting a cost on a tangible benefit that will be useless in 3 levels or so.

-Username17

[Prak]

You need enough play testing that one method is not significantly more powerful than the other, not enough play testing to rewrite the human species into perfect rational actors.

This. RPGs don't need good rules, because people aren't rational anyway.

I wouldn't say you don't need good rules, just that you don't need platonically perfect rules. You need rules that function, and which the average gamer will use and have fun using, not rules which are formulated for the imaginary rational actor.

[FatR]

How about you take it out of the drawer, since people have been able to buy closed Magic: the Gathering packs and visible cards out of opened packs for over twenty years. Or people in Final Fantasy XI have been able to craft things that have a chance of having bonus abilities or buy pre-crafted items whose possession or lack of bonuses are known since Bush II's first term.

MtG is an entire hobby in itself.

In FF you have servers to handle markets interactions between thousands and thousands of people. Also, engaging in crafting on a remotely relevant level is an entire game in itself, which as of FF XIV is as much or more time-consuming than the rest of the content put together; if you just want good items for the main game you're better off completely ignoring it and running more instances instead.

In DnD magic item economy, never mind a magic crafting system, is frankly the least important of minigames useful in delivering genre emulation, considerably behind diplomacy, mass combat and kingdom management. Asking MtG-level compexity from it is ridiculous.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, you're concerned that the crafting minigame will eat the rest of the game and suddenly D&D will be Atelier d20.

[deaddmwalking]

Speaking for myself - there are times where I would craft an item and times where I would buy an item assuming both were options. Part of it is time versus expense and availability. If an item is ubiquitous and relatively cheap, buying it is the way to go. If finding an item takes longer than making it (and I'd usually expect it to be more expensive) than crafting is the better option.

AD&D has a verisimilitude problem with magic items. Nobody can make them, but the world is awash in magical items. How did all of these items get there if nobody can make them? Now artifacts are specifically called out as 'from the ancient past and the method of manufacture has been irrevocably lost in the sands of time, while magical items are presumed to be able to be made - just not by PCs. The method of manufacture just isn't detailed at all.

Having a crafting system is important for me just to explain how items can get made. Even if the PCs never choose to use it, it has 'world-building' consequences that are worth knowing. For example, can anyone make a magic item under the right circumstances? Or is it limited to people with magical abilities?

In the Game of Thrones books, I recall that there was a swordsmith (mundane) making a magical weapon and it was complete when he quenched it in his own blood. That's fine if that's one way to make magical items, but if the only way is a college of wizards to group chant, that's going to have a very different feel. Either way, knowing it is worthwhile.

Regarding 'random treasure parcels', there are a couple of issues I have. First, generating them can be a pain. Assuming you had an app that made it easy, you'd address most of my concern there. But if you create in advance, there is a tendency to want to 'tweak' a particular roll. Maybe it says 'potion of water breathing', but oil of fire resistance would be more useful - I don't really think there is a problem with that type of tweaking, but it's going to happen more when you roll in advance. If you roll after the encounter, it'll seem strange that the creature didn't use the item. If the wight is using a +1 sword but there is a +6 Deathbringer, it would have made more sense to use the better weapon. Some of that can be due to lack of knowledge, but too much of it strains belief.

[Prak]

That's a good point. If treasure is randomly determined at point of looting, there needs to be an explanation as to why the thing you're taking it from wasn't using it, and whatever explanation you go with will have in world consequences.

I suppose one possible explanation might be that the PCs are special in some metaphysical way that unlocked magic item potential. Maybe your average wight can only activate a basic magical bonus, and that's why the sword it was using wasn't the +6 Flaming Sword of the Mohel you looted from it. And of course some enemies are PC level that's and can activate magic item potential fully, and Strahd can have +4 Armor of Darkness in his stat block.

[RadiantPhoenix]

That's a good point. If treasure is randomly determined at point of looting, there needs to be an explanation as to why the thing you're taking it from want using it, and whatever expansion you go with will have in world consequences.

"It's a magic sword. The gnoll used it because it's slightly more effective than a slightly less magical sword."

"It's a shiny magic widget. The dragon keeps it in its lair because it's shiny."

[TiaC]

This example does not actually refute his point. His point is that actual markets are balanced by thousands of actors acting until equilibrium is reached. However, if want to include prices for both crafting and finished items in your book, you will need an unfeasible amount of playtesting to balance it. In addition, where you put that slider will likely have to vary across different item types, leading to added complexity.

Like Kaelik, everything you are saying on this subject is dumb and wrong.

Balancing the cost of random unopened boxes versus propened boxes is in fact very easy. You multiply the value of all the potential box contents by their frequencies and add them together to get your average value for an unopened box. Then you give a discount/cost increase based on how a couple of your friends feel about the risks involved such that at least one of your friends takes the unopened box and at least one of your friends holds out for pre-opened contents they are comfortable with. It's that fucking easy. It takes less than 15 minutes total.

The hard part is setting cost of the "opened" products in the first place. Putting a ring of fire resistance, a dragon slaying sword, a slightly better dragon slaying sword, and boots of flying into the same currency is in fact incredibly difficult. Recall that 3rd edition made a mathematically elegant system for evaluating the costs of magic items, and it is completely shit and in all ways worse than just asking people to assign prices by gut check.

You guys are mouth breathing retards. You're saying the easy part is nigh impossible, while hand waving the really hard part off as if it was easy.

That's my point. The way MtG ends up setting the prices of the opened products is through market interactions. So this system still won't have balanced prices, meaning that most people will just use the killer apps anyway.

[angelfromanotherpin]

That's a good point. If treasure is randomly determined at point of looting, there needs to be an explanation as to why the thing you're taking it from want using it, and whatever expansion you go with will have in world consequences.

I'm going to assume that's meant to be wasn't using it. It's typical to generate the random treasure before running the encounter so that, yes, any relevant treasure is being used by the opposition in question.

[Prak]

That's a good point. If treasure is randomly determined at point of looting, there needs to be an explanation as to why the thing you're taking it from want using it, and whatever expansion you go with will have in world consequences.

"It's a magic sword. The gnoll used it because it's slightly more effective than a slightly less magical sword."

"It's a shiny magic widget. The dragon keeps it in its lair because it's shiny."

That's a good point. If treasure is randomly determined at point of looting, there needs to be an explanation as to why the thing you're taking it from want using it, and whatever expansion you go with will have in world consequences.

I'm going to assume that's meant to be wasn't using it. It's typical to generate the random treasure before running the encounter so that, yes, any relevant treasure is being used by the opposition in question.

Yeah, I was posting from my phone, so. That was supposed to be about the "why wasn't the thing we just killed using this awesome sword?" problem that deaddmwalking raised, because it's not universal to generate random treasure before the encounter. For verisimilitude that's the better way to do it, but people like their christmas presents, and there is a very real segment of the gamer population that does like seeing the treasure generated at the point of looting.

Now, how hard you should work to please that segment, I don't know, but it's probably not much. On the other hand, for an OSR, it should probably be done whichever way is the more old-school way to handle it. I started playing D&D at 3.0, so I don't know what that is.

[tussock]

Old school would be generating personal treasures on the fly, but lair treasures in advance. So you get a small handful of silver after the fact with your clone lizardfolk patrols, but when you find their lair you also get all the interesting lizardfolk, thousands of coins, and a few magic items.

All the modules had the local bosses use whatever magic gear they could, and lock away whatever they couldn't. Less intelligent monsters with items would be worked into the scene somehow, on the body of a previous victim, buried in their excrement, or even stuck in their gizzard.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Now, how hard you should work to please that segment, I don't know, but it's probably not much. On the other hand, for an OSR, it should probably be done whichever way is the more old-school way to handle it. I started playing D&D at 3.0, so I don't know what that is.

Per rule negative something, it should be interpreted whichever way makes things more difficult for the players.

... which is probably "roll first, have monster use treasure", because it results in vorpal decapitations and hoards full of empty potion bottles more often.

[maglag]

This example does not actually refute his point. His point is that actual markets are balanced by thousands of actors acting until equilibrium is reached. However, if want to include prices for both crafting and finished items in your book, you will need an unfeasible amount of playtesting to balance it. In addition, where you put that slider will likely have to vary across different item types, leading to added complexity.

Like Kaelik, everything you are saying on this subject is dumb and wrong.

Balancing the cost of random unopened boxes versus propened boxes is in fact very easy. You multiply the value of all the potential box contents by their frequencies and add them together to get your average value for an unopened box. Then you give a discount/cost increase based on how a couple of your friends feel about the risks involved such that at least one of your friends takes the unopened box and at least one of your friends holds out for pre-opened contents they are comfortable with. It's that fucking easy. It takes less than 15 minutes total.

The hard part is setting cost of the "opened" products in the first place. Putting a ring of fire resistance, a dragon slaying sword, a slightly better dragon slaying sword, and boots of flying into the same currency is in fact incredibly difficult. Recall that 3rd edition made a mathematically elegant system for evaluating the costs of magic items, and it is completely shit and in all ways worse than just asking people to assign prices by gut check.

You guys are mouth breathing retards. You're saying the easy part is nigh impossible, while hand waving the really hard part off as if it was easy.

That's my point. The way MtG ends up setting the prices of the opened products is through market interactions. So this system still won't have balanced prices, meaning that most people will just use the killer apps anyway.

You seem to be implying that MTG has balanced prices.

Back in Kamigawa block, there was the Umezawa's Jitte rare that easily sold for 20+bucks as a single.

However there was a pre-constructed deck that had Umezawa's Jitte along 59 other cards, and that deck only costed some 13 bucks.

But people still were paying 20+bucks for each jitte since the pre-constructed decks usually sold out as soon as they appeared, aka market manipulation. Or you went take a walk to the city in search of obscure stores in dark alleys that had the pre-constructed deck stocked on, aka exploration/dungeon searching.

And if you were going to a tournament and needed some Jittes in a hurry, the dealers would be asking you 30+ or even 40+ for each, knowing that there's the tournament and the door and hahaha fuck your wallet.

TL: DR-A "realistic" market system would have the shopkeepers be total dicks to the PCs. "There's an undead invasion? Every anti-undead item and reagent now costs double. Exploiters also mined out all the raw materials used for crafting anti-undead stuff in the wild because that stuff's selling like hot cakes, so good luck crafting any yourself."

[Schleiermacher]

Of course in the case of an undead invasion of your average sword-and-sorcery fiefdom, trying to gouge adventurers during a crisis like that is a good way to get murdered and your entire stock "expropriated", in contrast to the typical behavior of MtG tournament-goers.

[Prak]

Of course in the case of an undead invasion of your average sword-and-sorcery fiefdom, trying to gouge adventurers during a crisis like that is a good way to get murdered and your entire stock "expropriated", in contrast to the typical behavior of MtG tournament-goers.

So you're saying D&D characters are more like Yu Gi Oh or Pokemon tcg players? I'd buy it.

[Username17]

Before we crawl too far up each other's assholes, remember that a lively trade of gold pieces for magic item upgrades isn't necessarily a good thing. There's no particular reason to believe that one wants a marketplace for higher tier adventuring gear. This particular tangent was simply launched by Kaelik making the bizarre claim that if crafting had some degree of randomization in its outputs, that this was 100% incompatible with there also being a gp to magic item marketplace. And that's wrong. Completely, laughably wrong. We know it's wrong, not just because we have games that have analogous systems, but because Final Fantasy XI has literally exactly that system and both the crafting and item purchasing are used side by side (or at least were, they may have broken one system or the other in the many years and updates since I stopped paying attention). It's not just "theoretically possible," it's "already been done, more than a decade ago, and no longer interesting."

That particular part of the discussion was over before it began. Kaelik is and was wrong. The end.

Anyway, the question of whether you want items to be purchased for gold is an open one, and I continue to hold that there comes a time when the answer is "No." There is a time when an adventurer should buy themselves a sword and shield, and there is a time when a king should buy a whole lot of swords and shields for their army. It is plainly problematic if the adventurer who has become a king is supposed to be saving his gold pieces to buy a level appropriate belt of strength. The army might be hundreds or thousands of people, which means that the combined savings of giving out shoddy equipment or cost of giving out quality equipment could have several zeroes added to the end - which in turn makes almost any conceivable cost for those shiny new gauntlets you want into a rounding error.

While I have no problem with characters prying the ruby eyes out of the idols of snake cultists to get gold-denominated wealth to buy better armor and boots, there is a limit to that. Eventually, characters will be conquering entire cities, and I genuinely don't want to have to discuss how many belt buckle upgrades you can get for dismantling the entire onyx citadel or whatever. There is simply a limit to how large scale looting can be before it stops being personal - and impersonal looting for personal gear is thematically bad. Once wealth gets physically large enough that it takes vehicles and warehouses, it should be spent on things that are similarly larger than the person. Minions, land, strongholds, etc. So when player characters start getting piles of gold large enough that they need treasure ships and vaults rather than sacks they should be spending that gold on external things such as outfitting their griffin riders and decorating their castles. This means that players who need to upgrade their flaming swords to ruin blades should be getting higher tier wealth items such as astral diamonds for that purpose so that the mere gold and silver can be spent on regular halberds.

I don't think that 2nd edition's "No Magic Sword Purchases, Fox Only, Final Destination" was feasible or good. But it's actually closer to what is desirable than the clusterfail that is the 3.x magic item market.

-Username17