Wealth and Power

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Username17
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Wealth and Power

Post by Username17 »

We all know that the wealth system of D&D is annoying and stupid. So the question is, how would we adjust it to be less so? Here are some possibilities:

- Portable Holes. By giving everyone near instantaneous access to what is essentially a treasure room, people can actually claim giant gold statues and ivory herons and such. And then they can trade those back and forth in a reasonable amount of time.

- Remove the Magic Mart. If we go back to the AD&D standard where you couldn't purchase magic items, and you were therefore not expected to do so, the problem is gone. You can have dragon hordes of millions of gold pieces, piles of copper and fountains of rubies. And it can be used to hire goblins to stand on the towers of your castle and put fancy rugs on the walls of said castle, and it can't be used to get an additional +1 to your to-hit score. So the problem is solved. If people just want to stab demons they don't have to pick up the treasure at all, and people who want to swim in their money bin can do so.

- Non Convertible Currency We throw in something like an Astral Diamond but with a cooler name. Maybe we even use Dragon Shards. Point is, the exchange rate of Gold to Dragon Shard is set at "not a chance in hell." Then you have the magic economy set in that currency so that the piles of gold don't have to be intractably large and yet they still can be without breaking the game.

- Bank Notes We just accept that a +2 Sword costs 167 pounds of gold. And then... we keep the gold in big keeps and we conduct our actual trade with checks. We trade the ownership of giant piles of gold which are kept in vaults back and forth. And then the currency of the powerful is measured in little pieces of velum and we still get to loot orcish treasuries with Santa Sacks and fill wagons with the hoards of mighty dragons.

- Barter Give magic items no fixed value and just trade them like baseball cards. Make people think about how much an Amulet of Turning is worth to them.

- A Rainbow of Flavors Bring back the old gem/jewelry system. Heck, it was never actually gone because it still appeared in the 3rd edition DMG. But actually use it. Don't hand out thousands of gold pieces. Hand out various gems worth thousands of gold pieces. As long as people are throwing around amethysts and sapphires and tourmaline earrings, the thrill of treasure discovery will still be there.

- Approved by the Sultan Bring in the Wish Economy as official serious business. Have the City of Brass issue letters of credit redeemable for assistance from the Lords of Fire. These have real value to powerful people and they can trade them back and forth. Kind of like the Stone of Jordan economy from Diablo II.

- Raw Power Liquid Pain, Human Souls, Raw Chaos, Larvae... the D&D world has a lot of crap in it that you can use to fashion magic items for cheap or free. If you just use these power sources directly as currency you can imagine people trading them back and forth for powerful magic items. Like, you give a Wizard power components sufficient to make a Staff of Power with some left over and he gives you a Staff of Power. He trades his time and expertise for your power components. Alternately, you trade someone a pile of power components for a magic item that he doesn't necessarily want. You get something you can use, and he gets something which is fungible into something he wants.

- Miniaturize Currency D&D coins are Heug Like XBox! Drop them in size. A lot. A .01 Euro coin is a quarter the mass of a copper piece. You could seriously ramp down mass inflation severely by just making coins lighter. We don't deal with the crappy old AD&D coins that are 1/10th of a pound, why don't we have coins that are 400 to the kilogram?

- Deflate Currency The D&D Copper Piece is pretty much worthless to an average adventurer. Why? It's the standard of exchange in the campaign world, why not make it valuable? If people were seriously given their basic equipment in Copper Pieces and a piece of Silver was a big deal, and a piece of Gold was an even bigger deal, then you could purchase stuff with actually portable amounts of currency. Imagine for the moment that currency was pretty much the same only the masterwork/magic item costs were written in copper instead of gold. Suddenly you could plausibly purchase a +2 sword for less than two pounds of gold. That's actually plausible. And when you eventually get to the Epic levels where you are paying with hundreds of pounds of gold anyway you already have a celestial rhinoceros mount to carry it for you and that's OK.

Thoughts?

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Post by virgil »

I assume we still want to divorce the connection between material wealth and physical power, so we don't have to worry about people stripping down the walls of the Hall of Golden Silence. I liken such behavior to defacing Lady Liberty solely for the ability to jump really high.

For low-grade wealth, I'd prefer deflating currency, but throw in the rainbow of flavours (not every gemstone needs to be a 500gp ruby).

For actual adventuring folks who care only for how much power it might net them, I like the option for Barter & Non-convertible currency. Any kind of powerful empire can set itself up to use the "Approved by the Sultan" system, and the "Raw Power..." is largely a Non-convertible system anyway. So all four options could likely work in tandem.
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Post by SphereOfFeetMan »

Before I address the listed options, I'll first note a couple important points:
-We don't want a game where magic items are disproportionately tied to the power of different character classes. (Ex: Sorcerer vs Fighter).
-We don't want to exclude or diminish entire character archetypes just because they can't find their iconic magic item in the campaign world. It sucks hard if your Kukri/Two-Bladed Sword/etc user only finds magic longswords on his enemies.

On to the possibilities:
-I want to play a game called something like Dungeons and Dragons, not Accountants and Logistics. Portable Holes, Bank Notes, and Barter all can lead Gm's and Players down the unfun road. It is not inevitable, but I would rather have a system that is predisposed not to lead to dull playtime.
-Miniaturize Currency and Deflate Currency both lessen the absurdity of the Magic Mart, but they don't fix the problem.

My choice:
-My first choice is Remove the Magic Mart. My ideal game would have magic items be as rare as artifacts, and have expanded character abilities which incorporated the roles of magic items. This way you could 'attune' your magic weapon ability to your Trident, and you don't have to worry about balancing treasure to account for different Pc's.

-My second choice is A Rainbow of Flowers/Raw Power. Either way, I don't want people to use gold/wealth to purchase magic items. A Rainbow of Flowers/Raw Power could be more like power components, and magic items in their own right. They have intrinsic worth on the magic item economy.
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Post by Koumei »

And, having taken long enough to realise we'd moved...

I like Non Convertable Currency, a Rainbow of Flavours, Approved by the Sultan and Raw Power. That being said, Removing the Magic Mart would be a great idea at the same time - so, you can't go and buy a +2 Sword, no amount of gold will do it, and no-one is selling one. But you can find someone to make one, and it costs a soul/ink of creation/250g of Hope.

Because I like being able to pick my own equipment, but I prefer that it can't be bought for regular money, so that people can have rooms filled with gold and still not be able to trade that for a meteor cannon.

At the higher levels, Portable Holes would be good so that people can access the rooms filled with crazy unique statues they stole. Or maybe make them fairly basic - after all, if people can choose to go stealing every copper they find at level 1 and not have it interfere with their power, may as well let them see this wealth from time to time.
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Post by Draco_Argentum »

Anything that divorces power from the amount of food you can buy is a good start. Hording turnips until you have a snicker-snack sword is easily the worst thing about the current system.

The actual size of the currency is silly. So is the value of a copper piece. Fixing those would make the economy more manageable but wouldn't stop dungeon strip mining.

I like the various high end currencies. I'd prefer the esoteric materials over the djinni state bank though.
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Post by Falgund »

I'm also in favor of 'Remove the Magic Mart' plus 'Raw Power', with maybe a twist of 'Non Convertible Currency' for high level favors (Recruiting standard armsmen costs gold, Creating magic item costs raw ingredients, Asking a djinn to construct a castle in one night costs a Perfect Soul).
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Post by Cielingcat »

Here's what I was thinking. Money buys things, but you can't buy power. A shadow blade is completely priceless because making one requires imbuing it with the power of Neraka. You can still trade the greedy merchant a chunk of gold for it, but it doesn't have a price tag on it. Even a masterwork sword is priceless, but that doesn't mean you can't trade one for gold, or food, or the help of the Hobgoblin Warlord.

Equipping a character should be a matter of selecting items from a list, or gathering them in game. If you want your 5th level character to have a sword you select one that he has from the list of 5th level appropriate swords and he just has it.

And hell, we can still have a bunch of that other stuff. People can trade souls back and forth because you can do stuff for souls.

So yeah, the barter system for anything of real value. We can have a turnip be worth a copper piece, but the hero's sword is worth whatever he'll trade it for-which may very well be nothing.
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Post by NoDot »

Miniaturize and Deflate Currency, but have high level dominated by Barter of (mostly) Non-Convertibles like Approved by the Sultan, Raw Power, and Rainbow of Flavors.
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Post by Maxus »

The question I have about magic items being on a barter system would be: Who do you trade them to?

I mean, it's one thing if there's The Adventurer's Guildhall in most fair-sized towns and you stand a chance of finding someone willing you swap you a nice magic ring that's the wrong size for an amulet you can't use. But that makes some assumptions about the level of society that some people don't like. For one thing, you'd have to give a party a chance to trade the stuff, which would almost certainly mean an encounter with another adventuring party, or someone who was an adventurer, or whatever.
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Post by Talisman »

I think there definitely needs to be a mix of the listed options.

For the common folk (and here I'm including nobility whose only claim to fame is their Tome of Geneology), the system should be primarily mundane. If you aren't a hero/villain, if you don't wield awesome power, and if you don't go out and take the risks to gain awesome power, you don't get into the club. Simple as that. Sure, you can throw around 1,000-gp gems, but when it comes to magic you're dirt-poor.

The other half of this economy would be the wizards, high priests, master swordsmen, shadow rogues...the heroes and villains; the supernatural beings; the adventurers. They still use gold, but it becomes far less important when magic gets thrown around.

Thus, I vote for Deflate Currency scaling up to A Rainbow of Flavors for just about everyone. Copper is something you care about, (unless you're rich), and everybody likes gems. Treat a single copper as roughly equivalent to one US dollar and you have a starting point. Coppers aren't worth a ton, but a sack of 200 copper is a noticeable treasure, and a sack of 100 gold is like finding $10,000 - unless your character concept is Bill Gates, you're going to appreciate it.

For the "magical community," I think a mix of Barter and Raw Power is the way to go. Magic items should be special; you don't just pop in Ye Olde Magick Shoppe and say "Got a plus two sword here...I was hoping to get four K for it." Like baseball cards, the value of a magic item varies based on who has it and who wants it. For a fighter, that phylactery of faithfullness is worth the materials its made of...but to Sir Bill the Uncertain, it's worth a heck of a lot.

OTOH, someone has to make these damn things...which is where Raw Power comes in. Once a hero reaches a certain power level, they to can make magic stuff...but it costs more than mere gold. It requires the heartsblood of a wyrm...a demon's soul, freely given...the tear of an angel...the skull of a redeemed necromancer...etc. Weird stuff like this is what the magical community trades in; it may be priceless or valueless by mundane terms.

I really dislike Portable Holes, Bank Notes, Approved by the Sultan and Miniaturize Currency, as they all (with the possible exception of AbtS) tend to take away the heroic flavor of D&D and replace it with the heroic flavor of a calculator and a checkbook.

I regards to Maxus's concerns, I think that needs to be worked into the adventure. Maybe you need a flaming sword to defeat the ice-wights that keep attacking. Well, you ask the local spellcaster who he knows that needs a ring of ruby coolness (which is redundant for your gem-mage). It simply adds another level of complexity, and forces the GM to carefully consider what treasure he hands out.
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Post by SphereOfFeetMan »

Cielingcat: If you want your 5th level character to have a sword you select one that he has from the list of 5th level appropriate swords and he just has it.
Yes. That is the best way.
Cielingcat: So yeah, the barter system for anything of real value. We can have a turnip be worth a copper piece, but the hero's sword is worth whatever he'll trade it for-which may very well be nothing.
I'm not sure I understand you here, could you expand on this?

In any case, any barter system which has leeway with regard to the price Pc's can trade magic items for is crap. This becomes increasingly true the more Pc's and magic items you have. If you give different levels of wealth or power to Pc's for bartering magic items then you have failed.

The following are some reasons why:
-Some magic items will have a higher barter price than others, even when they are of the same usefulness to the party. This means that different characters will be unduly rewarded or penalized solely because of their character niche.

-If bartering for each magic item is the best way to get them, then you have made Accountants and Dragons. In 3.x each Pc can wear ~13 magic items, and have countless more in a bag. With four Pc's, and each level granting new magic items, it becomes a nightmare. Even if TNE cut it down to five, it would still suck hard.

-In 3.x terms this isn't even counting all the +1 swords and +1 armors and +1 shields and +1 rings and....If you can barter all that shit. ugh. Even if all that shit is set at a standardized price, it is still a huge headache.
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Post by Ravengm »

I'm going to have to say that I like the idea of deflating currency. And while we're at it, why not make it smaller? Those twenty copper pieces that jingle around in the palm of your hand are now worth a lot more, and easily portable to boot.
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Post by JonSetanta »

Deflate looks promising.
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Post by Draco_Argentum »

Being able to trade a bunch of weak magic items for one powerful one is a bad thing IMO. It'd be good if a +5 item was priceless compared to +1 items.

Note that +X items are a pain, I'm just using it as a shorthand.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

Yeah, how about we don't hypothetically use items which we know won't exist. Some of the problems of bonus items may just fade away.
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Post by Draco_Argentum »

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Yeah, how about we don't hypothetically use items which we know won't exist. Some of the problems of bonus items may just fade away.
Is being able to trade a lot of rings that shed light like a torch for a flaming sword of burntasticness really that much different?
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Post by Cielingcat »

The point of a barter economy is that you only trade things which are actually equivalent in value. Small items do not become a unit of currency, they become worthless unless that person actually feels that a pile of worthless rings is worth a magic sword.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

Draco_Argentum wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote:Yeah, how about we don't hypothetically use items which we know won't exist. Some of the problems of bonus items may just fade away.
Is being able to trade a lot of rings that shed light like a torch for a flaming sword of burntasticness really that much different?
That depends on whether you're a sword fighter, how much you like fire, and how difficult it is to see in the dark. A +2 sword strictly dominates a +1 sword.
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Post by Draco_Argentum »

CatharzGodfoot wrote: That depends on whether you're a sword fighter, how much you like fire, and how difficult it is to see in the dark. A +2 sword strictly dominates a +1 sword.
Whilst food is worth many times its weight in gold to a starving man we probably agree that a meal is worth less than a gold bar. Your point would stand in a setting where you couldn't easily trade in magic items. Since several of the present options allow for magic item trade thats not necessarily a valid assumption.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

Draco_Argentum wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote: That depends on whether you're a sword fighter, how much you like fire, and how difficult it is to see in the dark. A +2 sword strictly dominates a +1 sword.
Whilst food is worth many times its weight in gold to a starving man we probably agree that a meal is worth less than a gold bar. Your point would stand in a setting where you couldn't easily trade in magic items. Since several of the present options allow for magic item trade thats not necessarily a valid assumption.
No. You always want a +2 sword more than a +1 sword, no matter how easy it is to trade for either. That's just about as simple as it can get.
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Post by Prak »

Wrong. If you have to help a small villiage defend itself from a horde of goblins, you can either weild a +2 sword yourself, while the dirt farmers weild pitchforks and such, or you could trade your +2 sword for many +1 swords so the entire militia can weild magic swords.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

Prak_Anima wrote:Wrong. If you have to help a small villiage defend itself from a horde of goblins, you can either weild a +2 sword yourself, while the dirt farmers weild pitchforks and such, or you could trade your +2 sword for many +1 swords so the entire militia can weild magic swords.
Ah, I see the confusion. In the English language, we use a singular form (often characterised by the article "a") and a plural form (usually with the "s" postfix). Although the plural form can be used to include the singular where there is a range or uncertainty, the singular is not used when referring to larger amounts.

So when I say that "a +2 sword strictly dominates a +1 sword", it is a single +2 sword and a single +1 sword. It's possible to expand on this by inferring that any number of +2 swords will be preferable to the same number of +1 swords, but (as you say) comparing different numbers is much more difficult.

On the other hand, there is no number of flaming swords which is strictly superior to any number of illuminating rings. Apples and oranges.
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Post by Cielingcat »

Prak_Anima wrote:Wrong. If you have to help a small villiage defend itself from a horde of goblins, you can either weild a +2 sword yourself, while the dirt farmers weild pitchforks and such, or you could trade your +2 sword for many +1 swords so the entire militia can weild magic swords.
If there are +1 swords in the village then the villagers can use them without having to trade them to you.
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Post by Koumei »

Yeah, and also, I'd rather have one PC on my side with a +2 weapon than a bunch of yokels with +1 weapons. They're just more likely to accidentally kill each other and hamper the PC from doing his job: saving the day in a heroic fashion and reminding the NPCs that they suck.
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Post by Cielingcat »

Koumei, go make 4 more posts.
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