Truisms of any magical item economy.

[Username17]

That only works if the civilization is impotent and adventurers are gods who laugh at the law. If the town guard comes and beats your ass down for attacking a citizen in the middle of town, then this strategy clearly is more dangerous than fighting the manticore.

But if the adventurers can't just slap the town guard around, why are they the ones solving the fucking crimes and killing the manticores in the first place? In short, adventurers are acting as the law men of the town, if there are actual lawmen who are better than they are, their job doesn't exist.

-Username17

[shadzar]

You also have to be careful when mixing the models or else you will pull a Gygax and make your son cry when you set his Cloak of Displacement on fire.

Wait, what? Did Gygax actually do that?

Yeh, true story. His 10 year old son played Melf from "Melf's Acid Arrow" fame in Gygax's old Greyhawk campaign.

Gygax, the patron saint of DnD douchbaggery, was using his "miss a saving throw and lose a magic item" tables and a chimera burned Melf's Cloak of Displacement. This caused his son to cry, and Gygax even incorporated this into his campaign as the Trail of Tears and Ash part of Castle Greyhawk.

True story. Real douche.

I have only started reading this thread for informative reason, and have not fully formed a thought or opinion on the overall idea, but this I have to stop reading and say somethign about.

Gary and his son....

Right here, parents often do things that upset their children, and it has nothing to do with games.

D&D itself, maybe this shows just how some people should not be playing if they are unable to accept the parameters of the game. Like many who have a problem with "permanent character death".

The kid was 10 for crying out loud (no pun). He obviously didn't fully understand the game even those his father made it. This is just something about miscommunication often with parents and children.

Nothing to call someone a douchebag for. There are other things you could call Gary a douchebag for, but for DMing his game consistent? I would like to see more DMs not play favoritism in games, and be as universal in their decisions as this.

Now to continue reading and gather my own thoughts on magical item economies.

[K]

That only works if the civilization is impotent and adventurers are gods who laugh at the law. If the town guard comes and beats your ass down for attacking a citizen in the middle of town, then this strategy clearly is more dangerous than fighting the manticore.

But if the adventurers can't just slap the town guard around, why are they the ones solving the fucking crimes and killing the manticores in the first place? In short, adventurers are acting as the law men of the town, if there are actual lawmen who are better than they are, their job doesn't exist.

-Username17

Not just that, but even with 21st century technology and organization, the vast majority of crimes don't culminate in an arrest or even a suspect. Now add in teleportation, mind control, illusion, and medieval power structures and suddenly crime goes to a different level.

I mean, as adventurers you are criminals. Liches are on your tail to get the spellbook you took from the corpse of the Black Mage of the Demon Reaches, the Shadow Order wants revenge for the reaver operation you busted up, and the sister of the red dragon you killed takes it personally that you are wearing her brother as a suit of armor.

If you can't handle a bounty on your head because as a 9th level adventurer you robbed a 4th level adventurer on a potion run, then you don't deserve to be an adventurer. Heck, bounties are awesome because it means guys with magic items are going to show up for an asskicking.

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As an aside, magic item economies are never level-appropriate. I can't tell you the number of times I didn't take a cut of the treasure so that we could keep a level-inappropriate item or we pooled our funds to buy something for one character that none of us should have for another 7 levels.

Sure, I've joined games where people were shocked to find out that I thought it was dumb to sell all the loot for half price so we could get some gold to buy things for ourselves at full price, but they come around pretty quick when they realize how much better it is to have one level 10 item in the party rather than five level 3 items.

[K]

Nothing to call someone a douchebag for. There are other things you could call Gary a douchebag for, but for DMing his game consistent? I would like to see more DMs not play favoritism in games, and be as universal in their decisions as this.

Mr. Gygax's flaw is that he never connected the douchebag things he did in the game with the quality and playability of his game. If you did something that made your son cry, it's going to make a more mature player decide that you are arbitrary and cruel and not want to play with you.

Basic rule of game design: run it past a 10 year old and if they cry, you have done something wrong.

Ps. I reserve the right to call anyone a douchebag.

[shadzar]

Nothing to call someone a douchebag for. There are other things you could call Gary a douchebag for, but for DMing his game consistent? I would like to see more DMs not play favoritism in games, and be as universal in their decisions as this.

Mr. Gygax's flaw is that he never connected the douchebag things he did in the game with the quality and playability of his game. If you did something that made your son cry, it's going to make a more mature player decide that you are arbitrary and cruel and not want to play with you.

Basic rule of game design: run it past a 10 year old and if they cry, you have done something wrong.

Ps. I reserve the right to call anyone a douchebag.

I have seen grown men cry because a magic item got destroyed....tough titty said the kitty cause the milks gone dry.

I like a good table that gives equal chance for results. No DM interference cannot make the DM responsible. I would also have to ask was this done in playtesting? if so then maybe it WAS looked at in regards to how it would affect the game, expenditure of income from treasure to replace it, and the playability of the game.

I want to hear the whole story.

...If a magical item economy exists, then I foresee the D&D the Movie concept Wizards ruling everything and controlling everything. It follows the golden rule, "He who has the gold (or can transmute it from something else) makes the rules."

[The Lunatic Fringe]

I have seen grown men cry because a magic item got destroyed....tough titty said the kitty cause the milks gone dry.

You...have seen...grown men...crying...over DnD?

You must have an exceptionally strange group.

I like a good table that gives equal chance for results. No DM interference cannot make the DM responsible.

Except in this case the DM was the same person as the game designer, and thus is totally responsible for every aspect of the game.

I would also have to ask was this done in playtesting?

Playtests for professional games are done by paid employees who write long pieces about their game experience. Gygax's 10-year-old son was probably not involved.

[shadzar]

I have seen grown men cry because a magic item got destroyed....tough titty said the kitty cause the milks gone dry.

You...have seen...grown men...crying...over DnD?

You must have an exceptionally strange group.

I like a good table that gives equal chance for results. No DM interference cannot make the DM responsible.

Except in this case the DM was the same person as the game designer, and thus is totally responsible for every aspect of the game.

I would also have to ask was this done in playtesting?

Playtests for professional games are done by paid employees who write long pieces about their game experience. Gygax's 10-year-old son was probably not involved.

Then who playtested Melf's Acid Arrow?

This is getting WAY off track, and I am getting lost in multi-topics, maybe it should be spun out into a new thread about it....

[RandomCasualty2]

But if the adventurers can't just slap the town guard around, why are they the ones solving the fucking crimes and killing the manticores in the first place? In short, adventurers are acting as the law men of the town, if there are actual lawmen who are better than they are, their job doesn't exist.

Well yeah, the heroes become much less worldsavers and more special forces. They're the green berets and SWAT teams of the world, and there's need for them on special tasks. But the city probably doesn't risk falling just because they leave town for a few weeks.

It's also probable that adventurers may be better suited to handle magical beasts than guards, but guards can still beat adventurers. Since guards are trained mostly in fighting humanoid foes, it creates a sort of RPS situation.

[shadzar]

But if the adventurers can't just slap the town guard around, why are they the ones solving the fucking crimes and killing the manticores in the first place? In short, adventurers are acting as the law men of the town, if there are actual lawmen who are better than they are, their job doesn't exist.

-Username17

If I may stick my nose in where it probably doesn't belong.....

There are many ways to think of adventures in the game in terms of persons of the world, regular and/or magic economies, and power levels and who/what they represent.

In regards to why they cannot slap down all the guards, and how they are hired for job X wherein the guards that are stronger than them could take care of it have a few simple reasons.

You have your region to maintain and have limited resources save for calling on your people to defend themselves. When you do that, then why do you even have guards? The adventurers are expendable and not anything more than a consumable resource to the locales they visit. The standard guard may well be able to do the job, but that would take the resources away from normal operations that they must do. So you hire a small militia to do it for you at lower the cost that feeding and training more guards.

Kind of like how one ancient civilization sacrificed women to the gods, but didn't want to sacrifice their own, so kidnapped ones from other areas to sacrifice so they didn't have to loose any of their own people unless absolutely necessary.

[Just another user]

The way I see it is that the guards can handle the PCs because they have the number and the strategy. The PCs can't slap the guards around because there are 4 of PCs and 40+ of the guards, also every average sized city have probably a special team of guard trained and equipped to deal with adventurers ("surrender immediately or we start using the scrolls of Disjunction")

So why you can't send the 40+ guards to deal with the monsters? Mostly because, beside what Shadzar said, if you send an army against a monster, the monster hear them coming from one mile away and just run, only to come back when they are gone (and keep them here for a long time is expensive), adventurers OTOH are more stealthy, have an higher mobility and being only an half dozen they don't look an as big a threat as 40 men (level is, or should be, mostly transparent, you can't simply look at someone and be able to say his level and/or class, especially if you are a dumb monster) so it is more probable for the monsters to attack them than to run from them.

Of course there are exceptions for every thing I've said here, but that is the way I'd handle it most of the times.

[MGuy]

Alternately it may just not be worth the player's resources to slap around the guards. In any game world you'd have to expect their are other adventurers who could start coming after you again and again.If you start causing a lot of trouble you become the big bad that a group of adventurers have to stop. You may survive the first one or the second one but your life is just easier not to have that happen.

What keeps the merchants safe? Guilds. Merchants aren't stupid and know how to band together. If adventurer's start getting to rowdy the bigger guilds will start calling in favors off plane and bring very real threats to face the PCs. Organizations can be a scary thing to face.

For the PCs that don't care about all that shit they are either rebels or evil (few other outliers would explain why they'd go around mass murdering people but they exist) and should be handled accordingly.

[violence in the media]

For the PCs that don't care about all that shit they are either rebels or evil (few other outliers would explain why they'd go around mass murdering people but they exist) and should be handled accordingly.

"Handled accordingly?" We don't get to play games where the PCs waltz into town, kill the sheriff, declare the town part of the new kingdom of Mine!, and tax the peasantry? What if I'm 15th level? Could I reasonably expect to pull this off, at least for a good while until the king notices that he's lost 3000 soldiers trying to put down this "minor" insurgency in the hinterlands?

What about as part of a campaign, where I'm doing this as a distraction for my own nation during a time of war? Is that allowed? Or is it only allowed if I'm suitably heroic and am liberating the town from their mean ol' overlord? If I kill the dragon terrorizing the town, do I get the virgins they were going to send to him? Seems fair, as in this instance the town will at least be getting their daughters back.

[hogarth]

"Handled accordingly?" We don't get to play games where the PCs waltz into town, kill the sheriff, declare the town part of the new kingdom of Mine!, and tax the peasantry? What if I'm 15th level? Could I reasonably expect to pull this off, at least for a good while until the king notices that he's lost 3000 soldiers trying to put down this "minor" insurgency in the hinterlands?

What about as part of a campaign, where I'm doing this as a distraction for my own nation during a time of war? Is that allowed? Or is it only allowed if I'm suitably heroic and am liberating the town from their mean ol' overlord? If I kill the dragon terrorizing the town, do I get the virgins they were going to send to him? Seems fair, as in this instance the town will at least be getting their daughters back.

Sure, but in that case the problems with the economy have nothing to do with the presence or absence of magic items, and everything to do with anarchy/civil war in your campaign.