Wish Economy

[fectin]

The Wish Economy solves a lot of problems. As is (caveat that wish has a 15k limit), it is elegant and amazing, and I have liked it ever since I first wrapped my head around it, and only liked it more as I grokked it better. It is A Good Thing ((TM), Full Stop, etc. )

But could it be better?
The Wish Economy breaks the game cleanly in half, and it does it at a fairly arbitrary point. So, I was thinking:
Is there a better breakpoint than 15000?
Is 9th level the right time for that to come online?
Should there be an earlier breakpoint too? (e.g. The "limited wish economy" with a 500 gold breakpoint, low level spells, no inherent bonuses (maybe gems become a currency there). Or whatever). If so, when should that come online?

I have opinions, but they're not really well informed yet.

[RobbyPants]

The 15,000 breakpoint keeps you from getting moderate magical weapons with wishes. I think 9th or 11th level are typical levels for a party to access Wish. Why do you want an earlier breakpoint? What do you gain from that?

[mean_liar]

I hate the Wish Economy. I love not worrying about silver pieces, or gold pieces, or anything less than a few grand.

The idea that its primarily built around a clearly fucked monster (the Efreet) is a mark against it. My only wish is that the Efreet would be the only way to gain infinite wealth, but... it is not.

[Leress]

I hate the Wish Economy. I love not worrying about silver pieces, or gold pieces, or anything less than a few grand.

Umm, that is what the wish economy is you don't worry about silver, gold, or copper pieces because you are beyond that.

The idea that its primarily built around a clearly fucked monster (the Efreet) is a mark against it. My only wish is that the Efreet would be the only way to gain infinite wealth, but... it is not.

It not built around the Efreet. It's built around a modified wish spell. It for making ways of getting items without using truckloads of gold/platinum/silver/copper/electrum pieces to buy them.

[RobbyPants]

I thought it was semi-build around Efreet in that it's likely the earliest way to enter the wish economy.

[talozin]

Umm, that is what the wish economy is you don't worry about silver, gold, or copper pieces because you are beyond that.

I think what he meant was that he likes that effect of the wish economy, without liking the wish economy as a whole. I can relate. I don't hate the wish economy, but I definitely like that part (not worrying about money) more than the others.

[hogarth]

The Wish Economy breaks the game cleanly in half, and it does it at a fairly arbitrary point.

It sure as hell doesn't "break the game cleanly in half". You have to hold your nose and pretend that no person or organization could possibly want both "regular money" and "super money" at the same time.

[Josh_Kablack]

Wish Economy is fine.

If you are at least this tall, then you get infinite numbers of items less than X cost/power is fine. This lets high-level characters not have to worry about obsessive tracking of low level items, and it doesn't prohibit lower-level characters from getting their hands on the occasional "not sold in stores" item. Frank and K having found a pre-existing spell and several setting justifications for why that should happen within the 3re Ed ruleset is genius.

If you are so inclined, it's fine to split things further with multiple "this tall" lines and tiers of items for your game but you'd need to introduce new spells or tweak existing spells and/or write setting justifications for why that would happen.

The problem I have with the Wish Economy is actually in how fubar-ed the pre-Wish economy is. The 3.x rules for costs and items in general are crazy-go-nuts, and Book of Gears is never going to be completed to a degree that fixes all of that.

[DSMatticus]

The Efreeti is just a good marking point, because once you have access to them you have clearly entered the wish economy. You can actually enter it earlier or later, depending on how lucky or unlucky you are.

The Efreeti is NOT the reason for the wish economy. There are tons of other reasons, like planeshift, wall of iron, and being able to put legendary cities of [expensive material here] without having to watch your level 15 PC's strip it for financial wealth, and just generally trying to stop your PC's from turning everything remotely cool or shiny into character power.

D&D needs a wealth system where you cannot take tons of mundane things and convert them to +10 swords. Using gold as a currency for levels 1-20 completely fails to do this, because a cubic foot of gold will buy you a lot and around the time planeshift comes online you can probably find many cubic feet of gold somewhere for free if you're willing to dig through enough books.

[hogarth]

D&D needs a wealth system where you cannot take tons of mundane things and convert them to +10 swords.

It doesn't need a wealth system like that, but you might want a wealth system like that.

In the real world, it's perfectly feasible to take tons of mundane dollars from people and convert them to aircraft carriers or nuclear bombs.

[Vebyast]

You can actually enter it earlier or later, depending on how lucky or unlucky you are.

Or how many virgins you're willing to sacrifice, given that the BoED (miserable failure that it is) gives level-one characters an option for entering the WE.

In the real world,

... we don't have such a thing as game balance. DND is intended to be fun, and it turns out that some of the features of the 3.5e economy lead directly to not-fun. The Wish Economy is an easy, clean way to make DND more fun. I'm all for it.

[DSMatticus]

Comparing D&D characters to real world nations is a little strange. That breaks down in a few ways.

Firstly, just having a ton of money will not get you an aircraft carrier or a nuclear bomb. There's certainly a "you must be this tall to ride" aspect of the real world in that sense.

Secondly, in the real world tons of mundane dollars tend to come with tons of mundane options. Certainly, you could buy an aircraft carrier, or you could do something mundane and boring with that money like a social program or tax return or whatever. In D&D land, there is no overhead, there are no mundane obligations. You have wealth, and wealth is directly equivalent to your character power (as a stated design goal of D&D 3.5), so you are totally incentivized to convert every single mundane dollar (gold piece) into aircraft carriers (+10 killing sticks), and there is no other not-suck option.

The real world is complex - you can do lots of things with wealth, all of them arguably important and good. D&D land is a funnel - wealth goes in, power comes out. The equivalency is not there.

[fectin]

I get how it works. I like how it works.
I was wondering if it could work even better.

If you are so inclined, it's fine to split things further with multiple "this tall" lines and tiers of items for your game but you'd need to introduce new spells or tweak existing spells and/or write setting justifications for why that would happen.

It shouldn't be that hard to tweak though. For example take this set of changes:
- Janni get access to limited wish like efreeti get acess to wish.
- Limited wish gets added to its explicit list of effects, "Create a valuable item, even a magic item, of up to 500 gp in value"
- Efreeti get bumped to 13 HD minimum
Now with those three changes, you have the generic gold economy disappearing around seventh to ninth level, with tracking precise numbers of cure potions going away at the same time. You also have an easy entry into more barter-based currencies (gold->gems->souls instead of straight from cash to murder), and you get a gap between "characters stop counting pennies" and "characters have infinite wishes". (Which kicks in a little later instead: 15th level) That matters because limited wish isn't that stellar, but free wishes are good for more than just making shinies. They give you permanent bonuses, they give you free contingencies, free permenacy, etc. That's not a bad thing, especially at high level, but 9th isn't all the way into crazy-go-nuts DnD yet, it's just when all the cool character options start coming online.

The problem I have with the Wish Economy is actually in how fubar-ed the pre-Wish economy is. The 3.x rules for costs and items in general are crazy-go-nuts, and Book of Gears is never going to be completed to a degree that fixes all of that.

I thought maybe a shorter bar to knock out mundane stuff would help address that.

[fectin]

Sorry for the double post.

The Wish Economy breaks the game cleanly in half, and it does it at a fairly arbitrary point.

It sure as hell doesn't "break the game cleanly in half". You have to hold your nose and pretend that no person or organization could possibly want both "regular money" and "super money" at the same time.

Okay. That's fair and good advice, but I was unclear before. Does "arbitrarily segregates the game into two radically different tiers" work better? Before you enter the upper tier, everythnig is scarce. you conserve everything, because it does turn directly into power, and that your biggest way to turn wealth into power is early entry to the upper tier. Afterwards, you're in a post-scarcity economy. That is a radical change, enough that you are playing a very different game before and after. Also, there's no halfway or gradation: you are either pinching every penny and living under a bush, hobo-style, or you are literally swimming in gold, Scrooge McDuck style.
That kind of sudden paradigm shift can be bad.

[Josh_Kablack]

It shouldn't be that hard to tweak though. For example take this set of changes:
- Janni get access to limited wish like efreeti get acess to wish.
- Limited wish gets added to its explicit list of effects, "Create a valuable item, even a magic item, of up to 500 gp in value"
- Efreeti get bumped to 13 HD minimum
Now with those three changes, you have the generic gold economy disappearing around seventh to ninth level, with tracking precise numbers of cure potions going away at the same time. .

I'm curious about the particular breakpoints chosen. Why 500 gp? And why 7th-9th level?

That gives characters over that hurdle as-many-as-they want on masterwork weapons, alchemical silver weapons, cold iron weapons, quaal's feather tokens, scrolls of up to 3rd level spells, Potions of up to 2nd level spells, and wands of 0 level spells.

It does not let such characters stockpile anything which provides raw numeric bonuses that don't come from spell-items. (+1 sword is over the line, oil of magic weapon is under it)

Is that what you want to happen at 7th-9th level ?

[fectin]

The specific changes were largely a demonstration that it didn't taker a lot of edits to change the breakpoints, and that those edits were pretty reasonable.

7-9th level falls out of being able to turn lesser planar binding into infinite limited wishes (a 5th level spell is the real entry to it, but I assume you can probably get into that a couple levels early without too much difficulty).

If you can make gold go away as a consideration in some other way, I am for pushing the full wish economy later. That's not a well-tested opinion, but I see a qualitative difference difference between "infinite gold" and "infinite wishes".

I pulled 500 gold out of my ass. I have no idea what the right number is. Probably at least 50, but also probably less than 1000. Either way, I think CLW potions should be free at that point, and that actually magic armor/weapons should not.

Underall, I really don't know though. Would something like that make for better games? It seems like it gets you the wish economy benefits faster, and with a smoother transition. On ther other hand, it adds a new tier of currency, slightly more complexity, and adds a minor incompatability with vanilla Dnd (and too many of those add up fast).

[CCarter]

I pulled 500 gold out of my ass. I have no idea what the right number is. Probably at least 50, but also probably less than 1000. Either way, I think CLW potions should be free at that point, and that actually magic armor/weapons should not.

Standard exchange rate is 1 XP = 5 GP.
(its debatable as to whether this actually makes sense since a character's wealth inflates much faster than their GPs, but that's the default guideline used in item creation or spell purchasing).
So Limited wish = 300 xp cost = 1500 GP produced, if you let it do that.

[Grek]

Any number of wishes is infinite wishes, as one of the things you can wish for is a scroll of planar binding, or a casting of planar binding.

[wotmaniac]

I may have missed something here, but one thing I've always wondered is why 15k?
To me, it seems that it should be 25k (as per max effect of the spell), or possibly 10k (as per max eschew-able component).

[Maxus]

I may have missed something here, but one thing I've always wondered is why 15k?
To me, it seems that it should be 25k (as per max effect of the spell), or possibly 10k (as per max eschew-able component).

Because 15k is 50 pounds of...platinum, isn't it? Something along those lines. A lot of spell-like abilities mean you can carry yourself and another fifty pounds of stuff.

[LR]

I may have missed something here, but one thing I've always wondered is why 15k?
To me, it seems that it should be 25k (as per max effect of the spell), or possibly 10k (as per max eschew-able component).

It had a flat 15k limit in 3.0. The 3.5 update changed it to 25k mundane/unlimited magic wealth.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Because 15k is 50 pounds of...platinum, isn't it? Something along those lines. A lot of spell-like abilities mean you can carry yourself and another fifty pounds of stuff.

30lbs of platinum; platinum being 10 times as valuable as gold, and a metal coin weighing 1/50th of a pound.

[Koumei]

Actually it's 25 pieces to the pound. So 50 pounds of platinum is 50*25 == 1,250 PP == 12,500 GP.

[Maxus]

That aside, I'm pretty sure the 15k limit is based around the carrying load of a Greater Teleport SLA.

[Lokathor]

Actually it's 25 pieces to the pound. So 50 pounds of platinum is 50*25 == 1,250 PP == 12,500 GP.

No, it's 50 coins to the pound for sure.