Chamomile wrote: But also, yes, the primary source of disagreement here is that every time, in any group, that getting either a boat or a castle has been an option, it has immediately become a high priority. For the Kingmaker group, that's not surprising, the group is probably self selecting for the kind of person who sees an island on the world map and immediately resolves to build Barad-Dur on top of it, but it also happened with completely unrelated groups in three other games (four, if you add "a shop" to boats and castles, although that one was motivated by a desire to make even more money rather than a direct desire to own real estate).
Your assertion that people don't want castles unless they do something has been exactly the opposite of my experience: People always want castles unless they come packaged with an obligation to play a new mini-game.
My experience is that the castles issue usually either A. Does nothing because players spend the money and then it plays no relevance in the plot. This makes people who spent for it pissed off.
or B. The people who buy it want everything to be about it which pisses off all the players who were invested in stopping the necromancer from taking over the world or whatever todays quest was. Finally, if the castle would be relevant to the plot the GM will give you one as part of the plot. That makes the option of buying one seem very fake.
Yes, exactly. This is why I said that the item has to exist. If you make a huge expendature for a castle and it turns out your game is Indiana Jonesing you across the world map in search of means to stop the world from ending then you are going to be a bit pissed off.tussock wrote:
Hey souron. There's people have studied what players like, and modern PC games are heavily based on the psychology of it all to maximise profits. .... Anyway, your "it feels like getting nothing" complaint is essentially about a lack of screen time.
World of Warcraft sells lots of cosmetic only items. However, those items exist. If you buy the 1 million gold purple loin cloth of azeroth it may not do anything to help you raid but you can teabag your foes with it till their eyes bleed. They can't turn it off and as long as you are co located with people they can't ignore its existence.
Contrast this to a castle that you can spend your D&D monies on that just never appears in the adventure. Its not even close to the same thing.
No I mean economic rational actors. The distance between the D&D player and their character affects how they interact with the world. We both agree that the player doesn't experience the danger associated with adventurering that the character does. However, they also don't have to taste bad food, sleep in bad beds, or otherwise deal with the discomfort their character does. They may be sympathetic too it, but they don't experience it. Their risk/reward pyramid is all screwed up. Players characters are like roulettle players who bet the whole house on black over and over and over again.FrankTrollman wrote: The term you are looking for isn't that D&D players aren't rational actors. Indeed, the fact that D&D players generally have much more time to consider their actions during high stress situations makes them behave much more "rationally" than real people do in their own lives. The point is that they exist at a point in the hierarchy of needs where their security is completely assured. Nothing that happens in the game can seriously harm them, because they are playing a game. Even the death of their character is not necessarily the end of their game since they can and often do just make a new character.
From a psychological standpoint they are rational, and like you say are making informed reasonable choices for the situation that they, the player, find themselves in. However, from an economic perspective player characters are basically broken cogs in the economic wheel.
You don't spend your whole life looking for the treasure of the Sierra Madre and then turn around and use proceeds of that to look for secret Nazi gold.
Again, the fact that it seems like every Inn across the forgotten realms has a 5th level half-elf fighter/mage as its proprietor is both very silly and very reasonable. As soon as you can afford to stop risking life and limb because you have enough gold for an elfs lifetime a rational actor would.
However, this logic doesn't apply to players. They don't go "we found the treasure! time to retire these characters!" they want to use the treasure from defeating the dragon to...go kill a bigger meaner dragon.
