Once more (and I'll assume you didn't read the previous posts), I gave multiple valid reasons for it to be more, so no, it's not because "I say so." It's based on actual reason.
No, it's because you say so. Ultimately the value of a material is determined by the DM. It is within your purview to say it is more valuable but there is nothing about it that makes it inherently so. Rarity alone is not sufficient.
You have your reasons, yes, but they are yours. They are not objective laws.
We're going to have to agree to disagree. "Because I say so." is an arbitray decision based on nothing. Basing a decision on reasons is an arbitrary "Because I say so." situation.
Obryn was moving the goal posts, so I played along
Nope. You were fine with Dark Sun having non-standard weapons due to both scarcity and need. In a similar island environment with both scarcity and need, all of a sudden it's Wrong.
It's not at similar due to Dark Sun have many other homebrewed reasons for such weapons to exist. An island =/= Dark Sun.
But where is this default flavor that all 1gp daggers are made of steel? If you are not changing a default there is nothing actually being re-flavored
It's in the PHB in the pictures. Those pictures represent the default fluff for those weapons.
I knew you were going to bring up pictures, okay so as long as you use the Heavy flail or the longspear they can be anything you wish, Gotcha
The pictures clearly show the intended default fluff. We don't need a picture of both a spear AND a long spear to know wood with a steel tip is for spears.
No they dont, maybe a heavy flail is heavy because it's made out of depleted uraniium, or the long spear is longer because coral spires are only usable at that length :P
The fact that the Greatsword and greataxe are shown shows that it's important to show bigger versions of the weapons.
Appearantly with the longspear and heavy flail they can be anything.
Never Point a loaded party at a plot you are not willing to shoot.
It's not at similar due to Dark Sun have many other homebrewed reasons for such weapons to exist. An island =/= Dark Sun.
You'll have to justify this further, because I'm not buying your argument that what works for Dark Sun couldn't possibly work for a regular 4e game, when every game has a homebrew setting.
Wow, it's like every time I walk away from this thread for a few days something new happens and I come back to 100+ posts / 20 pages. By Orcus' flaming beard! What I wanted to reply to kinda got subsumed in this whole lance argument and talking about geometry and coral spears (e.e). I'm thinking some things should be broken off into their own threads, but I did want to actually finish replying to what I was discussing. Apologies for the throwback Hopefully it doesn't get lost in the noise.
Well, to me, now you're talking about a different and entirely unfortunate issue.
While I agree it's unfortunate, I don't really see it as separate.
It's most certainly a much more clear example of the same thing, in the same way a skyscraper that's a towering inferno (starring Steve McQueen) is more noticeable than a house fire... but they're both buildings on fire.
Just because an unmounted cleric in 4th (in some alternate universe where 4th includes rules for having mounts act independently of the characters) is in a 7 person party and now makes up one tenth of the action because three players have mounts is not as put out as he would be in the example 3.5 game where he's one thirtieth of the action because you have several players using their summonings, doesn't mean that something is not amiss.
Amiss, certainly, but amiss in different ways. You're still, to me, grouping two distinct issues ("having a mount or having summons means you're doing less, and those are doing more, and they're not a part of the PC" on the one hand, and "the gameplay problems found in having way more people on the field.") into one on grounds that I don't find stable.
And again, that cleric would now have to be twice as effective on his own as the mounted characters are on their own to contribute equally in his (relatively lesser) amount of time in the space of the round. Fixing this only creates further problems as that means the other characters now NEED those mounts to keep up with the cleric, which means that their horses (or whatever) are just as important to the narrative resolution as they are.
Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by narrative resolution, because this only seems particularly relevant to the combat encounter resolution. I just want to make sure I'm following properly.
Again, whether it's a really powerful magic item that dwarfs the character holding it, or a companion of some sort that is just as important than the character, (or more) you've reduced the relative contribution of that character to the narrative, which pulls the focus from them.
For further example, let's look at The Lone Ranger.
We've got the Lone Ranger himself... he's certainly the focus here, and no one's disputing that.
Then we've got Tonto, loyal companion, friend, and somewhat abrasive stereotype.
There's also Silver, his horse.
And then we have his gun, with its nifty (and unrealistic) silver bullets.
The acting was pretty awful and many of the stries weren't great, but there were some good bare bones ideas. The Lone Ranger was the star of the show, sure, but Tonto was his own separate character, and one could argue Silver was, as well. (I think SAG did... damned unions)
But there weren't a lot of plots that centered around Silver. He pulled off a nifty trick every now and then, and when he did, the cameras were on him, not our masked man. For those moments, the spotlight shifted away.
And then we had the guns and the silver bullets... they were cool, and the lone ranger did some things with them that most certainly qualify as magic, but that was the character acting through the item. He was pretty awesome without him, and random badguy #5 didn't suddenly become the lone ranger when he picked them up--they weren't a focus. They were an addition, and a tool.
The guns didn't pull attention from the character, they added to it. When the Lone Ranger was riding the horse, Silver, it drew attention to him... But when Silver was the horse that was carrying the Lone Ranger (figuratively) it drew attention away.
I see what you mean, but I think it's a fundamental difference in perspective.
I've played (both personally and at-table) with characters who had powerful magic items, I've played with mounted characters who were built to take advantage of their mount, and I've played with characters who were necromancers or effigy masters and had a number of small summons or some big ugly things, characters who's build was defined by an item or two such as "a high-threat exotic one-handed weapon" or "a pair of high-threat light weapons" or "a spiked chain"... and in addition to characters who are entirely gear-dependent (beyond the math aspects of gear), mountless, minionless ...
... and all in all, I've never looked at any of them and gone "any of those things that change what they can do and how effective they are reduce how much the character personally contributes to the ongoings." Rather, even when mounts had their own actions, even when the fire giant effigy is stomping mudholes into monsters, even when a swarm of summons skitters across the ground and someone's only near as effective as they are because of the specific gear they wield, it still felt like it was all, still, 'coming' from the character. It was a part of their character, part of what they were built to do, and a part of what they, individually, brought to the table and they, the player, controlled.
So no, I imagine it's mostly a perspective issue, but I really don't get your perspective that these things reduce how much a player's character contributes. Because to me, they're all contributions of the character.
It's not at similar due to Dark Sun have many other homebrewed reasons for such weapons to exist. An island =/= Dark Sun.
You'll have to justify this further, because I'm not buying your argument that what works for Dark Sun couldn't possibly work for a regular 4e game, when every game has a homebrew setting.
-O
Every setting being homebrew is irrelevant unless you are saying that all homerew settings are identical. Each setting is complete in and of itself and Dark Sun is simply not on par with an island.
... and all in all, I've never looked at any of them and gone "any of those things that change what they can do and how effective they are reduce how much the character personally contributes to the ongoings." Rather, even when mounts had their own actions, even when the fire giant effigy is stomping mudholes into monsters, even when a swarm of summons skitters across the ground and someone's only near as effective as they are because of the specific gear they wield, it still felt like it was all, still, 'coming' from the character. It was a part of their character, part of what they were built to do, and a part of what they, individually, brought to the table and they, the player, controlled.
Agreed. No matter what edition and no matter how powerful the items, those items were always a part of the character. Not once did I ever have the Mayor of a town I saved run up and say, "Thank you Artifact of Doom for saving us. Who is this person that hold you in his hand?" Items have never defined the character unless the player wanted them to.
Every setting being homebrew is irrelevant unless you are saying that all homerew settings are identical. Each setting is complete in and of itself and Dark Sun is simply not on par with an island.
Wha? No, I'm not saying every setting is identical.
I'm saying that you can come up with a plausible explanation for something like a mechanically-identical-to-normal coral spear from an island culture. You can come up with them in Dark Sun, so it stands to reason that you can come up with sufficient reasons to do so in any campaign. Because the DM can do stuff like that.
Every setting being homebrew is irrelevant unless you are saying that all homerew settings are identical. Each setting is complete in and of itself and Dark Sun is simply not on par with an island.
Wha? No, I'm not saying every setting is identical.
I'm saying that you can come up with a plausible explanation for something like a mechanically-identical-to-normal coral spear from an island culture. You can come up with them in Dark Sun, so it stands to reason that you can come up with sufficient reasons to do so in any campaign. Because the DM can do stuff like that.
-O
So because one business gives me my money back without a receipt, all businesses should give me back my money without a receipt. After all, they can all do stuff like that. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. What makes sense in one campaign does not make sense in all campaigns.
Art objects aren't starting equipment. They are found via adventuring. In any case this is trivial unless you are denying players starting equipment due to the 100 GP limit. That's the last I'll have to say on that topic.
As to the OP.
I thought of an analogy that may be helpful when examining the problem of PC versus NPC/Monster versimilitude (or rather, why I don't have a problem at all with it).
Imagine the party of players standing in front of a mirror. It's a magic mirror trap that creates an exact, if antagonistic, copy of the party. I see requests for this kind of thing crop up now and again, or some variation, so I think it's a not uncommon fantasy trope.
There's a number of ways this can play out and I think it elucidates how 4e deals with this situation and why it is superior to other editions.
First of all, we could just have a flat (a.k.a. one to one) mirror that works as advertised and creates exact copies of the party. There of course is a huge problem with this. Unless your roleplay system has a player centric mechanic that staves off death (such as fate points, etc, in which case I'd argue that the mirror isn't exact anymore) it will be a crap shoot as to whether the party or at least particular members will survive. Opening up the analogy, if normal play in the system is to have fights with mechanically equal antagonists, play will be essentially a series of 50-50 coin flips until inevitably a tails shows up and failure occurs.
It certainly seems that earlier systems were be built around the 1-1 mirror analogy, so how could parties actually play such a game?
The first option is that it's possible they couldn't. I've gone to games (this was the early 90s btw) where I've observed play that consists of players with generic PCs with 2 backup character sheets in reserve exploring empty 10' by 10' rooms filled with random mobs. Play here is supposed to be a nasty, brutish and short struggle for survival. I won't comment much but to say I hope no one is expecting this to be the future of the hobby, it's entirely niche (though not to say invalid). As such it doesn't pertain to the OP.
A second option is one I think touches on a major play style that previous edition players feel lacks in 4e and that I tend to agree could use more representation now. In this case the mirror is still 1-1, but tilted at an angle or even on edge. To explain, since a fair fight will always be an unacceptable risk of character loss, the party will plan, fudge, and fight to make every fight as unfair as possible or even work to avoid a fight all together. When a party of 1st level orcs can instakill 1st level PCs, the best solution is just never to go toe to toe with them. Better to fly over and drop a barrel of flaming oil, or rolls rocks at them, or just bluff them into thinking you're particularly short and unhairy reinforcements. Unfortunately, I don't think it's a good reflection (no pun intended) on a game system where the best approach to play the game is to avoid most of the mechanical systems (or warp them in possibly unintended ways) and essentially play a largely mechanics free game. I much prefer a system like 4e where the mechanics always works and doesn't have to be ran from. For a while, since 4e was so balanced and had such an emphasis on encounter based play, I used to think that attempts to "break" an encounter were in a sense cheating. I now think that the occasional encounter bypass can be enjoyable and especially rewarding to players who like to figure out gameplay puzzles. I know I have very much enjoyed an encounter in the Scales of War campaign were we realized we could all run for a gate, take down the guards, and barricade outside some unintelligent elemental enemies. In another encounter in LFR play, my character led the way in securing a way past a horde of swarm type monsters by flying up to a balcony and securing a rope there. We got past the encounter without reducing all the monsters to 0 hit points, but we all felt it still was a challenging and rewarding encounter.
The big risk with the above and the main reason I'd not prefer to play in a older system where the mirror is 1-1 is that if the party ever fails and finds itself in a fair fight, we arrive at the crapshoot problem. In 4e, if you fail to obtain a large advantage the system doesn't fall down and one is still likely to avoid catastrope and merely expend greater than expected resources, which of course can be a problem down the road. I think this is a point in favor of 4e.
A final way the mirror can interact with the party, and here is where we can see how it colors all of 4e PC versus NPC/monster interactions and solves versimilitude (if one gives in to the analogy that is) is that the mirror can distort the image.
In remembering some old style play and in replaying Baldur's Gate 2 lately (not a perfect reflection of a fully DM'd system of course), I've seen one way the mirror can be distorted. Either the mirror can dog pile the images into one large threat (wyvren, golem, lich) that is beatable with throwing enough resources at it due to save or die/suck abilities/unbeatable buffs or the images are shrunk and the party fights a lot of less capable enemies that aren't a real threat in any real sense (goblins, kobolds, orcs versus level 8-12 parties), but can nonetheless be an obstacle due to attrition and the expenditure of limited healing resources and/or AoE damage/save or die abilites just to squash the threat.
I still think the 4e system is superior due to the problem of having underwelming fights that are largely predetermined and the swinginess of combat where character loss can come out of left field. Which brings me to 4e's approach.
I know this is already a big wall of text. If you read anything in this post, please read just the following.
4e's relationship between PCs and NPC/monsters is like a fun house mirror. This colors all interactions between the two and, if you can commit to relax into the framework, solves the potential versimilitude problems that can crop up. We know from the analysis above that a plain 1-1 mirror will lead to a unacceptably swingy game where PCs losses will occur with some non-negligable odds for each encounter (50-50 in the extreme case). With repeated rolls of the dice, loss will be inevitable.
By funhouse mirror I mean that every interaction between PCs and NPC/monsters is distorted to restore balance (that is a game that is able to be played in a campaign style and be consistantly interesting, non-swingy, and fair). Only on one's own side of the mirror do direct comparisions make sense: PCs look undistorted to PCs and NPCs look undistorted to NPCs. This is because they inhabit two different worlds (their mirror image worlds) from each other.
This is most evident with damage and hit point balance. PCs largely inflict large amounts of damage while having a low hit point total and numerous surges to bring them back to health. NPCs have lower rates of damage, higher hit point totals and infrequent access to surges. This doesn't mean that NPCs should be able to ford lava streams at will due to their hit point buffer. This hit point difference only has any meaning when the distorted mirror comes into play and the PCs and NPCs are toe-to-toe and acutally have damaging powers to use. If somehow the PCs where to direct a lava stream into an enemy camp (via player ingeniuty or DM plot point), NPCs should still (very likely) just die outright to the lava flood despite by-the-numbers having way too many hit points to be taken down like that. NPC stats don't have meaning until they come up across the PCs (this is also why the falacy that minions would never survive to reach PCs in fear of stubbing their toes is solved).
A further extension of the distortion is that the entire action and power economy between PCs and NPCs is altered for balance. NPCs need ways of dishing out higher proportional power in a quicker amount of time than PCs since they usually won't last beyond a round or two whereas the Players should last for a few encounters before they need to rest (and will rarely die). This means that an NPC is perfectly justified in having a minor action rechargable domination or a rechargable burst stun (save ends) or a slow (save ends) basic attack (Pirate captain example) or an at-will power for a ranged pull with a harpoon (Kuo-toa example). These exist along the balance continuum but don't have any objective meaning outside of a comparison with PCs. There's nothing to figure out for the PCs in why something works (though of course putting in additional flavor is always welcome) because the answer is always the NPC has a move that is in line with game balance. If you could figure out the identical move, with the exact same training, and exact same capabilities as the NPC, the exact same force and precision will be translated to the PC side of the funhouse mirror to be much diminished (likely a page 42 scaled effect or a one time deal) than if the players assume the mirror is flat and 1-1. But the problem isn't that the power was diminished, it's still full power, it's just that the entire hitpoint, action, and power economy is different between PCs and NPCs.
If you acknowledge that this mirror exists, and commit to observing the game through its image,verisimilitude issues dissapear into the distortions of the mirror. You don't have to think about why a PC and NPC are different and why shouldn't one be able to achieve NPC power, they are just on their own sides of the mirror and meet only in the image of a balanced encounter. And since this solves and is neccessary for so much of what 4e has done to make a balanced, fun, and meaningful play experience that is a dream to DM, I don't think this commitment is too much to endure for the strength of the hobby.
Edit: BTW the Oblivion Moss Mindmaster is a perfect 4e response to the mirror image trap problem. In 4e, this just will not work as an identical antagonistic cloned party.
Hopefully it doesn't get lost in the noise. 
