Community

Dec 5, 2012 -- 1:34PM, nukunuku wrote:

And when 125 gold is like giving out 12,500 dollars, it makes sense that you'd inflate the economy quickly!  

Not to say that giving treasure rewards isn't acceptable or even story-positive sometimes.  I mean, think of the scene in Conan with the old king talking about how gems lose their luster...

But when 125 gold is something you get and you're like, "eh, that's another six thousand hammers but not much else," something is messed up.

exactly!

Dec 5, 2012 -- 1:40PM, Dwarfslayer wrote:

I like the idea that gold doesn't buy anything "worthwhile."

You spend gold on flavor stuff like castles and arcane laboratories, but it doesn't make your character more powerful. The thing I always hated about 3E/4E is that characters became effectively heavily armed paupers, because every single coin they made went to buying better stuff. Every coin that you spent on not-gear was making you weaker and was just a flat out waste of money. So forget about your cleric donating to his church or your fighter ever owning a stronghold, you need to save up for that +4 cloak!

+1

It saddens me when people say that in 4e you needed to spend all your money on gear or you'd fall behind, because it meant that the designers failed.    They were obviously trying to make sure that only 3 items had strong relevance to combat, and make the economy exponential to encourage "wasting money".   I mean, my bard spent money on rituals, potions, a castle, restoring a temple of bahamut and a variety of other things that the forums would tell me are a waste and causing me to fall behind.   But, 4e was originally designed to have reduced payoff for spending money, so that even though you'd fall behind in theory, you wouldn't be noticeably punished for spending some money on pointless trivialities. 

It saddens me they couldn't make this more clear.  Perhaps by enforcing level limits and by enforcing a strict limit of magic items per person, they can make sure that people have money they can't use for war.    That'll avoid people feeling that they're falling behind without removing item shops and without arguing why 30% of your gold must be spent on story.

Dec 5, 2012 -- 5:48PM, MeCorva wrote:

It saddens me when people say that in 4e you needed to spend all your money on gear or you'd fall behind, because it meant that the designers failed. They were obviously trying to make sure that only 3 items had strong relevance to combat, and make the economy exponential to encourage "wasting money". I mean, my bard spent money on rituals, potions, a castle, restoring a temple of bahamut and a variety of other things that the forums would tell me are a waste and causing me to fall behind. But, 4e was originally designed to have reduced payoff for spending money, so that even though you'd fall behind in theory, you wouldn't be noticeably punished for spending some money on pointless trivialities. It saddens me they couldn't make this more clear. Perhaps by enforcing level limits and by enforcing a strict limit of magic items per person, they can make sure that people have money they can't use for war. That'll avoid people feeling that they're falling behind without removing item shops and without arguing why 30% of your gold must be spent on story.

 It wasn't a 4th ed problem although it just made it a bit more apparent as it assumed you would have a +XYZ item by a certain level. 3.5 had the same incentive to spend money on magic items as well. If you can buy and sell magic items as default rules there will be a strong inventive to buy combat gear over everything else.

 Pre 3rd ed characters tened to have more nagical items than 3.5 and 4th ed characters. Some of them would be pointless from a min/max point of view or hardly used (6 +1 spears carries as thrown weapons)

 The lony real way to have interesting mgical items is to divource them from an assumed or implied WBL guideline otherwise the incentive to buy magical items (combat ones) is a large one.