Or in units of, say, 240 silver coins. Which together weigh one pound.Lackhand said:Alternatively, you end up on effecively a gold standard, as everything is measured in hundreds of silver pieces.
Yes, there's a finite number of coins. You'd never really run out of them though; their value would just escalate. But then all the prices in the PHB would be wrong.Wulf Ratbane said:I voted "Other." I'd rather a barter economy. Small, everyday transactions-- currency is fine. When you're talking about the value of magic items, currency gets ridiculous, fast. I mean, who minted all these coins? Is there not a finite number of coins in the world? Especially a PoL world?
I would look at metal coins the way we look at cash today, as something you carry for liquidity, i.e. in case you need to buy something. You don't generally hold on to thousands of dollars in cash, even if your net worth is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A quasi-medieval lord would hold his wealth in land, which yields an income measured in pounds (of silver) per year, and luxury goods, not coins.Irda Ranger said:Yes, there's a finite number of coins. You'd never really run out of them though; their value would just escalate.
Irda Ranger said:Alternately, you could create a special currency that is used only for magical items. They really are more expensive than anything else in the economy, other than Castles and Warships, or the cost of fielding an army for months at a time.....Perhaps magical items have a de minimus g.p. cost (a masterwork sword is all you need), and rest is something more rare and only used in making magical items. Perhaps a special kind of crystal that can only be distilled from fresh demon blood. If the crystals lose their potency after only a couple hours there wouldn't be a market in them; so it's purely a "go get your own" thing.
You mean like this? Key thing is that you allow smaller magic items to be bought in the specie economy. Because beyond a certain point these things aren't an important power boost anymore so having lots of them isn't a great help. Whereas more powerful magic items are by their nature potentially more disruptive if available early or too easily. But you still want to be able to properly reward PC via "money". So instead you have that cut-off point, beyond it mere specie is worthless and it takes something cosmologically valuable like souls-chaos-xp-expensive spell components-favors of extraplanar beings-whatever. It serves the dual purpose of granting more DM control over the powerful items while separating them from the specie economy so that PCs can plow their wealth into things beyond the highest tier of mechanically optimum magic items.:) said:High-end magic items had ridiculous prices in gp in 3e, I mean once you got past the first couple + equivalents you're talking about hundreds of pounds of gold. Yet with various conjuration, creation, or summoning spells raw materials of any kind become trivial beyond a certain level. Want platinum summon a djinn and have it provide, bind a lantern archon and produce potentially thousands of everburning torches, etc...Above a certain level it becomes worthless since characters of that level can effectively have as much as they desire via magic...What this means is while there can be a trade in high-powered magical items they can't be bought for anything so crude as a raw material beyond a certain level. Beyond 15,000gp you can't buy it with gold or silver or even platinum. It takes souls, or gems useful as spell components, or weird planar currencies based on things like raw chaos, bottled pain, high level scrolls, etc.
I would love to see mid-tier on up magic taken out of the gold piece economy and into one of it's own. Large sums of gold then might actually see some other use in the campaign (castles, armies, mansions, servants, etc...).Irda Ranger said:Alternately, you could create a special currency that is used only for magical items. They really are more expensive than anything else in the economy, other than Castles and Warships, or the cost of fielding an army for months at a time.
Maybe not quite: see below.Cadfan said:There will be wealth/level requirements in 4e. There HAS to be. Or at least their equivalent.
Hussar, what you are describing is not quite wealth-by-level: rather, it is item-cap-by-level (ie none of an item better than +X until at least level Z).Hussar said:1e and 2e most certainly did have expected wealth by level. It didn't state it explicitly, but it was certainly there. Look at every module. How often do you see Vorpal swords in 1st level modules? How often do you see 9th level NPC's with no magic items? There's a reason for that.
It may not have been explicitly stated, but, it was there.