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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6305744" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I thought it was an amazingly insightful innovation.</p><p></p><p>In 1e and 2e, there systems hesitated to ever let players gain access to permanent magical abilities whether as spells or magic items. Any spell or item which had a duration which never expired threatened to become a force multiplier. As a result, in practice the creation of enduring magic was almost entirely the province of NPCs, who - on the basis of the unique magical effects that abounded in Gygaxian D&D - could do just about anything. PC's by contrast paid enormous costs for even the most simple magical creations.</p><p></p><p>The XP trade for permanent effects provided a natural limitation on how many permanent effects you could make while still providing theoretical complete access to anything that the player could imagine.</p><p></p><p>Frankly, if I was going to drop either the gold cost or the XP cost, I'd drop the cost in gold. I think it's a mistake to tie assumptions of wealth too heavily to level. It essentially is dictating the style and content of the game being run too heavily. But XP in some form is theoretically universal (unless you house rule it away, in which case, deal with your own consequences) and available XP is inherently tied to level without in any fashion dictating the content of play (because XP exists mainly in the metagame, unlike gold which exists entirely in play). </p><p></p><p>If you want to reduce the burden of XP costs, I think that the best methodology is figure out what you are willing to substitute for XP to reduce or eliminate direct payment - ritual sacrifices of specific magical beings, rare components, rare days of power, exotic locations of power, etc. This moves you back in the direction of 1e, where control of access amounts to DM story control, but at least doesn't force you to run an in game commodity (gold) as a metagame construct.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6305744, member: 4937"] I thought it was an amazingly insightful innovation. In 1e and 2e, there systems hesitated to ever let players gain access to permanent magical abilities whether as spells or magic items. Any spell or item which had a duration which never expired threatened to become a force multiplier. As a result, in practice the creation of enduring magic was almost entirely the province of NPCs, who - on the basis of the unique magical effects that abounded in Gygaxian D&D - could do just about anything. PC's by contrast paid enormous costs for even the most simple magical creations. The XP trade for permanent effects provided a natural limitation on how many permanent effects you could make while still providing theoretical complete access to anything that the player could imagine. Frankly, if I was going to drop either the gold cost or the XP cost, I'd drop the cost in gold. I think it's a mistake to tie assumptions of wealth too heavily to level. It essentially is dictating the style and content of the game being run too heavily. But XP in some form is theoretically universal (unless you house rule it away, in which case, deal with your own consequences) and available XP is inherently tied to level without in any fashion dictating the content of play (because XP exists mainly in the metagame, unlike gold which exists entirely in play). If you want to reduce the burden of XP costs, I think that the best methodology is figure out what you are willing to substitute for XP to reduce or eliminate direct payment - ritual sacrifices of specific magical beings, rare components, rare days of power, exotic locations of power, etc. This moves you back in the direction of 1e, where control of access amounts to DM story control, but at least doesn't force you to run an in game commodity (gold) as a metagame construct. [/QUOTE]
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