Excerpt: Economies [merged]

[pawsplay]

Man, I am not a grognard but this sentence just made me puke in my hat.

You know, you could probably make a decent espresso machine as a level 5 magic item.

 

[Kraydak]

Perversely enough, we already have a real-world example of the exact truthfulness of the default. WoW has demonstrated that the minimal sale price of a disenchantable object is the sale price of the remnants it disenchants into, and that's in a market with no barrier to entry whatsoever and trivial transaction costs. Why is this so? Because you can make things with the remnants that are more wanted than a useless original item. Are WoW players (economically) insane?

The default rules are not a demented assault on economic sanity, and a DM who lets his world use them is not offending against D&D-appropriate levels of realism. A designer who values a world consistent with human experience does not gain any appreciable credit by deciding that 20% is insane while 50% is "realistic".

Well duh. If you have an item whose only value is in its component parts, it will sell at (or a bit below, extracting the parts will cost something) the value of its component parts. That puts a floor on the selling price, but does nothing for the ceiling. Note that in WoW, *useful* items bazaar for much more than the salvage price.

20% is insane because a magic item market tends to liquidity and rapid turn around. It does that because the people who want magic items have immense mobility and large amounts of ready cash. Adventurers aren't poor 3rd world farmers with no ability to take their products directly to the 1st world market, nor are they 17th century Europeans dependent on merchants bringing them spices from the Orient. They can travel to wherever the magic item market is themselves, rapidly.

 

[pawsplay]

Let's face it, adventurers are the East India Trading Company and Waterdeep is London.

 

[gizmo33]

As people have said, the rule is there for game balance.

But if the rule is there for game balance, then I think one is in somewhat of an awkward posistion to try to defend it based on versimiltude. If the rule were not arrived at through a reasonable analysis of "simulation" type stuff, then why pretend that it satisfies that kind of gamer? The rule appears to me as a gamist, fiat-driven construct designed to take money out of pockets of PCs. There's nothing evil about that, I just would prefer that it be called what it is. Obviously you can suggest a bunch of conditions that would create a universal 1:5 situation for magic items, but the lack of presence of these elements in other areas (for example, suggesting that the merchants have to pay 50% tax on their magic items to enter a city but not accounting for why the PCs never do) doesn't pass the simulationist test.

So it's a game construct, and were it a video game, I would simply sell my items for 1:5 to the local faceless NPC and get on with killing things. This seems consistent with the more "gamist" design approach that folks are telling me that 4E is taking. It doesn't surprise me - WotC IMO has shown virtually no interest or ability in any sort of simulationist design or thinking - the only thing vaguely historical in DnD 3E are artifacts from prior editions, and inconsistencies between the costs of raw materials, labor, and finished product (ex. high-quality iron, a weapon-smith's wages, and a longsword) are trivial to find in the rules. The people who invented the dire flail or decided that a glorified sickle was an exotic weapon doing 1d6 damage were not simulationists.

I think the whole "wealth management by gp" rules is a simulationist construct anyway. It's not cinematic for heroes to be buying and selling stuff anyway - that's a hold-over from DnD's simulationist days. If I were going to adopt 4Es gaming philosophy completely, I might just dispense with the whole pretense of looting creatures for stuff and selling it as being completely contrary to the spirit of the rules and distracting to intelligent players and opt for "wealth points" or something instead.

 

[pawsplay]

Heck, formalize "item slots" and let players pick 75% of their own loot, ignore ordinary coin, and create a "wealth reating" for large mundane purchases that can also be used to swap magic items.

There, I think I just gave away a free GSL idea to some publisher.

 

[gizmo33]

Perversely enough, we already have a real-world example of the exact truthfulness of the default. WoW has demonstrated that the minimal sale price of a disenchantable object is the sale price of the remnants it disenchants into, and that's in a market with no barrier to entry whatsoever and trivial transaction costs. Why is this so? Because you can make things with the remnants that are more wanted than a useless original item. Are WoW players (economically) insane?

Maybe they are insane. Something's missing here. If people will pay 5,000 gp for an item, but they can only sell it to the faceless merchants for 1,000, then what's to stop a player from putting out the word that they'll buy said items for 2,000 and sell it for 4,000? It seems to me to be a no-brainer that you've got 2,000 easy gps coming to you just because the NPCs are foolish. I don't know much about WoW, but unless the player has to walk from India to England for every transaction I would think this would be a gold-mine and much appreciated by persons wishing to sell items as well as those wishing to buy. Of course if I can kill monsters and loot 100000s of gps easily then I might not want to spend time with merchant activities, but that's a zany MMORPG situation and not a satisfying simulation. WoW might be skewed in that there are no actual, functioning, intelligent merchants who are working the system.

 

[Stalker0]

Adventurers aren't poor 3rd world farmers with no ability to take their products directly to the 1st world market, nor are they 17th century Europeans dependent on merchants bringing them spices from the Orient. They can travel to wherever the magic item market is themselves, rapidly.

Keep in mind that magic has been greatly decreased in 4e. I don't think any old adventurer can just snap his fingers and fly at high speeds, or teleport. Most adventurers have to walk just like anyone else. No granted they are going to be better at traveling than your low level farmer, but they still have to deal with many of the problems of the darkness around those points of light.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Maybe they are insane. Something's missing here. If people will pay 5,000 gp for an item, but they can only sell it to the faceless merchants for 1,000, then what's to stop a player from putting out the word that they'll buy said items for 2,000 and sell it for 4,000? It seems to me to be a no-brainer that you've got 2,000 easy gps coming to you just because the NPCs are foolish. I don't know much about WoW, but unless the player has to walk from India to England for every transaction I would think this would be a gold-mine and much appreciated by persons wishing to sell items as well as those wishing to buy. Of course if I can kill monsters and loot 100000s of gps easily then I might not want to spend time with merchant activities, but that's a zany MMORPG situation and not a satisfying simulation. WoW might be skewed in that there are no actual, functioning, intelligent merchants who are working the system.

Honestly, a merchant campaign sounds pretty cool to me.

 

[JohnSnow]

But if the rule is there for game balance, then I think one is in somewhat of an awkward posistion to try to defend it based on versimiltude. If the rule were not arrived at through a reasonable analysis of "simulation" type stuff, then why pretend that it satisfies that kind of gamer? The rule appears to me as a gamist, fiat-driven construct designed to take money out of pockets of PCs.

*SIGH*

D&D has never been a game aimed purely at simulationists (and in my opinion, hopefully never will). What it has always had is a mostly gamist mindset, tagged with enough simulation to be believable.

Vancian magic, for example, was an entirely gamist construct that the game bent over backwards to justify as a simulation. Gary having a somewhat "backwards" notion of what constituted "balance" aside, the vancian magic system was there for game balance purposes. If you stick by Gary's assumptions about how a game works (including that every character starts at 1st-level, including replacement PCs!), it's even "fair" in the sense that every character has a level and situation in which they get to shine.

Hit points are another example. They exist for gamist reasons, and with healing spells included, characters never have to worry about the slow pace of natural healing. But that slow pace of natural healing was there as a simulationist nod to the fact that people just don't heal that fast. Similarly, their 'abstract' nature was there as a simulationist nod to the fact that real people just can't get stabbed 50 times and be "fine."

So D&D is, and has always been, a gamist system with just enough simulation (or justification) to allow suspension of disbelief. So the new trade-in system can exist purely for balance reasons, but still be based on entirely justifiable simulationist reasons. Those reasons can include: acceptable profit margins, risk of loss, taxation, demand for items, and so on.

The in-world justifications can be found if you're willing to look for them, just as has always been the case for (nearly) every "gamist" rule in D&D.

Conversely, if you're unwilling to look for them, you won't find them. Because, at the end of the day, this is a game that's intended to be played for fun, not a wholly consistent fantasy world simulator.

 

[Andor]

And how long did it take you to get your newly plundered south American antiquity to Sotheby's in 1770? And how much did it cost to make that happen?

Hard to say. The spanish treasure fleets reckoned the voyage at 4 to 8 months, and charged a 20% tax. Mind you that was due to a theoretical Spanish monopoly over trade to the new world.

Of course by 1770 the trip from Australia to England was only 80 days. And 70 years later it was cheaper to ship gold miners laundry from California to China than it was to have them laundered in San Fransisico. Presumably the greater speed of the Clipper ships reduced overhead.

Of course by late Paragon tier, the party can just teleport to London.