Making money matter (forked from Abstracting Wealth)

[AbdulAlhazred]

@AbdulAlhazred - There are actually two feats from the Eberron Player's Guide, and one feat from Dragon 385 that allow you to enchant items higher than your level. Any players in a campaign that can access one of those AND have signficantly higher wealth than the game assumes are going to be able to get ahead of the curve pretty easily.

Sure, but again you can only make common items. The most you can do is make an item ONE plus above what you can make without any of these optimizations. This simply will not break the game. It also requires a LOT of gold. Admittedly if you give away 10x the recommended gp consistently level after level and have someone who'll optimize their artificer for this it makes SOME difference, but it is still pretty limited, and again it won't even come close to breaking the game.

Also note that the restriction to creating Common items isn't actually a rule, or at least not one that I can find. Enchant Magic Item has received one update since item rarity was introduced, and it wasn't to restrict players to enchanting common items. It merely added the ability to upgrade magic items to the version of them that is 5 levels higher. It's the only line that mentions item rarity at all, and it says it can be performed on common, uncommon, and rare items.

Yes, but it still cannot be performed on items above your level. You can 'catch up' older items, which is helpful but still won't even come close to breaking anything. As for making items that aren't common, this is an argument, but it is also clearly not the way the GENERAL item construction rules are now written, where it is clearly stated PCs can only enchant common items. In theory the Enchant Item ritual can be USED to make other items, but equally clearly being able to make them at all by any means is a house rule and Enchant Item doesn't make an exception to that rule.

Frankly if you have a player that is going to try to rules lawyer that the best they can do is make a dubious case and also quite clearly they have to go out of their way and actively rules lawyer. Obviously if someone is that desirous not to play in your campaign with different treasure distribution then they probably shouldn't play in your campaign! If they DO want to play there, then they won't mind playing by the rules and it isn't an issue.

As this is going to be a campaign where magic items aren't regularly bought and sold, and the players won't have access to the Enchant Magic Item ritual, it's not a direct concern for me, though other DMs planning on altering their economies should be aware.

And giving out more money would be directly counter-productive to what I'm trying to accomplish. I want money to be a motivator, something that you take risks to gain and worry about running out of.

Will it be possible for the players to become wealthy enough that, once again, coppers and silvers become irrelevant? Certainly. But with the scaling treasure economy gone, it's not an inevitability, but rather the result of in game decisions.

Oh, yeah, you don't have to worry about it if you don't give out as much gold as normal, but then why would there be any issue at all? PCs never NEEDED to make any items at all to start with. They get something like 8x more treasure value worth of placed items by RAW than they do gold anyway. Just give out much less GP and leave it at that, you can leave Enchant Item and Magi-Mart in the game and they're irrelevant anyway, nobody will ever be able to set foot in there. They could sell loads of spare items and MAYBE buy/make a couple other ones, but big deal from a balance standpoint.

Really, the whole wealth system is highly robust and has many firewalls at this point. The only way to break things really would be to give out loads of treasure, let anyone make anything, etc.

So your idea is fine, it will work great except for ritual and consumable cost, but you can obviously just slide those a decimal place or whatever works.

Just speaking for myself I know it does feel more realistic to have silver be useful and interesting, but OTOH after running like 10 full D&D campaigns I've long since concluded that making change and tracking what is in people's pockets is low fun for high investment. It is interesting for a couple sessions and then it quickly pales, like tracking arrows and charges on wands did. Now and then it is fun to have the PCs run into some kind of monetary bind as a plot hook. IMHO as a routine everyday part of the campaign it just gets tiresome. My opinion of course being of no relevance to you

 

[Tony Vargas]

copper pieces are essentially meaningless. They matter for about 5 minutes during level 1, after which you might as well skip writing them down. Silver pieces have relevance for a couple of levels longer, but soon anything but vast quantities of them are simply an inconvenience rather than treasure.

Nod. This was a problem even in AD&D. In my old (1e) campaign, I put my world on a 'silver standard,' that is, all the prices that said 'gp' were actually silver, and those that said 'sp' were copper ('cp' was a near-valueless coin called a 'groat,' made of iron). Actually, I had a full page of different currencies and conversions in the world, but I was a crazy teenaged geek at the time...

ahem

Costs of living become relevant. If your job in the city pays 1 gp a day, you're barely scraping by. That's enough for a day's stay at an inn in a typical room, one meal, and one pitcher of ale, with a silver left over. An offer of a 10 gp reward for a task is a chance to get ahead, rather than a joke. A promise of a 100 gp for a quest isn't a trivial amount used as a plot-hook, it's a serious motivator.

Maybe, once I run it, I'll find it frustrates me, or the players, or both. Still, I want to give it a shot.

You may find that once you implement it, you've created a game that's "not an adventure, but a job." Not that jobs aren't the stuff of High Fantasy these days...

 

[S'mon]

You may find that once you implement it, you've created a game that's "not an adventure, but a job." Not that jobs aren't the stuff of High Fantasy these days...

I don't find that; OTOH I don't make PCs track sp-level expenditure. If they want to just get by and are reasonably active then I say that looting silvers from corpses gives enough for roughly the 'commoner' lifestyle. Only if they want to live middle-class or wealthy they should deduct gp on a weekly basis, and I give mechanical benefits for doing so.

 

[DracoSuave]

If you want to make money matter, you have to make spending money matter.

That means that your consequences for not having money have to matter. If it can be handwaved as 'you sleep in a bad inn' rather than a 'good inn' you've missed the point.

At the same time, you don't want to stunt character growth

The trick is not to have things YOU care about cost money. That's just DM wankery. The trick is to have PC goals cost money. THEY want it. They'll scrimp and save for it.

See, the bottom line is, the reason D&D has a magic item economy, is simply because magic items are universal things adventurers want. So collecting money for deeds, and spending that money on loot makes sense from a motivation aspect.

Now, if you change the economy so that magic items are no longer available, that's fine. But, you have this goal of making money matter. Can characters, in your system buy things they want?

If the answer is no, or even "I don't know", then your system will not have money that matters. However, if your characters can have monetary goals, then suddenly scrimping and saving matters.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that not being able to afford an inn is going to make your money system suddenly interesting. Players are the determiners of interest. Many players will be put off by having to budget for stuff like that, especially if the only goal of the budgeting is to 'make budgeting matter.' Accounting isn't interesting unless you're an accoutant. If you have one person who actually likes this type of play, the players will just delegate the money tracking to him, and then pretend it doesn't exist.

And if they're pretending it doesn't exist... then money doesn't matter.