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What's the point of gold?
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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7517920" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>Lol. You must not be very familiar with statistics.</p><p></p><p></p><p>We’re working from different definitions of the word here. You’re talking about the quality of being worthy of attention. That’s subjective. I’m talking about the objective impact something has. Bill Gates may not consider $1,000 worthy of his attention, but it has exactly the same purchasing power in is hands as it does in mine. Your friends may not care that at 5th level their martial characters gain an extra attack and their casters get access to 3rd level spells. But their characters are capable of more whether they care or not.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Your friends may not care that their character’s can take more damage, deal more damage, cast different spells, and succeed 5% more often at trained checks, but they can. You may not be interested in playing races other than humans, elves, and half-elves, but something about the races you do want to play is appealing to you in a way that those other races are not.</p><p></p><p></p><p>So how do you determine how much gold it’s going to take to successfully bribe the guards into letting you in? If there’s a specific minimum amount that the guards will accept, that’s a game mechanic. If you allow the players to adjust that minimum amount by their actions, that’s a game mechanic. You’ve actually created a situation here where it is mechanically beneficial to save all of your wealth for bribes instead of spending it on things like building castles or fixing hometowns or whatever. Unless you allow characters with better lifestyles to be able to bribe guards more easily. Rhar’s Be another mechanic, and would you look at that, you’ve got the beginnings of a (very rudimentary) economy subsystem. And, as I’ve been saying all along, it was you who did that work, instead of the designer’s at WotC.</p><p></p><p></p><p>No, ifbthe stuff you spend your money on is only used for narrative purposes, there’s no <em>need</em> to track every copper, just like there’s no <em>need</em> to track your character’s gebeology and alleles is eye color only matters for descriptive purposes. You certainly can, if you want to, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If counting coppers that you can’t spend on anything with mechanical impact is so important to you, knock yourself out, no one is stopping you. But it’s not <em>neeeded</em> to play the game. To say otherwise is to “One True Way” the people who don’t care about tracking coinage. People are perfectly free to play the game with or without coin tracking, but if individual coins don’t matter to the rules, then please don’t waste wordcount in the rulebook on coin values and exchange rates.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Stop. Just f***ing stop. I am sick and tired of you making assumptions about my play style preferences. I absolutely do not prefer mechanics over roleplay and I strongly resent being misrepresented in this way.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Mechanics and roleplaying are not dichotomous. Treating them as zero sum values like this is nonsense, because game mechanics do not prevent roleplaying and roleplaying does not diminish game mechanics.</p><p></p><p></p><p>See, when I say “game mechanics,” you seem to hear “combat-related stat boosts.” That is not what the term means and it is not what I am using the term to mean.</p><p></p><p></p><p>I do not devalue roleplaying. Roleplaying is the most important part of the game to me. But I like roleplaying choices to have weight. Mechanics can and do enhance roleplaying, by assigning risk and reward to your choices. Making it a game, as opposed to just a story. I enjoy telling stories, but I enjoy it more when there is an element of challenge. When there are rules that guide the storytelling rather than leaving it freeform. When it’s a roleplaying GAME as opposed to just roleplaying.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 7517920, member: 6779196"] Lol. You must not be very familiar with statistics. We’re working from different definitions of the word here. You’re talking about the quality of being worthy of attention. That’s subjective. I’m talking about the objective impact something has. Bill Gates may not consider $1,000 worthy of his attention, but it has exactly the same purchasing power in is hands as it does in mine. Your friends may not care that at 5th level their martial characters gain an extra attack and their casters get access to 3rd level spells. But their characters are capable of more whether they care or not. Your friends may not care that their character’s can take more damage, deal more damage, cast different spells, and succeed 5% more often at trained checks, but they can. You may not be interested in playing races other than humans, elves, and half-elves, but something about the races you do want to play is appealing to you in a way that those other races are not. So how do you determine how much gold it’s going to take to successfully bribe the guards into letting you in? If there’s a specific minimum amount that the guards will accept, that’s a game mechanic. If you allow the players to adjust that minimum amount by their actions, that’s a game mechanic. You’ve actually created a situation here where it is mechanically beneficial to save all of your wealth for bribes instead of spending it on things like building castles or fixing hometowns or whatever. Unless you allow characters with better lifestyles to be able to bribe guards more easily. Rhar’s Be another mechanic, and would you look at that, you’ve got the beginnings of a (very rudimentary) economy subsystem. And, as I’ve been saying all along, it was you who did that work, instead of the designer’s at WotC. No, ifbthe stuff you spend your money on is only used for narrative purposes, there’s no [i]need[/i] to track every copper, just like there’s no [i]need[/i] to track your character’s gebeology and alleles is eye color only matters for descriptive purposes. You certainly can, if you want to, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If counting coppers that you can’t spend on anything with mechanical impact is so important to you, knock yourself out, no one is stopping you. But it’s not [I]neeeded[/I] to play the game. To say otherwise is to “One True Way” the people who don’t care about tracking coinage. People are perfectly free to play the game with or without coin tracking, but if individual coins don’t matter to the rules, then please don’t waste wordcount in the rulebook on coin values and exchange rates. Stop. Just f***ing stop. I am sick and tired of you making assumptions about my play style preferences. I absolutely do not prefer mechanics over roleplay and I strongly resent being misrepresented in this way. Mechanics and roleplaying are not dichotomous. Treating them as zero sum values like this is nonsense, because game mechanics do not prevent roleplaying and roleplaying does not diminish game mechanics. See, when I say “game mechanics,” you seem to hear “combat-related stat boosts.” That is not what the term means and it is not what I am using the term to mean. I do not devalue roleplaying. Roleplaying is the most important part of the game to me. But I like roleplaying choices to have weight. Mechanics can and do enhance roleplaying, by assigning risk and reward to your choices. Making it a game, as opposed to just a story. I enjoy telling stories, but I enjoy it more when there is an element of challenge. When there are rules that guide the storytelling rather than leaving it freeform. When it’s a roleplaying GAME as opposed to just roleplaying. [/QUOTE]
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