D&D 5E Deconstructing 5e: Typical Wealth by Level

CapnZapp said:

Just want to chime in and say I don't have the energy to revisit this other than to say all of you are essentially saying "so there is no strawberry flavor. But have some chocolate then. Or this flavor, or that flavor..."

This isn't helping if strawberry is what you want.

None of the alternatives help when you're not interested in downtime. None of the alternatives help when it is the fun mini-game of building your character's gear loadout from a given gp budget and shoppe availabili.

The fact remains:

WotC took a significant aspect of 3E play and just removed it.

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Most of my suggestions do not require downtime.

anyway, I’m fine with a very optional table of item costs by utility, with level values at which it’s a good idea to open up availability for them, but I’m glad it isn’t part of the core.

S'mon said:

"Let's make DnD 4e again!"?

I think rebuilding 4e with lessons from 5e would be a lot more practical endeavour than rebuilding 5e to function like 4e.

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I doubt it. Two of the biggest lessons of 4e are solved by 5e’s math. Applying that to 4e would be laborious, otherwise I’d have done it several years ago. You can work up some tables and run 4e monsters in 5e, but actually making all the options work, deciding what non-translatable options deserve a total overhaul and which just get canned, etc, is an enormous hypothetical undertaking. You’d have to rebuild the entire game. Every single element.

OTOH, porting 4e’s magic item assumptions, and making subclasses and alternate class features to allow every class to be played more like a Battle Master fighter or spellcaster, is the work of a fairly small DMsGuild product. Probably 15 subclasses roughly the size of the BM fighter, 1 new class, a handful of feats, and a couple charts for items. Put an Advance Bestiary in the back, with tactical templates for running skirmishers, brutes, skulkers, artillery, leaders, solos, minions, and elite versions of each, or keep it simple with new monster traits and advice on how to apply them and what to expect in terms of encounter CR.

CapnZapp said:

Yes, but if you're playing a campaign... you're playing that campaign, and there's no time or interest or relevance for focusing on ships or laboratories. All the story wants you to, all the players want to - is to get to the next dungeon and keep experiencing the written story and maybe stop the big bad evil guy from wrecking the world in time.

In other words, offering eighteen or twentyfive alternatives to magic shoppes is fine. For campaigns with downtime. Sandboxes and such.

Insisting these eighteen options can replace the magic shoppe alternative, on the other hand, makes no sense. Official campaigns are for the most part focused affairs with a vague but definite clock ticking.

Supporting a means to translate gold into magic item power-ups is extremely essential and absolutely core to the D&D experience. It was one of the best things that d20 offered, and it is a shame WotC has decided to scrimp on the dev resources that is needed to expand and improve upon that work.

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Hmmm. Not sure you read the list properly. At least 9 of those points do translate gold into power. Just not in a formulaic way like +1 equals 5,000 gp like you’re suggesting. Having powerful useful effects in the game at a cost is already established in the rules.

You also seem blinded by the fact that not all player goals involve becoming immediately more physically powerful. Neither do they require down time. Having nice things, collecting, art objects etc are purchased for many reasons. Sometimes it’s just for the status symbol of demonstrating success. I’m a successful adventurer because look I have kingsTear earrings. Or a ruby studded scabbard. Or the gold plated skull of the troll I killed mounted above my fireplace.

You might purchase a collection of elven artifacts because the party intends to recruit the efforts of an elf mage and wants him to look favourably on them. Wearing rich clothing and jewelry might get them into a corrupt nobles ball that they would otherwise be excluded from... or at least kept at a distance. If you’re interested in the benefits of conspicuous wealth read ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ or watch some more Bond films. It doesn’t take down time to buy these things... in fact pay someone else to buy them for you.

I can’t agree with your claim that the official campaigns come with hard deadlines as standard. In fact the only one I can think of that does (Tomb of Annihilation) specifically says the deadline can be flexed dependent on the campaign. It’s also a bit gauche to suggest that campaigns are all about dungeons in the traditional rats and spiders sense. a Noble Villa or city street is as likely to be dungeon as a hole in the ground in most of the official campaigns. I also think most players these days expect more than just a 30 room isometric dungeon experience.

You can simplify all you want for your campaigns and create your lists I’ve seen what you’ve suggested in other threads. I think it’s a bad idea personally because lists of magic mart pricing lead to builds for the most efficient character; discussion about ‘trap’ options - a term I abhor; and an unavoidable arms race between Players power and monster strength. It also makes magic items less magical.

In essence the OP was asking what else is there to spend money on and I have a list. The post wasn’t specifically aimed at you.

3E didn't assume much iirc. They playtested it like 2Evwith more options. A lot of people also didn't play it like online assumptions.

I think that I would argue that the 3e playtesting was, by today's standards anyway, very, very minimal. Yes, they had a lot of eyes looking at it, but, nothing like what went through and is going through Pathfinder or 5e. There's a reason that, 5 years in, no one is seriously talking about broken stuff in 5e. No CoDzilla, no quadratic wizards, no massive power difference between classes.

Sure, there's some rumbling about "tiers" but, frankly, the space between top and bottom mechanically is overshadowed by play skill. IOW, a beast master ranger in the hands of someone who can eke out lots of advantages is probably just as effective as a sorcerer in the hands of someone who's not terribly adept at maxing things out.

And most of the classes are far closer together than that.

Hussar said:

No, actually, that's not quite true. You can see, over the publishing life of 3e and then 3.5, a constant upward power creep in modules. To the point where early 3e modules, like Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, are significantly less powered than later modules, like Savage Tides or other Paizo Dungeon modules.

For example, a later development that you see is the addition of NPC levels onto creatures to bump their effectiveness without changing their listed CR's. This is something you don't see in earlier modules because, at the time of writing 3e, and even 3.5, they hadn't quite realized the impact of fungible magic items on play. How could they really? They hadn't had time to see this effect and the development of things like the Big 6 items.

So, you can compare modules from, say 2000 and then modules from, say 2006 and you'll see an almost straight line increase in DC's and encounter difficulties, despite the modules being for the same level of character. Now, part of that is possibly due to the proliferation of classes, sure, but, it's at least partially because of the magic item economy of 3e. Whispering Cairn, despite being for the same level as, say, Sunless Citadel, is probably a full level higher in difficulty and arguably more. And, as you proceed into higher level adventures, the disparity becomes a LOT more pronounced.

I think you are underplaying the impact that the magic item economy had on 3e. It seriously impacted monster design (later era monsters are significantly more powerful for their CR than earlier ones) and adventure design. AFAIC, the magic item economy in 3e serves as a cautionary tale for how far reaching a seemingly fairly innocuous game element can be.

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Power creep is not new. It is not unique to 3E.

Arguing rational magic item pricing is the cause is straw-clutching at best.

Maxperson said:

The items there in no way refutes the fact that magic items are optional. They have to create modules to appeal to the widest variety of players. That means that they must include magic items since most people use them. It's also the smart way to play it, because it takes all of literally half a second to remove them all from the module of you don't play with magic items. However, if they didn't include them, DMs who want magic items in the module would not only have to spend a great deal of time and effort placing magic items, but they would also have to make sure that they weren't unbalancing encounters as they did so.

Do you understand now?

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They include magic items because players love them.

The claim they're "optional" is just a fantasy they use to wriggle out of having to properly support them.

This is clearly evidenced by published modules, which all have them.

You claiming they're kind of an ephemeral distraction that doesn't impact the game is what's non-sensical.

It's by including magic items, but then designing monsters with them not taken into account, they're betraying gamers.

As if magic items were just a crutch newbs need.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Even heavily minmaxing power gamers live magic items. In fact, especially power games love to use magic items!

By providing items in the DMGs hoard rules as well as every published module on one hand, but then pretending nobody uses that when it comes to character vs monster strength, they're trying g to have the cake and still eat it. They can't publish D&D without loot, but they won't acknowledge this in a weasely attempt to not having to put in the man-hours necessary to properly support it.

Do you understand now?

TheSword said:

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My point is that far too many posters dismiss what I want by saying "look at all these things you can do instead".

As if they replace spending gold on items and going straight back into the adventure.

They don't. They're fine - for those interested.

But the fact remains: the biggest subsystem of d20 that remains wholly unsupported in 5E is formulas to calculate item prices based on utility.

We don’t dismiss it. I think pretty much every has said you are entitled to want it. What I see is people saying a variation on...

1. It doesn’t bother us
2. It can’t be achieved by consensus so is best done on a table by table basis
3. It will vary wildly campaign to campaign so what’s the point of assigning a utility cost.

Saying that this is the biggest subsystem unsupported by 5e is like saying ‘horses are entirely unsupported by British motorways” - they aren’t designed for horses, most people don’t need horses to travel because cars are faster and less hassle. Sure some horse riders may wish that they could ride on motorways but no one is gonna get particularly excited by the cause.

CapnZapp said:

They include magic items because players love them.

The claim they're "optional" is just a fantasy they use to wriggle out of having to properly support them.

This is clearly evidenced by published modules, which all have them.

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Did you somehow miss where I said that they include them because most people use magic items?

You claiming they're kind of an ephemeral distraction that doesn't impact the game is what's non-sensical.

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I didn't say they don't have an impact. I said the game doesn't care about them, and it doesn't. The designers did not include magic items in the game math, because they don't assume that every DM will use them.

For someone who yells Strawman so often, you should know what a Strawman is and not use one. You've falsely accused me of using Strawman several times where I did not attribute an argument to you, but merely disagreed with your premise and presented a counter argument, and now here you are falsely attributing a claim that magic items don't impact the game to me and then arguing against that false claim, which is a classic Strawman.

It's by including magic items, but then designing monsters with them not taken into account, they're betraying gamers.

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If by betray, you mean taking gamers into consideration and making magic items awesome again for the first time since 2e, you are correct. Including magic items in the monster math was the betrayal. If magic items are assumed and accounted for, they are a worthless tax that you must have in order to just break even. They are no longer a magical item that provides the PC with a bonus. With the change back to magic items being unaccounted for, they have truly become magic items again and are wonderful to possess. The DM just needs to be careful not to overload the players with them or he will unbalance the game.

As if magic items were just a crutch newbs need.

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Magic items were a crutch in 3e and 4e. They are no longer a crutch in 5e as you don't NEED them. Crutches are needed in order to get by, which is what happens when you include them in the game math.

Do you understand now?

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I understand very well. The confusion is entirely on your end.

TheSword said:

We don’t dismiss it. I think pretty much every has said you are entitled to want it. What I see is people saying a variation on...

1. It doesn’t bother us
2. It can’t be achieved by consensus so is best done on a table by table basis
3. It will vary wildly campaign to campaign so what’s the point of assigning a utility cost.

Saying that this is the biggest subsystem unsupported by 5e is like saying ‘horses are entirely unsupported by British motorways” - they aren’t designed for horses, most people don’t need horses to travel because cars are faster and less hassle. Sure some horse riders may wish that they could ride on motorways but no one is gonna get particularly excited by the cause.

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Yeah right. Comparing 3E to horse carriages and 5E to motorways is an entirely neutral and reasonable comparison.

/s