So ... my DM doesn't let us buy items ... ever ... what do I do?

[Renthar]

This is kind of an odd question but I need some help. My DM (who I have played with over the past several years) has recently decided to do what he refers to as "de-monetizing" our campeign.

Basically what this boils down to is that we can no longer buy items. Instead he will be providing us with items he decides we should have. The concept is that when we raid a dungeon or defeat a boss he/she/it will provide us with loot which we can take or leave (selling items is also out).

He gives 2 reasons for this. First is that, while some of our players look into item guides and what is provided in the player manuals, there are also those that don't. He feels like when he rewards us with loot those players who don't do their research just let all of that go to waste and as such drag down the team (since he bases the difficulty of fights and the like off of how powerful we should be within reason). Second, our DM is very big into RP and world continuity. He feels that our characters wouldn't really know about all of the different enchantments and items shown in the guides and as such wouldn't know to look for them.

Normally I'm pretty chill about playing (because our DM is quite good), but I really enjoy the aspect of character building and the feeling I get when I pick out that item that is perfect for what I am trying to accomplish with my character.

If I could get any suggestions about how to convince him that he is incorrect with this idea, or reasons why I am wrong (so that I can justify this to myself), that would be much appreciated!

 

[Gorgoroth]

if he's

using inherent bonuses you may end up with all the items you would have bought anyway, but at random times, and possibly much later than you would have liked.

Can you at least transfer enchantment? That would really suck if you find a flame sword +2 and you want a flame axe +2 but no NPCs favor axes in this land. Kind of forces you to pick the least common denominator.

I appreciate removing the blinking christmass lights from my character sheet, but 4e assumes magic items follow your level, and once you approve inherent bonuses, and you find the item you want, it pretty much removes the interest in finding new items, period. Kind of sucky that you can't sell items though. Very meta game. What, you can't walk up to some kid in the village and say, hey, 1 copper for this flaming sword? That would kill my disbelief to play in such a contrived world.

 

[Renthar]

What do you mean when you say inherent bonuses?

I think he would probably let us do something like transfer enchantment. The problem really lies in the fact that he's picking the enchantment or item we get and we never have any freedom to chose our own. If he picks the thing we liked/wanted then that's awesome, but if he doesn't then we never get to pick anything. It really becomes an issue when he picks an item that he feels is best for a character when the player was wanting to go for something different.

I understand the meta part of it, but I always thought the purpose of a DM was to enable the meta to work with the mechanics rather than have one inhibit the other or vice versa. For example, it wouldn't be that hard to have us visit a large town or even get access to some sort of travelling merchant or any simple thing like that.

 

[Tukka]

First is that, while some of our players look into item guides and what is provided in the player manuals, there are also those that don't. He feels like when he rewards us with loot those players who don't do their research just let all of that go to waste and as such drag down the team (since he bases the difficulty of fights and the like off of how powerful we should be within reason).

If the players who do not put a lot of energy into shopping are having fun, feel like they're carrying their weight, and don't feel too underpowered, then the intraparty imbalance issue really isn't an issue (unless maybe the DM thinks the only reason those party members are satisfied is because he is putting a lot of effort designing encounters catering to their limited strengths).

If the players do feel it is a problem, it might be better addressed through other measures, such as having the players who do shop around help those who don't pick more suitable items. Either way, it just comes down to someone else picking your items. I'd rather have another player pick their items with the power to veto their choices than have to accept whatever the DM gives to me.

If the DM feels that the party is having difficulty rising to meet what he feels are "appropriate challenges" because some players aren't taking the time to research equipment, well, he's made your point for you. Taking away the ability to pick and choose gear from the players who are pulling their weight is just going to make the party as a whole less effective, and less able to meet the challenges he expects them to.

Second, our DM is very big into RP and world continuity. He feels that our characters wouldn't really know about all of the different enchantments and items shown in the guides and as such wouldn't know to look for them.

While this makes some sense, you can still rationalize a character's in-world knowledge of optimal gear to a large extent, because the character would actually be a lot more invested in making good gear choices than the player is.

For the character, picking good equipment is literally a life and death matter, not to mention his livelihood. An adventurer's gear represents the tools of his professional trade, and a heroic+ adventurer is essentially an expert in his trade. He should have a pretty good idea what the good stuff is.

The player has the benefit of nicely indexed and organized universal lists of gear that the character probably wouldn't have, but I would still expect somewhat similar indexes to exist in-world, in tomes compiled by guilds and in the minds of sages. The info the character has is less exact and complete than the player, but the character would also spend a lot more time researching these matters than the player does.

In addition, much of the gear the character acquires, though picked by the player, is not necessarily directly sought out by the character. It just "happens" to be in the dragon's horde, on the warlord's body, or in the shopkeeper's window. Maybe it requires a slight suspension of disbelief to believe that an adventurer could be so consistently fortunate in finding the perfect magic items and equipment to suit his fighting style ... but even then, you can justify it by claiming the reverse -- the character ends up molding his fighting style to realize the full potential of the item he acquires. I believe this has some precedent in genre literature and cinema.

What do you mean when you say inherent bonuses?

Inherent bonuses are a system in which characters get inherent enhancement bonuses to attacks and defenses which don't stack with the enhancement bonuses from magical equipment, but receive less loot. It's described in the DMG2 and Dark Sun Campaign Guide. Basically, it makes it so +X weapons, implements, armor and neck items are no longer necessary for characters to remain viable.

I understand the meta part of it, but I always thought the purpose of a DM was to enable the meta to work with the mechanics rather than have one inhibit the other or vice versa. For example, it wouldn't be that hard to have us visit a large town or even get access to some sort of travelling merchant or any simple thing like that.

Yes, and you DM is taking this idea to such an extreme that you're not able to sell items (even at the usual punishing 20% rate) or buy items (if only from a restricted list), your DM is cutting off his nose to spite his face. Setting continuity is probably not going to be enhanced by having a world in which nobody is interested in buying or selling magic items, unless it's a world where such items are highly taboo or subject to draconian laws (which might be fun, but if you've already been playing this campaign a while, to have this come out of left field would be a bit much).

Likewise, if he's having to contort the plot/setting or railroad you away from towns and cities so he can enforce his ban on magic item sales, that of course is not a very good thing either.

Good luck.

 

[S'mon]

Neither you nor your GM are wrong; you just have conflicting preferences. Personally I sympathise strongly with your GM, but he could perhaps allow very minor items to be crafted to order, and more powerful stuff to be given as rewards. I take it he disallows use of the Enchant Item ritual by PCs?

 

[Nichwee]

I doubt Enchant Item would be allowed if his issue is that the PCs shouldn't even know these items exist.
Plus if they aren't allowed to sell magic items I suspect the Disenchant Item ritual would be equally 'off-limits', which would mean the PCs have no way to get the money to make items they want.

 

[Dausuul]

What S'mon said: Neither you nor your DM is wrong, you just have a playstyle conflict. He's taking the "old school" view of magic items, where they are rare and precious and finding one is a stroke of fortune, and you're taking the "new school" view where they are another element of your character build.

His viewpoint is mostly* self-consistent, and it makes sense for his preferences. DMs who are strongly into verisimilitude often have trouble with the idea that the world is swimming in magic items and you can go into any two-bit town and buy anything you have the cash for. Where do all these items come from? Why are they so expensive if there are so many of them? What happens when some enterprising player decides to knock over the local magic shop and loot the place?

Remember that this is a medieval setting. We live in the Internet age, so it's easy to forget how much harder it was to find something you wanted before the rise of Amazon and eBay. Now, in addition to no Internet, imagine no phones. No mail-order catalogs. No fleet of trucks hauling goods hither and yon. No large orderly nations where you can reliably get from point A to point B without fear of being hijacked by bandits or eaten by monsters.

Being unable to buy magic items also creates a very different flavor for items. They take on significance; each item you find and keep has a story behind it, and I don't mean some back story the DM made up. What it has is the story of the dark priestess who killed half the party before you beat her and took the item off her corpse, the ancient dragon who got bamboozled out of it by a fast-talking PC rogue, the dungeon that you collapsed by accident and this was the only thing you got away with.

[SIZE=-2]*I do think you have a strong case that your DM should allow you to sell items. If you have a +3 flaming sword, in a world where magic items are rare and precious, and you want to sell it, there should be no shortage of buyers! But think carefully before selling, since you can't just turn around and buy a different item with the proceeds.[/SIZE]

 

[Renthar]

Neither you nor your GM are wrong; you just have conflicting preferences. Personally I sympathise strongly with your GM, but he could perhaps allow very minor items to be crafted to order, and more powerful stuff to be given as rewards. I take it he disallows use of the Enchant Item ritual by PCs?

Yea, we can't use that. Honestly the more I think about it we probably won't be able to use any ritual that involves enchantments. In his mind, from what he's telling us, money no longer exists in any tangible way that our PC's can interact with. Everything that would ever require it is taken care of by him.

I guess part of what bothers me is that he never asked any of us what we think about this. I understand that DM's must make decisions at times because either the game is broken or something doesn't seem to work right, but it seems like changing something that's this integral to the system is stepping over this boundary a tad much, or am I wrong in that feeling?
(I understand that I may be wrong, I just want to try to justify this in my mind if I am so that it stops bothering me).

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Neither you nor your GM are wrong; you just have conflicting preferences. Personally I sympathise strongly with your GM, but he could perhaps allow very minor items to be crafted to order, and more powerful stuff to be given as rewards. I take it he disallows use of the Enchant Item ritual by PCs?

I dunno, I can understand Renthar's DM's second reason for his new attitude toward shopping -- setting continuity and all that. I don't think it's a particularly convincing reason, but I can understand it. But his first reason sounds like he's trying to fix something that's not broken, or he just invented a second reason to pad out his argument for his 'no shopping' rule.

Unless the more casual shoppers blow all of their money on healing potions while the serious shoppers are buying useful stuff, I can't imagine the disparity in PC effectiveness would be wide enough to cause problems. So long as everyone gets their +X's, everyone's essentially functional. And it's not like typical PCs have a lot of cash to waste on frivolous items anyway -- most loot in a typical campaign comes in the form of useful items. Even if Renthar's DM didn't do loot the typical way to begin with, Tukka's point stands: why don't the serious shoppers help the casual shoppers get more bang for their buck? Maybe Renthar can shed some light on the situation in previous campaigns.

 

[Ferghis]

Neither you nor your GM are wrong; you just have conflicting preferences.

As other posters note, this is true.

Unlike S'mon, in fourth edition, I sympathize with your position. If you're into character building at all, you can't ignore items as a resource. In this position, you can't ignore that certain items are essential to a particular character build. Frost cheese comes to mind: if you're taking the two frost-cheese feats, the DM would have to be rather mean to not provide you with the item you need to actually implement the whole thing.

I would explain that particular situation to the DM. Name the item (or couple of items) that your character absolutely needs to work. Explain that if the character doesn't get those items, the particular build you are going for doesn't make sense, and so you'd like to know if the build would make sense in his campaign.