D&D 5E What's the point of gold?

[CapnZapp]

the rarities in the DMG quite often make no sense at all. Inconsistent, slapdash crunch is worse than no crunch.

I can't blame you because they are garbage.

Thanks for agreeing with my assessment of the DMG's efforts.

I don't mind you asking the Internet for magic item prices, but I reserve the right to be glad that the DMG has no such prices listed in it.

And I have no problem with this. Not having it in the DMG should solve the major issue people had with 3E: the way it made adventure designers and players feel it was mandatory and core.

Now, what I am asking really isn't for the "the internet" to provide those prices.

What I want is an official, playtested, well-crafted but completely optional pricelist from WotC itself.

What I am asking of you and the internet, is acceptance of this want.

 

[Celtavian]

Just stop there. We've had that argument before, and it is just untrue.

Setting up a balanced set of pricing components is far from easy. In fact, it's quite difficult.

I've considered the task myself, but already the fundamentals are different. Not just how 3E goes from +1 to +5 while 5E stops at +3 (that part is almost trivial), but how to price attunement instead of body slots, and what about concentration and how spell damage doesn't auto-increase with level...

The differences between d20 and 5E in how magic items work, as well as how individual items are constructed are significant enough that you can't just "tweak the numbers" and go for it.

There's lots of niggling little details I'd rather have WotC crunch.

A fledgling DM should definitely never be told she can do it herself.

Ask yourself: if it really were as easy as you claim, why haven't the ENWorld fans done it over and over already?

Yes. It is that easy. You don't need to set it up for the whole list.

If you do advance preparation, you come up with a handful of magic items you would like the characters to have access to, price them according to what your players can afford, set up a magic shop, let your players role-play buying them. If you want to have magic items made, then do the same thing save have a timetable for them to be made.

If you're interested in setting up magic like 3E, then use 3E books to set up the prices and use 3E conventions for gold. That's what you appear to be asking for.

Why do you need your players to be able to open up the DMG and have a set price for all magic items in an edition of D&D that is specifically not made for you to be able to do that? Even the attunement rules are there to make sure your players have no more than a handful of magic items. Three attuned and anything more than a simple +1 sword or suit of armor or a separately carried back is attuned. That means three attuned magic items and maybe a few extra items here and there at most is the design of the new game.

You should have no trouble coming up with a few available magic items for your players to buy that are useful and should be able to make the experience of acquiring them fun. This edition most assuredly was not set up to be in anyway like 3E with magic shops everywhere. If you want that, then use the 3E magic item rules and gold conventions. Then adjust all your monsters and encounters to account for using 3E magic item and gold rules. You'll have to do it all on your own because 5E was not built for 3E magic item items as easily acquired products rules. It would be your house rule. It is possible for you to do it using older editions and adjusting your encounters to fit that model.

Otherwise, you are out of luck. You can argue until you're blue in the face that you think the option should have been available. Maybe they make something like it available in later books or a third party vendor makes it available. It is pretty obvious that the designers of 5E did not intend in anyway for magic items to be that available and did provide an option for it other than what you make up. 5E doesn't want magic item shops with easily available magic items. The game isn't balanced for it. The rules don't encourage it. So why include something the game is not currently built for?

 

[Hussar]

/snip.

Ask yourself: if it really were as easy as you claim, why haven't the ENWorld fans done it over and over already?

Probably because there is far less want for such a thing than you think. The rules do in fact give you a pretty good list of things to spend cash on. Most of which will help to ground the pc's in the game world.

Forcing everyone at the table to optimize because you don't want to embed your character in the world is the last thing I want wotc to enable.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

What I am asking of you and the internet, is acceptance of this want.

Why do you need my permission to want things?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Probably because there is far less want for such a thing than you think. The rules do in fact give you a pretty good list of things to spend cash on. Most of which will help to ground the pc's in the game world.

One thing I don't get is why the "no way to spend money" crowd doesn't buy more poisons. Purple Worm venom will quadruple your DPR (400 on an action surge) for the low, low cost of 2000 gold pieces per combat. Poisons don't work on everything but they do work on dragons, giants, beholders, slaads, and even vampires. Poison is way better than a +2 weapon for those fights, and cheaper too most likely.

 

[Riley37]

Why do societies progress at different rates?

Tangent, but there's a book on this topic, which rather impressed me: "Guns, Germs and Steel".

So, we have the real-world range of historical developments, as reference. It's a wide range.

And then there's magic. What can we say about the development of magical item production, that's rooted in real-world history? How closely shared is your understanding and my understanding, of how one researches magic, of how long ago was the FIRST EVER casting of Fireball? Has Fireball been written in spell books, in the setting, longer than, say, armorers have been forging plate mail? Or vice versa?

Even though we can take the D&D spell lists as canonical, those questions are setting questions, and every D&D setting is substantially divergent from anything in real-world history.

Though that DOES give me an idea for a setting. Let's say, take real world history, and then around 1066 AD, the Earth's magnetic field reverses, contact with other planes becomes possible, and D&D-style magic becomes possible. The appearance of extraplanar creatures causes religious upheaval. People stumble across spells. The first-ever casting of Fireball is a disaster, but the caster survives and teaches the spell formula to other mages. Druids appear; how closely they match their predecessors of Julius Caesar's time is arguable, but the power of their magic is not. As in Shadowrun, some humans give birth to children who are elves, dwarves, gnomes or halflings; some families are horrified, others consider their pointy-eared or hairy-footed children a miraculous gift.

The PCs are born in, say, 1101 AD. They grew up in a time of transition. Their grandparents remember the days when no one ever saw a spell cast, and when no one had ever seen an elf, dwarf or halfling. If one of them becomes a 9th level wizard... they won't be able to copy anyone's list of 5th level spells, because *no one before them has ever reached 9th level*; they become the INVENTOR of the world's first-ever 5th level spell formulas. (Though who knows what's being invented on other continents - well, until the Aztecs fly across the Atlantic, and demonstrate their set of spells at the Battle of Gibraltar in 1123, and then western Europeans become very darn aware of what's been invented in the Americas, such as the Hunger of Hadar.)

The oldest living elf was born in 1072, and hasn't yet reached full adulthood. The first dwarf born to dwarven parents, rather than to human parents, was born *last year*; there are, as yet, no cities founded by elves, dwarves or halflings, though there's already an Elven Quarter in some cities, and some mining towns have become all-dwarf enclaves.

Any +1 sword or other magic item has, necessarily, been forged, or at least enchanted, within the past 60 years.

There are, so far, a total of six cloaks of elvenkind in Europe, and four in North Africa, but with rumors of many more arriving by the spice trades route from India.

"NOW how much would you pay?"

 

[Riley37]

Don't underestimate the economic value of being able to continue working past sundown.

Also, don't underestimate the value of a lamp which *never causes a house fire*. Especially in a city. Double-especially in feudal Japan, where earthquakes tip over lamps now and then, and many buildings are as flammable as, well, paper.

Seriously, if you live in a city that hasn't seen fire destroy a whole neighborhood in your lifetime, then perhaps you don't live in the Middle Ages.

If you're a traveller, or a shepherd, or a city watchman, then having a lamp which never blows out on a windy night is a big deal. Also, one which never needs a refill halfway through your task. (If you're helping a sheep give birth, out in the pastures at midnight, and the oil lamp starts to flicker just as you've got a double handful of newborn lamb, that can be a real annoyance. Just sayin'.)

The cost of an ordinary lamp + the annual cost of lamp oil, vs. the cost of a magic lamp, is perhaps a break-even calculation. But there's also other differences.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Kaiilurker's point is that there isn't any such balanced price list. The current rarity-based prices simply doesn't work for when you want to hand out a menu to the players. (They weren't made for that purpose, so nothing wrong there. But the game still lacks the option for those who need it)

Now, no matter what prices the campaign is using, of course the DM should feel free to use or change those prices precisely as you say.

But that's something different from what's discussed here: the lack of a balanced set of guidelines for item pricing.

The difference is that whenever the DM doesn't feel like being creative, she doesn't have to be, since there is a price list that can be trusted to give fair options and not wreck the campaign to fall back on.

If you never do that, fine, you don't need the list. But that doesn't mean D&D shouldn't have one.

My answer is the same it's been since the 1980s: the players can know what is in the world. They know what services and items are out there. They DO have the metaphorical menu, as it were.

The menu, however, has no set prices: "market price, if available" is all they see.

Now, TBH, for most goods and services, the price in the books IS the price I use (if the item or service is available). But almost the only time you're paying book amount for magic items is when:

1) it is something relatively common, like a healing potion.
2) you're making it yourself.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Personally I think the best pricing for magic items is "significantly more than the PC who wants it can afford", because that provides motive for adventure.

Also I like the fact that the value of gold is entirely up to me - I can just let players grab handfuls of it wherever they see a chance and not worry about the world falling over.

In short, I can use gold to fuel story instead of worrying that it will translate to combat bonuses.

 

[Riley37]

the solution is as simple as it it inclusive:

In YOUR game of D&D, there either are no magic shoppes, or their shelves are empty.

In MY game of D&D, magic shoppes are where heroes go to get some use out of the otherwise-worthless gold they've been collecting.

I'm with Zapp here. (Perhaps to his surprise.) Well, okay, I'm still baffled at how anyone considers gold to be "otherwise-useless", if they care at all about the society around them which runs on mundane commerce; but I'm 100% down with people adjusting their setting as they see fit, especially the role and prevalence of magic.