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To balance this out, then, why aren't PCs (who obviously have more disposable income than many other people in many typical campaign settings) constantly being barraged by offers to buy items that they don't particularly burn with desire for, at bargain-basement prices? Funny how it's the NPCs...

I don't think our attitudes are all that far apart, actually. I don't mind things that advance a plotline or bring up interesting complications, and when crafting/selling items can be used to serve that purpose, I'm totally fine with spending time on playing it out. In our past games...

My opinion is that the rule about selling magic items for half value is kind of dumb in most campaigns. Magic items don't really wear out, so the whole "previously-owned" discount doesn't seem like it should ever apply. The only real exception being campaigns where the gameworld has magic item...

Even if you stick obsessively closely to the wealth-by-level guidelines, there's a lot of wiggle room in CRs. So I think you're seriously overstating things when you say it's more a game balance issue than preference...and by "seriously overstating," I mean you're almost entirely wrong. ;) You...

Chalk up another one in the "run a few interesting highlights of the trip, gloss over the rest" column. I'd say that I've gotten too old to enjoy playing out every moment of every day and sticking as closely to "realistic" as a fantasy game with spells and monsters can get, but the fact is that...

Heh. I saw the topic and just knew gnomes were going to be the most hated. Hardly anyone wants their PC to be a gnome. And the people who do want to play a gnome, well...they tend to be a little odd in other ways, too. And their descriptions of their gnome characters don't really sell the...

Exactly. To me, it sounds like your players want a different game than the one you do. They've made these fairly interesting characters which they seem to enjoy playing, and they're making the in-game decisions that they want to. And if that's a game that you are seriously not enjoying...

Those are pretty good choices, though my personal tastes would tell me to ditch Permanent Image in favor of something else. Almost anything else, in fact. That might just be me, though; I find that it's too much of a headache for the few benefits it's capable of providing. (Also, I don't tend...

Tucson, Arizona, doesn't have any. Seriously, the last one folded about a year ago when the restaurant next door bought out its storefront so they could expand. Since then, no new gaming stores have arisen. And probably won't, honestly; it didn't seem like a terribly lucrative business even...

This might be strange, but until I read this, I was blissfully unaware that there were any plotlines hanging out there. I guess I've got my automatic "metaplot sucks and I shall ignore it" response tuned so well now that I'm not even registering that it's there (sucking and needing to be...

Oh man, I was just about to make this same suggestion. Except I was going to recommend Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and any cheap detective novel you can find at your local used bookstore. ;) I'll go ahead and refine the suggestion a little bit, using something from a foreword to...

Another thing you really need to think about when aiming for a "low-economy" game is what you're going to do about wizards. You can't just leave them as written, because by the RAW they're a frightfully expensive character class. Any time you drop the recommended treasure haul or change all...

With 6 players? Ouch. Like Henry said, your biggest worry is going to be switching back and forth often enough and well enough to keep people from getting bored. Or at least from getting too bored. At 6 players, I can almost guarantee that you're not going to be able to involve everyone...

That's part of the fun of it, though: just think, at any moment, the fragile vehicle of well-reasoned discussion can totally derail, maiming passengers and passersby alike, or maybe just flooding the streets with seven million gallons of burning molasses. Threads like this keep you sharp, man...

Our last D&D game is on hiatus (we're playing this now), but here goes anyway: Milo Greenbrook (halfing Wiz10/El.Savant 1, Scarred Lands): "I don't know, I give up....Oh, sorry, I thought you were starting to tell a joke. That's a strange question to ask, you know. I mean, I can list some...

Same here. For a PC, it's just too distracting to try and maintain a silly voice or accent all the time; there are better ways for me to be using my time and energy during a game. The most I'll do is adjust my own speech pattern to fit the character, by using more formal grammar or speaking in...

In our games, magic items are basically always made on commission; rather than have stores which buy and sell items, it's always a process of looking for a wizard or a temple that'll be willing to take money (market price or higher, depending on the setting and the city) in exchange for making...

If the GM's the one giving the NPC (or the PC) an epithet, it happens when most people are supposed to find that character to be impressive and/or famous. For most GMs in most games I've seen, that doesn't tend to happen until at least 8th level. Something about trying to scale fame according...

This has always been my favorite version. Especially considering the whacked-out economy of vanilla D&D, where monsters who spend all their time squatting in a filthy lair somehow have more treasure (both in coins and in magic items) than a village of a thousand people. You know, where somehow...

This was what we did, and it worked out pretty well. I was the wizard player, and I had the same basic problem fourthmensch has: too many spells, too many options, too many things to keep track of. So I made a cheat sheet for myself, a spreadsheet that I put together listing all the spells my...