Anyone importing 4E’s’Used gear sells for 1/5th if at all’ to other RPG systems?

[delericho]

Where the hell can I find me one of those DMs! That is exactly the kind of game I am looking for rather than these video game weened new-age D&D players and DMs.

See, where you say "video game weaned new-age...", I say, "have wasted far too much time over twenty years of play, purely because the DM wanted to be awkward." If the DMs had actually had a reason for making us jump through all those hoops, then that would have been one thing, but all too often, they were just being ornery for the sake of it.

 

[Fifth Element]

That Walmart nonsense was never in the 3e books, but rather is a hyperbolic complaint against 3e that is as valid as the "4e is too video-gamey" thing.

That's right.

"3E has magic Wal-Marts. It's in the rules! = "4E has plane-hopping omniscient merchants. It's in the rules!"

 

[pawsplay]

That Walmart nonsense was never in the 3e books, but rather is a hyperbolic complaint against 3e that is as valid as the "4e is too video-gamey" thing. The rules assume that certain items are available for purchase in a society of a given size, but they nowhere express how that should be handled.

Not only that, but if you assume there are only a handful of communities over 25,000 in population across the continent, it's going to be rare to find very powerful items easily for sale.

In my game 3e, I use the Mercane to bridge high level play, making more valuable equipment available for the right price.

 

[Loonook]

Be careful, that's not what they're saying. Let's stop this meme before it spreads too far.

They're saying, in the default PoL setting, and using 4E's "skip the boring parts" ideal (context!), there will generally be merchants around, or one will be around soon. (If you like haggling with merchants in your game, that's awesome!, but remember they are giving advice to DMs as a whole and many players find regular haggling with merchants boring.)

When characters have magic items to sell, a travelling merchant is in town - or will be soon - to take it off their hands.

Yep... nothing about merchants traveling about collecting magic items.

I also enjoy the fact that 'the boring parts' now consist of any interaction which isn't about the combat or the immediate thread in front of you. And here's the issue with it that no one seems to cover:

Those of us 'stuck' in our 'inferior' editions learned the tropes and traits from the knee of those editions or earlier editions. We fell in love with THAC0, the Will and the Way, Van Richten's Guides, Necromancer's Handbook, old Cthulu-inspired Deities and Demigods, etc. etc. etc.

Through these developments, and the outside interactions of years (or decades) of our varying chosen cultures we develop games . . . and then have to shatter the player's specific concepts of 'how things must be done'. Because, just like us, the players will develop their own styles.

A lot of player enjoyment comes from the DM side, and as new individuals take up the mantle they get to add their own touches. Bad Shaw Bros. movies, Shakespeare, webcomics, farmer's almanacs, histories... all sorts of things begin to build that DM's style. And the player's style gets around it to.

The boring parts... well, they've never been boring to me. I had DMs who brought about that feeling of those things mattering to their setting, their concept, etc. because the old editions were the Wild West of gaming. Hamsters in Space! Not my bag, but it was someone's. Lots of dangerous traps and derring-do? Yeah, depends on the game. A good game is out your window or deep in the Abyss, dealing with dwarven taboos or fighting your way out of some castle which has become infested with the Red Death.

Rules are a necessity for the style of game that most of us D&D (no matter the edition) weaned suckling pigs grew into . . . and when we became the big boars with all the slings and arrows of crap games, great ideas, and experience came about we become focused on our styles. Nothing wrong with it, and I encourage it because we make games...

The best games, in my opinion, come from flavor. An Orc shouldn't always be an Orc, and the levels of fun, fear, and fantasy in games should be giant knobs yanked about by DMs to create the balance they want in their games. Flavor is primary to a narrative device; too much and you bog your players down, too little and we may as well all play an MMO and get it over with... but MMOs have flavor too. EVE is as different from UO as can be, but they have specific things close to each other than define the genre.

We cannot allow the rules to overrun the flavor of the game, because then 4e is less than even the lowest MMORPG or wargame... hell, even they have stories behind them. 3e's concept of half price sales is close to console RPGs like Final Fantasy, but we accepted that as 'the baseline', and it can be adjusted from. 4e tilts on a lot of points I really like; it is the flavor of things which seem to be suggested heavier than they were in 3e that irritate me more than anything, and the lack of a strong 3rd party element which allows the average gamer who doesn't want to have to homebrew to 'opt out' of settings as presented which irritate me the most of it.

I've been granted the 'gift' of the 4e books from the SO. I like a lot that I see but I hate the presentation. However, looking at the way that people talk on the forums about even these little bits, how vehemently they protect the new sacred calves of 4e, that worries me. The thinness of skin when it comes to this, the lashing out against older edition groggies who are trying to at least learn opinions and find out whether they will adopt the system is worrisome. There are plenty of ideas I like about 4e, but having to retrofit all of the materials I have without really solid analogues, the posts by WotC staff early on that suggested you just wrap up and retire your games before launch... that really poisoned the well for me.

Yeah, I may bring in some of the concepts which I wasn't already using into my 3.X and Modern gaming (consolidated skills with skill ranks seems great to allow access to mystic skills using Psychic's Handbook and Mythic Earth, foe example). However, with this pressing forward on both sides I just feel more and more compelled to just dig a hole and start running WW and other materials. I attempt to help where I can on 4e threads when someone posts a concept; a basic understanding of the system should be a given for anyone who is interested in D&D because, well, how else will you modify something you like from it?

Ars Magica... I'm coming to join you honey.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[justanobody]

Not sure what you think is the "gem" part.

Then you clearly didn't read what you quoted.

For those without the DMG and want to reference this discussion

See, where you say "video game weaned new-age...", I say, "have wasted far too much time over twenty years of play, purely because the DM wanted to be awkward." If the DMs had actually had a reason for making us jump through all those hoops, then that would have been one thing, but all too often, they were just being ornery for the sake of it.

I like the haggling as a player, and am usually the one that will start it with the DM as the NPC. I like roleplaying. I don't call character interaction that isn't combat "making us jump through all those hoops".

 

[Treebore]

Travelling merchants? Why is this so hard a concept to accept? 90% of all road traffic was either merchants, armies, or the rich. Everyone else very rarely travelled. Most people were born in their village/town/city and NEVER travelled to another one.

Heck, today I get blown away by people I know who have never travelled more than 200 miles from their home. This is shocking to me.

Anyways, I agree that there will not be traveling merchants everywhere, at all times. But they do eventually go to every hamlet, village, town and city.
Its how they made money. Traveling around with goods these places don't have and trading for goods they do have, but other places don't.

Plus if you have magic items in your world your going to have a demand for it. Only idiots would pass up the opportunity to supply that demand.

So what they are saying in 4E, is KEEP IT SIMPLE! Just make the assumption that there are always merchants available, assume 20%, ect...

I personally don't like it that simple, but a certain percentage of gamers do, don't, modify it, etc...

Now if you want to keep your world as abstract and simple as possible, go ahead and ignore it. However don't act like your way is "realistic".

Fact: If you have magic there will be a demand for it. To deny this is ignoring reality. When you have a demand you have potential for profit. Someone will decide to get that profit, so will make magic items.

Fact: In a D&D game you have numerous spell casters around. These characters will buy things that make their life easier. So there will be "Magic Shops", that may do things as simple as supply basic components for their spells, and inks for their books, and maybe even a selection of finely crafted wands, staves, daggers, etc...

To have a shop that provides magic all it takes is for one spell caster capable of making magics to decide to sell these items through such a shop. This is going to happen, its human nature.

So to claim there would not be "Magic Wal-mart shops" etc... is also a denial of realistic human behavior. ITs the nature of the beast. So unless you run games where there are very few mages and priests in the world, and they are not capable of making any kind of magic item, you are going to have magic shops. Its the "reality". One gamers are welcome to ignore, but to claim they are not realistic betrays a total lack of understanding of human nature and economic realities.

So feel free to say you ignore such realities, but don't claim they would not happen, because they will. IF there is any kind of "realism" at all, you will have magic shops, and you will have merchants traveling everywhere trying to make as much coin as possible. That is the "realistic reality".

Every published setting, Faerun, Greyhawk, Scarred LAnds, Kalamar, Eberron, Mystara, Planescape, Dark Sun, and even the world of Conan have enough population to make such things a reality.

The only variance is how often will you find such shops or see such traveling merchants. Along major trade ways every residence, farm, hamlet, village, town, and city will see many merchants travel by every single day. The more off the beaten path they are the less often they will see such merchants, probably only once or twice per year in the most remote locations.

You will see magic shops in the largest of cities, since there will be many priests and mages there.

The only way to avoid this as being a realistic "reality" of any well populated world is to say only 1 in 100,000 can be a spellcaster. Then the numbers will likely stay low enough to not support magic shops, unless you have huge populations numbering in the millions like some cities in Faerun.

So its fine to say you want to ignore the realities of human nature and trade and commerce, but please quit saying they are unrealistic. They are far more realistic than insisting they would not exist.

 

[Fifth Element]

When characters have magic items to sell, a travelling merchant is in town - or will be soon - to take it off their hands.

Yep... nothing about merchants traveling about collecting magic items.

Yes. Once again, if you read the single sentence without the context, you arrive at an erroneous conclusion. That was the whole point of what I was saying.

I also enjoy the fact that 'the boring parts' now consist of any interaction which isn't about the combat or the immediate thread in front of you.

That's also an overstatement of 4E's assumption. Sure, the books could use a few more "generally"s and "often"s in their advice. But again, read things in context.

In my games (3E and earlier editions), sometimes we do like to haggle with the merchant and spend some time on it. Other times, there are other things we want to get to and skip over the details. Nothing wrong with either approach. 4E's advice should probably have been written more clearly to escape the overly literal reading that seems to haunt it at times.

Those of us 'stuck' in our 'inferior' editions learned the tropes and traits from the knee of those editions or earlier editions.

There's no need to try and turn this thread into edition war v.178. No one here, as far as I can tell, has referred to previous editions as inferior. Or that people playing them are 'stuck'.

 

[Fifth Element]

Then you clearly didn't read what you quoted.

That's a non-answer. You're the one quoting things from a book you don't have.

I like the haggling as a player, and am usually the one that will start it with the DM as the NPC. I like roleplaying.

That's fine. I like roleplaying like that myself. Sometimes. And sometimes the characters have more interesting things to get to, so we hurry through it.

 

[Fifth Element]

So what they are saying in 4E, is KEEP IT SIMPLE! Just make the assumption that there are always merchants available, assume 20%, ect...

This is a succinct summary of the DMG's advice. No plane-hopping merchants required.

And also, if you don't like it that way, do something different. Just like Treebore says. The DMG contains some advice for that as well.

 

[justanobody]

You need to place an image on the internet if you intend for someone else to see it. You can use various places like photobucket, imageshack, etc; or even attach it to your thread via the provided tools here ay ENWorld.

Your harddrive is not a valid resource to hotlink an image to.

That's fine. I like roleplaying like that myself. Sometimes. And sometimes the characters have more interesting things to get to, so we hurry through it.

If your characters have more interesting things to do than you do, you may need some professional help.