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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5368663" data-attributes="member: 58197">No, they can't. You can't eat gold, and you can't buy food that doesn't exist. If a town is growing enough food to feed 200 people, and a gang of adventurers rolls in with a wagon full of gold from a dragon's hoard and distributes it among the peasants, how much food is the town growing now? That's right--enough to feed 200 people, same as before. The only difference is that now a meal at the inn costs 10 gold instead of 1 copper.Similarly, when adventurers increase the number of magic items on the market, they do so via the direct method of hauling them back from dungeons. Pumping gold into the economy doesn't conjure up new magic items, nor does it enable people to afford a magic item who couldn't afford one before. Either the makers of magic items will raise prices to bring demand in line with supply, or there will be a shortage.Personally, I find the idea that adventuring is a widespread profession, that adventurers haul back boatloads of treasure from dungeons, and that this has been going on for a long time, to be ludicrous. Where is all this treasure coming from? How are these dungeons being restocked given that adventurers are constantly picking them over? How can a stable society exist when there are all these gangs of powerful, heavily armed mercenaries roaming around?I prefer a world in which the PCs are exceptional. The vast majority of people reckless enough to venture into a dungeon end up as goblin chow. Only a tiny handful have what it takes to become a successful adventuring hero. As a consequence, there are no institutions built around them. If you have a magic item you want to sell, your asking price determines whether you can find a buyer and how long it takes; you can sell almost anything if you're willing to go low enough. But the supply is far too small, and medieval transport and communications far too inefficient, to produce anything like a working market.</blockquote>

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