I’m thinking about running the Orcus conversion of Keep on the Shadowfell after a roleplaying hiatus. It’s the first version of D&D I’ve looked at as a potential game since playing 1st edition way back when.
There are things about 4e I really admire. Especially the way party co-operation is hardwired into the mechanics. I think that’s a truly innovative and interesting approach to a tabletop RPG. I’m interested in finding out whether that ‘co-operation’ mechanic has a pay-off in terms of satisfaction for the players.
But I’m also seeing a lot of stuff reminding me why I always found D&D ludicrous. One of the most blatant (IMO this isn’t just a fourth edition blip) is that the economics of both magic and treasure are simply ridiculous.
Magic is not rare and wondrous in D&D. Magic is a consumer accessory subject to prices and values out of all scale to anything else in the world. Treasure isn’t rare either. There are piles of gold and gems everywhere. Huge piles of gold. Economy re-adjusting piles of gold. In every bloody cave, crypt and castle you can name.
A meal in the inn is 2sp and a room is 5sp. An innkeeper with 6 rooms and never-ending trade is turning over 42sp a day. Assuming the inn is not permanently full, but with some extra bar trade, our innkeeper might turn over 7gp a day. Assuming he’s taking 20 per cent as profit, he and his family are living off 14sp a day.
The Dwarven smith in Neverwinter will make you a military weapon in a day (5 to 15gp) and a superior weapon in a week (25 to 30gp). So on rare custom jobs the town blacksmith has a turnover of 5 to 15gp a day. More often he’s churning out buckets and hinges and repairing wheels for far less. After materials, he’s making a living wage in the same order as the innkeeper.
The resident Lord of Neverwinter can muster a quite colossal 100gp reward for saving his entire town. And truly, our innkeeper or smith would look at 100gp as the kind of cash they can only dream about.
Within 2 encounters inside the Keep on the Shadowfell our players have picked up a set of Bloodcut Hide Armour +1. This, apparently, retails at 840gp. Go the DMG, look at the Nentir Vale and find me someone with 840gp in spare cash to buy that kind of item. Our prosperous innkeeper – he owns his own inn FFS! – has to put away 4sp a day for 5 years and 9 months to have that kind of money. Who, in the entire region, has 840gp to spare?
Even assuming our PCs are stupid enough to sell for 168gp something that retails at 840gp (and seriously folks, if I were playing, I’d be putting posters up around town advertising that sucker for the bargain price of 650gp) who in Winterhaven or even Fallcrest has even 168gp to spare? And who in the name of Orcus needs Bloodcut Hide +1 in their life?
See, the price of something is determined by its desirability. There is almost no-one in the Nentir Vale who wants, needs or can use a set of Bloodcut Hide armour. And certainly no-one who wants to pay for it in a shop or market. It is, in reality, almost entirely without value. Its worth is far, far, less than that of a cart, horse, plough, inn or bakery.
And this is for a trivial +1 item. At +3 we’re talking twenty-one thousand gold pieces. At +6 it’s 2.6 million. That’s like assuming that instead of that tiresome trek to Mordor, Frodo could have popped down to Bree, sold the One Ring for 5 million and bought his own country somewhere out of harm’s way. It’s utter nonsense.
The fallacy is to assume that there is a market demand for Bloodcut Hide +6 or The One Ring which will sustain that price. Which there patently isn’t. If our innkeeper wins the Nentir Vale lottery, safe to assume that +6 Bloodcut Hide is nowhere to be seen on his wishlist. The only people who might have that item on a wishlist is the PCs. This is the phoney basis of the listed price – the supposed desirability of an item for the players not the market.
So what D&D 4e has done (and I think D&D has always been a terrible game for this) is marry a completely broken consumer approach to magic weapons, armour, bracers, boots and rings with a feudal economy of subsistence peasants, silver-a-day guards, gold-a-day innkeepers and craftsmen, and a reigning nobility/clergy.
It compounds this farce by creating an economy in which 100gp is the kind of money a Lord will offer to save an entire town while simultaneously giving a no-mark hobgoblin in Bloodcut Hide +1 armour, and an in-game lifespan of around 30 seconds, a whopping 55gp in loose change. Looting the first level of the keep is worth over 800gp in coin alone.
In my view this kind of boundless cash creates a disconnect between PCs and the world they inhabit. It insulates them from the struggles of the community they supposedly represent. And in the campaign I’m looking at based on some sort of ‘greater good’ in defeating the plans of Orcus it’s ironic that with the RAW the PCs would be the most relentlessly mercenary characters in the story.
So I’m not going to show my players the PHB. I’m not having some D&D equivalent of Cash Converters for magic items. And I’m not having them walk back into town with enough money to buy it. If and when they find Aecris in Lord Keegan’s tomb it will be the kind of weapon someone will want to carry for a long, long time. The Glamdring of a campaign based around Orcus and his undead horde.
It looks to me like the first step in GM-ing D&D 4e is to regain some measure of control over treasure, magic and money. To avoid starting with GPs and magical pluses as the default units of value in the game, doled out as of right for each dead goblin and kobold. And to make magical items iconic and memorable, unsaleable and unbuyable, use it or lose it. It’s a theme I want to explore further.
There are things about 4e I really admire. Especially the way party co-operation is hardwired into the mechanics. I think that’s a truly innovative and interesting approach to a tabletop RPG. I’m interested in finding out whether that ‘co-operation’ mechanic has a pay-off in terms of satisfaction for the players.
But I’m also seeing a lot of stuff reminding me why I always found D&D ludicrous. One of the most blatant (IMO this isn’t just a fourth edition blip) is that the economics of both magic and treasure are simply ridiculous.
Magic is not rare and wondrous in D&D. Magic is a consumer accessory subject to prices and values out of all scale to anything else in the world. Treasure isn’t rare either. There are piles of gold and gems everywhere. Huge piles of gold. Economy re-adjusting piles of gold. In every bloody cave, crypt and castle you can name.
A meal in the inn is 2sp and a room is 5sp. An innkeeper with 6 rooms and never-ending trade is turning over 42sp a day. Assuming the inn is not permanently full, but with some extra bar trade, our innkeeper might turn over 7gp a day. Assuming he’s taking 20 per cent as profit, he and his family are living off 14sp a day.
The Dwarven smith in Neverwinter will make you a military weapon in a day (5 to 15gp) and a superior weapon in a week (25 to 30gp). So on rare custom jobs the town blacksmith has a turnover of 5 to 15gp a day. More often he’s churning out buckets and hinges and repairing wheels for far less. After materials, he’s making a living wage in the same order as the innkeeper.
The resident Lord of Neverwinter can muster a quite colossal 100gp reward for saving his entire town. And truly, our innkeeper or smith would look at 100gp as the kind of cash they can only dream about.
Within 2 encounters inside the Keep on the Shadowfell our players have picked up a set of Bloodcut Hide Armour +1. This, apparently, retails at 840gp. Go the DMG, look at the Nentir Vale and find me someone with 840gp in spare cash to buy that kind of item. Our prosperous innkeeper – he owns his own inn FFS! – has to put away 4sp a day for 5 years and 9 months to have that kind of money. Who, in the entire region, has 840gp to spare?
Even assuming our PCs are stupid enough to sell for 168gp something that retails at 840gp (and seriously folks, if I were playing, I’d be putting posters up around town advertising that sucker for the bargain price of 650gp) who in Winterhaven or even Fallcrest has even 168gp to spare? And who in the name of Orcus needs Bloodcut Hide +1 in their life?
See, the price of something is determined by its desirability. There is almost no-one in the Nentir Vale who wants, needs or can use a set of Bloodcut Hide armour. And certainly no-one who wants to pay for it in a shop or market. It is, in reality, almost entirely without value. Its worth is far, far, less than that of a cart, horse, plough, inn or bakery.
And this is for a trivial +1 item. At +3 we’re talking twenty-one thousand gold pieces. At +6 it’s 2.6 million. That’s like assuming that instead of that tiresome trek to Mordor, Frodo could have popped down to Bree, sold the One Ring for 5 million and bought his own country somewhere out of harm’s way. It’s utter nonsense.
The fallacy is to assume that there is a market demand for Bloodcut Hide +6 or The One Ring which will sustain that price. Which there patently isn’t. If our innkeeper wins the Nentir Vale lottery, safe to assume that +6 Bloodcut Hide is nowhere to be seen on his wishlist. The only people who might have that item on a wishlist is the PCs. This is the phoney basis of the listed price – the supposed desirability of an item for the players not the market.
So what D&D 4e has done (and I think D&D has always been a terrible game for this) is marry a completely broken consumer approach to magic weapons, armour, bracers, boots and rings with a feudal economy of subsistence peasants, silver-a-day guards, gold-a-day innkeepers and craftsmen, and a reigning nobility/clergy.
It compounds this farce by creating an economy in which 100gp is the kind of money a Lord will offer to save an entire town while simultaneously giving a no-mark hobgoblin in Bloodcut Hide +1 armour, and an in-game lifespan of around 30 seconds, a whopping 55gp in loose change. Looting the first level of the keep is worth over 800gp in coin alone.
In my view this kind of boundless cash creates a disconnect between PCs and the world they inhabit. It insulates them from the struggles of the community they supposedly represent. And in the campaign I’m looking at based on some sort of ‘greater good’ in defeating the plans of Orcus it’s ironic that with the RAW the PCs would be the most relentlessly mercenary characters in the story.
So I’m not going to show my players the PHB. I’m not having some D&D equivalent of Cash Converters for magic items. And I’m not having them walk back into town with enough money to buy it. If and when they find Aecris in Lord Keegan’s tomb it will be the kind of weapon someone will want to carry for a long, long time. The Glamdring of a campaign based around Orcus and his undead horde.
It looks to me like the first step in GM-ing D&D 4e is to regain some measure of control over treasure, magic and money. To avoid starting with GPs and magical pluses as the default units of value in the game, doled out as of right for each dead goblin and kobold. And to make magical items iconic and memorable, unsaleable and unbuyable, use it or lose it. It’s a theme I want to explore further.