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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Damon Griffin" data-source="post: 995920" data-attributes="member: 3568">See the latter part of this message, following your enumerated list of problems with changing the price list.If the bard has any sense, he'll do the peacock display when it's appropriate or advantageous to do so, and not at other times.  Getting respect is fine, but when the primary effect of that respect is going to be that the bard loses a lot of extra money, then he'll probably learn to live with five minutes worth of disdain in order to conduct one transaction while passing through town.  After all, what does he care for the opinion of this cultural Philistine, who wouldn't be able to properly appreciate the subtleties of the bard's artistic performance anyway?  If I'm only passing through town with a brief stop for supplies, I want the shopkeeper's grain, and as much of my own money as I can retain, more than I want his respect.I was actually speaking of my PC at the time; he doesn't routinely carry all his money with him because it would be silly to do so.  Liquid assets are more versatile than magic items, so I always try to keep as much cash as possible, though I've certainly turned some of my gold into magic items.  But even if I'd turned all of it into magic, I don't take all my magic items with me wherever I go.  In some of the well-patrolled cities our group visits, it's not lawful to carry most weapons around.  Quarterstaves and maybe a dagger, you'll be fine.  +1 keen longswords and +2 flaming warhammers, not so much.  So the magic weapons are generally not with us in town.  Ditto the fancy armor.  There may be magic items appropriate for at-home or in-town use that I wouldn't bother taking on a short wilderness trip.There you go.  Smart shoppers -- in fact, shoppers with any common sense at all, once they've realized how the pricing system works -- will routinely find ways to avoid making themselves look like rich marks.  They don't wear their best clothes for travel, they don't carry huge coin purses openly into every merchant shop they visit, and they don't deck themselves with magic items from head to toe before trotting off to the local farmers market to buy bread and cheese.The innkeeper assesses people for a living, but for what you've been describing, he's making his assessment based on a quick first impression and probably very little time to gather information.  The bard, perhaps simply by virtue of being an adventurer and therefore on the move all the time, is a savvy traveller who has had scores of innkeepers, merchants and so forth try to bilk him out of extra money for routine things.  He knows how to avoid being taken for too much money.  He'll pay more than the locals, but not a great deal more.  Experience has taught him that haggling will only go so far; best to do whatever can be done to lower the merchant's initial estimate of the bard's wealth, then haggle down from that lower starting point.  After all, maybe he really is rich, but how long would he stay that way if he agreed to pay whatever these greedy merchants asked? As with the innkeeper who assesses people's personalities for a living, this isn't a special skill that an individual character must train himself to use (though such complementary skills as Bluff, Disguise or Perform(Acting) could certainly help), it's something he'll automatically acquire as part of the traveller's lifestyle. Maybe, maybe not, but the PC is apparently worth ten local sales -- more, if the shopkeeper is only losing one item and getting the usual price for ten of that item.  They both want something, or there'd be no basis for trade.Ever try having a game without NPCs?  I imagine it would be a very short game.  Oh, you can get through a session or two with nothing but monsters, but ultimately there will have to be other people to interact with.  NPCs are indispensible -- we are hired by them to clear their land of monsters, we hire them to carry our equipment and maintain our keeps, we are robbed by them, we fight them, we learn from them and on occasion we marry them.The DM participates in the game through NPCs, to a greater extent than he does in other ways.  Drawing maps, writing background history and planning an adventure is a lot of work, and vital to the game, but none of that is interactive.  Once the game gets going, the NPCs are what allow the DM to really join in.1. Correct.2. I may have to , but only if I agree that the current starting amount is correct in proprotion to the price list.  For now, let's agree that I'd have to re-examine the starting gold amounts.3 & 5. I think magic should be fairly expensive, so I'd take a look at this, but there's a good chance I would leave this as is.4 & 6. Reducing the cost of ordinary mundane items and not making these two adjustments would certainly give the PCs more buying power, but I don't see this as a problem unless it gives them so much extra buying power that they can now afford to purchase significantly more magic items than they could before; that's easily prevented by not making magic any cheaper than it is right now, and by having the DM regulate the availability of such things. 7. Sure.  Everything I said above about 2 thru 6 is subject to testing.  Hey, if I thought this would be an easy, one step process, I would have simply announced that I had singlehandedly fixed the D&D pricing problem and posted my masterful solution at the beginning of this thread.  I don't have a complete solution.  I'm still analyzing the problem.  Frankly, I don't ever expect to see a complete solution, but I am hoping that some changes can be made to reduce the problem.  Make sure the discrepancies are smaller, or come up less frequently, that sort of thing.That's true, but it may be possible, for example, to choose one set of base assumptions, and the numbers implied by those assumptions, as the price list for an imagined "default" setting (some specific region of Greyhawk, most likely, if this sort of thing ever appeared in a WotC book) and then provide a simple mechanic and some explanatory text to describe how to modify the price list for different regions.   DC system or not, in order for this to work you'd have to provide the price list for, say, 14th Century Italy and show DMs how the list could be quickly tweaked in order to convert the figures to something appropriate for...I don't know, 16th Century Japan or 12th Century England. In order to keep things as simple as possible, this would probably involve the use of a small number of "key" goods and services, whose index values the DM would work out according to the instructions given, and then the other values on the list would fall into place based on the indexed keys, sort of a tricke down economics effect.Which goods and services are "key?"  Dunno, and that might have to vary somewhat as you change from one region/time period to another, but ideally most of the key items would appear on the lists for most regions/time periods (that is what would make them "key" items, after all.)Would this be a universal system, accurately adaptable to any region or historical period?  That's be nice, but within the limits of the simplicity required for gaming, it's probably impossible.  If it works for several of the more common settings, that would be enough.  Not that many D&D games are set in Mesopotamia or the Aztec lands.Okay, the last few paragraphs above are all so vague they don't even deserve the term "vaporware".  I don't claim to be describing a system here, just brainstorming for possible features to be included in a system that may exist at some point.Sigh.  I've been playing this game off and on for 25+ years, and I have never made it to Gen Con.   This isn't going to be the year where that changes, either.</blockquote>

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