Just saw where Zapp says he'll Report anyone who disagrees with his thread premises. :-O This attitude might possibly have some connection to his failure. People need to be able to say "X won't work because Y, but if we try Z..." and not be abused, never mind Reported!
D&D 5E Deconstructing 5e: Typical Wealth by Level
Just saw where Zapp says he'll Report anyone who disagrees with his thread premises. :-O This attitude might possibly have some connection to his failure. People need to be able to say "X won't work because Y, but if we try Z..." and not be abused, never mind Reported!
Oofta
Legend
IIRC, in part that was because people were stating their opinion that what he was trying to do is kind of a fools errand. I guess I feel for him a bit ... but only to a point. Nobody "owns" a thread.
Hah, that's hilarious. That not agreeing with ideas on posts is grounds for moderator action.
Hussar
Legend
As far as WotC modules dripping with gold and magic, again, I'm not really convinced.
I've only run Dragon Heist, but, I've played a good chunk of Princes, Ravenloft and all of the Giants module (and I mean all, we took on every single giant lair.) Hardly seemed like a lot of magic or money to be honest. We did wind up with magic items, sure, but, that's because we used the Xanathar's buying system.
Found it to be a lot of fun actually. I wound up with interesting items that I never would have considered buying but added all sorts of goodies to my character - a warhammer of warning, for example, turned out to be far more interesting in play than I would have thought. Advantage to initiative and can't be surprised. Came in very useful. The Cube of Force that we got became the center piece of the campaign for several modules.
The problem with an item pricing list, as I said before, is you wind up with cookie cutter characters. Everyone quickly learns what the "best" items for the price are. It's like the stat boost items in 3e. Nothing you could buy would impact more of the game than a stat boost item. It would affect nearly every roll you made. For the price, you could simply not beat it. So, EVERYONE had a +2 then maybe +4 stat boost item ASAP. It makes sense. From a utility standpoint, you couldn't beat it. Not doing it was virtually gimping your character.
And, then, the designers started taking that into consideration when making modules. The Dungeon modules, for example, assumed you would have these Big Six items and designed encounters, not based on baseline, but based on the expected items you would have - so upping the DC's, using higher HP and AC monsters, etc. And the arms race got off with a bang. But, that meant that the items you got weren't actually doing anything. You just fought bigger monsters at lower levels.
5e really has ejected that baggage and I can't say I'm disappointed.
I've only run Dragon Heist, but, I've played a good chunk of Princes, Ravenloft and all of the Giants module (and I mean all, we took on every single giant lair.) Hardly seemed like a lot of magic or money to be honest. We did wind up with magic items, sure, but, that's because we used the Xanathar's buying system.
Found it to be a lot of fun actually. I wound up with interesting items that I never would have considered buying but added all sorts of goodies to my character - a warhammer of warning, for example, turned out to be far more interesting in play than I would have thought. Advantage to initiative and can't be surprised. Came in very useful. The Cube of Force that we got became the center piece of the campaign for several modules.
The problem with an item pricing list, as I said before, is you wind up with cookie cutter characters. Everyone quickly learns what the "best" items for the price are. It's like the stat boost items in 3e. Nothing you could buy would impact more of the game than a stat boost item. It would affect nearly every roll you made. For the price, you could simply not beat it. So, EVERYONE had a +2 then maybe +4 stat boost item ASAP. It makes sense. From a utility standpoint, you couldn't beat it. Not doing it was virtually gimping your character.
And, then, the designers started taking that into consideration when making modules. The Dungeon modules, for example, assumed you would have these Big Six items and designed encounters, not based on baseline, but based on the expected items you would have - so upping the DC's, using higher HP and AC monsters, etc. And the arms race got off with a bang. But, that meant that the items you got weren't actually doing anything. You just fought bigger monsters at lower levels.
5e really has ejected that baggage and I can't say I'm disappointed.
CapnZapp
Legend
What are you talking about?
That the items and gold is there is refuting the claim 5E is somehow a non-magic setting in no need for uptime as well as downtime gold expenditures etc
CapnZapp
Legend
Yes, but in the context of a D&D price list you would have one entry ("supercar") with the price of the lower-cost (but still full-utility) brand.
Then, the DM is free to multiply that base price based on pretty much anything, including rarity, brand recognition or whatever.
The point is that speed/handling etc sets the base price. And not rarity.
CapnZapp
Legend
Here you're conflating different things.
3E came with the larger numbers expectation built in. The designers did not take it into account because it crept into the system because prices existed. They took it into account because they were supposed to all along!
You can have prices without the expectation.
Take 5E for example. The core three books expect nothing. Nobody can go back in time and magically add in such expectations.
Adding prices to a supplement helps the DM whose players want to spend their gold on stuff but not on downtime things unrelated to the quest at hand. It still does not magically alter the math of the game or its expectations.
Oofta
Legend
But it is still ultimately arbitrary. If I have a magical thrown weapon (no + anything) that returns, is that more or less valuable than a +1 version of that weapon that does not return? Should +1 armor cost more than a +1 weapon? Should a Picasso cost more than a velvet painting of Elvis? How much more? Because honestly I'm not into surrealism so that velvet painting would probably look more at home on my wall than some painting that only bears a slight resemblance to anything real.
In any case I think Xanathar's gives us a decent general guideline. We even now have differentiations between different items in the rarity list, much like we have luxury cars and luxury sports cars.
Hussar
Legend
No, actually, that's not quite true. You can see, over the publishing life of 3e and then 3.5, a constant upward power creep in modules. To the point where early 3e modules, like Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, are significantly less powered than later modules, like Savage Tides or other Paizo Dungeon modules.
For example, a later development that you see is the addition of NPC levels onto creatures to bump their effectiveness without changing their listed CR's. This is something you don't see in earlier modules because, at the time of writing 3e, and even 3.5, they hadn't quite realized the impact of fungible magic items on play. How could they really? They hadn't had time to see this effect and the development of things like the Big 6 items.
So, you can compare modules from, say 2000 and then modules from, say 2006 and you'll see an almost straight line increase in DC's and encounter difficulties, despite the modules being for the same level of character. Now, part of that is possibly due to the proliferation of classes, sure, but, it's at least partially because of the magic item economy of 3e. Whispering Cairn, despite being for the same level as, say, Sunless Citadel, is probably a full level higher in difficulty and arguably more. And, as you proceed into higher level adventures, the disparity becomes a LOT more pronounced.
I think you are underplaying the impact that the magic item economy had on 3e. It seriously impacted monster design (later era monsters are significantly more powerful for their CR than earlier ones) and adventure design. AFAIC, the magic item economy in 3e serves as a cautionary tale for how far reaching a seemingly fairly innocuous game element can be.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
The items there in no way refutes the fact that magic items are optional. They have to create modules to appeal to the widest variety of players. That means that they must include magic items since most people use them. It's also the smart way to play it, because it takes all of literally half a second to remove them all from the module of you don't play with magic items. However, if they didn't include them, DMs who want magic items in the module would not only have to spend a great deal of time and effort placing magic items, but they would also have to make sure that they weren't unbalancing encounters as they did so.
Do you understand now?
