Decoupling wealth from magic items, help wanted

[Blackbrrd]

I want to run a campaign where magic items aren't worth hundreds of thousands of gold. Mostly because I find the idea of buying and selling magic items worth that much preposterous.

I think that finding and enchanting magic items using residuum should take care of equipping the characters. Residuum might be a currency by it self, but not something anybody would readily trade for gold.

What I would do is change the amount of valuables (not magic equipment) the characters find, so that it doesn't scale exponentially with the characters level, more in a linear fashion.

I would probably need to compensate the players in a certain degree since they don't get as much treasure to buy magic items for by giving them residuum in addition to magic items and valuables.

Is there any pit traps I haven't thought of?

I am also thinking of maybe restricting what they can enchant items into, but allowing them to find recipes as loot or from NPC's. Some recipes would be multi-use and some would be single use. I would reserve the single use recipes for the typical items you would find in the "broken items" thread.

Any input would be appreciated.

 

[Fanaelialae]

The way I would do this would be to completely replace gold with residuum. Magic items are effectively priceless and can only be bought/sold using residuum (assuming there is a magic item economy to begin with). Gold parcels in the treasure table now become residuum. This preserves the original party wealth values that the treasure tables in the DMG are based on.

If you so desire, you can also give residuum a more organic feel, since it will make up a large portion of found treasure. In addition to the silvery dust (refined residuum) you could also grant unusual treasure items in the form of unrefined residuum (dragon scales, beholder eyes, waters of the River Styx, etc.) looted from monster corpses or forgotten mystic glades. I'd recommend, for the sake of bookkeeping, that there be no difference in the magical potency of refined and unrefined residuum; the terms would merely be cosmetic, for flavor. For example, the salvageable parts of a dragon might be worth 1000 residuum.

Then I would add in however much gold I felt like. Since gold is now exclusively for the purchase of mundane conveniences and the like, there isn't any need to balance it against much else (though I'd avoid giving the party enough gold to hire an army at level 1).

Be careful to avoid shortcuts for converting gold to residuum (ritual components should be bought using the residuum economy) and you should be solid.

 

[keterys]

The concept of something being priceless is... odd. It either means it's worthless or someone just hasn't said a high enough price yet.

If we're talking about something you find all over the place, ie residuum replacing things, it only follows logically that you _can_, say, sell some residuum to someone for a horse. And once you're there, you can likely sell a team or horses and a wagon for some residuum. Etc.

That said, I totally applaud the concept of divorcing them, it just doesn't really make a ton of sense to me except in gamist terms.

 

[kaomera]

The first question that comes to my mind is how much of the standard wealth are the PCs expected to spend on magic items? I haven't actually seen this addressed directly anywhere in the 4e rules. I suppose the other side of this would be how much gold do the PCs spend on other stuff, and what do they spend it on?

I've always felt that keeping track of each gold piece (or copper...) is really kind of silly. Small expenditures, like a round of ale or a night at the Inn aren't worth recording, while big ones are far better handled abstractly (IMO, at least - it's more fun to roleplay out the process of getting a land grant from the local baron, attracting settlers, and actually managing the building of a keep, rather than just plopping down 2,000,000gp...).

 

[keterys]

As far as I can tell, it's expected that you spend 100% of your monetary wealth on magic items and drinks and such are handwaved.

So yeah, I totally like the idea of splitting up the two.

 

[kaomera]

The concept of something being priceless is... odd. It either means it's worthless or someone just hasn't said a high enough price yet.

Or it's worth is just highly specific. If you assume that only PCs who take the ritual and maybe a few scattered high-level NPCs can actually manufacture magic items, most people probably have no use whatsoever for Residium. As an example: Would you trade something for industrial-grade diamonds? Would you even be able to tell if they where legit? Maybe if the local Lord has a use for it and they can verify it's value they might trade for Residium and hope to us it to pay off their taxes, but I don't see it becoming viable for use as a general currency.

 

[keterys]

Residuum is useful for _any_ ritual, though. So, y'know, it's tough to use, but it pays for having the local shaman heal a disease from your kid.

Maybe you'd have to trade '300g' worth of residuum to get a 1g stay at the inn, due to lack of clarity in value, but it still has a value. And every lord, every seller or scrounger of magic items, every ritualist (village priest, witch doctor, local druid, etc) well knows that value and would give you much closer to a correct value even if it were still a bad deal.

Within limits, of course. After all, a few hundred gold worth of residuum is easy to dip into, but 100,000g? Eh. You get your couple of items for the Kingdom like a Keoghtem's Ointment, Decanter of Endless Water, whatever... then realize the rest is just a target.

I mean, I'm still all for it, but it just feels odd except in gamist terms. Like, clearly it has a value, we just don't want it to, so shush, it's valueless to everyone else.

 

[Alex319]

Here's my analysis of the situation. Basically, there are three ways that characters can get magic items:

1. Find them as treasure.

2. Find residuum, which they can use to make them using EMI (Enchant Magic Item).

3. Find monetary treasure or other valuables which they can exchange for magic items.

So my understanding is that you don't want (3). That leaves either (1) or (2), or some combination of the above.

If you just use (1), and don't give out residuum, then your problem is basically solved. The characters don't get any residuum, so you don't have to worry about them trying to trade it for something else. And you can still give them the same amount of treasure as before, and put whatever restrictions you want on trading away the magic items. The only caveat is that players may disenchant them for residuum which they can then sell as described above. So you could remove DEMI (Disenchant Magic Item) from the game, or reduce the amount of residuum it generates for higher level items (you could use a formula like 100 gp worth * level of item, to be linear, or whatever other formula you wanted.)

You could also go with (2). Then, if you didn't want ultra-valuable magic items, you could again create your own cost curve - like say some constant times the level of the item. And if you calculate the amount of residuum you give out based on the new magic item costs rather than the old ones, then you're not increasing the amount of treasure the characters are getting. You are making items above the character's level far cheaper than would be otherwise, but that doesn't matter since you're not providing places where they can buy them, and they can't make items above their own level using EMI anyway (except I think there's a feat that lets them go a few above - might want to take a look at that).

 

[Starfox]

I've been playing around with similar ideas. Some thoughts:

• Magic items have a linear cost of 100 gp + 10 gp/level
• Magic items don't have enhancement bonuses. The enhancement bonus is a function of the level of the wielder (+1/4 levels). Most magic items are purchased for their side effects only.
• Characters can use magic items of their level +4.

Magic items now become much less central to the game. You can get away with using non-magic items because you get the enhancement bonus anyway. And the DM doesn't have top give out a king's ransom every session at higher levels; PC wealth stays reasonable and within the economy. A very rich player can get an edge, but not an overwhelming one.

I think this would work well for the basic stuff such as weapons,a armor, and neck items. What worries me are all the miscelania.

 

[Blackbrrd]

The concept of something being priceless is... odd. It either means it's worthless or someone just hasn't said a high enough price yet.

If we're talking about something you find all over the place, ie residuum replacing things, it only follows logically that you _can_, say, sell some residuum to someone for a horse. And once you're there, you can likely sell a team or horses and a wagon for some residuum. Etc.

That said, I totally applaud the concept of divorcing them, it just doesn't really make a ton of sense to me except in gamist terms.

The goal isn't to disallow buying and selling magic items, but to make buying and selling magic items for gold the exception. I see no logic in a full suit of armor costing 50 gp, but a slightly better version of the same armor costing 5000 gp. In addition, nobody should afford sitting around with a 5000gp set of armor that can easily be bought. Why hasn't it been stolen? etc, etc...

Residuum is as you say an easily transportable valuable, but is at the same time a rare commodity with very few buyers and sellers. You might be able to use it to pay for something, but you might have to pay 10x-1000x as much for it as if you had bought it for gold.

You can think of residuum like money on a polar expedition in the 20th century where the other currency is food. You would have to pay a LOT of money to buy food.

Btw, I liked the idea of unrefined residuum from dragons blood, beholder eyes and the like. It makes more sense than just finding the refined material all over the place.