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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 7345654" data-attributes="member: 12731">2. Price expressed as a levelA fundamental property of any magic item price list is that the prices actually don't matter unless you have decided how much gold the adventurers are going to get their hands on.In other words, whether a magic sword costs 1000 gp or 99999 gp is meaningless unless you say something like "at 5th level, I aim for each of my player characters to have gained very roughly 4500 gp".Yes, this leads us to the - much maligned - "expected wealth" tables of 3rd edition. Except in 5th edition you are free to hand out much less (or much more, but mostly much less) gold, since no magic items are actually needed for the game to work. Sure, I think most players expect to be able to buy a few potions of healing, a plate mail for the fighter and a magic weapon at somewhere between 3rd and 7th level. Other than that, the PCs are entitled to nothing.Edit: this thread does a much better job of introducing "wealth curves":http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?619626-Design-amp-Development-Wealth-CurvesLet me show you a graph.[ATTACH]94318[/ATTACH]Here we have four wealth curves. Note the absence of the word "expected" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The lowest, blue, one is based on the "Starting Equipment" table in the DMG for a standard campaign. We can read that as the designers opinion on what a character ought to have as a bare minimum. As you can see, it's essentially peanuts compared to the "Treasure" line. This "treasure" line, the red one, is (approximately) what the random loot tables of the DMG actually results in, if you follow the official guidelines for number of hoards per level and so on.Feel free to check this out if you don't believe me. I used these figures: <a href="http://blogofholding.com/?p=6760" target="_blank">http://blogofholding.com/?p=6760</a> But the main point is that my line doesn't have to be particularly correct. Just as long as you yourself have some idea of how much gold your party will have amassed at levels 5, 11 and 17!The yellow and green lines are mostly there for comparison, being based on d20. The yellow line is "expected wealth for NPCs in 3rd edition". The green line is "expected wealth for PCs in Pathfinder".---So. Should a magic sword cost 1000 gp? Or 10000 gp? Or somewhere in between?Actually, to have a fruitful discussion, I propose that the relevant question is instead:At what level is a player character supposed to be able to afford his magic sword?This is because if we agree the answer is "5th level" then that can mean 500 gp for a low-cash campaign, 4500 gp for a standard 5th edition campaign, and 10500 gp for a Pathfinder:ish campaign!And if we end up saying a Staff of Frost feels about right for a level 11 character, that means 5000 gp for a "blue" campaign (going by the line colors above), 21000 gp for a "yellow" campaign, 35500 gp for the "red" campaign, and finally 82000 gp for a "green" campaign.At this initial stage, we don't put a price in gold pieces such as 35500 gp on the staff. We put a price of "11th level" on it.   Instead of quarreling about how much gold your favorite character had or did not have at a certain level, we will focus on what's really interesting, namely at what level he's supposed to afford certain items.And there I will argue 5th edition can and should differ significantly from 3rd edition.</blockquote>

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