Jemal said:
So two things - First off, why is playing a character who's optimized a bad thing? You don't like being effective? And I deplore the insinuation that doing so is 'munchkinizing'.. Why is it people think that a character can be either Role Play worthy or Effective but not both? I happen to prefer playing the Heroic Warrior-king or powerful Archmage who saves the world from marauding demons to the anorexic bard with 10 pages of backstory who wants to make a couple bucks by stealing from peasants. (And just for the record, I happen to think Conan has one hell of a good 'story' to him, and wow guess what.. he kicks Ass too!)
I wouldn't make the blanket statement that playing an optimized character is a bad thing. It's just that I'm distressed by the idea that hand-picking one's magic items is a valid avenue of optimization.
This thread has really made me reflect on why I consider hand-picked magic items so detrimental to the game, on why the idea gets under my skin. I think it boils down to a couple of things:
- It eliminates the thrill of finding magic items in a treasure hoard. This thrill didn't derive from the items' being unknowable or mysterious or unpredictable, but simply from the fact that any given item, such as a serpentine owl, was so rare as to often be unique within a given campaign. This thrill was present in 1E, 2E, and even the computer RPGs I've played. (Think of finding a Ring of Polymorph Control down in the dungeons of Nethack. Or the Wand of Wishing, one of the incredibly rare opportunities to pick any item you wanted, but which only had a few charges -- now there was a find! You did well to think long and hard about what to wish for when you used it.) In 3E, this thrill is gone, and I miss it terribly.
- There's no in-game justification for an arbitrary list of items under a certain price limit to all happen to be on the market in a given place, at a given time. It's just not plausible.
The argument that it's great to be able to customize your character's items, well, it just doesn't resonate with me. You could customize your character's items in
Nethack or
Diablo by using a cheat program. What I quickly found was that doing so took the fun out of the game. Sure, it was cool for a little while, but then it just got boring.
To each his own! One man's meat is another man's poison, as they say.
Secondly, If you're selling off ALL of the stuff you find to buy what you want, then you're loosing about half your treasure value.. Remember, resale is half price. Thus, if there's anything even a little interesting in a treasure horde, most smart players I've known will take it first.. it's only if nobody can use something that it gets hocked. If your DM throws you a Wand of Fireballs and there's no mage or anyone with UMD, what the heck were you going to do with it ANYWAYS?
We weren't aware of that rule. (Was it present in 3.0? The campaign started before 3.5 came out.)
I can see that it would have mitigated things a bit, but it seems hard to justify from an in-game standpoint. Is the idea that NPCs have more time to build up contacts to whom they can sell? Then what if the PCs befriend an NPC and have him sell things for them? Maybe they could offer him a cut to make it worth his while. Or what if someone sets up a cohort as a merchant and has him sell things?
(Or perhaps the next time they save someone's life... "A reward? Why no, no, I could never accept a reward. As a small favor, however, perhaps you could liquidate these items for me -- I'm so busy with heroic deeds, you see...")
