[EDITION WARZ] Selling Out D&D's Soul?

[Garnfellow]

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that you cherry pick out the things you don't like about an edition of D&D you don't play any more for the sole purpose of slagging said edition of D&D on web boards that'll listen to you.

I think you are really barking up the wrong tree here. Merric is probably the most even-handed defender of all editions of the game. Why don’t you take a deep breath, and remember, we’re all just talking about games where big, grown, bearded men roll dice and pretend to be elven sorceresses fighting goblins, acidic jellos, and floating balls of eyes that shoot death rays. It's really nothing more than that.

 

[Kormydigar]

I just don't see this as what PC's do. PC's adventure, they fight things, they Do Deeds, and they find neat stuff...that someone else made! A PC's place is in the field, not the item-construction shop.

If a PC wizard wants to spend time building items rather than adventuring, then fine; as long as the player knows the PC is going to miss the next several adventures while so engaged, and that none of time, levels, or the activities of the rest of the world are going to stop and wait till she's done.

This, in fact, might hearken back to the start of this enormous thread: the soul of the game. I suggest the game's soul resides in the field-adventuring party, and things like this sitting around waiting for the wizard to build items is rather soulless.

Lane-"how many other 1000-post threads have there been?"-fan

QFT Man! I worked on a solution to this problem for my next campaign. I am removing all item creation feats except scribe scroll and brew potion and replacing them with some other feats. For magic item creation I am making up the Artificer base class. Members of this class cannot multiclass, and earn thier XP from crafting and enchanting items. No XP can be earned through adventuring activities. The class will have access to all spell lists (and be able to specialize in arcane or divine) but only the "enchant" versions of the spells can be cast. By doing this the world has creators of magic gear that actually IMPROVE at thier job as they work, instead of retarding thier progress, and adventurers can get on with the business of saving the world.

 

[Ourph]

What??? Not having an NPC mage just bumming around, idle, waiting for a PC to place an order for an item, is considered "Mother may I?"...holy crap, and people think my feeling that player entitlement is at an all time high is misplaced...

GEEZ people, lighten up! I'm not using "mother may I?" in a pejorative sense. I'm saying that there's no difference, from the player's perspective, if the NPC takes 2 months to make the +1 sword because "he just can't get around to it" or if the DM's houserules say that's how long it takes. It's still the DM deciding for the player when that magic item is available. I DO NOT THINK THIS IS A BAD THING (as some of you seem to have assumed). I think any responsible DM does this.

My original point was simply that if your goal is to increase the time it takes for a PC to acquire an item, there's no real difference between having an in-game and a meta-game reason for the delay. Obviously, if you have other goals (i.e. - RP goals, world simulation goals, etc.) there can be a huge difference.

You have a very simplistic view of the game.

You have a very poor grasp of nuance.

 

[The Shaman]

It would be a shame to see this thread closed.

 

[Justin Bacon]

GEEZ people, lighten up! I'm not using "mother may I?" in a pejorative sense. I'm saying that there's no difference, from the player's perspective, if the NPC takes 2 months to make the +1 sword because "he just can't get around to it" or if the DM's houserules say that's how long it takes. It's still the DM deciding for the player when that magic item is available. I DO NOT THINK THIS IS A BAD THING (as some of you seem to have assumed). I think any responsible DM does this.

Actually, there's a key difference here: If the DM's house rules say X, the player has presumably seen these houserules. And even if the DM creates the house rule for X right on the spot, then they will presumably be part of the house rules from now on.

In either case, there's a predictability there: The player knows what to expect and can plan their actions accordingly.

In a mother-may-I scenario, the player doesn't know what to expect: Any time they go to get an item crafted, the waiting period will fluctuate at the DM's whim. The success or failure of their plans will depend on whether or not the DM likes the idea of them having item X.

Now, in the specific example you've proffered, there's considerable gray area: It's clearly a mother-may-I situation (since the DM is deciding on-the-fly whether a particular item will be available to them on a case-by-case basis by deciding on a case-by-case basis how long it will take them to commission the item). OTOH, it's not unreasonable for a DM to say: "There's only 25 people in this village and none of them know the spells or have the material they need to craft the item you're looking for."

IMO, the question of whether or not this is a true mother-may-I scenario depends on whether the DM is leaving options open for the PCs to pursue: Is he saying "this particular wizard has a backlog of items" because that's legitimately true, or is he saying it because he doesn't want the PCs to have item X?

And that basically comes down to a simple question: Is there anybody else in the world we could go to and get this item?

Personally, as a DM, I use the Community Wealth and Population guidelines in the DMG (pg. 137) as a starting point. But since I find the assertion in that section that every single magical item with a value of less than 40,000 gp should be "most likely" available in a community of 12,000 people (if you do the full math suggested in that section, it turns out that -- just using the magic items in the DMG -- every single person in the town has something like a half dozen magic items). So I tend to use an uncodified set of guidelines which roughly looks at what percentage of the community's GP limit any give item's value is, and then roll some percentiles to see whether it's available.

And I also generally treat magic items, in general, as a class of items -- so the upper limit of magic items available in a typical community is half the GP limit times 1/10th the population. (This value is finagled quite a bit depending on the "feel" of the community -- if it's a highly magical city, then there's more magic available. If it's a rough frontier town, there'll be less magic available.)

Anyway, I'm rambling. And this, like I say, is largely an uncodified "back of the envelope" calculation just to give me a rough idea of what should be available.

Is the Random Town Generation informatio and/or GP limit rules in the SRD? I don't think so, but does anybody know?

 

[Lanefan]

I worked on a solution to this problem for my next campaign. I am removing all item creation feats except scribe scroll and brew potion and replacing them with some other feats. For magic item creation I am making up the Artificer base class. Members of this class cannot multiclass, and earn thier XP from crafting and enchanting items. No XP can be earned through adventuring activities. The class will have access to all spell lists (and be able to specialize in arcane or divine) but only the "enchant" versions of the spells can be cast. By doing this the world has creators of magic gear that actually IMPROVE at thier job as they work, instead of retarding thier progress, and adventurers can get on with the business of saving the world.

And if commissioning an item from them takes a bit of time, such that they're not an on-demand magic shop with feet, you might have hit on a rather elegant solution here. I'd also give them some divination spells, to make them game-useful as information sources about found items...at a price, of course.

Mind if I steal this one?

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Actually, there's a key difference here: If the DM's house rules say X, the player has presumably seen these houserules. And even if the DM creates the house rule for X right on the spot, then they will presumably be part of the house rules from now on.

In either case, there's a predictability there: The player knows what to expect and can plan their actions accordingly.

In a mother-may-I scenario, the player doesn't know what to expect: Any time they go to get an item crafted, the waiting period will fluctuate at the DM's whim. The success or failure of their plans will depend on whether or not the DM likes the idea of them having item X.

Sounds just fine to me. There's a random element also, or should be; the dice might say that something that shouldn't normally be available is (a party just came back from a big adventure in the mountains; they're loaded with loot they want to sell, and this tiny village you're in just happens to be where they're spending the night), or that something you'd always expect to find is sold out (someone's bought up every +1 longsword in Waterdeep for reasons known only to herself).

Same for item creation; this tiny village might be home to a master artificer, now mostly retired...or, the artificers' guild in Greyhawk might have walked off the job and nobody's getting anything made for a while. Same for getting high-level spells (wish, resurrection, etc.) cast. Nothing is certain...

Lanefan

 

[jcfiala]

It would be a shame to see this thread closed.

Well, it's a shame to see any thread close, but this one's had a good run, and it's possible we've hit all the points of discussion by now.

 

[The Shaman]

Well, it's a shame to see any thread close, but this one's had a good run, and it's possible we've hit all the points of discussion by now.

The thread petering out for lack of new content is one thing, being shut down for rude comments something else entirely.

 

[Numion]

What I think irks DMs in magic item creation by PCs and buying them is this: as a DM when designing an adventure the DMs puts there neat magic items that he would like the PCs to get (after maybe being used against them). The DM has spent effort on this, and the items are cool.

But then the PCs come, they bag the loot, cart it of to the nearest wizard in the business, sell the stuff and buy items they want. At least that's what annoyed me when I started 3E.

But after playing (as in being a player instead of DM) 3E I noticed that from that POV it's actually great that I can customize my items. Maybe there's less sense of wonder from the DMs point of view, but not from the players. At least in my mind. The DM planted items great history etc. don't matter to me or my character squat compared to what I have accomplished with it. For example: I don't care if my bow was the one used to destroy the great wyrm dragon Fieryballs 1000 years ago. I care much more that I slew an adult dragon with it just last week.

I get much more sense of wonder from customizing my own bows flames to be silvery colored after my characters name, than .. you get the point.

Besides, if I make a really cool magic item the players will want to keep it for its own sake, and not just because customized ones werent available.