Excerpt: Economies [merged]

[Voss]

do you think so? IMHO it is more believable than searching in ruins for items other people lost somehow...

its also on less believable than buying silk in china and selling it in europe for a lot more than they paid there (i don´t know the exact numbers)

or buying cocoa and coffee in africa/south america and selling it for several times as much here...

so that model is not soooo far away from reality...

Except none of those economies involved relying on bilking a handful of adventurers while trying not to be eaten by dragons. Or indeed, finding the adventurers to bilk them.
There is a huge difference between trying to cashi in on a small handful of people and selling large quantities of raw materials to a national economy.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Re: Vendor sells it for 5x purchase but does nothing with it - Artwork?

 

[med stud]

I'm thinking about introducing mercanes for this purpose. They can always buy items and they can find buyers. If the PCs want to run a similiar operation, they will get involved with the "mercane mob" with all that it entails. Not necessarily violence, but boycotts and finansial sabotage and the like. How do you find the mercanes? Well, the mercanes find you, possibly by using a travelling salesman as a cover.

 

[Torchlyte]

And yes, it is railroading. When the DM decides that the players aren't mature enough to handle their own in game resources, you may as well just tell them in the first five minutes of the game exactly how the story goes, what they did, and how it ended.

Hi, I don't know if you remember me. I'm the one who didn't like the example skill challenge because I felt it was railroading the players into playing one way.

This is not railroading because players are not being discouraged from doing things their way, it's merely an arbitrary balance goal. Consider your situation in reverse: should the players be penalized for adventuring instead of haggling? Giving extra gold to group A is the same as taking gold away from group B, so no matter what you're railroading (by your definition, since you're encouraging group B to haggle when they don't want to).

The game gives you treasure parcels to hand out with the assumption that players are unpredictable, so I think the mindset you're taking is fundamentally wrong.

Was anyone else disappointed this WASN'T about world-building economics, but instead about handing out loot? Sigh...

I mean, when I saw "Economics", I thought we'd be getting things like cost of daily life, ow much wealth exists in villages, where towns and cities get their income from, acres of farmland needed to support a city, and so on.

Seriously. Instead, it's loot&XP. Oh well...

I'm glad they didn't do this; it would be a very boring reveal... and that's coming from an economics major who very much enjoys that field. I don't need game designers to feed me their guesswork/bull.

On the plus side...

a)"Magic item shops" are still in, despite claims to the contrary. (There's the exact same "support" for Wal-Magic in 4e as there was in 3e -- a note in the DMG that magic items can be bought and sold and players are free to do so by default, though the DM can always rule otherwise.)

4e "supports" playstyles other than your own? Oh noes!

What? You IGNORED the rules and used your JUDGMENT?

I'm sorry. That's not possible in 3e. Only in 4e is the DM free to do this. In 3e, if you ignored any rules, WOTC ninjas came and killed you. The ability of a DM to be a DM was not present in 3e. The greatest innovation in 4e is the ability to ignore/alter the rules at whim. If you could already do that in 3e...well, what's the point of 4e, then?

Sheesh. Get with the program.

Straw troll.

You missed the point of my post.

Mousferatu seemed to be asserting that, in 4e, magic items would be hard to dispose of, due to the lack of buyers.

The very excerpt we're discussing says that, by default, there will always be a buyer in the next town the PCs stumble across, no matter how small it is. Yes, the DM can change this, but the "expected" rule is that no matter where you are, some merchant will be there with the gold to take your items off your hands.

No, Mousferatu asserted that, in 4e, magic items would be hard to dispose of, due to the lack of buyers who will use the items themselves. It's the merchant's job to travel from town to town to try and actually find the above.

To the Pro-4E Magic Item System Crowd:

Can you list an example of a real world good where:
It sells for 5 times as much as the vendor buys it for
The vendor adds no value to the good (either by changing it, or moving it from point A to point B)

I can't. And it's messing with my chi. Spare me the chorus of "Can you name a real world good that SHOOTS FIREBALLS!", too. =)

I'm pretty sure soda pop at least fulfills this one, if it doesn't blow it out of the water altogether.

 

[Wormwood]

Was anyone else disappointed this WASN'T about world-building economics, but instead about handing out loot? Sigh...

I think about world-building economics about once every six months. Maybe.

Loot, on the other hand, I hand out about 5 times per session.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Yay to 4e for fixing my most hated element, and biggest time-waster, of previous editions. I refer, of course, to treasure.

Yay to 4e for including, as something other than ad-hoc awards, a "quest XP" system somewhat similar to my beloved Earthdawn.

 

[eleran]

Agreed.

This is the first major problem I've had with the preview material. I don't know what I'm going to do when my players start becoming merchants.

I can see them stockpiling gear until they get to a metropolis. Then setting up a store to sell their magic items at 80% and undercutting local merchants. I can also see them sending messengers out to all towns in the vicinity letting other adventurers know about their goods.

They've done stuff like this before just to make 75% off items in 3.5 and I cannot realistically think of a way to keep it from working.

How about reminding them they are ADVENTURERS and not shopkeepers? If they want to do that why don't you all just play monopoly or Acquire instead of D&D?

sorry, sometimes badwrongfun is just the necessary response.

 

[Celebrim]

"The 5th-level NPC has a 6th-level item—not because he needs it, but because it’s one of the treasure parcels."

That pretty much settles that simulation is dead in 4e. It's now official. Treasure exists not because its reasonable to be where it is or because sentient creatures need and collect stuff. Rather treasure exists solely because the PC's need it and for no other reason. Balance and other metagame considerations now completely trump all other considerations.

Hmmm... and is platinum now 100 times as valuable as gold?

 

[med stud]

Used books... at least in this bloody country... You often don't get more than 1 single buck for them and then they sell them again for 5 easily...

Also, I believe the idea was that the merchant DID move them from point a to b and that costs money...

Not only money, risk is also a factor. You sit on something that is extremely valuable and there is a concrete risk that noone will buy it in your life time. An adventurer comes to you with a sword. You buy the sword for, say, 2000 gp, more money than ten peasants will earn in a lifetime. If you find the right buyer, you can get 12000 gp for it. The problem is that that particular buyer may not show up for twenty years. You stockpile these items and by selling them off at one piece per, maybe six months, you manage to get a good living out of it.

If the adventurer himself wants to sell it, there is no ebay.com for it. Very few people want to buy a 12000 gp sword when that is enough to buy armour and horses for 12 knights. The adventurer can sit on the sword, relying on luck to sell it. Most likely it will become the famous family heirloom in that case. He can spend time to find a buyer, but then that will essentially become his job. That way, he will lose time.

Really, the merchants in this case are like risk capitalists, they make an unsure investment for a potentially great profit. The risks are that the item may not be sold and the item has to be stored safely. I can't see that this is illogical.

 

[quindia]

How long will it be before UNALIGNED PC's realize that merchants have far more magic items and cash than the monsters?