Excerpt: Economies [merged]

[Rechan]

This thread exploded while I went to bed.

I will say that, with regards to The Economy of Magical Items, I'll also encourage my PCs to leave heroic tier magical items with town/cities for the purposes of defense. The captain of the guard in Smalltown having a flaming sword owned by the city would be kind've neat. Also funding adventuring companies/orders/churches, and passing the magical items along them.

For Paragon tier, kings and dragons et al will likely appreciate adding to their collection, and probably will pay more than 20%.

Epic tier, um... I don't know. It'd probably be hard to sell the Sword of Kyuss around you know?

Also

If PCs want to negotiate a higher price from an NPC for their mission, I'd just add two treasure parcels together.

 

[Voss]

sorry, but if i am not able to defend myself properly, i would not run through the wilderness with items more worth than a whole kingdom...
...when you reach epic Levels, you don´t need merchants to bring items to you... you visit the city of brass where you get professionally ripped off...

The same applies at low levels too. The merchants don't need a target on their back for carrying magic items and other adventuring gear. The adventurers can suck it up, get some horses, and go to a city.

That way, the merchant can make a decent living sell goods that 99% of the population will actually buy, and avoid death at the hands monsters, bandits or adventurers turned bandits in the process.

 

[Ximenes088]

So, adventurers are heroic because normal people don't have destiny, or special powers, or other adventurer coolness.

Except merchants, who for some anamolous reason, far exceed anything the adventurers can do?

Does this apply to epic level adventures? When my PCs are 30th level, will they still be unable to plunder merchant caravans, due to merchants are all "elite monster way above your level"?

Is there any hope of injecting a little verisimilitude into a campaign where this is how merchants exist? Or, will it be like WoW, where NPCs in the town are simply not attackable?

Traveling merchants exceed heroic-tier PCs the way a lot of important NPCs exceed heroic-tier PCs. Some by a little, some by a lot, and some not at all. It requires no strain whatsoever to imagine One-Eyed Holger, the leathery trader whose heavily-armed caravan has been running the salvage circuit between the ruins of Lost Bahria, the almost-abandoned dwarven mines of Plunderstone, the remnant garrison at the Keep on the Borderlands, and the big city of Ailspire. He buys the relics that young adventurers pull out of Bahria, Plunderstone, and the Borderlands raiders, giving them cash on the barrelhead for the goods and bringing the comforts of Ailspire with him.

Sure, the adventurers could try going to Ailspire themselves to sell the goods, but the lords of the city would probably just confiscate them. They don't much care for strange adventurers meddling with their peaceful city and passing around powerful magical objects to gods-know-who. Holger can make deals there because the lords trust him not to sell to problematic people, and because he's got the friends and resources to protect what he buys. He can sell at the prices he does because people trust his goods; he _needs_ to sell at the prices he does because staying friends with the lords and paying his guards costs big money.

The adventurers can set up shop elsewhere, of course, and merely advertise that they have the goods for sale at a lower price. After they've beaten off the first dozen waves of thieves, swindlers, taxmen and cheats and waited eight months for someone who really does want to pay 80% book for that +2 shocking greataxe instead of 140%, they'll have earned all the profit they get. By the time the adventurers get powerful enough to dismiss these problems easily, an extra 60-80% of full market value on a +2 dagger is going to be about as important to them as the change in their couch cushions.

 

[eleran]

I'm guessing you didn't spend your college years with an article from Different Worlds magazine which detailed acreage needed for population support, plotting out precisely how big the farmlands around each city in your campaign needed to be...

I bet he also got to kiss girls in college

 

[TwoSix]

Ouch.

So, if players find a creative way to get some roleplaying, have some fun, and make a profit while they're at it, their reward is to know that their future will be less profitable to balance out the profit they just made?

Yea, but they don't KNOW that. I'll even let them keep the extra money for a couple levels, and then something storyline related comes along that makes them want to spend the extra money. Trust me, it's not as hard as it looks.

 

[Serensius]

Ouch.

So, if players find a creative way to get some roleplaying, have some fun, and make a profit while they're at it, their reward is to know that their future will be less profitable to balance out the profit they just made?

Why bother?

If I were a player in that campaign, it would be very hard to avoid metagaming myself and my fellow players out of even bothering to go to the big city to sell magic items. I would see it as an exercise in futility. Why should I go through all this trouble to earn extra profit, if the cosmic gods will punish me by reducing my future adventuring profit to balance out? Especially if I know the cosmic gods will also make it difficult for me to simply spend that cash on something else I value, like a new magic weapon?

Much easier to just dump the item on the local wandering merchant for a fraction of its worth and get on with my adventuring. Oh boy, cue up the next monster for me to kill and take its stuff.

First thought: But! What if it screws up the system? The players will be stronger than monsters of their level.

Second thought: So? They earned it!

Third thought: But that will create lots of work for me as a DM, in that I have to balance/handwave encounters and xp because the PCs have broken the system.

Fourth thought: It will balance itself after a few levels, maybe give them slightly less treasure over the course of several adventures. Also, the value of the extra items they bought might simply decrease over time; that Gauntlet of Ogre Power isn't looking as good at level 8 as it did when you purchased it for excess funds at level 4, is it?

 

[eleran]

Well, the economy still feels flimsy, the table error is yet another annoyance, and residuum is... rather silly. And the traveling merchants are outright ridiculous. 'The world is a dangerous place. I think I will load up on valuables and hit the road, *just in case* one of those rare bands of adventurers needs something obscure at the last minute'. *Stab, knife, rend* And the monsters now have more treasure.

So thats my first impression.

My second impression is, of course, that WotC should fire all their editors and hire competent ones. Its been a week of Just Too Many Cockups.

Haven't you sent them a resume` yet?

 

[Cadfan]

Ouch.

So, if players find a creative way to get some roleplaying, have some fun, and make a profit while they're at it, their reward is to know that their future will be less profitable to balance out the profit they just made?

Why bother?

You wouldn't know that was going on. You'd know that plot appropriate enemies challenged the PCs in various ways over time, and that for similar plot appropriate reasons, these enemies weren't all that wealthy. If I felt that the loot level was dropping so low that the PCs would start grumbling, I'd compensate with non loot rewards, like favors owed or non saleable assets like titles.

Look, there's a basic problem here, and it has to be solved.

Imagine the PCs, happily at level 9. They've just finished a major adventure, and they've upgraded much of their gear. Now they have extra gear they don't want, plus some new gear they can't use.

There are two ways this could go.

They could sell it for a low price, right now. If they do that, they'll get back 20% of the value of what they sold. Then they go back to adventuring, and the game's balance stays where its calibrated to be.

Alternately, they decide they want to find buyers themselves, and sell these items for full cost or near full cost. Lets say they do this. I as DM have a challenge. I need the PCs to have gear that's about level appropriate. I need the players to feel that their quest to sell their stuff was fun, and with effort, successful.

If I let them sell things for full value without any other intervention, I have a problem. The PCs will have more money than their level suggests, which they'll use to obtain more powerful equipment than their level suggests. My campaign enters a wealth acquisition spiral.

So how can I intervene?

Well, the easiest way is to make selling the items into a sort of quest on its own, where success in the quest is success in selling the items. So they finish this quest, maybe level up to level 10, and now they've got all the gear they had at 9th level plus a bunch of gold. Conveniently, enough gold that they can buy gear appropriate for 10th level.

And I make up the difference by adjusting the gear owned by the foes they encounter.

Everyone wins.

 

[Engilbrand]

A recent 3.5 game was RttToEE. I had some of the most fun actually playing out what we did with all of the money and crap we found. Silver tea sets and quality brandy got us in great with the local shopkeeper. I like stuff like that.
I love magic items, so I'm looking forward to seeing how I'm going to play things in the new edition. As a player AND a DM. I've never liked needing to "balance" treasures. I'll keep the rough level balances, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to screw them later if they do some good trading now. That just seems... dumb.

 

[Piratecat]

Well, when I start to rant, I'll let you know. But you folks have consistently done a poor job with it, and I was hoping for a bit more from the new edition. Previews with obvious errors aren't exactly a great way to sell a product.

You can discuss editing problems without insulting people. Do so.

I agree with Derren in this case; while what I've seen of the book editing has been quite good, I'm less impressed by error-checking from the web team. The web entires may need more eyes on them before they go live.