Gold or Silver Standard?

[3catcircus]

Two easy suggestions.

1. ALL magic items are rare and unique. That +1 sword oughta be highly valued, not because it is a +1 longsword, but because it is "Rat-squasher, the sword that saved the Village of Hovel from a horde of were-rats 50 winters ago and was thought to be lost forever."

2. The PHB prices are just fine, but you just have everyone on a silver standard by eliminating gold as anything other than either a unit of measure. That longsword still costs 15 gp, but it means carrying 150 sp instead of 15 gp - 3 lbs. of metal vs. 1/3 of a lb. Simple encumbrance and desire not to handle so much coinage makes it impossible to carry thousands of gold pieces and get people to accept them. A modern example is the joker who pays his taxes or buys a car using pennies - more often than not, he has to have a truck haul them in and most places won't accept them unless they are already in coin rolls.

 

[pemerton]

Speaking of which, 4E would benefit from some good hireling rules in the PHB (not in the DMG). When was the last time the PC's hired a half-dozen hireswords and some torchbearers? Where are the mules? What with the Warlord now passing out buffs left and right a second rank of Warrior archers would be a pretty nice benefit in the Heroic Tier.

I'm pretty sure that they won't be there. One of the stated aims (can't remember where - maybe one of Mearls's blogs excerpted into Worlds & Monsters) is to let every player take their turn when it is their turn, and not to clog when they take their turn. Thus they're getting rid of familiars, summoned creatures, the shapechange spell, etc.

They're not going to do all that and then reintroduce hirelings to reclog things.

There are mechanical solutions to hirelings which don't have to clog play - eg in HeroQuest/Wars they give adds to the PC's action rather than perform actions of their own - but I doubt that these solutions would work very well in D&D, with its very detailed timing and location rules for combat.

It's going to get worse for hired help in 4E without Summoning spells. "Check for trap dude" will quickly replace "torch bearer" as worst NPC job.

Most of those traps will be gone, I think, to be replaced by encounter traps (where detection is less of an issue).

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Two easy suggestions.

1. ALL magic items are rare and unique. That +1 sword oughta be highly valued, not because it is a +1 longsword, but because it is "Rat-squasher, the sword that saved the Village of Hovel from a horde of were-rats 50 winters ago and was thought to be lost forever."

Invent a mind control laser that makes me forget 25 years of finding +1 swords and I'll actually care again.

I think people take this sense of wonder thing to absurd levels. You aren't going to feel like you're 12 again. I'm never going to enjoy the Usual Suspects as much as the first time either. Give it up wildebeest, yer done.

 

[pemerton]

ALL magic items are rare and unique. That +1 sword oughta be highly valued, not because it is a +1 longsword, but because it is "Rat-squasher, the sword that saved the Village of Hovel from a horde of were-rats 50 winters ago and was thought to be lost forever."

Taking a slightly different tack from Ehren37:

The problem with this is that it doesn't recognise the difference between PC and players. Yes, PCs in the gameworld may well care about the history and significance of an item (just as collectors of artwork and memoribilia do in our own world). But players can't be expected to care unless the history and significance impact on their own gameplay.

Because D&D's mechanics are generally indifferent to matters of ingame history and significance (eg Rat-squasher is not noticeably better at squashing rats than any other +1 sword -even in the Village of Hovel - and is noticeably worse than any +2 sword out there), players usually (and justifiably, in my view) don't care about those matters.

Weapons of Legacy tried to bridge this divide between PC's interest and player's interest, by linking the history of an item to the unlocking of its powers. A bit cheesy, perhaps, but did it do the job? I've read posts from GMs praising it, but I've never had a sense of whether or not non-GM players liked it.

 

[hornedturtle]

Agreed. I'm thinking either 1/3 to 1/2 tops. What would be preferrable is something that lets you leach the power out of an existing magic item to fuel the creation of something else. Perhaps you destroy the pick, but in doing so enable the creation of a +1 weapon of another variety or something. What I'm really getting at is there needs to be a way to transform unwanted items into wanted items. Either via selling and buyi8ng what you want, rituals, commissioning the creation of something, etc.

Isn't that what the Artificer does from Eberron?

 

[CanadienneBacon]

Another thread talking about currency made me wonder... should gold be the standard in a POL setting?

I say no.

Right now, copper pieces make about zero sense since most things are priced in gold, especially from an adventurer's point of view.

Silver standard would allow other types of metals like bronze and electrum to be added while making things like platinum and gold 'real' treasures.

Opinions?

I am a gold-standard kind of DM, personally. Gold is what I have been using and will continue to use.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Like I said, it takes a special type of player interested in that. Out of my group of 6, only 1 is that type of player. I had to go to 3rd party supplements to get decent rules, which tells me that, in general, your average player isnt that interested in army building. Any of the completes far outsold Heroes of Battle if that tells you where interest lies. Hell, it wasnt until I pointed out that they lived in a hovel that the remaining 5 took any interest in actually spending gold on a remotely decent lifestyle for their characters. Even still, most of their gold goes towards buying more power for themselves, which is fairly understandable given their deadly lifestyle.

I would think it is largely a factor of what gets in the basic rule book.

1e and earlier had rules for building castles, attracting followers etc and it was quite a natural thing for the players to want their PCs to do across the board in my experience.

I was always disappointed that 3e had abandoned any concept of that kind of RPGing in the core rules. I'm not surprised that not many people were interested in it if there wasn't baseline support for those activities.

In 1e, castle building was the big money sink required to take money out of the PC's hands and into the economy. In 3e magic item 'purchasing' notionally took its place, but I found it much harder to believe in - spending 50,000gp on building a castle was actually lots of little bits of money going to lots and lots of people for their work. Spending 50,000gp on a single item... much harder to rationalise for me.

Cheers

 

[Fenes]

Makes me glad I don't use exact coin numbers anymore, but something a bit like the d20 modern's wealth levels.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

They're not going to do all that and then reintroduce XXX to reclog things.

Well, not right away.

But it's pretty much a fundamental (marketing) tenet of game design these days, to strip the rules down for relaunch, and then add complexity upon complexity until the whole thing has to be rebooted.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Isn't that what the Artificer does from Eberron?

Dunno, I've never really looked at the class. But imagine if you destroy an item, and trap the essence in a gem or something via ritual. You can then use that gem to fuel the creation of a similar item. It keeps items rare, allows pc's to dispose of unwanted items, and upgrade their own legacy gear.