Gold or Silver Standard?

[Lackhand]

Besides the total nonsensicalness of that statement (it practically violates a law of physics to imagine a good that costs the same at market as to produce), I don't think that leads to assumed wealth guidelines. It's just a cost to produce. The 4E system seems to be built such that you can have as much or as little magic as you want, and as long as everyone in the party has the same amount, game on. One playtest report specifically mentioned how they got all the way to 10th level without a single item being handed out, and no one really noticed.

At the very least, I really, really hope you're wrong. The wealth & item requirements in 3E were its hands-down worst feature, and one of the main reasons I gave up on the game. This may seem like an extreme statement, but if 4E still has wealth-by-level requirements, I will consider the whole project a failure. I realize it won't be failure in everyone's eyes, but it will be in mine. I'll just have to stick to Iron Heroes and Conan until they're updated to 4E Core mechanics.

Minor nitpick (I like to post those, don't I? I'm sorry!) and it's probably already been pointed out, but: I suspect the quote means "the amount that it costs to produce an item is the same for all items of the same level, and the amount that it costs to purchase an item is the same for all items of the same level", not "the amount that it costs to produce a ninth level item is the same as the amount that it costs to purchase a ninth level item, and this amount is equal for all ninth level items"

I had a brief freak out period in an old campaign where I had a nation of scholar-mages who used as their currency standardized potions and scrolls (with spellcraft checks to read them at DC 5 -- and the occasional cursed scroll being merely the cost of doing business as a moneylender!). Their moneychangers ran the magic-marts, and invested heavily in gemstones and slave-trading with the outside world. You do otherwise run out of raw ore pretty quickly.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Besides the total nonsensicalness of that statement (it practically violates a law of physics to imagine a good that costs the same at market as to produce)

I'm pretty sure they don't mean that the selling price is equal to the crafting price, but rather that the crafting price and selling price are EACH identical for a given item.

At the very least, I really, really hope you're wrong. The wealth & item requirements in 3E were its hands-down worst feature, and one of the main reasons I gave up on the game. This may seem like an extreme statement, but if 4E still has wealth-by-level requirements, I will consider the whole project a failure.

"Wealth and item requirements" ≠ "wealth-by-level requirements." First off, wealth-by-level was CLEARLY a suggestion in 3e, not a "requirement." You could easily ignore those tables altogether.

Secondly, just because players are assumed to have a certain amount of wealth/resources doesn't mean that those resources will be as necessary in 4e as they were in 3e. For example, I'm guessing/hoping that 4e will see the end of monsters with DR that requires magic weapons to overcome. We already KNOW that they're making certain other magical items less mandatory by doing things like giving red dragons the ability to "burn away" your fire resistance. And the move to per-encounter and at-will spells means that you won't need to carry around wands of Cure Light Wounds to heal up the party between encounters, while abilities like Second Wind will probably limit the party's reliance on healing potions.

So basically, a 15th-level party with no magical items will certainly be less powerful than a 15th-level party with the "recommended" wealth, but in 4e the DM can hopefully adjust for that by just pitting the party against monsters a couple levels lower, rather than radically adjusting stuff as you'd have to do in 3e.

 

[FireLance]

Gold? Silver? It's all just a way of keeping score. Does it really make a difference whether a longsword costs 15 gp or 150 sp? Or, for that matter, 15 sp or 150 gp? It's all relative to expected character wealth, after all.

That said, Thirdwizard's suggestion of silver at heroic, gold at paragon and platinum at epic does serve to cut down on the number of unnecessary zeros at higher level.

 

[Cadfan]

There will be wealth/level requirements in 4e. There HAS to be. Or at least their equivalent.

1: Encounters at a particular level are balanced by creating monsters that are appropriate for the expected power level of characters at that level.

2: Magic items increase a character's power level, often in combat.

3: If the increase from magic items is NOT factored in to monster design, then when characters get magic items they will be overpowered compared to monsters.

4: If the increase from magic items IS factored in to monster design, then characters who do not have magic items will be underpowered in comparison to monsters.

5: The only solution is to assume a particular amount of magic items, and create a system to tell DMs what that amount is at each given level.

Now, maybe the amount of boost provided by magic items will be lower in 4e. In 3e, thanks to +X to stat items and other stackable bonuses, magic items counted as a very considerable portion of a PCs power in combat. In 4e, maybe that portion will be lower, which will make a mismatch between expected items and actually possessed items less of a big deal.

But it will still be there if there are no guidelines.

This doesn't mean that we will get wealth-per-level guidelines precisely, but I expect to AT LEAST see a note in the DMG saying something like,

"The following chart shows the levels by which a character is expected to have obtained the listed magic items:" and then a chart that explains when a fighting character should have a magical sword of each power level, and so forth.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There will be wealth/level requirements in 4e. There HAS to be. Or at least their equivalent.

No, I don't think so. I think you're really overstating the potential problem massively, in a way that's faintly hilarious to anyone who played 1E/2E. Do you think monsters back then we built "expecting" X magical items of Y level per player? Because I sure as hell don't. Did the DMG have a table like the one you described? I don't remember it.

Didn't seem to hurt anything, in my experience.

In 3E this semi-psychotic "balance" obsession came in, and so we had our detailed tables of GP of magic items and monsters designed tightly around expectations, expectations, furthermore, which were NOT written into the DMG (like no advice on how you had to ensure your PCs all got +saving throw items if they didn't want to die a lot at higher levels), and guess what, whilst "monty haul" or "treasure-free" campaigns were more obvious, I seriously did not notice the game being significantly more balanced than when we were eyeballing it in 2E.

Maybe others did, I'd be interested to hear from them if so, but it seems that that system caused as many, if not more, problems than it solved.

I really honestly believe any similar chart in the DMG would have a similar effect.

 

[A'koss]

Boooooo!

Thanks for linking it though. At least it makes more sense than the 3E stuff and will presumably be less fiddly.

The real kicker of course being that if money can be spent on magic items, that is all large sums of money will ever be used for. This is the reason why I've always railed against them being on the market (at least the mid-level items on up).

Forget about PCs building castles, cities, armies, mansions, servants and the myriad other things PCs could be spending their money on to actually contribute to the setting...

 

[morbiczer]

I'm not sure bronze is a good idea as a coinage (tin is cheaper than copper, so it would actually be worth less than a copper piece; plus there's always a problem when alloys are uses as coins, since you can never be sure how much of each metal are in the coin).

Real life coins were always alloys to some degree or another.

The actual silver content of the coins varied over time. Usually it did decline, so newer coins had les silver content, and more copper (I think it was usually mixed with copper). This gradual decline in silver content was in times a major income source for kings and other rulers. Every year new coins would be minted, with usually slowly declining silver content, and people had to exchange their older coins for these newer coins in a 1:1 ratio. Since the old coins had more silver in them, ther was a profit for the king.

And in mediaval times gold coins were very rare for a long time. The Romans (and people before them) minted gold coins, but this practice came to a halt after the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe. There were just sliver coins + some byzantine and Arab gold coins. The mining of gold coins restarted in Europe just in the 13th century in Italy.

Western European currency was clearly silver based. I'm pretty sure there were no copper coins either. Although sometimes silver coins had far more copper in them than silver.


But D&D is not a scientific simulation of medieval times, so the old gp - sp - cp is okay I guess.

 

[FireLance]

No, I don't think so. I think you're really overstating the potential problem massively, in a way that's faintly hilarious to anyone who played 1E/2E. Do you think monsters back then we built "expecting" X magical items of Y level per player? Because I sure as hell don't. Did the DMG have a table like the one you described? I don't remember it.

Didn't seem to hurt anything, in my experience.

In 3E this semi-psychotic "balance" obsession came in, and so we had our detailed tables of GP of magic items and monsters designed tightly around expectations, expectations, furthermore, which were NOT written into the DMG (like no advice on how you had to ensure your PCs all got +saving throw items if they didn't want to die a lot at higher levels), and guess what, whilst "monty haul" or "treasure-free" campaigns were more obvious, I seriously did not notice the game being significantly more balanced than when we were eyeballing it in 2E.

Maybe others did, I'd be interested to hear from them if so, but it seems that that system caused as many, if not more, problems than it solved.

I really honestly believe any similar chart in the DMG would have a similar effect.

I'm probably a bad example, since I eyeballed in 1e and 2e, and I continued to eyeball in 3e.

What the guidelines did was to cut down on the amount of eyeballing that I needed to do in 3e when I followed them. I could quickly eliminate from consideration monsters that were obviously too weak to make a good challenge or too powerful for the PCs to handle.

 

[A'koss]

No, I don't think so. I think you're really overstating the potential problem massively, in a way that's faintly hilarious to anyone who played 1E/2E. Do you think monsters back then we built "expecting" X magical items of Y level per player? Because I sure as hell don't. Did the DMG have a table like the one you described? I don't remember it.

Didn't seem to hurt anything, in my experience.

In 3E this semi-psychotic "balance" obsession came in, and so we had our detailed tables of GP of magic items and monsters designed tightly around expectations, expectations, furthermore, which were NOT written into the DMG (like no advice on how you had to ensure your PCs all got +saving throw items if they didn't want to die a lot at higher levels), and guess what, whilst "monty haul" or "treasure-free" campaigns were more obvious, I seriously did not notice the game being significantly more balanced than when we were eyeballing it in 2E.

Maybe others did, I'd be interested to hear from them if so, but it seems that that system caused as many, if not more, problems than it solved.

I really honestly believe any similar chart in the DMG would have a similar effect.

Just a couple of things to consider. In 1e/2e you couldn't buy magic items so all that you could ever acquire were those (generally) appropriately leveled items you found in modules. Item creation in those days were more of a hassle than it was worth so was almost never done by the PCs.

Earlier editions also had a lot more "ceilings" than 3e had. Saving Throws were fundamentally different in those days - your saves got easier as you got higher level to the point where they were all pretty much gimmes to make in the high teens. AC had a hard limit (-10) so the range of AC across the game was very compressed and items only got you so far. Stats had a hard limit as well and there were very few ways to boost them. HD caps limited HPs from Con. Caps on Attack Progressions...

In 3e the sky was basically the limit (especially when magic items became easily purchasable) so more attention had to be paid to game balance.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Until the general costs of living are significant relative to the expected wealth of an adventurer, the use of gold or silver does not matter.

if a commoner can live in comfort for his natural lifespan with a 3rd level adventurers average wealth, I do not see the issue being one of any great importance.

END COMMUNICATION