Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 7424254" data-attributes="member: 21169">That DM does seem to have a similar attitude to the one I expressed in the OP, but it's clear the way he was going about it was heavy handed and wasn't working.Like I say the GM needs to get player buy in at the start. In the same way that everyone accepts that in a D&D game they roll a d20 to hit, and that the world they live in is full of crazy magic, then ideally the players in such a game would accept that they are engaged in a Sisyphean struggle - constantly pursuing wealth but never attaining it for long. It's a rule that needs to be made clear to the players at the beginning. One way it could work in practice is simply beginning every adventure with the PCs owning very little again. It doesn't need to be explained how the wealth was lost, relative poverty is simply part of the scene framing. I think this would work better than describing it in a detailed way, which makes it seem like something the players can fight but can't. This imo, is an important distinction between railroading and scene framing. Railroading looks like normal game play where the players get to make decisions, but has actually been predetermined.I played in a years long 2e AD&D campaign (it went from 1st to 8th level) where the DM wanted to keep us poor, for a similar reason to my OP - he thought it was implausible that wealthy characters would be motivated to go on adventures. The mechanisms he used were: not hand out large treasures in the first place, allow us to buy magic potions, and (I think) at one point he had my PC fined by the authorities. I didn't mind because I knew why he was doing it. But I think if a DM pulled the kind of thing you describe in a typical 3e game, without any warning or explanation, and didn't seem to have taken the PCs lack of magic items into account when constructing challenges then, like you, I wouldn't be happy.</blockquote>

Verification