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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6978562" data-attributes="member: 996">There was no reason if your goal was to get rich, sure.  Well, except, y'know, saving the world because that's where you keep all your stuff, I suppose.For instance, the DM would've had to've tweaked things to make the scrabbling-for-survival mercenary company I mentioned work (I'd think: go with inherent bonuses and simply not give out treasure to speak of).  You could also draw a line between mundane wealth and magic resources.  Instead of spending gold to enchant items, have another commodity (like the hokey 'residuum' in 4e; or 'mana' or whatever) that's fungible for making (or buying) magic items and certain other adventuring uses, but doesn't convert to gold/have consistent value in normal markets.  Including mundane purchases like Wands of Cure Light Wounds, Potions, low-level spell scrolls.  ;P  Yet that was part of the point, the game balanced on the back of that oddity.  FWIW.  Net, I do like that the game doesn't try to balance the availability of magical resources across classes with wealth/level and cheap commodity magic items.  Net.  But I do have to acknowledge that it's not great they didn't try, at all.Sure, just like Rule 0 said you could change whatever you want.  The environment or zeitgeist of the 3.x era, though, put a lot of weight on following whateer rule or rule-like-text could be found in the books.  It wasn't exactly an attitude that edition seemed to discourage, either.You had wealth/level creating an expectation, price lists and availability by population were just further justification.(4e hardly even bothered with that rationale - if you weren't somewhere you could buy & sell magic items, you could Enchant & Disenchant them at the same ratios.)1e also gave the DM advice on siphoning off treasure particularly training costs, but also money-pits - strongholds, spell research, and the like.The thing is, if gold has no great hard-coded mechanical use, if it can't be translated into power via magic items or leveling or what-have-you, it doesn't matter of you give out vast amounts of treasure or not.  It just matters what motivates the PCs (and the players).  How starkly the line between them is drawn has varied.  In 3e wealth/level and make/buy made not only gold vs magic items strictly fungible, it allowed you to trade exp for gold, too (via item-creation feats).  In 1e, while you got exp for finding gold, you couldn't necessarily convert it efficiently into power. 5e D&D didn't set out to support only one playstyle.  It's an available, supported playstyle.  You can ignore downtime and run a fine, fast-forward, campaign, if that's the kind of pacing you enjoy.</blockquote>

Verification