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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 6162857" data-attributes="member: 6669384">Okay, I see two problems with your question/argument.  The first one is strictly numbers:  The arms and armor you offer retail at 100k.  The ring retails at either 180k or somewhere north of 300 k.  In neither case do I have to come up with 20 k.But while numbers irk me, they're kind of a distraction.The other problem is the real one:  A martial character *needs* arms and armor.  The option you offer says, "Would you rather go into melee unarmed and unarmored, but relatively fireproof, or are swords and claws the bigger threat?"In short you're asking me to compare apples to oranges.  Comparing apples to apples would be, "You can add Dancing and Flaming Burst to your sword, and Ghost Touch to your armor and shield, or you can have this shiny ring of Greater Universal Fire resistance?"Presuming that the bonus add-ons to my arms and armor came out to something like 180 k, I'd take the ring.  I'll run into energy damage far more often than I'll face non-corporeal undead.  Of course, if the price of the ring is over 300k, I'd be looking at a lot more nifties on my arms and armor to match the price.  That becomes a different question.  Say if we were talking Ethereal on the armor, and Holy on the weapons, so I could go after the non-corporeals on their own turf and smear them, and add in some Dimension Stride boots, I might decide to buff the other equipment instead.  Or I might not.  I'll still run into fire, cold, acid and electrical damage more often than I'll go chasing undead from plane to plane.But both forms of this question presume that the character is of a level to be tossing hundreds of thousands of gold around at once.  It's the rare case.Looking at the whole scope of the items in MIC, and comparing them to the scope of items in the DMG, they amount to a bargain hunter's dream.  The MIC offers more power, over all, for less gold, and it offers it to pretty much every level of PC.  The stated goal of the repricing was to make more and more varied magic available at lower levels.You want to re-price the DMG items to the new scale?  Cool.  Drop the treasure handed out and the "wealth per level" to match, and you're good.  The average 5th level PC, walking into a common town or village is carrying enough wealth on their body, in the form of magical gear, to buy that town.  But more power for less gold under the current economic scale spells power creep.I've asked that question several times now:  How is it anything but power creep?  Nobody's even tried to answer it.  They've tried to shuffle and side step, "Well, it's just more efficient, more options, more opportunity."  Ignoring the fact that all of these "more" things are just other ways to say more power.I think the linkage that's been missing, that would make it clear, is the linkage between character level, money available, and resultant power.  All the arguments I've seen have turned a blind eye to the link between level and wealth.The question is, do I get that Necklace of Adaptation at 7th level, or do I have to wait until 9th?  Do I get my Universal Resistance Ring at 16th level, or do I have to wait until 19th to afford it?Under the MIC items like those come into play sooner.  The Wealth per Level chart in the DMG lays out a good scale, and while we might not all use it as a hard and fast guideline, we can at least use it as a reference.  If the wealth difference between level X and level X+3 is 40% (the approximate difference between 308,000 and 180,000), then dropping prices by 40% effectively gives a character at Level X the magical gear horsepower of someone three levels higher.And that, my friends, is power creep, by the numbers.</blockquote>

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