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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brother MacLaren" data-source="post: 3507315" data-attributes="member: 15999">Generally correct, though visible in rudimentary form in earlier editions.  For example, the Master DM's Book (p. 4) had a method for creating high-level PCs and assigning wealth to them, with rough guidelines for pricing magic items and a guideline of one permanent magic item per 2 levels of experience (as well as one temporary item per 2 levels). Lower wealth isn't the issue.  Lower magical wealth is.  3e assumes that PCs can convert wealth to magic, and convert less-than-optimized magic to more-optimized magic.  The 2e DMG explicitly states "no magical stores exist" -- p. 83.  The Companion Set DM's Book talks about magic item shops on p. 26, and the sense there is clearly this: 1) it is up to the DM whether they exist or not, and 2) if they are, the available selection, and the selection to be sold to any particular PC, is likely to be limited.  So you can find all the gold you want in lairs, but at a certain point you don't have anything to spend it on.  In the two versions of D&D I've played before 3.x, it is not a default assumption of the ruleset that PCs can buy ANY magic items, let alone the exact ones they want.  The randomness of treasure and the lack of magic shops are what made earlier edition treasure less advantageous for PCs.Treasure Type F was pretty generous, and even so it wasn't likely to have ANY magical items.  NONE of the lair treasures were more than 35% likely to have magic items.  Some of the individual treasure types were, though even then you were rolling randomly.  That's 35% chance of a potion or scroll, 5% ring, 5% rod/staff/wand, 15% misc, 15% armor/shield, 25% weapon.  About 10% were cursed (14% potions, 2% scrolls, 0% wands/staves/rods, 13% rings, 17% misc, 10% armor/shield, 10% weapons).  A few were useful.  Suppose I'm a fighter using a +1 longsword.  Yay me!  Of all magic items we find, 2.6% will be a longsword of +2 or better!  Good thing I'm not a battle-axe specialist (0.125%).  And a magic bow?  0.0375% chance.</blockquote>

Verification