Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinematics" data-source="post: 8334064" data-attributes="member: 6932123">NB: These are my own thoughts, and the train of thought I've had that lead me to the conclusions that I reached, and isn't really an argument about the design, or even necessarily the train of logic the designers used or intended.Trying to simulate the economical value of the items is, I think, an exercise in futility. The game is not designed to actually match a real economy, and it isn't useful to the primary purpose of the game design.  As long as there aren't any egregious issues, you can get away with a "good enough" economic build that's focused on the needs of the player adventurers.  Otherwise you add an extra burden to the GM and designers that probably doesn't rise to the level of usefully necessary.What we have, instead, is what appears to be a valuation of goods based on affordability parameters, gauged against expected player wealth, so that you can have an expected AC by player level. Armor costing 100,000 GP isn't set to that price because that's proportional to its cost to manufacture, but because the player shouldn't be affording that til somewhere around level 17. That makes things more predictable to the designers, GMs, and module builders.I will say, however, that I'm a bit uncomfortable with all the target ACs being given the same rarity.  Should a chain shirt +3 (AC 18 when including Dex) cost (approximately) the same as baseline full plate? From the perspective of final AC, that's fine, but it feels "off" that a high tier enchantment isn't much rarer to find than an unenchanted piece of armor.That, of course, is from the perspective of the enchanting system itself having its own scaling difficulty. IE: +1 takes effort, +2 takes more effort, and +3 takes extreme effort, regardless of what it's applied to.However...We know from other posts that the designers will be providing a more "exact" definition for HP, and it seems reasonable that a proper definition for AC will be associated with that. So what if the enchanting difficulty isn't bottom up, but instead top down? That is, the numeric scale that you're adding on top of the base equipment isn't, "How much am I improving this?", but instead is, "How much protection does this provide?"  So the base cost of a chain shirt is much cheaper than full plate, but you can enchant it to reach a similar level of protection as full plate. It's just that doing so uses as much magic/energy/cost as it would cost to make the baseline full plate itself.Or put another way, you can reach 18 AC either with pure physical materials (full plate), or with some mix of physical materials and "magic" (plus expectations of user dexterity).  In that case, the "magic" used to boost the weaker physical material has the same "cost" as what you might use pure physical material to achieve.  So you need 2 units of "magic" to give leather brigandine the same level of protection as an unboosted full plate, though you also require a certain amount of dexterity for the user to achieve that.  Or you could use less physical material for a chain shirt, but add 3 units of "magic" to achieve the same thing.So economically, the physical and the magical parts of armor are interchangeable and fungible.  The choice of what to buy is then based on proficiency, affordability, and the opportunity cost of purchased Dexterity.The intended goal of the system would then be primarily about making balanced encounters easier, rather than simulating a world economy.</blockquote>

Verification