Magic Item Wishlist: Yea or Nay?

[Tallifer]

Using my system (detailled on page eight in this thread, but that depends how many posts-per-page you have your settings), the need for thousands of platinum is negated, because the adventurers simply encounter a pile of treasure: much of that treasure is presumed to be readily portable wondrous artifacts of marvelous power: when the adventure is done, the players figure out what they got. They investigate and appraise the various trinkets and things and figure out what they are.

On the other hand, there is another way to use my system of abstracting the treasure during the adventure and realizing it specifically once the adventure is finished. The dungeon master could say that there are great heaps of gold, heavy statues, piles of trade goods and bits of gold which must be pried from the gilded walls and statuary. Either way, the math and the statistics do not slow down the adventure, because that will all be figured at the end.

 

[Dausuul]

I hope it's OK to answer your rhetorical (and mildly sarcastic, in an inoffensive way) question with a straight answer.

It preserves the game/metagame distinction - the wishlist is purely an artifact of the metagame. Whereas item creation is something that happens within the gameworld. So eliminating the ingame gold and creation steps, and instead just sticking the item into the encounter as something to be found by the PCs, or having the item given to the PC by an NPC, makes a different type of story possible.

Well, fair enough. If you want the player to decide what stuff the PC finds in dungeons, that's a difference in taste and not something that's going to be reconciled mechanically. Me, I feel that treasure hoards are the DM's province and players should not expect to dictate any part of them, except what they can influence in-game through their characters' actions. I don't tell you what feats to put on your character sheet and you don't tell me what magic items to put in my dungeon.

But still. If you do want the player to dictate what loot the PC finds, why does the DM have to be involved? While I was being sarcastic above, the question isn't purely rhetorical. Why not just do like Tallifer suggests and give the players a "magic item budget" where they fill in the contents of a treasure hoard? Wish lists are a waste of everybody's time.

It also reduces the need to incorporate ludicrous quantities of gold into your treasures.

The ludicrous amounts of gold is an artifact of the magic item pricing system. It's only necessary because the "+1 sword" sacred cow managed to escape the 4E slaughterhouse. If +X items were got rid of, item prices could scale at a much more reasonable pace.