D&D 5E No Magic Shops!

[Maxperson]

I think you are missing my point about how the pricing of magic items is unlike, say, a rule for grappling or the mechanics of a spell. You can test the latter by saying, "Hey let's have a mock combat and see how grappling works and test Witch Bolt." But how do you do that with magic item prices? "Ok, I'm going to give you each 100,000 gold and 10th level characters. Let's pretend you're in a magic shop and haggle over prices."

The problem isn't the playtesting, but rather that the game doesn't take magic items into consideration. As pure bonus, being able to buy whatever you want would break the game very quickly.

To playtest, though, you just arbitrarily pick numbers. 1,000gp for common, 10,000gp for uncommon, 25,000gp for rare, and 50,000gp for very rare. Then give the 10th level party 100,000gp and say buy whatever you want. They play it and see if they think that amount of gold and those prices break the game. If yes, tweak the prices upwards. If no, tweak them downwards. You do that for each level with each playtest group and eventually you'd have opinion that you could get the aggregate of and would be useful. However, as stated above, 5e isn't designed to make that feasible like 3e and 4e were.

 

[delericho]

Ok, so you meant the massive group of anonymous volunteers who claim they have used the rules in an actual game and are willing to fill out surveys.

I meant the same thing WotC do when they say "playtesters".

I could go on...but hopefully do not need to. "Playtesting" is not a useful option here. Well, that's not completely true: the bizarre numbers that would result would at least make the current rarity pricing look logicial.

That's why my previous post didn't go with playtesting alone - you have the professionals come up with what they think is about right first and then use playtest feedback to tweak it.

It is, of course, impossible to get a set of numbers that will be perfect, for all groups in all situations. Which is true of everything else in 5e (and every other RPG ever). But that doesn't mean the process is a waste of time - it gets you closer than the alternatives.

(It is entirely valid to say that doing so isn't worth the effort, of course. That's why I prefaced my previous comments by putting aside the question of 'why' and only talking about 'how'. By this point in the thread, we've pretty much exhausted why or why not.)

 

[Warmaster Horus]

You can really see the influence computer games have had on RPGs in this thread. Terms like balance, fairness, etc were just scudding clouds on the horizon when I started playing D&D. I don't see the need to codify gold/magic/'power' in D&D to an absolute scale. It's like trying to make a truly informative CR system - it can be done, in a computer game where all the abstraction is handled under the hood, but has too many mingy bits to make work in a pen & paper.

 

[Guest 6801328]

The problem isn't the playtesting, but rather that the game doesn't take magic items into consideration. As pure bonus, being able to buy whatever you want would break the game very quickly.

It's not either/or. Both are problems, independent of each other.

To playtest, though, you just arbitrarily pick numbers. 1,000gp for common, 10,000gp for uncommon, 25,000gp for rare, and 50,000gp for very rare. Then give the 10th level party 100,000gp and say buy whatever you want. They play it and see if they think that amount of gold and those prices break the game. If yes, tweak the prices upwards. If no, tweak them downwards. You do that for each level with each playtest group and eventually you'd have opinion that you could get the aggregate of and would be useful.

I don't think that works at all. If it's not a real character in which you have long term investment, you are not going to make realistic decisions. You might get some data about relative worth between items, but it's happening in a total vacuum. It's only valid data if it's a character you actually plan to keep playing for a long time. Otherwise the gold you are spending has no actual value.

And even then, the value of gold varies dramatically game to game depending on how plentiful it is and what the other options are for spending it.

EDIT: Oh, and if you do test under the premise of "buy whatever you want" that is really only testing for the Magic Mart model. You might learn that players are, on average, willing to pay 6x as much for a +1 sword as a +1 hammer, but that only tells you something about the relative popularity of swords. If the DM only makes the hammer available, it's value would go way up.

 

[Guest 6801328]

That's why my previous post didn't go with playtesting alone - you have the professionals come up with what they think is about right first and then use playtest feedback to tweak it.

Respectfully disagree. For all the reasons I have been offering, there is almost no valid data to be gained from surveys without controlling for a bunch of other variables (abundance of gold, options for spending, and most especially investment in characters). 'Simulation' of the rules is worthless in this case.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't think that works at all. If it's not a real character in which you have long term investment, you are not going to make realistic decisions. You might get some data about relative worth between items, but it's happening in a total vacuum. It's only valid data if it's a character you actually plan to keep playing for a long time. Otherwise the gold you are spending has no actual value.

It actually works better without that investment. The investment will cloud your thinking with biases and fears that make some fights seem easier and others seem harder. Without the investment you will give a more objective opinion on whether the fights are easy, hard, or just right. It's not about whether the gold has any value at all, but rather whether the magic items you buy break the game or not at the wealth by level currently assigned to the playtest and the prices of items.

And even then, the value of gold varies dramatically game to game depending on how plentiful it is and what the other options are for spending it.

The gold would be the same for all groups. This is a wealth by level test, not one where the DM has the ability to independently change things. In the real world DM can tweak gold, just as they always have. For the rules, though, the playtest groups would not have that option. The goal is to provide a baseline.

 

[delericho]

Respectfully disagree. For all the reasons I have been offering, there is almost no valid data to be gained from surveys without controlling for a bunch of other variables (abundance of gold, options for spending, and most especially investment in characters). 'Simulation' of the rules is worthless in this case.

That feedback loop has been used extensively in other areas of 5e, some of which are equally vulnerable to external factors (balancing the monsters in particular). If it's without value here, it's without value in those other cases as well. And given the quality of 5e overall, I refuse to believe that.

 

[Guest 6801328]

It actually works better without that investment. The investment will cloud your thinking with biases and fears that make some fights seem easier and others seem harder. Without the investment you will give a more objective opinion on whether the fights are easy, hard, or just right. It's not about whether the gold has any value at all, but rather whether the magic items you buy break the game or not at the wealth by level currently assigned to the playtest and the prices of items.

But if the gold has no value (because it's not your character, and you will never have an option to spend it on anything else) then it has no value. It's meaningless to ask players whether they would be willing to spend 50,000 gold on a sword if they will not only never have another opportunity to spend the gold, but will also never have an opportunity to use it.

Milton Friedman used to say that there are four ways to spend money:

• You can spend your own money on yourself, in which case you are most likely to get a good deal on a desired good.
• You can spend your own money on somebody else, in which case you are likely to get a good deal but it may not be a desired product (e.g., socks as gifts)
• You can spend somebody else's money on yourself, in which case you will get a desired product but not necessarily at a good price (e.g. expense accounts)
• You can spend somebody else's money on somebody else, in which case all bets are off (e.g. government spending).

Simulating the purchase of magic items falls squarely into the last category. There are no actual incentives to balance
cost vs. utility. All you are measuring are players preconceived notions of value vs. utility, by players who already have an opinion of such things.

To go back to the example of spells, it's kind of like asking players for their opinion on a spell, as opposed to having them actually playtest it.

And maybe that's what you want: player opinions of the relative worth of magic items. But that is heavily, heavily biased by subjective perception, because nobody has enough objective data to determine an item's actual worth. Deck of Many Things might be over/under prices for reasons (nostalgia?) that have nothing to do with it's actual utility.

And if you are going to base it off something as variable as opinion, why bother? Why not just tell DMs, "Charge whatever you think is appropriate." It just doesn't matter.

The gold would be the same for all groups. This is a wealth by level test, not one where the DM has the ability to independently change things. In the real world DM can tweak gold, just as they always have. For the rules, though, the playtest groups would not have that option. The goal is to provide a baseline.

Again, not their gold, not their character. Bad data.

 

[Guest 6801328]

That feedback loop has been used extensively in other areas of 5e, some of which are equally vulnerable to external factors (balancing the monsters in particular). If it's without value here, it's without value in those other cases as well. And given the quality of 5e overall, I refuse to believe that.

I think you're still missing my point.

You can test monster balance by giving players pregens and asking them to fight the monster. It doesn't matter whether they plan on playing those characters again, or how long it would have taken to get to that level, or what other monsters they might have had the choice in fighting. You roll some dice and find out the fight was easy. 10,000 other people do the same thing, and find out on average the characters defeated the monster while losing 0.378 of their health. Useful data.

A more appropriate comparison to the magic item survey would be giving the players the pregens and asking, "You see a such-and-such monster: do you fight it, or try to run away?" 99.9% of the players will fight it, because they won't care if their pregens die. You learn nothing.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Here's another way of asking it. Let's say WotC does this survey, and 100,000 people respond, and WotC publishes the data without any editorial correction. It turns out +1 Warhammer is calculated to be worth only a fraction of what a +1 Sword is worth. Do you actually price it that way in your game, or do you rely on your own opinion/intuition?

Remember, we aren't talking about player entitled shopping; these are just guidelines for the DM. Do you use the calculated price, or do you overrule it?

If you overrule it because you trust your own sense of what items are really worth, why do you want official numbers?