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<blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6132243" data-attributes="member: 22424">In the 2nd Ed books, and also Dragon magazine at the time, there was an awful lot of discussion about Monte Haul campaigns, about controlling access to magic, and so forth. So, when running the game, I basically had the notion that it was amongst the greatest and most deadly of DM sins to include too much treasure. That meant that I was running magic- and treasure-poor campaigns.3e, for better or worse, had very different assumptions built in, and specifically the assumption that PCs would get treasure and that they could, in general, buy those magic items they wanted. They even went so far as to include the Wealth by Level guidelines, codifying the exact amount of treasure that PCs &quot;should&quot; get. The game also gave fairly extensive guidelines on how common NPCs of various classes and levels were in the setting.Because these assumptions were different (and I'm not making any value judgement on which is 'better', BTW), I constructed homebrew settings in different ways - whereas in 2nd Ed the PCs would be lucky to find an honest-to-goodness Wizard in any settlement smaller than a city, in 3e there was one in most small towns.And everything goes from there. More magic items, and more classed NPCs, meant a higher level of fantasy overall, which tended to mean more monsters out there, which meant that most NPCs would have encountered at least some monsters in their lives, and certainly wouldn't react to an Orcish PC with quite the same horror that their 2nd Ed counterparts would have... and so on.As I said, if I were homebrewing a setting now, I would do things rather differently, including rewriting the WbL guidelines quite extensively, and simply throwing away the demographic guidelines (which are utterly insane anyway).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="delericho, post: 6132243, member: 22424"] In the 2nd Ed books, and also Dragon magazine at the time, there was an awful lot of discussion about Monte Haul campaigns, about controlling access to magic, and so forth. So, when running the game, I basically had the notion that it was amongst the greatest and most deadly of DM sins to include too much treasure. That meant that I was running magic- and treasure-poor campaigns. 3e, for better or worse, had very different assumptions built in, and specifically the assumption that PCs [i]would[/i] get treasure and that they could, in general, buy those magic items they wanted. They even went so far as to include the Wealth by Level guidelines, codifying the exact amount of treasure that PCs "should" get. The game also gave fairly extensive guidelines on how common NPCs of various classes and levels were in the setting. Because these assumptions were different (and I'm not making any value judgement on which is 'better', BTW), I constructed homebrew settings in different ways - whereas in 2nd Ed the PCs would be lucky to find an honest-to-goodness Wizard in any settlement smaller than a city, in 3e there was one in most small towns. And everything goes from there. More magic items, and more classed NPCs, meant a higher level of fantasy overall, which tended to mean more monsters out there, which meant that most NPCs would have encountered at least some monsters in their lives, and certainly wouldn't react to an Orcish PC with quite the same horror that their 2nd Ed counterparts would have... and so on. As I said, if I were homebrewing a setting now, I would do things rather differently, including rewriting the WbL guidelines quite extensively, and simply throwing away the demographic guidelines (which are utterly insane anyway). [/QUOTE]

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