D&D 4E Points of Light, Dawn War, and Magic Item Economy (4e)

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

I treat players buying magical items for their characters in 4e as an out of character decision similar to picking a new feat at level up.

In game there's no magical emporium with shelves and shelves of different magic items, but as a plot convenience there will be a traveling merchant who just happens to have exactly the items for sale that the players want their characters to buy, or a peasant who needs to sell a heirloom for fast cash, etc.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I didn't have magic marts in my 4e campaigns either. Treasure was almost always found via adventure. A major part of PoL is that the fallen empires that came before were mighty, and left behind vast treasures to be found by the daring.

The PCs might occasionally come across a rare being who had a few choice items that they'd be willing to part with, but that was the exception rather than the rule, and those guys certainly weren't hanging around Nowheresville. They were either traveling somewhere (in which case they were a rare but beneficial random encounter) or they could be found in some unusual place that the players would need to make an effort to discover (a Grove deep in the forest that is a crossroads to the Feywild, watched over by an ancient fey guardian).

 

[Derren]

It is often overlooked, and to be fair not many players care for it, but to keep a society as presented in the core books running you need quite an intensive trade network. You need so many different ressources that no single point of light could get them all by itself.

 

[Garthanos]

disenchanting giving the same yield as selling.

Yes a wonderful 20 percent return rate... players doing this extensively? seems unlikely except in the town of theorycraftville for dissers who do not like the idea.

 

[Garthanos]

I didn't use inherent bonuses, but I didn't use "item shoppes" either. As best I can recall not a single item was purchased in my 30 level 4e game. Items were sometimes found, mostly gifted (by NPCs, gods, etc), and then stepped up as the PCs levelled (using the approriate treasure parcel maths, and configuring the stepping up with appropriate in-fiction moments for divine boons, moments of self-realisation, etc).

Didn't they call items with their own advancing - heirloom item. But yes I have always thought of it as the hero learning deeper secrets of the items and such (you can add powers related to items too)

 

[Garthanos]

@Tony Vargas I agree that 4e is best read as having the intent that magic items will, at least typically, be 'build elements'. I am just not sure it absolutely follows that PCs are intended to be able to easily trot down to the Magic Mart and pick up a Staff of Ruin. I think the 'quest model' is closer to what was intended. The idea of 'wish lists' sounds a LOT more like facilitating that than anything else. The players provide a list of items THEY think would be cool to have, and then GM is enabled to work relevant and interesting treasures into the story instead of just giving away whatever they feel like or whatever happened to be listed in some horde listing in Module X, Room 42.
4e actually does NOT encourage purchase or make that much at all. Yes, it is easy enough, in theory, to make items, but it requires residuum (basically gold) and then precludes all the ways to amass enough to do so! Only 10% of all treasure is money by RAW, barely enough to enchant a few less critical items. If you try to sell/disenchant, you get drastically less than the item is worth, and thus cut into your overall power (IE you can have 3 good items or one that is the perfect item for you, take your pick). Buying, as I said before, also has an ADDITIONAL 'overhead cost' of 10-40% by RAW, making it the worst way to acquire items.

You can definitely buy items by RAW, but you will do so maybe only a few times in your character's career, if at all, and that isn't even factoring in that the GM is not obliged to make any arbitrary item available or put the seller in some convenient location.
Finally, with the rarity addendum WotC pretty clearly put a LARGE swath of the more specific items out of bounds entirely.

Rarity was dumb but other than that... yeh all this exactly.

 

[Garthanos]

4e actually does NOT encourage purchase or make that much at all. Yes, it is easy enough, in theory, to make items, but it requires residuum (basically gold) and then precludes all the ways to amass enough to do so!

In other words if a DM actually wants his players who are interested in making items they want there is a context for making story around it. You don't just stumble into the resources to accomplish it for the general case. Specific components are still an option where you make those the object of quest lines too.

 

[pemerton]

Didn't they call items with their own advancing - heirloom item. But yes I have always thought of it as the hero learning deeper secrets of the items and such (you can add powers related to items too)

It was talked about in Adventurer's Vault, pp 197-98, under the headings Item Levels as Treasure and Empowering Events.

 

[Garthanos]

EDIT: This is all solved in HoML by the 'boon system'. Basically when you acquire a major 'item' you gain a level. There need not be any separate treasure system, and all acquisition becomes highly organic. You can, of course, have quests, etc. and it could run in a range of styles from basically 'like 4e' to 'like AD&D' within that framework.

Heavy emphasis on like AD&D though you collapsed well everything into the item economy... and effectively created a DM/Story gate on every item gained via advancement.

It was talked about in Adventurer's Vault, pp 197-98, under the headings Item Levels as Treasure and Empowering Events.

There is one I haven't purchased yet!

 

[Tony Vargas]

Rarity was dumb but other than that... yeh all this exactly.

I did not care for rarity - it was just a flimsy excuse to make some items of a given level more powerful/potentially-game-breaking than others, in lieu of making them simply cool or interesting.

But I /really/ didn't like dropping the milestone limit on item dailies, nor, before that, the rapid proliferation of item encounter powers. Milestones were a nice pacing counterweight to the 5MWD impulse of dailies, I'd rather they'd gotten more emphasis as time went on.

But, that's off my own topic. which is fine, I feel my concerns have been adequately addressed.