D&D 4E Prediction: 4e economy will have to change

[ArcaneSpringboard]

Given the news that magic items will be classified as common, uncommon and rare, with the common items the only ones that can be purchased by PCs or created using the Craft Magic Item ritual. This puts the distribution of uncommon items (which is most of the items currently listed) back into the hands of the DM.

One of the effects of this change is that the restriction to the number of Daily powers that the PCs can use from magic items is going to be eliminated.

However, it is my guess that another effect will be to change the economy of treasure allocation and spending.

The fact is that the vast majority of gold that gets spent right now is for other magic items. But if those magic items are not available to be bought, there isn't really a lot for the PCs to buy.

Also, with the magic items for the most part not being purchasable there is less reason for the treasure acquired per level to go up exponentially (which to me is rather annoying).

So I'm hoping that the treasure amounts for higher levels will be reduced.

Though that still brings up another thing...if PCs aren't buying magic items...what ARE they going to be buying? Strongholds? Airships?

 

[ferratus]

Dear god I hope so.

I would love the opportunity to buy stronghold spaces that do neat stuff in game. If you own an inn for example, you get to reroll your streetwise checks 1/day. Hirelings are good too.

I miss that part of the game.

 

[Scribble]

Yeah I would love to see PCs buying strongholds and airships and stuff.

 

[Mand]

This is something that I think 3e did better - gold felt more like an actual currency rather than a secondary form of experience that covers items instead of character level. In 4e, the game expects you to get X gold as you level up, and that you'll use that gold on magic weapons. In 3.5, yeah getting gold is nice but you aren't so mathematically directed to increase your weapon, armor, and neck items like 4e. If you were to spend gold on anything else, you're making your character mathematically weaker in a system that is based around mathematical balance.

I'd strongly support a change to make gold something that you'd actually use as a resource that promotes choices in-game as compared to a second experience count.

Part of this comes from the notion that, as was put by someone rather eloquently, by the time you hit epic level a PC can sell his back-up sword and feed an entire country full of people for a year. That doesn't make any sense to me. You SHOULD need to consider how much money any given vendor has, but saying the vendors can't buy your old loot breaks the economic assumptions of gold progression.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't really see a big need for things to change. For one thing I doubt it will be impossible for PCs to make uncommon items. Harder in all likelihood, but probably not impossible. Cash is already a small fraction of the total treasure value PCs get anyway, so why should it diminish even more?

As for things to spend it on... Well, AD&D went on for 20 years without there being ANY defined way to spend your cash AT ALL. I don't see where that's really necessary. Players will find things to do with money. Some will pursue making uncommon items or loading up on rituals and consumables, others may spend their cash on story related stuff. Some will just happily tote it around with them or do goofy things with it. There never really needed to be a justification for having cash, nor were the amounts ever sensible compared with any kind of economy except at very low levels.

There may be some discussion of alternative ways to use and distribute treasure depending on how you want it to work in your game, but in terms of 'rules' that kind of thing has always been firmly in the realm of game management suggestions vs being any kind of hard rules anyway. The existing 4e system is great for games that are fairly casual where the DM and players don't want to spend a huge amount of time thinking about treasure, so I really seriously doubt they're going to mess with that.

 

[the Jester]

Yeah, the hyperinflation at higher levels in the D&D economy since 3e really annoys me.

For instance, in epic 3e the cost in money of developing epic spells, items, etc. can easily be more than the gold held by the treasury of entire countries.

I would love to see incentives for pcs to buy strongholds and the like, too. One thing I have complained about since, well, 1e, really, is the lack of a good system for managing domains. That's a great place for a pc to invest their money! Yet there's no rule support for it at all in 4e and very little in earlier editions.

 

[keterys]

This is something that I think 3e did better - gold felt more like an actual currency rather than a secondary form of experience that covers items instead of character level. In 4e, the game expects you to get X gold as you level up, and that you'll use that gold on magic weapons. In 3.5, yeah getting gold is nice but you aren't so mathematically directed to increase your weapon, armor, and neck items like 4e. If you were to spend gold on anything else, you're making your character mathematically weaker in a system that is based around mathematical balance.

The only real difference is that 4e made it more clear to you - the situation was no different in 3e, except that it was easier to leapfrog to higher tier gear.

I'd strongly support a change to make gold something that you'd actually use as a resource that promotes choices in-game as compared to a second experience count.

For clarity, what kind of choices are you thinking of? I'd be all for players having a reason to invest in inns and castles, merchant empires and skyships (and I love the idea of getting things like Streetwise rerolls from them!), but if the choice is 'A good inn' or 'Better magic items or my character', then it might just be a false choice. Now, it may be that the new setup makes it 'A good inn' or 'Backup magic items that are relatively awful that I'll avoid using', well, sure, that's a choice. Personally I'm wondering if we'll see a lot more rituals used cause you can't use that gold for magic items you actually care about. Depends a lot on how much is actually "common". Certainly I'd not be surprised to see people still use +X generic magic weapons, armor, and necks because they're "common" and people will go "As neat as it is to once a day daze an enemy when I hit it, I'll take +1 attack and damage over that, thanks."

Part of this comes from the notion that, as was put by someone rather eloquently, by the time you hit epic level a PC can sell his back-up sword and feed an entire country full of people for a year. That doesn't make any sense to me. You SHOULD need to consider how much money any given vendor has, but saying the vendors can't buy your old loot breaks the economic assumptions of gold progression.

Yeah, the real answer is that you turn it into residuum or go to some place like the City of Brass, Sigil, or the Mercane city to sell it. We hit the same problem back in 3e, when the party's very low level adventures would eat up all the gold a city had, then they'd try to sell things and the merchants would go 'Well, we don't have spare change, but would you like to trade for some suits of full plate? We appear to have ten suits that we bought from, oh, you.'

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is something that I think 3e did better - gold felt more like an actual currency rather than a secondary form of experience that covers items instead of character level. In 4e, the game expects you to get X gold as you level up, and that you'll use that gold on magic weapons. In 3.5, yeah getting gold is nice but you aren't so mathematically directed to increase your weapon, armor, and neck items like 4e. If you were to spend gold on anything else, you're making your character mathematically weaker in a system that is based around mathematical balance.

I'd strongly support a change to make gold something that you'd actually use as a resource that promotes choices in-game as compared to a second experience count.

Part of this comes from the notion that, as was put by someone rather eloquently, by the time you hit epic level a PC can sell his back-up sword and feed an entire country full of people for a year. That doesn't make any sense to me. You SHOULD need to consider how much money any given vendor has, but saying the vendors can't buy your old loot breaks the economic assumptions of gold progression.

Uh, the amounts of gold floating around in a 3.x campaign were VERY likely to be at least as absurd as the sums you will find in 4e games. Even if they were an order of magnitude less they're still so completely off the scale compared to any kind of rational economic system that another decimal point is not even worth arguing about. AD&D characters CERTAINLY had treasure hordes of a scale similar to those in 4e. Heck, you HAD to have that kind of treasure in 1e just to level.

Vendors are never an assumed thing in 4e. The PHB just states that OPTIONALLY the DM might let you buy or sell magic items. Nowhere is it assumed you can do this by default, so any sense that it is ridiculous isn't something that comes from the rules. The DM can simply say "nope, you can't find anyone with a million GP to buy that sword in Podunklia" which makes perfectly good sense.

I'd also rather disagree with the idea that 3.5 didn't DEMAND that you have the proper magic items and the proper number and power of them. Items were MUCH more a core part of what your character could do and without them many characters at higher levels are virtually ineffective or lack any way to use significant aspects of their class features.

The reason it feels more this way in 4e is because there is an expectation of fighting a graded series of more difficult encounters where the opponents in each one have monotonically increasing defense scores and hit points. This is only an expectation though, and need not really be the case. It isn't even the case that combat has to be the be-all and end-all of a given game. Play your 4e game in a style reminiscent of 3.x (or AD&D) and you'll find that scratching for another +1 doesn't seem so terribly urgent all the time.

 

[ArcaneSpringboard]

I don't really see a big need for things to change. For one thing I doubt it will be impossible for PCs to make uncommon items. Harder in all likelihood, but probably not impossible. Cash is already a small fraction of the total treasure value PCs get anyway, so why should it diminish even more?

The problem is that by upper paragon and epic tier, the PCs are getting MASSIVE amounts of gold or gold equivalent...such that WotC had to invent Astral Diamonds in order to handle the huge numbers involved.

There may be some way for PCs to make uncommon items (by requiring them to get components and such), but it's enough that they simply won't be able to just walk into Sharn and buy them.

As for things to spend it on... Well, AD&D went on for 20 years without there being ANY defined way to spend your cash AT ALL. I don't see where that's really necessary. Players will find things to do with money. Some will pursue making uncommon items or loading up on rituals and consumables, others may spend their cash on story related stuff. Some will just happily tote it around with them or do goofy things with it. There never really needed to be a justification for having cash, nor were the amounts ever sensible compared with any kind of economy except at very low levels.

True...but my point is that it doesn't make any sense to have the magic item prices escalate so massively by later levels if the PCs aren't going to be buying them. The reason it's like that now, is that if you didn't have it escalate like that, you could easily buy higher level items rather than have to adventure for them.

If you have to get them via adventures _anyways_, then there isn't any reason for the magic item prices to get ridiculously high.

There may be some discussion of alternative ways to use and distribute treasure depending on how you want it to work in your game, but in terms of 'rules' that kind of thing has always been firmly in the realm of game management suggestions vs being any kind of hard rules anyway. The existing 4e system is great for games that are fairly casual where the DM and players don't want to spend a huge amount of time thinking about treasure, so I really seriously doubt they're going to mess with that.

We'll see, but if they do change the ridiculousness that is magic item prices at high levels, I'll be a happy camper.

 

[gtJormungand]

I would love to see incentives for pcs to buy strongholds and the like, too. One thing I have complained about since, well, 1e, really, is the lack of a good system for managing domains. That's a great place for a pc to invest their money! Yet there's no rule support for it at all in 4e and very little in earlier editions.

I would rather not see such rules, since D&D is for group-based adventuring games. Running domains or the like, in my experience, only focuses on a subset of the players. I would prefer for all the players to be able to be involved in each scene as much as possible.