NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7752333" data-attributes="member: 82106">Certain problems confront FRPG game designers (and maybe to different degrees other genres as well). The first is the need to keep giving out treasures, and for those treasures to increase in value as the game progresses. Otherwise there's really little meaning to character progression. This is then coupled with the 'dragon horde problem', which is basically that fantastical hordes of wealth, of preposterous size, are a part of the fantasy genre, and thus it must be possible for at least some sort of high powered PCs to acquire them.The next problem is economics. Even the most ignorant game designer understands the basic concept of the value of money. No matter how precious or rare something is there is SOME price at which its owners will part with that thing. If not, then there is certainly some price at which some 3rd party will part the owners from said thing violently and sell it to you, which amounts to the same thing. Thus that character who has the dragon horde, he can get whatever he wants, pretty much. At least his money COULD get him most anything.Because treasures in RPGs are generally fundamentally structured as rewards for play, any attempts to part PCs from said rewards is, in effect, dickish and unsporting. Thus, at least within the paradigms of play which D&D and its ilk generally work within, there simply is no general solution for the 'treasure problem', and if magic items exist, then the treasure problem is also a magic item problem. Use rates, and simply making treasure 100% GM controlled and thus at least fantastically expensive, have been the standard solutions. They sort of work, but they always add some annoying subsystem to the game which is arbitrary and requires bookkeeping. Even 4e never REALLY solved this, and the attempts of its authors were in some ways quite embarrassing.</blockquote>

Verification