Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
By the gods, how thankful am I that I shall never play 4e? Wow...every single point here sounds likes torturous nonsense. "Take -2 to bluff"? Dwarf killed a LAWFUL GOOD WIZARD who was there to HELP the party!
When you say "lawful good", you're referring to game mechanics. You make your choice on that, you're meta-gaming. When the dwarven believer says "necromancer" in a world where St. Cuthbert is shown to have no tolerance, that's roleplaying your character.
Wow. You really don't play any game I am remotely familiar with, do you? Not your (or anyone's) fault. Just a commentary on where the game has come...or gone...and, it is, gone.Blue said:But 4e item economy is so tightly a part of game balance that it's hard to penalize the party several parcels worth because of one character's action.
Actually, my longest running campaigns (one I'm still running) were very-low wealth/magic 3.x homebrew world. It has it's problems (3.x advances BAB but not AC with level, needing magic to keep that somewhat even), but it's workable with "non-standard" rewards. 4e on the other hand makes magic item economy less a reward system and more a secondary part of leveling. This isn't saying that a good or bad design choice, just saying how the game is put together.
You do have choices in 4e, DMG2 introduced alternate rewards including inherent bonuses to make the math work out and magic much more optional.