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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5001765" data-attributes="member: 51942">Why the 20% sale price needs to goOk, so how can we let PC's gain 1.45 to 2.3ei wealth per level without resorting to wishlists?Possibility #1: Just Use GoldWe could just hand out 2.3ei of raw gold and let them shop.  This just follows the DMG precisely; PC's will be a little weaker because they can't use gold right away but need to find a shop first and/or craft an item (but can't craft higher-level items).  On the other hand, they might make a bit better decisions than the DM.  (The DM can still restrict availability of specific items from shops and in any case that's not the focus of this house rule anyhow).While this works, this is boring (we never find items, only gold), and potentially troublesome for roleplaying since it makes it absolutely crucial to have fairly easy access to a magic item shop - and the PC's need to drag around absurd quantities of coinage.Possibility #2: Just Use More ItemsWe can't just hand out more items and hope for the best - because of the extreme difference engine in 4e economics, you lose 80% of all worth each time you sell an item.  This means that you'd need to hand out almost 5 times more items than usual to compensate if you keep the base system.  That sucks, because it makes the system volatile: sure, maybe you can't use all of those items, but if you're getting that many items, all of the sudden maybe you can (through luck or retraining) actually use a few, and that would represent a huge increase in weath; the system isn't very robust.  The problem traces its roots to the high cost of selling: the difference between buying and selling is so huge that it makes a big, big difference whether you get the right item, or you just get gunk.And that's exactly what we want to avoid: it shouldn't dramatically alter balance if you occasionally get something useful or less useful.  Selling stuff at just 20% of the list-price causes problems.Low Selling Price is not Important for BalanceIt's worth noting that this big loss isn't necessary for balance.  Because the total wealth rises exponentially an fairly rapidly so, any savings you make at low levels quickly become irrelevant at high levels simply because of massive, massive price rises.  Even without any buy/sell price difference, you'd still need 5 10th level items to afford just one 15th level item: in short, you just can't reasonably save up low level items to get a big boost later on because higher level items are just that much more expensive.  Some value loss is reasonable when buying and selling, of course, but the current approach makes wishlists and/or tailored items critical to reasonable balance.RecapInevitably thus, to permit some random item choice without unbalancing the game and heavily favoring the lucky few PCs versus the unlucky rest, we need to reduce the inefficiency of buying/selling (or disenchanting).</blockquote>

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