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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5002773" data-attributes="member: 51942">The players can still buy and sell items, so the in-game effect of a wishlist is still somewhat there.  Of course, it's attractive to avoid to much buying and selling as that's a loss-making proposition (and as that may cost in-game time).That's why I think the randomized system works so well: you can have flavor where you want it, but if you just don't care (often enough it doesn't matter) you can pick randomly and retain balance.It's also my experience that less die-hard players don't work well with wishlists.  They don't know what they want several levels in advance, and don't know what's feasible.  A wishlist is too open ended; a fixed budget handily restrains them so they only need to look for what's immediately affordable and useful.You can avoid some immersion issues by presentation; let them commission an item from a forging expert (costs time) or have it teleported in (interplanar trade, even - and 50% loss in selling would then be nicely explained away as to cover the costs of all this magic), let them find the right enchantment, but still need to increase the bonus by further enchantment.  Maybe a travelling genie pops (as in NWN, I believe?) up that makes it his business to cater to high-level adventurers (would be a lucrative market, after all)  In any case, I find wishlists even worse for immersion than magic shops - shops are just part of the economy, after all - the only weird thing is how well stocked they might be, and that you can tell a story around.To be honest here, this is basically quite similar to the 3e treasure economy, which worked just fine.  It's just much simpler to do in 4e since item prices scale much more simply so you don't need to do much in terms of accounting, and it's much more balanced since item balance is much better across the board.But the basic concept that items aren't tailored to the PCs and that the gap between PC's wishes and what they find must be bridged by shopping, crafting and some PC adaptation is just the same as in 3e.  I do find it somewhat amusing that it's actually easier to implement in 4e, though, even though it wasn't designed for it :-D.</blockquote>

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