Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kraydak" data-source="post: 3830331" data-attributes="member: 12306">Past editions of DnD have been based on "kill them and take their stuff" with the "take their stuff" being between a large and the dominant portions of the PC's motivation.  The success of this adventure-for-powerups design is obvious in the extent to which it dominates the market (RPGs/CRPGs).  This means there needs to be powerups to adventure for.  This means there needs to be widely available magic items, be they in treasure hoards or a market to be purchased with looted gold.  Of course, if there are widely available magic items, there will be a market for them, although the currency may not be in gold (there will be a way to convert between the magic item economy and the mundane economy though).Remember, if you can't spend gold on magic items, why can you spend gold at all?  This isn't an idle question.  For people to want gold, they need to be able to spend it on things they need.  At high levels, this means magic items.  Private armies?  The low level people who are interested in gold are irrelevant before the power of high level characters.  Castles?  Without exotic (read magical) defenses, castles are useless at high level.  If you can't spend gold on magic, you can't spend gold on relevant castles.  Bribes?  The only people you need to bribe are near or above your power level: if you can't spend money on magic items, then neither can they.  They will have no use for gold, and therefore won't be bribable with it.Even in 1ed with DMs who broke all hope of economic realism by vetoing magic item markets, you had the "christmas tree" syndrome.  It is inherent to any lootable powerup system.  The only way to cut back on the "christmas tree" syndrome without dropping the historically most successful design philosophy is by reducing the number of magic item slots (preventing people from dropping irrelevant amounts of cash on minor upgrades just to fill out their slots).  Making gold irrelevant... is irrelevant to mitigating the problem.</blockquote>

Verification