Standard DM behavior?

[Obryn]

It looks as if the functional role of magic items has been transformed into "build components" like parts of starships in Starfleet Battles or cars in Car Wars. Gold pieces are simply the units of the "points system" used for that aspect of construction.

More or less. At a very basic level, GP in both 3e and 4e is a secondary XP system which - unlike your main XP pool, generally - you spend for specific character upgrades.

I know it doesn't sound romantic, and it's pretty much not, but there you have it. Gold is 3e/4e D&D's point-buy character building.

-O

 

[Barastrondo]

It's all a spectrum. On one side, the wish lists and magic shops that enable a player to get what the player would like. On the other side, random treasure placements that care nothing for whether or not the party fighter is a flail specialist, it's a longsword again. More tellingly, on one side, the gold piece economy and the magic economy are separate things, on the other they are one and the same. I think there are many games that sit somewhere between the two extremes, where the DM places treasure with specific PCs in mind but doesn't adhere to the players' specific lists. Nobody does their ulcers any favors by assuming that the people who are on one side of the viewpoint are sitting all the way out at the end of the spectrum.

I also don't think it's really all that generational; I know that the concept of being able to find fabulous treasures in cramped and interesting shops has been with us for a long time. Robert Asprin's Myth series was an example I recall from my youth, and of course there are the peculiar bookshops and other stores where one could find all kinds of Life-Changing Deals from all sorts of young adult fantasy. (Though I admit So You Want To Be A Wizard was found in a library, not a shop.) Were there odd shops where you could buy magic in Guardians of the Flame? I forget. Anyway, really not a new concept in fantasy. There's nothing quite like what happens when that trope collides with the demands of gameplay, but as other people rightly point out, that's true of everything about D&D. The demands of gameplay change every fantasy trope in some way or another.

It's a complicated issue that varies from game to game. I can't agree with any statement that gold pieces "are simply" this or that if you talk about more than one roleplaying group at a time. In one group, you may find a simple answer. Beyond that, every point on the spectrum is going to be filled.

 

[DarkLord Of DForce]

I tend to put a pretty low cap on the level of available items.

Eg in my 3.5e game, you can quite easily buy items up to 4th level. 5th & 6th, such as +2 swords, are available from a very few sources for PCs in good standing. 7th+ need to be found.

In my 4e game, items of the Heroic Tier (1-10) can often be found or commissioned. Low Paragon tier items may be available very rarely, from the greatest wizards and such, probably at a big mark-up unless you're in good standing. High Paragon and Epic items are generally not available to buy or commission.

So, low level PCs can buy stuff pretty much as normal. High level PCs can buy minor stuff but powerful items must be crafted themselves, found, or quested for.

And this makes good sense to me. It strikes a fair balance. Some people mentioned high level items in earlier messages - keep in mind we were restricted from Artifacts and Wondrous items from the start of the game. At the rate of gold we're getting (48 gold from the last 2 large encounters), its not likely we're gonna be *able* to buy any big ticket items. Heck, we'd be happy to have enough to buy at our level.

For another example, at level 7, our swordmage asked the DM if he could buy a pair of sandals, lev1, heroic tier, 520gp. At that moment, he had nothing on his feet (empty slot).
DM told him no, that the weather was too cold - no one would be selling sandals. But he wouldn't let him buy any kind of boots either. So he's bare-footed in the cold weather the DM mentioned.

Well, this thread sure has gotten "long-ish"... but just so everyone knows, we are still having fun. None of us expect to have the top level items handed to us on a silver platter. We expected to have to earn things, thats part of the fun of D&D. We just didn't expect to have about the harshest level of restrictions put on us. When one of our DMs said that this was the way something was done in 3.x, and I gently reminded them that we are playing 4e, not 3x...I got a baleful glare +3 for my efforts.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this msg thread, and it is D&D so we ARE having fun...

 

[Oryan77]

So he's bare-footed in the cold weather the DM mentioned.

I've seen you allude to something several times, and I'm not trying to criticize your style of gaming, but you really should try to think of the game in broader terms than if it was just a video game. I only mention this based on what I've read from your posts...that's where my assumptions are coming from. Don't get upset with me if I'm totally wrong here

Unless this PC is the kind of guy that would be walking around barefoot (maybe a Barbarian type or something?), why wouldn't he be wearing boots? Just because he doesn't have magic boots to write in his feet slot on the character sheet? It's odd that the DM would also mention that he is barefoot. Boots are part of normal clothing....normal clothing is part of character creation. I give PCs normal starting clothes for free because; who's running around naked in town besides me on a Friday night of binge drinking? Just because this guy doesn't have magical boots doesn't mean he must be barefoot. I'm wearing shoes right now and mine aren't magical.

You also mentioned way back about not having anything to spend gold on if you can't buy magic items at the shop. I understand that a lot of players can't wrap their heads around the fact that you can think of a D&D campaign as if it were a real world. I get so much enjoyment out of my characters when I treat them like a real person instead of just buffing them up with better equipment so they are more powerful (like you'd do in a video game). My characters own homes, some owned shops and hired a manager to run it while he's off saving the world, one had a secret hideout that he had custom made in the back of a tavern and paid rent for it. One of the PCs in our game owns a tower and is currently saving money to refurbish it and do construction on it (adding a torture chamber & a guest room for other PCs). I'm sure if you gave a character a goal in life, it would cost money and be something that you can put money towards. Maybe he wants to start a thieves guild or be known as a master wizard that started a mage school...that'll cost money. Maybe he wants to own a large lot of land with a Keep on it so he can eventually retire in peace.

Not everything in the game has to go towards optimizing your PCs power level unless that is the kind of game the DM expects. But from my experience, the most fun and interesting characters were always the ones that had more "life" to them. Anyone can make a He-Man character, not many people seem to make a very interesting character though.

If your group doesn't like that type of game, nothing wrong with that. I just thought it was really weird that you guys would be claiming a guy is barefoot just cause he couldn't buy magical shoes. So I wanted to describe another way of approaching the game in case it may have never been considered.

 

[Ariosto]

It's kind of funny how things go. The original "dungeon game" pretty obviously anticipated common elements of many of the computer games that came along later. Early D&D was unabashedly "just a game" to a remarkable extent (reaction against which drove a lot of RPG development since).

From a purely technical game standpoint, it could have worked just fine with gold as the one thing to bring back from the dungeons, used to purchase experience levels and magic items alike. T&T still has a "pay to learn" system for spells, and originally had armor that essentially functioned as extra hit points for a price.

Perhaps oddly to some, though, the designers regarded magic as more than just "equipment". There are considerations of course that can be appreciated in pure game-design terms, such as that the original game was very keenly one of limited information and of long-term strategies (in which information gathering was prominent).

However, there was also the factor of what the game was about thematically, both in terms of fictional referents and in terms of how "story" and "role-playing" were conceived.

Those latter terms are often raised as objects championed in objection to the design of the original RPG, but there's a difficulty in that they tend to be given different meanings in the new context. As a result, they have come along with changes that can seem even more "gamy" from the traditional perspective.

I just thought it was really weird that you guys would be claiming a guy is barefoot just cause he couldn't buy magical shoes.

That's a kind of wackiness I don't recall having encountered before! In fairness, there are no normal shoes in the 4e PHB equipment lists -- and it was a "Murphy's Rules" moment to notice the lack of oil for lanterns (rectified in errata). Once upon a time, one might have counted on common sense ...

 

[Desdichado]

That's something I'm not getting, either. It's not to me a matter of "can" but what in fact has been standard practice in the D&D I've known.

Your arguments 'round here would get a lot more traction if you'd drop the obviously fallacious assumption that D&D "as you've always known" is the only D&D there is or ever has been. You're not the only one who's been playing D&D for several decades, y'know, and the way you've always played it isn't the only way it's been played throughout those decades. Your attempts to cite how D&D was played in the 70s by a handful of people come across as pretty irrelevent, frankly.

 

[DarkLord Of DForce]

I've seen you allude to something several times, and I'm not trying to criticize your style of gaming, but you really should try to think of the game in broader terms than if it was just a video game. I only mention this based on what I've read from your posts...that's where my assumptions are coming from. Don't get upset with me if I'm totally wrong here

Unless this PC is the kind of guy that would be walking around barefoot (maybe a Barbarian type or something?), why wouldn't he be wearing boots? Just because he doesn't have magic boots to write in his feet slot on the character sheet? It's odd that the DM would also mention that he is barefoot. Boots are part of normal clothing....normal clothing is part of character creation. I give PCs normal starting clothes for free because; who's running around naked in town besides me on a Friday night of binge drinking? Just because this guy doesn't have magical boots doesn't mean he must be barefoot. I'm wearing shoes right now and mine aren't magical.

You also mentioned way back about not having anything to spend gold on if you can't buy magic items at the shop. I understand that a lot of players can't wrap their heads around the fact that you can think of a D&D campaign as if it were a real world. I get so much enjoyment out of my characters when I treat them like a real person instead of just buffing them up with better equipment so they are more powerful (like you'd do in a video game). My characters own homes, some owned shops and hired a manager to run it while he's off saving the world, one had a secret hideout that he had custom made in the back of a tavern and paid rent for it. One of the PCs in our game owns a tower and is currently saving money to refurbish it and do construction on it (adding a torture chamber & a guest room for other PCs). I'm sure if you gave a character a goal in life, it would cost money and be something that you can put money towards. Maybe he wants to start a thieves guild or be known as a master wizard that started a mage school...that'll cost money. Maybe he wants to own a large lot of land with a Keep on it so he can eventually retire in peace.

Not everything in the game has to go towards optimizing your PCs power level unless that is the kind of game the DM expects. But from my experience, the most fun and interesting characters were always the ones that had more "life" to them. Anyone can make a He-Man character, not many people seem to make a very interesting character though.

If your group doesn't like that type of game, nothing wrong with that. I just thought it was really weird that you guys would be claiming a guy is barefoot just cause he couldn't buy magical shoes. So I wanted to describe another way of approaching the game in case it may have never been considered.

No problem, and I do play a lot of video games.

Anyways, I get your point about the slots - even though they are empty of magical items, doesn't mean they are empty altogether.

We are going other directions with our group. We invaded a Thieves guild, fought through multi-levels and took it over... left for awhile, and when we came back, the DM said it burnt down in our absense.

We did manage to "acquire" <cough> a deed to an Inn. Right now, we still have it. The necro orientated mage in our group came up with a scheme to replace all the barmaids with Undead so we wouldn't have to pay them or feed them.

Thanks for your input.

 

[Ariosto]

Hobo, do you not see the hypocrisy? You are the one dismissing someone else's perspective as "irrelevant". I most definitely made no assertion as to "the only D&D there is or ever has been."

It simply seemed to me that as I can easily see that the variant offers no great incompatibility with adventure, it was curious indeed that a partisan should levy such an accusation against the standard and long-proven method.

 

[Desdichado]

Hobo, do you not see the hypocrisy? You are the one dismissing someone else's perspective as "irrelevant". I most definitely made no assertion as to "the only D&D there is or ever has been."

This doesn't sound like very ripe fruit for discussion; but no, I'm not, and yes you did.

:shrug: I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to spell it out for you, or if I should just drop it, though.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

it was curious indeed that a partisan should levy such an accusation against the standard and long-proven method.

Emphasis mine.

Hobo may not be willing to try, but I'll give it a shot. Assuming that your method of play is both the standard and long-proven method is the problem. There is no standard way to play. The method you subscribe to is only long-proven for your group. Any such assertion that your way is the standard comes off as pompous and dismissive of other methods that aren't the standard that you espouse.