D&D 5E Thoughts on spending gold ...

[77IM]

Similar to Fralex, I created a set of tables for attempting to purchase magic items:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?404489-Buying-Magic-Items&p=6490189#post6490189

The idea is to make item purchase difficult yet possible, and have the process feel like an adventure rather than feel mundane.

Player wants bracers of defense? Sure, sure, no problem, the diary of the mage Englehart (b. 733 - d. 821) claims he met an Azer in the fabled City of Brass who makes them and sells them for around 3000 gp worth of gems. Too risky? Well temple records say the legendary monk Cadmon wore some, but he was lost at sea off of Bloodrock Island in the year 672 while defending the king's armada from some kind of sea monster. Too much trouble? Well this rather pale and sweaty fellow contacts you to say he's heard you are looking for these magic bracers, and he'll let you have his for only 300 gold. No, there's nothing wrong with them, he just needs the money is all. They're supposed to glow red like that. Hey if you don't like them you can always use the rules for selling magic items, right? Go on, pay the nice man...

 

[miniaturehoarder]

You tax and fine your players instead of giving them less treasure because they might decide not to pay...

PCs gotta rule somewhere. Town near the dungeon is fair game if the local ruler can't keep the damned hole in the ground empty of monsters. Bribe the guards, knock em out if they raise a stink or just intimidate with the very real threat of "Yield or our mage gets involved!"

There is a reason why you have stats for commoners, guards, knights and nobles in the MM.

 

[Sunseeker]

You tax and fine your players instead of giving them less treasure because they might decide not to pay...

Which creates interesting events! Does the town leader raise a hand against the aggressive and bloodthirsty adventurers? Do the adventurers fight back against the shackles of oppression? Do they pay up, only to discover that the corrupt sheriff is using the money to hire bandits to attack the town in order to give himself more power! Or maybe they find that the taxes are bring used to pay off a an evil lord from another kingdom, leading the party off in new adventurous directions!

Things that exist in game should exist with a purpose.

 

[EvanNave55]

Question?

What's actually stopping some of you from creating a magic item value chart and adding magic items shops to your 5th edition games?

Have you have ever tried to actually create a good balanced in depth system for a game? Especially for one as free and open as D&D it is an incredible amount of work. Let's say you are quite devoted to the task and spend 4 hours a day on it. In a few MONTHS of work you might be able to cover the majority of the things you come across.
Of course you could throw together something in just a few hours of work without going through all that research and balancing, but then it is basically crap that falls apart with the slightest use or thought - along the lines of the current variant for magic item prices.
Don't get me wrong I kindof enjoy the new feeling of magic item rarity. I just think its rediculous how many people are saying it'd be easier to design your own system. Any half decent system requires hundreds of hours of work or more.
And to you who will flame this saying this isn't true and I don't know what I'm talking about I do. I've gone through this process and created systems for RPG games before I know how much work it is.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Have you have ever tried to actually create a good balanced in depth system for a game? Especially for one as free and open as D&D it is an incredible amount of work. Let's say you are quite devoted to the task and spend 4 hours a day on it. In a few MONTHS of work you might be able to cover the majority of the things you come across.
Of course you could throw together something in just a few hours of work without going through all that research and balancing, but then it is basically crap that falls apart with the slightest use or thought - along the lines of the current variant for magic item prices.
Don't get me wrong I kindof enjoy the new feeling of magic item rarity. I just think its rediculous how many people are saying it'd be easier to design your own system. Any half decent system requires hundreds of hours of work or more.
And to you who will flame this saying this isn't true and I don't know what I'm talking about I do. I've gone through this process and created systems for RPG games before I know how much work it is.

I'm afraid you are making it out to be more difficult than it really is.

All you have to do is set up prices for items and then adjust the gold you hand out to your player's. A +1 sword could cost 4000. Now just setup your adventure to where a party of 4 players find a combined total of 16,000 gold during a span of level 1 to 4.

This was just a quick two second example I came up with on the fly.

It's not complicated nor does it half to be. The only way it becomes hard or impossible is if you make it that way.

 

[MoonSong]

The problem is that once you assign prices to magic items, you will immediately create a sense of "I have so and so much gold, that means I can afford either item X or item Y." When that happens, people will start looking at which item benefits them the most. That is, after all, the whole point of economics - using price as a means of prioritizing scarce resources.

That's what happened in 3e, where "Big Six" items (weapon, armor, cloak of resistance, ring of protection, amulet of natural armor, stat-booster) edged out pretty much every other item. How many PCs did you see who took a folding boat over a ring of protection +2? Or a helm of underwater action over a cloak of resistance +5? I mean, in a 3e campaign where I found a folding boat I'd almost certainly keep it rather than sell it, but it's not something I'd spend character gold on.

If that is the problem, then assume we are not giving prices to math items. To be honest I can't relate to the optimizers experience, I rather have character enabling and quirky items than straight combat boosters. But if I want prices is for those other items, and the fact that the average player would rather spend on a +1 sword over a folding boat just shows how much their costs were unbalanced to each other.

Ultimately it doesn't appear that RAW 5e caters much to the 3e/4e/PF assumption of D&D. I don't think that is changing any time soon but it is easy for a DM to fix himself I think. As a side the 5e DM needs to run better adventures I think since less of the game focus is tweaking your build when you level or buying that artifact you had your eye on.

If it is so easy to solve, can you do it? can you provide a balanced list of costs for all magic items in the dmg? Don't tell, show.

I'm afraid you are making it out to be more difficult than it really is.

All you have to do is set up prices for items and then adjust the gold you hand out to your player's. A +1 sword could cost 4000. Now just setup your adventure to where a party of 4 players find a combined total of 16,000 gold during a span of level 1 to 4.

This was just a quick two second example I came up with on the fly.

It's not complicated nor does it half to be. The only way it becomes hard or impossible is if you make it that way.

But how about the items that aren't obvious math items? What is more useful/powerful a dose of sovereign glue or a magic carpet? how much in relation to a plain boring +1 sword? game impact, number of uses, overall out of combat utility and so on?.

 

[Evhelm]

I'm afraid you are making it out to be more difficult than it really is.

All you have to do is set up prices for items and then adjust the gold you hand out to your player's. A +1 sword could cost 4000. Now just setup your adventure to where a party of 4 players find a combined total of 16,000 gold during a span of level 1 to 4.

This was just a quick two second example I came up with on the fly.

It's not complicated nor does it half to be. The only way it becomes hard or impossible is if you make it that way.

I disagree.

It's complicated when you want it to be consistent and smooth. It's easy to come up with a single example, but when that example has to interact with others it becomes geometrically more complicated with each new item.

I hear the folks saying that expectations (and managing them) is important, and that's why I'm trying to adapt my own expectations as a DM to the new normal, but I'm under no illusion that it would have been easier for me (and apparently for others) to have a system in place to refer to, and if I wanted to run a low-magic or no-magic-shop campaign, then I could much more easily ignore/remove a system than create one on the spot.

If it were easy to create an RPG system (or part of one), I wouldn't need the core books in the first place

 

[77IM]

I think some players would prefer to know exactly what all the prices will be and how much gold they will get per level so they can predict exactly what items they will get and incorporate that into the character-optimization mini-game.

Other players prefer to use item-acquisition as a motivation for adventuring and social-interaction. For them the vague pricing works better because finding out what price the DM will set is actually part of the game. That price may be in gold, bloodshed, rare arcane ingredients, or my favorite, promises.

5e leaves item prices vague, setting an important player expectation that DM's discretion will set the final price, and that the player's can't predict ahead of time what the prices will be (and there are no gold-per-level guidelines either). If players want predictable pricing, so they can browse magic items like a catalog, then that IS a lot of work for the DM.

 

[Derren]

Other players prefer to use item-acquisition as a motivation for adventuring and social-interaction. For them the vague pricing works better because finding out what price the DM will set is actually part of the game. That price may be in gold, bloodshed, rare arcane ingredients, or my favorite, promises.

No it isn't. For making item acquisition a adventuring goal fixed prices work as well. Actually they work better as they still give the DM a workable guideline (he is of course free to deviate from).

 

[Gecko85]

If players want predictable pricing, so they can browse magic items like a catalog, then that IS a lot of work for the DM.

But why would a player ever think predictable pricing makes sense in-game, when it doesn't exist in the real world? Let's say you have a rare collectible item (a Revolutionary War musket, a Babe Ruth signed baseball, an unopened Kenner Darth Vader from the original run of action figures, etc.) Even with the advent of the Internet and sites like eBay, there is no set pricing. You may be able to predict a price within a certain range, but there's no guarantee you'll get that price as either a buyer or a seller. And before the Internet? Forget it. Prices were all over the map, and availability was a crap shoot. You could never just walk into s store and pick up a Honus Wagner card. There are, what, 3 or 4 in known existence? They're almost never for sale, and on the rare occasion they are, it's at auction. Why would a medieval-like society be able to have stable pricing when our advanced society doesn't?