Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="keterys" data-source="post: 5043875" data-attributes="member: 43019">Whether I like it or not, the items don't exist and it's not really fair to just assume the DM is going to give out several times as much treasure at those levels instead of just giving items that do exist...But, maybe they'll just be artifacts of some randomness or other, which might travel on or not, but whose impact is difficult to foretell.Yeah, I'm with you there, and it ends up with the nice lvl+2 parcel as you hit each level, which works nicely.But you're not taking into account at all the impact of not getting the perfect bundles, which is a very large effect. Consumable and ritual use will have a varying impact by group, but I'd be willing to handwave it at 2% or less for most groups so it's barely a blip on the radar compared to the ranger who 'has' to use frost weapons so needs to spend money/residuum to upgrade at least half of his weapons.Only if you assume every item was actually worth keeping. A 14th level character will have gotten thirteen items, but potentially retired six of those (3 +1s, 3 +2s), nevermind more lateral changes like selling a found Boots of Freedom of Movement to purchase Boots of Eagerness, or direct upgrades like upgrading heroic Iron Armbands for paragon Iron Armbands.Their items aren't hand-chosen, or when they wanted hand-chosen they had to sell at 1/5. That certainly makes a huge difference. But I've never actually been in a game in which 100% of treasure was chosen by the players (and only run one, once, in 3rd edition).So I have a +3 Radiant Weapon instead of the +3 Mordant of another player, which is a better energy type and lets me deal extra damage. That other player has an Eladrin Ring of Passage that I don't, which helps him out some, but I'll certainly take +3 damage (+8/+13 against undead) over +1 to a couple teleport powers. I've got Healer's Brooch +3 which adds 3 to all my heals, while another character has a Torc of Fortune +3 which is actually a totally neat item, but mechanically speaking I'll just get more out of what I have, even though they're even level. Etc.They did have something like 57000g to spend each, so the DM has been giving out a ton of money and that money is actually, what, 75% of the total value of my items... but in a lot of cases they're not going to 'waste' a perfectly good +3 by selling it for 20% value and buying another +3 that does something just a little bit better. Organic treasure is just very very much not as perfect as you're thinking it is. Even on a character who gets to pick every single item they get, you'll get some waste, especially if they want to bump their enhancement bonuses as soon as possible. For example a twf ranger has four items to bump up every 5 levels, in theory. Looking at an example ranger progression on another board where he's using gp for items and try to compare that to what you end up with for bundles and it's a bit crazy - he's got a ton of low level items that are actually doing a fair bit for him (dragonshards, etc) that you'd have to sacrifice valuable higher level bundles to use:  <a href="http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19648854/Stormwarden" target="_blank">Whoops! Browser Settings Incompatible</a>And obviously with frost shards, wintertouched, lasting frost, he really is invested in certain items. If he's wielding a +2 Frost weapon in his off hand and the DM hands out a +3 Mordant, there's a pretty good chance he'll pass it up... and four more other level 13 items later, he can convert them into a +3 Frost for his off hand <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Unless you're arguing that in a group that is using all frost weapons with lasting frost and wintertouched that _all_ they ever find is frost weapons, several per level band?</blockquote>

Verification