Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6544339" data-attributes="member: 37579">Assuming magic items in the balance of D&D was arguably a mistake. I'm not sure why they went in that direction as it caused more problems than it solved. But hindsight is funny that way. The solution is there: allow magic item crafting and purchasing. Prices are on page 135 of the DMG and crafting is on page 128. They still exist in the game. There was only so much room in the DMG. Despite suggesting low/normal/high magic games, there's only a single set of treasure tables. There's LOTS of options that didn't make it into the DMG, including the entire mass combat section. Hopefully alternate magic tables and pricing will make it into the Unearthed Arcana articles.Pricing for magic items is finicky. Had they given set prices for items, that would have caused problems for people who wanted magic to be cheaper or more expensive. And there's the potential to misprice a magic item, making something too cheap or too expensive (a common occurrence in 3e/PF). And the formulas for making magic items in 3e/PF were laughably broken.Guestimating pricing isn't that complicated. Looking at the magic item charts (pages 144-149), some items have higher odds than others. Pricing should likely be related to those odds. Anything with a 1% chance should be much more expensive than something with a 10% chance. Any yet you're okay with people spending months out of the campaign crafting magic items? Aka a form of downtime. And a type of downtime that focuses on a single character doing something while the rest of the party sits idle. Why not let the fighter run a business while the wizard is making the +1 sword? Or the rogue operate a thieves' guild? Or the cleric build a cathedral?You're being a little contradictory. You're against going straight from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon but against downtime. This begs the question: why is the party adventuring? If they're just getting treasure to buy more magic items so they can get better treasure so they can buy better magic items then there's no real gain. They never actually end up with any treasure. It's lateral advancement. Except there are rules to support it. You can buy and make magic items with the DM's permission. If your DM is not permitting you then your issue is with him and not the rules. But what's the point of treasure if you can't actually use it???That's the thing with 3e/PF/4e, gold was redundant. Instead of gold, PCs could have conveniently received the gear they needed. RAW there's no reason for the party to receive a single gold piece. This is actually more efficient, as you're not selling treasure for half price or crafting and making items for half price, both of which can throw off the WBL. And the party never needs to go to town to sell/craft.This was pretty close to how I ran my 4e game. The players had no interest in the metagame of picking items so their gold was never spent. I just switched to the inherent bonus system, threw a few magic items at them I thought they'd like, and pretty much ended up ignoring treasure. Which worked out fine as the story became a lengthy journey lost in the Underdark, so they never had time to shop.As another example, right now, one of the games I'm running is Skull & Shackles for Pathfinder. And I very much AM handwaving away 90% of the gold. I stripped out the vast majority of the gold and am giving the players "points" they can use to buy small static bonuses. It's a math patch. The game is humming along quite nicely as I very literally ignore 9 out of 10 gold pieces in the modules.  But you're NOT improving your character. The magic item assumptions gave characters a +1 bonus while also giving monsters a +1 keeping everything even. It's the illusion of improvement. And, yes, picking items to gain extra powers and options is fun... for some people. For other people it's a chore as they have to spend their free time looking through books of magic items to spend another 15,000 gp. Not everyone wants that bookkeeping. Especially when there's a thousand other things you can do for fun when away from the game table. And planning purchases is very much NOT FUN at the game table because that's time you're not adventuring or playing the game (and, as the DM, having the players spend 30 minutes shopping and coordinating the crafting schedules is boring and anti-fun). Which is why information on buying and selling magic items is including in the game on pages 128-130 and 135-136 of the DMG.</blockquote>

Verification