D&D (2024) Uncommon items - actually common?

[Micah Sweet]

What do you actually do with this extra information? In what sort of situations would it come up, and how often these situations actually occur?

Mercantile ventures on the part of the PCs? Managing a logical economy in the domain game? Having a better variety if reasons for inter-polity conflict? I can go on.

 

[tetrasodium]

I think there should and could be some guidelines for crafting (aren't there?) but I don't think they need to be much more complex than just getting the stuff for half price or so if you just get the ingredients and spend the time of doing it yourself.

Those guidelines tend to be written with the goal of creating a product like a specific item, that immediately goes sideways when the item in question is a price tag.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, that is not a thing that actually happens.

Though I would not oppose some sort of light rules for running business, but those should be way more abstracted than counting weights of individual items. I think the new bastion rules might actually have something vaguely like that.

The new bastion rules, while definitely having some stuff worth adapting (I would buy them separately if that was still an option) have nothing to do with verisimilitude. They are essentially a new kind of class feature.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I like how the 50GP of ruby dust apparently requires pages of minutia on gem grinding techniques and gem clarity grading,
but no second thought was given to how the value was determined on the 100gp pearl slurped down with a bowl of wine and owl feathers for the past 50 years.

Time for pages of oyster biology tables!

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think there should and could be some guidelines for crafting (aren't there?) but I don't think they need to be much more complex than just getting the stuff for half price or so if you just get the ingredients and spend the time of doing it yourself.

This isn't about need. Some people just want more logic and consistency (and yes, granularity) in these parts of the game.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Mercantile ventures on the part of the PCs? Managing a logical economy in the domain game? Having a better variety if reasons for inter-polity conflict? I can go on.

Then you're catering to an unpleasable fan base who will just demand more and more minutia when 95% of the rest of the players will just shrug, mark off the GP value of the component and move on with their lives.

You give a mouse a cookie then he'll want to know in exacting details how much ruby dust is ground from gems of infinite varying qualities, how long it takes to grind, the cost of the ginder, what he can do to grind more efficiently, and timetables for maximum ROI on selling the dust.

This is exactly the kind of thing for a third party product. I highly recommend A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe, its third edition, but still largely usable.

 

[tetrasodium]

Then you're catering to an unpleasable fan base who will just demand more and more minutia when 95% of the rest of the players will just shrug, mark off the GP value of the component and move on with their lives.

You give a mouse a cookie then he'll want to know in exacting details how much ruby dust is ground from gems of infinite varying qualities, how long it takes to grind, the cost of the ginder, what he can do to grind more efficiently, and timetables for maximum ROI on selling the dust.

Quite the strawman there... We are talking about spells with a costly component needing to list a specific item instead of the current setup where they create problems by listing the price of an item.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then you're catering to an unpleasable fan base who will just demand more and more minutia when 95% of the rest of the players will just shrug, mark off the GP value of the component and move on with their lives.

You give a mouse a cookie then he'll want to know in exacting details how much ruby dust is ground from gems of infinite varying qualities, how long it takes to grind, the cost of the ginder, what he can do to grind more efficiently, and timetables for maximum ROI on selling the dust.

This is exactly the kind of thing for a third party product. I highly recommend A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe, its third edition, but still largely usable.

I have that book. It's great.

And you're acting like the amount of granularity 5.5 provides is the most they've ever done. The game has been simplified, and that is not automatically a good thing.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Mercantile ventures on the part of the PCs? Managing a logical economy in the domain game? Having a better variety if reasons for inter-polity conflict? I can go on.

Frankly, it seems utterly absurd to handle any of this on the detail level where we are measuring the weights, volumes, and qualities of individual trade items. Like this sounds like an utter boredom inducing waste of time to me.

But I actually get the desire to have some system for handling this sort of thing, I just think it would be way more abstracted than what you're suggesting. This is not the sort of thing I want to spend more than few moments in an action adventure game, nor the sort of detail I want to focus on.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

This isn't about need. Some people just want more logic and consistency (and yes, granularity) in these parts of the game.

I'd argue that more detailed we make this, more chance there is that it ceases to be logical.