Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5056920" data-attributes="member: 2011">This.I am currently DMing two games and playing two games. I enjoy the game system, but I also enjoy discussing suspect elements of it. Course, when people's opinions differ, that's when the swords come out. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Another thing I think that 4E does not do well is economy. Course, I thought 1E through 3E didn't do it well either.Yes, it's fun to acquire magic items, but when the game system revolves around ever increasing mega-treasures (not necessariliy at one location, but over the span of gaining a single level) starting at a very low level, it again drops the plausibility. A Dragon having a huge treasure, sure. But nearly every set of encounters having big treasure???If 1 GP = $10 (I actually equate 1 GP = $100, but I'll be conservative for this example), 15th level PCs are finding around $100,000 in each encounter and individual magic items worth $600,000 (I actually consider this $1 million or $6 million). A 30th level item is worth $30 million (or $300 million).Even at first level to second, the PCs are finding $13,000 to $38,000 ($130,000 to $380,000) depending on whether they keep or sell the magic items worth of stuff and this can be found is the span of a few days or a week.And this is one of the reasons why magic items sell for 20% of their purchase price. They should actually sell for 80% or more of their purchase price in a plausible world, but if that were to happen, the PCs would be swimming in wealth from found magic items.This is not a real world 6.5 billion people planet where wealth and the worth of coinage is driven by the labor of 5 billion people. The default setting is a points of light setting where presumably, there might be a few million people worldwide. Generation of wealth to this level shouldn't occur. There are not enough average people to tax based on the cost of normal goods and services. And even items found from long ago should not be worth that much because nobody could afford them.The magic item economic curve is just way too steep based on what the economics of a typical world (population, cost of goods and services, distances to other markets, etc.) should be. IMO.Where this causes an issue in the game system is that a 15th level PC can own a lot of lower level potions, wondrous items, etc. Practically any heroic magic item is well within his reach.If epic level items (not bonus items here, but other items) were really that much better than paragon and paragon were much better than heroic, then no big deal. But the increase in power of these items is typically not that great.For example, are Winged Boots at level 13 that much worse than a Ring of Flying at level 23? But a PC could sell the Ring of Flying and buy 5 sets of Winged Boots and get to basically do a similar set of functionality 5 times per day instead of 1. No, the functionality is not identical, the Ring is obviously better, but it is close enough that it might be worth it to do this. Better yet, buy/craft 3 sets of Winged Boots and 4 Elixirs of Flying and fly completely for 4 encounters over the next several levels and still fly 3 turns per day instead of 1+ turns per day.And then, go to Zephyr Boots at level 24 and the level 23 Ring of Flying is suddenly totally obsolete (as are most other options, at least for some classes).</blockquote>

Verification