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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5057304" data-attributes="member: 82106">I look at it like this KD:Items sell for a lot less than purchase price for a variety of reasons which include the difficulty in finding buyers for what are really essentially luxury goods. The PC is selling to a broker or certainly selling at a "wholesale" value (try selling some jewelry, I assure you if you sell it to a jeweler you'll be lucky to get more than the base metal value in most cases). The buyer also is effectively buying merchandise of unknown provenance which is basically almost certainly looted from somewhere. 20% really doesn't sound all that unreasonable when you think about it.The 20% value also neatly deals with problems like what happens when the PCs get hold of stuff that doesn't neatly fit into a treasure parcel such as the effects of a deceased ally or stuff the DM simply never considered it possible they could acquire. Its sort of a natural correcting factor that keeps the economy of the PCs firmly in the DM's grasp without resorting to cheap tricks like rust monsters and fairly arbitrary attempts by the DM to fleece the party out of its goods (all things that were far too often needed in the old days).In terms of the cost curve, sure it could be shallower. The thing is then basically you're looking at items of pretty disparate power levels being much closer in price. That could be good or bad depending on circumstances. I'm not sure its unequivocally a better treasure system though. From a DMing standpoint I'm finding the 4e system to be relatively bug free and that tells me its doing something right.I also think that yes once your PCs hit paragon tier then the pricing of items they're dealing with goes clean out of sight of the local economy they were dealing with at heroic tier. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It rather encourages the PCs to move on in the world and start dealing with the 'big boys' of the world. At 20th level an item costs 125k gp. That certainly is a good chunk of change but still not so astronomical that it goes completely into lala land. Its the kind of cash that Kings and Dragons and such can work in.Once you get into the epic tier then yes you are dealing with astronomical sums, but the PCs are also the most powerful heroes in the world at that point and their peers are world emperors and major unique beings. They are likely not buying and selling stuff to mere mortals anymore, its more like you deal with some high powered Efreet in the City of Brass or something where ordinary economics of ordinary mortals are just not relevant.So, yeah, you can create a shallower curve and that might work fine in a specific setting but the defaults also work within the context of what the authors of the game were envisioning.</blockquote>

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