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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5058738" data-attributes="member: 2011">Precisely. That's my only point with regards to economics here.One thing that 4E does not do well is to be even close to a decent economic simulator. Not that it has to be great at it, but it would be preferable if at least a little thought was put into this for a future (5E) release since little in this area was done for releases 1E through 4E.I think that it would not be too difficult to come up with a magic item cost scale that both allows for reasonable costs for items (so that PCs cannot buy hundreds or thousands of low cost magic items for the price of one high cost magic item), and still allows for the wonder of finding a dragon hoard.For example: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/wiki/index.php/The_Artificer's_Handbook" target="_blank">Artificer's Handbook</a> where even the most expensive of (3E) magical items tended to fall well below 100,000 GP.People talk a good game about roleplaying all of the time and then turn around and ignore a very important roleplaying motivator: money.Money motivation is typically only roleplayed via greed, or via munificence. Mostly, it is ignored completely.But we have these PCs that are filthy wealthy at somewhat moderate levels and none of them retire or take up a less hazardous profession. This is due to the fact that a player is playing the PC, so the player is motivated to continue the PC. Fair enough. But this entire aspect of being rich and never retiring is a bit jarring from a roleplaying perspective. Take away some of the "rich" aspect of the game system and it becomes less jarring. IMO, obviously YMMV.That and the implausibility aspect of a points of light setting where PCs can eventually find tens of millions of GP (over a billion dollars depending on what scale one picks) of loot floating around.Although 4E has combined the powers of some multiple magical items into single items, those items really don't have the umph that many 3E items had, especially the powerful ones (a good thing IMO). For example, a Holy Avenger. It hardly does anything beyond being a +5 or +6 sword in 4E, but it is one of the most expensive items in the game system. 2E and 3E Holy Avengers had real umph. They should have cost a lot. But they cost a lot less than 4E Holy Avengers. Those hardly do anything and are priced at (on a 1 GP to $100 scale) of $62.5 million for the +5 version and $312.5 million for the +6 version.NPC Paladin King: "Holy Avenger? It does what? And you want me to pay what for it? Are you out of your mind?"When it comes to reasonable magic item prices, 4E (like all of its predecessors) falls short.Note: I think the reason 4E's item costs are so steep is that it tried to somewhat match the 3E magic item prices for PC levels 3 to 20 or so, but then they thought that they had 10 more levels and had to keep upping it. But, they tended to ignore the fact that level 17 through 20 3.5 PCs fought the same types of monsters (e.g. Ancient through Great Wyrm Dragons, Tarrasque, etc.) that level 25 through 30 4E PCs now fight. 4E level 1 through 30 is more like 3E level 3 through 20, but the magic items got even more expensive than 3E.The items got weaker, but the items got even more expensive.</blockquote>

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