Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4843861" data-attributes="member: 30001">The important thing that you seem to be missing here is that *you're already using the tactic* if the DM is attempting to attrit it.  In the meantime, since it is such a powerful tactic (which is the premise of the example) the PCs are already accumulating successes (and gold!) and somehow what you suggest puts this genie back in the bottle?  Yea, hence having to buy them for money.  GOLD takes a while to dig up and refine.  Coins take a while to strike.  This is what I mean by being overly narrow in your economic theorizing - you're only applying these principles to one side of the problem in order to support a forgone conclusion.  The price of a war dog already assumes all of these factors.  And how many war-dogs are to be found in a 5-mile radius?  And what relevant is the number 5?  Why wouldn't the PCs follow sensible lines of distribution like everyone else does, instead of bumbling around and knocking on doors at random?  There are people who have a financial interest in hooking you up with the things you want to buy.  It's only the fact that ALL of those people are controlled by the DM that seems to apply here.  But shifts to what?  Dogs have been domesticated IRL for tens of thousands of years.  A vanilla sort of DnD setting would IMO be reasonably set that dogs had been bred to the level of their usefulness.  Yes, if it takes all this work and training and such to make a war dog available, then it's not worth 25 gp.  Suddenly suggesting that dogs are worth 250 gp (or even unavailable) once the players start making use of them is not simulationist - and so I don't see the use in given simulationist explanations for this ruling.  The same reason that there are apples to buy even though apples have been consumed by NPCs in the past.  Given the mechanical advantages that are assumed to be at the heart of the problem, this doesn't really seem to fit the circumstances.  The vanilla DnD setting probably has armies and bunches of people with weapons - which would suggest that military technology is not some niche only of interest to adventurers.  Right, so it's on to trained griffons and cheaply priced magic items and all sorts of higher-level versions of the same problem.  So the can IMO has just been kicked down the road - and it's arguable that even these short-term 'solutions' were all that plausible.</blockquote>

Verification