Where is my Freaking Mule?!

[Zaran]

Much as I think 4e is perfectly ginchy, the lack of mules probably has something to do with a design decision I don't personally agree with -- spending gold on magic. Once you have something clearly superior to spend gold on, unless you have some really roleplay-heavy players, magic is the best thing to spend your money on. And that gets kind of tragic. I prefer games where cold hard coin is something you're encouraged to spend on luxuries: spyglasses, sailing ships, owning your own property (and improving it), ale and whores. I really prefer having a "magic economy" that's divorced from gold, because then players feel that a fine standard of living is what gold is for, and act accordingly. It was a problem in 3e, and it's still one today.

Now that we've got the whole "alternate rewards for magic items" set up, there's really such an opportunity. Let people use alternate rewards as the basis for a separate economy of power-ups, and then figure out a gold-just-for-luxuries economy. Probably won't happen, but ah well, one can dream.

My thoughts exactly! Personally, I do not think "they" designed the game so we can go to the magic emporium and buy a glowing codpiece (or make one if you like that sort of thing). By the time we can afford something like that we've out-levelled it.

In the game I'm in now, my party is flat broke because we blew all our cash on a big house and nice curtains. Does it grant us any kind of game mechanics? Not really. But that sort of thing still has a place in the game and it would be nice if we didn't have to burden the GM with having to figure out prices and wall-paper patterns.

 

[coyote6]

the donkeyhorse that goes ahead of the party to find traps;

That would be the common Pitfinder Donkeyhorse.

the donkeyhorse that is fed to monsters to buy time for the party to run away;

Snackrun Donkeyhorse, IIRC. Its other notable use is in carrying the party's stash of medieval Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

and the donkeyhorse that is shoved through doors, laden with nothing but open flasks of oil, while the party readies flaming arrows.

Flamedeath Donkeyhorse, of course.

 

[Negflar2099]

I think there's place in the game for something like this, a book filled with semi-useless magic items and mundane gear. The problem is that when you really look at D&D you realize that "treasure" is essentially trying to do two things.

First it represents your characters reward/salary for living the life of an adventurer. It's meant to represent the logical reason your character can afford to go off spelunking in forgotten dungeons instead of farming the land like a sensible person. Second it represents the power your character has achieved. The more treasure you have the more powerful magic items you're able to purchase and the more powerful your character becomes.

If the DM says you find 10,000 gp in a chest you can either spend that on a new house or you can buy a powerful magic sword. The roleplayers would buy the house while his buddy the powergamer would buy the sword.

In a group where everyone agrees this is fine and dandy but I've DM'd mixed groups and let me tell you, it's a problem. When the roleplayers buy the house (or the donkey or what have you) they have essentially given up part of their power as a cost of roleplaying expense. The powergamer on the other hand, buys the powerful magical item and is suddenly much more powerful than the poor roleplayer. The roleplayer has been penalized for daring to roleplay.

So the 4e designers decided lets remove the roleplaying aspects of treasure and make it all about power. That way the roleplayers have no choice but to buy magic items and thus they will never fall behind the power curve. I don't love this approach but as a DM it's certainly kept my headaches down to a bare minimum.

I think the answer lies in the inherent bonuses system in the DMG2. If you no longer need magic items in order to be powerful than you can go ahead and buy that house. Sure your buddy might have a new flaming axe but other than turning his attacks to fire damage he doesn't gain that much benefit. Personally that's what I would do before introducing any sort of mundane items (and don't get me started on hirelings, as soon the PCs can hire torchbears mine just want a torchbearer army).

 

[S'mon]

In the game I'm in now, my party is flat broke because we blew all our cash on a big house and nice curtains. Does it grant us any kind of game mechanics? Not really. But that sort of thing still has a place in the game and it would be nice if we didn't have to burden the GM with having to figure out prices and wall-paper patterns.

I've always had a policy of giving fairly generous in-game bonuses for investment in stuff that isn't technically magical: the expensive soft boots that give +2 to move silently, the fearsome helm that gives +2 to intimidate, the ball gown that gives +4 to diplomacy at the Royal Ball, etc. Having a big house with nice curtains is going to make a lot of dealings in that city a lot easier. People will think of you very differently than if you were a homeless mercenary.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

The mule isn't the main point of this thread. I can probably get the gm to say I bought a mule for 8gp (I think that's how much they cost in 3e). I don't really need stats for it since if it should for the most part die if it's in any combat.

Then don't start a snarky thread asking where your freaking mule is. Most of the stuff in your proposed Book of Mundane Stuff (TM) would take less time for your DM to come up with on the fly than it took you to post. Stuff can exist outside of a rulebook. (Weird, I know!)

 

[S'mon]

If the DM says you find 10,000 gp in a chest you can either spend that on a new house or you can buy a powerful magic sword. The roleplayers would buy the house while his buddy the powergamer would buy the sword.

Well, the way cost scales up in 4e greatly mitigates this problem. You can get an item 1 '+' lower for 1/5 the cost. Early on, spending 10,000gp on a mansion is a big, and potentially foolish, investment for a dungeon-delving PC, but it soon becomes a small sum to a high level adventurer, and the benefits may far outweigh the costs.

Eg: IMC the standard sale price of magic items to adventurers is 140% of the production/list cost, at the top end of the PHB's recommended scale. But getting established in the community will bring that down - that 10,000gp villa can soon pay for itself, even for the powergamer.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I think it's important to note that gold in 4e isn't really representative of spending cash - it's more of an alternative, point based system of character advancement.

 

[ExploderWizard]

So the 4e designers decided lets remove the roleplaying aspects of treasure and make it all about power. That way the roleplayers have no choice but to buy magic items and thus they will never fall behind the power curve. I don't love this approach but as a DM it's certainly kept my headaches down to a bare minimum.

In my current 4E campaign the only magic available for sale (that is commonly available) is low level potions, some cheap magic trinkets and a few implements. This means the players can spend thier gold on whatever the hell they want thus keeping my headaches down to a minimum.

 

[Zaran]

In a group where everyone agrees this is fine and dandy but I've DM'd mixed groups and let me tell you, it's a problem. When the roleplayers buy the house (or the donkey or what have you) they have essentially given up part of their power as a cost of roleplaying expense. The powergamer on the other hand, buys the powerful magical item and is suddenly much more powerful than the poor roleplayer. The roleplayer has been penalized for daring to roleplay.

I think the balance is already built into the treasure reward system. By the time the powergamer can afford that really powerful magic item he will have something better. It would take the whole party putting all of their money into buying one item for one member to keep up with the normal magic item placement. So by the time we are finding 10k in gold we have magical weapons worth five times that. So there should really not be an issue about spending the money on non-essential things like donkeyhorses or harlot blightcarriers.

 

[Saeviomagy]

In any system where you can spend cash to get power, spending money on anything other than power has the potential to produce an imbalance in the game.

Now, there are DMs out there who understand this, recognise it and can compensate for the effects. They track how much cash-power characters have, and hand out items specifically suited to prop it up if it's low. Or they hand out the non-power items for free, or some such system that keeps the system balanced.

HOWEVER, the default rules should not, IMHO, be written assuming that they are being run by the perfect DM. After all, I think we'll all agree that if we assume a perfect DM, then a game in any system at all, regardless of it's flaws, will be fun.

Therefore I find it perfectly acceptable that the rules don't allow players to fritter away a power mechanic without needing to put some thought into it.

And that's why a big book of useless stuff would be bad (because I guarantee that if wizards released such a book, it wouldn't be called "the big book of useless stuff", or even insinuate that the items within were not much use).