A new paradigm for wealth by level

[Username17]

You could change the way things worked so that adventures took place a long time apart, and assume that characters are adventuring, exploring, and otherwise accomplishing things between times even while not being followed by the camera.

This would go a long way towards explaining how a bad could be more likely to have heard a tale between the adventure in the Musk Fens and the adventure at the Dark Tower. As is, of course, the camera follows our bard friend the whole way so we know damn well that there was no humanoid contact between the two. If the adventures take place nebulously in time with adventures and travel in between the two can make more sense together.

---

But that comes at a cost. If you assume that there is enoguh time between adventures to have meaningful learning, there's enough time in between adventures to meaningfully change your net worth. Heck, I know people who can go through 500 dollars in a day without really trying. If you turn the camera off long enough for the character to have heard stories and changed venues, then it would be sort of weird to focus back in on the character and see him wearing the same clothes or having the same number of silver pieces in his pouch.

No, if you are going to assume that background knowledge comes in somewhere in the middle, you have to simultaneously abandon the D&D concept of wealth itemization. No longer can you obsess about how many silver pieces your character is in possession of. Heck, you can't even give a damn about how many healing potions your character has - since those will presumably be drunk and found at various non-specific points during the interludes.

Ouch.

That requires a massive retooling of the entire treasure structure. What you'd then need to see would be the world split up into Signiature Items and Level Equipment.

A Signiature Item is something like the Cloud Pillow. Shaking it makes it rain, and you can't really tell the tale of Abigail and the Witch without it. A Signiature Item is something that does something really cool and somewhat unique and actually travels with your character from story to story.

A piece of Level Equipment is just that - equipment you get for being whatever level you happen to be. These things are transient and tend to give numeric bonuses or have limited charges if they are magical at all.

When you complete an adventure, you gain a level, and keep any of the Signiature Items you happened to pick up during that adventure. All the other equipment that you found or lost is completely irrelvent because we won't even see your character until next level when he will have managed to squander himself down (or build himself up) to an appropriate set of level equipment once more.

The next adventure will have your character non-specifically knowing more stuff about a variety of topics, having more power, and then having a pouch which is bare or heavy with gold based on the needs of the next story.

---

This kind of change would make characters more like the heroes of a series of novels or TV show, and less like the characters in a diary you are in the process of reading.

If you made such wide sweeping changes to the game, then you could change things to the point where starting characters might not know that beholders have antimagic eyes. But honestly, unless you do, they do, and you should probably just get over it.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

That is an awesome campaign variant that I must develop more heavily. In addtion to what you've said, it would be extremely condusive to an ensemble-style party, where everyone decides who they want to go off on the Quest to Destroy The Grey King. Each character begins game with a few Signature items, and a level-determined purse to buy equipment with.

-Desdan

[Maj]

The more I read it, the more I realize we play that way. Often, our adventures are months and/or years apart in-game. We decide what happens to our characters in the interim, what new equipment has been purchased, what "signature items" are kept (nice term, Frank) and what our characters' potential goals have changed to.

Ascension isn't something that you ought to do in a month of in-game time. Taking forty years, though, isn't unreasonable.

[Crissa]

Hai, I'd love to see that sort of campaign, Frank.

It really fits the style of gaming that I've done - We do that sort of thing when playing Dragon Storm.

Perhaps that should be your next set of rules after the Final Fantasy version.

-Crissa

...We need to get you a publisher.

[MrWaeseL]

How do you explain the year between adventures? IMC, the party is always on the lookout for more things to do, and there's always someone in the city that needs something done. You could probably remove that so that there's nothing to do for a year, but enterprising players would just go to another town or to the local evil castle.

[Username17]

How do you explain the year between adventures?

Either:

a> The players all get to rant for ten minutes (or more) about all the adventuring they've done over the last year. Every piece of weird stuff they have hanging on their neck is exhaustively explained and each character attempts to make their story more exciting than the one before. Heck, it doesn't even have to be true, and you could make a plot point about having other events happen in game that bring said story into doubt - or not. Either way.

or

b> You don't even mention it at all. The player just walks into another town a year later with a bunch of weird stuff, new abilties, and new scars. Whenever people ask you about particularly impressive or unique new abilties you can either answer gruffly about how you don't want to talk about it, or just kind of change the subject and trail off...

It's not really important. Once you've set up a variety of fifth level adventure hooks, and the 5th level players complete one of them, you can just sort of assume that they then went ahead and completed all the others too. Or not, whatever tickles your fancy.

The important thing here is to set it up so that there is not a disparity of down time, so that players aren't demanding that wizards stop researching spells and players aren't demanding that fighters sit on their hands for three months.

--

One thing you would have to do is radically change the price scale for "permanent" items vs. "temporary" items. After all, any "permanent" items you have are gone next time you show up for an adventure anyways, so they aren't really "permanent".

The D&D price scale is based on the idea that a potion of Heroism is going to help you out in one or two encounters, and then it's gone for good. Meanwhile, a +2 Sword is going to serve you for about a level or two and then you'll get something better and be able to resell the +2 Sword to a lower level character and get some of your money back - in essence you are purchasing a Potion of Heroism as a one-shot, while you are renting a +2 Sword for the next 26 encounters.

However, with such a system you are actually now purchasing the +2 Sword for a limited number of encounters (about 13 in a standard adventure I'm thinking), and you are purchasing the potion of eroism as well - to be used in some lesser number of encounters (1 to 3 based on how good your planning is, and how connected the encounters are).

That being the case, magic arms and armor would need to have a radically different cost structure, because they are really just potions that happen to last about a week.

---

Furthermore, the entire XP cost system has to be dumped, but of course we knew that. It's even more so here though, because an individual adventure is unlikely to last long enough for you to make more than a potion or two, and you can't bank them between adventures. Instead, people who have item creation feats should probably just walk into every adventure with some extra appopriate magic items based on their character level.

I could see the creation of an "alchemist" character, for instance, who simply took "brew potion" for all available feats and walked into every adventure with a really huge stack of potions.

-Username17

[User3]

Signature items really shouldn't change around off camera. Authur is not the King of England without Excaliber. Now, if on camera the sword is broken by Mordred in an Epic battle and you have to go on a quest to have a watery tart duct tape it back together, then fine. That's cool.

I've always thought that signature magic items should have a number of latent abilties, and based on your level, you can use them. The Fire Sword might pentrate the DR of Fire Creatures and do +1 Fire damage at 1st level, but at 10th level its +3, Flaming and Flaming Burst and offers Resistance 15 to Fire.

Rather than upgrading your sword at the local Ye' Olde Sword and Scroll Shoppe, you keep the same sword from level 1-20.

Non-signature items have to be left at whatever level that they were created at. Like Familiars whose masters have died, they can keep some of the power of their greatest signature wielder, but they won't synergize with the character's abilties. You can be like Angel, who has a wall of swords on his wall gained from adventures, and you can pick the right magic sword for the battle. The power is fixed, but sometimes is enough. If you loose it, or it gets broken, then no biggy. When is the last time you saw a 15th level fighter cry over a +1 Elemental Bane Sword?

Also, non-signature items should have a flat level dependant activation cost, with a baleful side effect f you fail(Artifacts should always activate and always side effect).
It could be something like a char level check vs the level of the itemseffect, no mods, and failure is baleful.

So the master of the Fire Sword(level 10) is in his adventure, and he fights a Master of a Demon Sword(15). He wins, and picks up the Demon Sword and puts it into his pocket to put in his batcave. Later in the same adventure, a fire-based Demon attacks, and the fighter is helpless. He pulls out the Demon sword from his Santa sack, and tries to activate it. He rolls a 4(oh nooo!), and the baleful effect hits him. He gains a temporary Demon feature(roleplaying), and he involuntarily Rages for 10 rounds and attacks everyone on sight, attempting to activate the sword at the end of the Rage.

Some items might have higher activation checks(Demon swords are +3 for non-demons) than normal for an items of that power level. Others would have lower costs(item was created specifically for the fighter by wizard friend.)

One shot or charged items siggy items would get refreshed at the end of every adventure in off-camera time. Potions would just be a class of items on your sheet like "4 1st level potions, 2 2nd, and 1 3rd" and you would decide the effects at the beginning of the adventure.

Overall, all of the magic pluses and minus would have to be reworked to make lesser magic items still useful. Items like Slippers of Spider Climb are useful at any level, even after you get Fly and Teleport, but a +1 sword is immediately pawned once a +2 sword comes along. A Bane weapon might always penetrate the Baned creature's DR, meaning that a fighter would always keep it in his batcave despite a low plus mod.

Permanent magic spells would have to be double priced items(as for no slots items) for people who want them at full strength, but half strength or set to a max if you want to fire and forget(A permanent Wizard lock might only have a max level of caster level 3(for dispels, etc) for a non-sgnature version, but up to the casters level for an "owned" version.

Items making feats would let you get the items you want, and not the DMs whim.

[Username17]

K, your system sounds like a lot of work. Especially this part:

Overall, all of the magic pluses and minus would have to be reworked to make lesser magic items still useful. Items like Slippers of Spider Climb are useful at any level, even after you get Fly and Teleport, but a +1 sword is immediately pawned once a +2 sword comes along. A Bane weapon might always penetrate the Baned creature's DR, meaning that a fighter would always keep it in his batcave despite a low plus mod.

Hell no. The idea is not to completely cover the back of your sheet with magic items that you've found at various points in your life - the point here is to make the number of magic items you have so small as to be manageable and memorable.

I mean seriously, do you even remember how many +2 Swords you've picked up in your life? How about the number of potions of healing? Can you remember all of them? Do you even care?

No. You don't care. And that's the point. The point isn't that all of the magic items should be made unique and precious to the point where you remember and care about all forty seven of them - the point is that we should stop pretending that we are supposed to care about all of the magic items!

All of the magical banded mail is probably going to get pawned because banded mail is ass. And rather than trying to make the banded mail so weird and cool that we hold onto all of it and get hugely long lists of equipment useful in weird situations such that we all need multiple bags of holding just to carry it all around - we should simply eliminate the middle man.

We all know that the banded mail is going to be left by the wayside as soon as something stylish in a mithril plate comes around - so we should simply not worry about it. And I mean completely not worry about it. The next adventure happens and you have different equipment completely independent of whether you kept the banded mail or not.

The banded mail is not saved in a pile. It's not sold as part of a package deal to afford a robe of eyes. It's just fvcking gone! No explanation is required. When you show up for the next adventure arc you show up with new level appropriate equipment and any +1 swords or +2 Banded you did or did not pick up along the way is completely irrelevent to this process.

People who are specialized in the Duom always have a Duom. People who specialize in the Orcish Double Axe always have a level appropriate Orc Double Axe. Etc. Whenever you walk into an adventure you have equipment which is appropriate both to your level and to your character.

Looting your enemies only helps you in that you can pick up stuff that is useful for your characters later in the same adventure only. And, of course, about once per adventure arc you'll get a new Signature Item, which then follows you from adventure to adventure.

That means that by 20th level, each party member ought to have about five signature items. Which I think is about the limit that anyone is going to be able to keep track of.

This means that people will, in general, be a lot more "heroic", and a lot less "mercenary". This is good. It means that you can have bridges made of moonstones without having the characters demand to mine it. It means that players can defeat the bandits without immediately demanding to go home and hock all of the masterwork studded leather. It means you can keep track of your fvcking character without having to have a separate sheet for all the scrolls you've saved away for a rainy day.

There is no problem now with handing out any items except signature items, because any other item is only going to be with you until the end of the current chapter (unless you select an identical item for some of your level equipment for the next chapter).

That means you don't need any level checks, or any other restraints on found gear, because even spectacularly overpowered objects are just there to make the end boss easier - for no particular reason you won't be using those items next adventure regardless.

-Username17

[User3]

If armor and weapons were more interesting than +1 vs +2, then you would keep them. For example, all magic armor should be as good as mithril. It just should. Non-magic junk should never be better than magic junk.

That being said, if your Banded Mail of Fog gave you the ability to turn into Gaseous form, and was as good as as mithril, sometimes you would wear that and not wear the mithril Elven Chain that added a Haste effect one turn out of three.

I like having a sheet with all the magic items I've found. I look back on it and say "oh yah, that Amulet of Weather Detection was what I won in that bet with that stupid fairy who kept turning my caltrops into bubblegum."

Right now, people can't play their character without a certain number of +crap items in their pants. That's dumb. Items need to be unique. When fighting the villain, you need a reason to want to grab his sword and stab him with it, and then think about leaving the item on the floor. Taking home the Unholy Blade of Ash and Blood should be a terrible idea, because none of the servants in your castle will sleep because of the nightmares the blade sends them. Carrying on your side should cause a low level fear effect that makes it impossible to sit in a tavern and drink a beer. That's flavorful, and the cause of stories.

A +4 Sword is nothing. Nothing at all. No story, no flavor, no fun.

If you want to keep DnD magic items as class features and basic pluses, then they don't matter at all. Just say "I attack with my +4 weapon. I hit? I roll my d8 +14 for damage. Yay." It could be a sword, an ax, or anything at all. Remove tactical feats and special attacks, and tactical movement. Just say "Here's my Attack roll. Damage? Here's my roll."

No fun at all.

---------------------------------
And Bags of Holding/Portable holes need to be nerfed. They are legacy material from back in the days when dragons had 20K copper, 10K silver, 5K gold, and 1K Plat, and people created spells like Tenser's Disk to carry all that crap home, even when they didn't have anything to spend it on. Now that they do have something to spend it on, you do mine out the bridge of moonstones.

Of course, buying magic items would go away if they were tied to the power of a character.

[Username17]

The solution being discussed, however, is to separate your meaningful items from your bonus items. While you could certainly have a situation where you had a list of weird useful magical swag which is a page and a half long, that's not for everybody.

I mean, you can't even keep track of your character's skill ranks, even when we institute house rules that make intelligence retroactive and therefore easier to compute. Asking you to keep track of 18 different weapons with different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses and then to make intelligent decisions about which item to use under what circumstances is simply a recipe for I Love Lucian Tragedy.

People already can't figure out their characters and lose track of total attack bonuses even when they have a single best weapon which they use all the time. Having people constantly reconfigure themselves in the middle of combat is a non-starter of a plan if I have ever heard of one. There is no reason why player characters should be shuffling through a set of index cards to find the perfect weapon for the situation - because players honestly can't handle that level of complexity.

A bonus item that gives a reasonable bonus at 4th level isn't likely to give a meaningful bonus at 14th level, and giving it weird powers that would make you maybe want to use it anyway under some weird circumstance later in life is just asking to have the game collapse the next time someone loses their character sheet.

Or to put it another way:

Between 1st and 20th level you'll go on about 20 adventure arcs, each of which has about 13 encounters in it (assuming we use a rough CR approximation from the DMG). That's maybe 20 signature items to keep track of, but potentially 260 regular treasuries. If you have a piece of loot from every encounter you ever have somewhere in the party - that's 65 pieces of swag to keep track of per character - and that's grotesquely too many.

If you only have one piece of swag to keep track of in the party per adventure, that's 5 signature items that carry over per character. And that's really the absolute limit of what people can manage.

All the other stuff your character needs to compete can be just designed by you to fit your individual character's needs on a per-adventure basis. Anything more complicated than that is simply too complicated.

-Username17

[User3]

Stats and numbers are easy to forget. However, as a Sorcerer with twenty different spell effects, I have never forgotten a spell. I’ve never forgotten what magic items I possess. I will admit, however, that I did forget what was in a few Tainted scrolls. Once I decided that I didn’t want to use them (the Taint was not worth the effect), I didn’t even write them down. A perfect example of items that get left behind.

Wizards don’t forget what spells they know. Its part of the class, each spell has a memory attached to it of when you got it, and all the times you used it.

Now, the last time I calced my AC, I added my Dex mod (with its own mods), my armor mod, my shield mod, my natural armor mod (with Alter Self or Polymorph), my magic armor and whether is was bigger than armor mod, my Finesse mod, and the ten different circumstances that can affect AC (like cover, blindness, random spells, etc.)

I’m not even going to start with my attack number.

That’s a lot to calculate. Too much in fact. That single stat is a far larger amount of information than all of my Sorcerer spells.

But, off the top of my head I can tell you all of my spells, 1st through 5th, and all of my pieces of equipment. I can even tell you the ones I destroyed, left behind, or just plain used up.

Now, a warrior won’t have a bunch of items on a separate sheet, and at the beginning of every battle he’ll flip through and pick the best sword. He might have a few swords that are non-signature, and he’ll keep them at home probably. His signature equipment will be 4-5 items at one time. The random stuff will be just that, random. On a day-to-day basis, it won’t be as good as signature stuff.

However, when you plan to go to the Plane of Fire, you’ll dust off the Fire Sword. In that circumstance, it’ll be better than your signature item.

Maybe your back-up weapon is a Dagger of Drinking, a weapon that Stuns water creatures and does a d6 extra magic damage. Its not a signature item, so you won’t use it unless you get disarmed or when that Water Elemental attacks and you’ll drop the Fear Blade and stab it with the Dagger of Drinking. It’s a minor item that you can activate easily with your level, so you carry it around as a back-up. You are not going to have 12 magic swords in a Bag of Holding and use it like a Swiss Army Knife to attack your enemies.

Maybe the Wizard keeps a Wand of Illusion as a non-signature item. He uses it a few times, and then it looses its charges. Big whoop. His signature item is still the Wand of Fireballs, and it’ll be recharged at the end of every adventure.

No story is ever about “and his mighty +8 sword boosted his attack roll to 27, beating the Demon’s natural armor and base AC by one point, and doing 43 damage to the demon, killing it.”

Stories are about: “he rolled away, and stabbed it with the Blade of the Demon’s Regret. Power flared from the holy katana, and burned deep into the foul creature, ending its foul life.”

[User3]

Ps. I forgot to summarize my idea.

A. All magic items are at a set power level, and must be activated(using unmodified char level) unless they are signature. Failing activation causes set crazy things to happen. They also have small effects when not-signature(like the Dragon Mail calls a CR 9 dragon once a month who tries to steal it from a non-dragon owner.).

B. Signature items increase in power past their base limit based on the power of the character. Bilbo has a Ring of Invisibility(non-signature), and Sauron has the One True Ring(Same item as a signature item). Gollum has a Ring of Invisibility and a permament Polymorph and Discern Location on the Ring effect(signature effect for a much lower level guy).

C. All items have powers that are useful at any level. No simple plus items any more. You can have a Sword of Sharpness thats +3, but the day of the "+3 sword" is done and gone.

[Username17]

This is actually really simple:

Every time you fight a group of NPCs, they have equipment or they suck. In fact, they have roughly as much equipment as the PCs are actually using, or they just aren't that much of a threat.

And when they inevitably die, the PCs get all that stuff. Now unless they for whatever reason don't use the vast majority of that stuff, the next group of NPCs they face is going to have to have twice as much stuff roundabout or they won't be a threat.

You can handle this however you want. The usual methods include:

1> Horribly cursing NPC gear. NPC gear which can only be used by villains or which carries a cost which is too high will not be used and doesn't require compensatory equipment on the next group of bad boys.

2> Inferior goods. The difference between a +2 Flaming Sword and a +3 Flaming Sword is noticable, but the guy with the +2 sword can still compete - and if the NPC has the +2 version and the PC has the +3 version, the character will end up throwing the +2 version into the money bin and it doesn't require compensatory equipment on the next encounter.

3> Redunadant equipment. Once you've handed +1 Rings of Protection to the whole party, the entire enemy party can have +1 Rings of Protection as well and there's no harm done - the party has't gained a thing, so the next NPC party doesn't need any equipment inflation.

4> Continuous destruction of items. That's right, if you let equipment slip into crazy tow you can reign it in with a combination of Rust Monsters, Disenchanters, Green Slime, and Drow EZ-Bake Gear.

And D&D has traditionally had to use all of them in tendem to barely keep things in line. And it's dumb. It's all really really dumb.

The bad guys should just have lazer swords or magic bane armor, or whatever. And because it isn't signature gear, it should just not show up for no reason at all.

If we can't just write off all that swag for no reason then we still have to write it off anyways. And then we have to write it off for a reason. And those reasons are going to be pretty sucktastic a lot of the time.

I mean, there are reasons that Drow Equipment melted in the sunlight as soon as it wasn't in contact with the special ultraviolet radiation found only underground. One of those reasons was that Gary Gygax apparently wouldn't know science if it kicked him in the balls, but the other is because the ame is not manageable if people actually just have all the magical equipment garnered from beating their own evil duplicates three times in a row. That's 8 times the equipment they started with, and it's straight off into madness.

---

The other thing to keep in mind, of course, is that the player isn't the only person who has to keep track of all this shit. The DM has to design encounters based on the actual capabilities and equipment of the PCs. And while you might be able to keep track of 65 different magic items (a claim I basically scoff at, by the way), I know for damn certain that neither you nor I, nor anyone else is going to be able to keep track of all 65 items for four characters closely enough to meaningfully design adventures with all of it in mind.

I mean, if someone has the Void Hand, then the whole adventure about the poison fog is going to be alot... shorter than you planned. And if you forgot about that, you'll end up having to bullshit your way through the rest of the night. Sometimes that's OK. That's happened to me, and it's been fine. But if players just continuously acrue more and more versatile and meaningful crap it's going to be the rule instead of the exception.

Going to the Superhero methaphor, where players mysteriously never bother to keep the poison trident they took off the Triton Guard and stabbed the MerKing with into subsequent adventures is a solid way to solve this problem.

It's not the only way, I mean we could just go back to the way some of your equipment melted in the sun, or we could fight a lot of Rust Monsters, or whatever. But it's a lot less insulting to just put the metaphor up front.

Make things more like stories and video games, and TV shows, and every other piece of media. Have characters defeat guys wearing totally pimp storm trooper armor and disguise themselves in it, and then throw it away for some reason before the next movie starts. That's what people actually want, and it's a lot easier on everyone.

And then we don't have to design all our NPCs meticulously around the concept of making damn sure that players won't get anything out of it - because that need is taken care of by the basic adventure structure.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

This would also prevent the players in most situations from having to go out and kill orcs for the bounty or clean out a dungeon to make enough money to finance a quest because their weapons and armor aren't powerful enough. You just buff their signature item between games.

-Desdan

[RandomCasualty]

To fix the whole magic item thing you've really got to eliminate item creation and magic item shops. Because as soon as you can create items easily you're going to have shops that sell those items. And you can be sure your PCs will have 600 of them.

I'm for removing magic items from CR entirely and making them mostly signature items and extra goodies that PCs collect and an occasional monster uses. But they should be add ons and overall fairly rare.

NPCs shouldn't need magical items to compete. A mid level fighter has to be a mid level challenge when all he has is masterwork gear. His AC should be able to be competetive without rings of protection and amulets of natural armor. If he gets one of these then he should be all the better.

A giant or beholder is its CR even when its using normal gear. Until we can say the same about a human NPC, we'll always have problems with overabundance of magical equipment.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

1088713151[/unixtime]]To fix the whole magic item thing you've really got to eliminate item creation and magic item shops. Because as soon as you can create items easily you're going to have shops that sell those items. And you can be sure your PCs will have 600 of them.

Not really, in fact in this situation, you remove XP costs from magic item creation, and it just becomes another source for non-signature equipment, or a supurflouous explanation for the enhancement of signature equipment. Remember that you have a static amount of resources to get quest equipment with that you get at the beginning of each adventure. At the end of the adventure, all non-signature items go away, sold for money or given away as a souviner to the barmaid you spent a night with when you got back from killing the werewolves plagueing the trade-pass or whatever. You don't have it anymore. If you decide you need an identical piece of equipment next adventure, you can say that it's the same thing that you used last adventure, but it's cost still comes out of your stipend.

-Desdan

[User3]

The problem with using "offstate" equipment swaps is the lack of continuity. Having some guy show up with a Doom Sword one day, and then not have it the next, is not fun. The story falls apart. People will min-max their equipment to the nth degree, not just at character creation, but before every adventure. Continuity is why we keep track of XP, or ability scores, or keep the same character sheet. You could have adventures where you said "and you spent levels 10-14 doing adentures. Now you are on the adventure of the Mummy's Tomb!" Story to story its fine, but as a campaign its no fun at all.

Second, min/maxing is not fun to a lot of people. Having equipment that allows you do that just compounds the problem. When you are stuck with found items that are cursed when not signature items is that you can't really min-max at all. The reason that most superheroes don't use Doctor Doom's death ray is that they are sure that its going to go horribly wrong in the hands of anyone but Doctor Doom.

Third, the equipment should never be more imporant to a character than the character. Right now, a min-maxed 10th level warrior will school a min/maxed 10th level fighter without equipment, and thats not right.

And if you have a pocket full of interesting rings, and sometimes you break the DM's game, then that happens. It happens all the time anyway, and the DM always adapts, or not.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

K, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Let's say you're playing an 8th level Barbarian/Fighter. His signature items are, lets say, a +2 Flaming Burst greatsword and an amulet of Natty Armor 3. Some guy runs into town, all bedraggled and wounded, and announces that werewolves have taken the mountain pass that all of the trade caravans from the east come through. Your barbairian and his party stand up and say "WE'LL handle this". They spend the evening shopping and your barbarian, in addtion to some potions and whatnot, buys a silvered greatsword.

Now, once that adventure's over, the silvered sword goes away. Maybe he lost it in a poker game or sold it to finance his next adventure, or gave it to a 10yo kid who was looking at him with admiration and gratitude for saving his town or whatever. The fact is that as far as mechanics go, you don't have that sword anymore! To get it again, you have to shell out the money required to get it back, even if as far as game continuity goes, you never lost it. However, the barbarian's main weapon, his Flaming Burst Greatsword +2 is still there. He never lost it, nothing happened to it except maybe next time it'll have another ability tacked on. I don't see where the lack of continuity comes in.

-Desdan

[Edit: Clarity]

[RandomCasualty]

I dunno. For something like the RPGA that equipment system would be great, since you're assumed to be just doing a bunch of crap between adventures, and that assures people that everyone is getting the fair amount of gear.

But for the average game, part of the adventure is trying to acquire gold and/or magic items. When you make the acquisition of this stuff irrelevant (because everything is based on level anyway), then you change how the game looks. Players are now going to be a lot more worried about simple survival and gaining XP than collecting any kind of rewards, since rewards are meaningless.

The game takes on much more of a tournament atmosphere as opposed to that of an RPG, and you run into a lot more trouble whenever you try to run a time intensive campaign (which a lot of people actually run) where adventurers don't simply take months off between adventures.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

1088718532[/unixtime]]But for the average game, part of the adventure is trying to acquire gold and/or magic items. When you make the acquisition of this stuff irrelevant (because everything is based on level anyway), then you change how the game looks. Players are now going to be a lot more worried about simple survival and gaining XP than collecting any kind of rewards, since rewards are meaningless.

This is a problem because...?

One of the problems with D&D is that the risks would be so much less than the rewards in just about every combat. The campaign model where people have to scrape together all the gold they can to remain competitive is what creates the mercenary attitude in the average D&D party. Because of that you have to state the rewards upfront or the party isn't interested. This creates situations where the party will actually refuse to help take down a local theive's guild if they know that, like IRL, the city they're working for will want to confiscate all the loot as evidence. They won't save the small border town from the orc warband that sweeps through every fall becaust the town can only scrape up a few hundred gold plus room and board. They go after the necromancer plaguing the land because they can get his gold, his spellbook, and his sweet-ass staff, and not because the Necromancer is killing innocents and raising them for his unholy army. They'll try to kill the Goblin Cheiftain rather than negotiate a peace treaty because there's more profit in killing the Goblins, even though other tribes would probably get pissed off.

See what I'm getting at?

-K

[RandomCasualty]

Well the problem si when you take a pretty big bit of loot away from them, namely a dragon hoard. Usually when they go through the trouble risking their characters to kill a big creature like a dragon, they expect to get something out of it beyond XP, since after all, they could collect XP doing something a little less risky.

I'm not saying it'd necessarily be bad, but a lot of players would really have to get used to it, because it encourages a very different style of play.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Then they saved the princess that the Dragon was about to eat or they restored the underground city that the dragon lives in to the dwarves that rule it, or whatever.

-Desdan

[Username17]

But for the average game, part of the adventure is trying to acquire gold and/or magic items.

And that's why the average game falls apart and goes nuclear as soon as somebody figures out how fabricate works, or reads the dao entry.

You can play whack-a-mole with the infinite money loops for the rest of your life, but realistically speaking you are never going to make "questing" more monetarily profitable than sitting around performing skilled labor, because lets face it - it isn't.

In real life, there are infinite money loops. You put oats in the ground, and the next year you have more oats. So many more, that you can eat some of them, scrape off enough to put oats into the ground again, and still have oats left over to sell.

This is, however, dungeons and dragons. Not logistics and dragons. As soon as you make people itemize their wealth, people are going to figure out that you can increase it unrecognizably by performing magically assisted entirely mundane tasks which are not even tangential to any quest or story, but simply unrelated. Players are going to teleport in spices from the orient (or the heavens), they are going to strip mine the opal throne (or the plane of earth), they are going to forge exquisite blades (or telescopes), or whatever.

The fact is that if you spend five years doing something in the game this takes one sentence of real life:

And then I spend five years supervising my skeletons in their excavation of the platinum spire, cutting it down into chunks, and teleporting to the far corners of the globe to sell the platinum in small lots as a precious metal for whatever luxury goods, magical trinkets, or adamantite I can get. How much do I get?

If you want to itemize the total accumulated wealth of the players you have to be willing to accept that it is going to be 100% ape shit unrecognizably insane within 3 months. Any campaign based on the itemization of wealth has to be OK with the fact that you are going to be roleplaying "near unlimited resources" within a narrow time frame.

If you don't want that, you have to do something drastic. And that is where my proposal comes in. It's drastic. It would work.

It requires you to let go of the idea that if you find one more or less gold piece when you knock over the bug bear banditos at level 2 that it will be reflected as one more or less gold piece on your character sheet at level eleven. That idea simply has to go, because no matter what you do, it's just not true.

-Username17

[Sma]

Im in love with this system. Plain and simple.

But while I can easily embrace the premise of losing the fat loot you got after you killed that dragon and the Dragon adventure is over, I´m asking myself how to implement this in an ongoing campaign, that takes places within a relatively short amount of time.
It´s easy to find ways to hve your characters loose wealth if there is a year between levels, but is there any way to implement it in a campaign spanning 6+ levels taking place in only a year game time ?

Sma

[User3]

Silver swords are non-magical equipment. Buy all that crap to your heart’s content. We are talking about magic items.

You should not buy (good) magic items. They should be quested for, either to create them, or to find/steal them.

You should not base your whole character on a magic item.

You should not choose adventures based on whether you feel you have enough magic items. If signature items grow in power, or are set by the power of the user, based on the character's level, then you will alway have good stuff needed to play.

Gaining magic items should not be a primary motivator for all adventures(but some, sure, why not?).

I want to collect magic items. Its fun. If I can't have a giant penny in my batcave, then why am I an adventurer?

But, to balance out the effect of magic items, they need to have drawbacks and limits. And they need to be created by adventurers using them in adventures, or finding them in adventures.

I don’t care if the Barbarian fighter picks up a silver sword and sells it after the werewolf fight. Really, I don’t. I do care if one day he buys a +3 Natty Armor Amulet, a Ring of Blinking, an Animated Shield, and an Pantaloons +5 of Fortification one day, and then for the next adventure looses all of that and he picks up a Ring of Fire Resistance, a Cloak of Spell Resistance, Arrows of Elemental Slaying, and a +3 Bow.

Now, some items should be bought. Potions, for example. I am going to fight a Red Dragon, so I should be able to buy some Healing potions and potions of Fire Resistance. Fine.

Items should be little plot devices. Signature items are ones that you have mastered. No one tells stories about the Eye of Thundara causing Lion-O to rage or feel pain or any other malefic thing. Its his signature item. But, it did in the beginning. He couldn’t get it to do what he wanted. Later in the series, he got it to do all kinds of crazy things.

Other items are things that you find, use a few times, but you don’t ever master them because they are too dangerous, or don’t give you the benefits you want. You don’t have the time to master them. Startrek Voyager had them gaining dozens of new and crazy technologies, sometimes once an episode, but most of the time they set aside the tech as, basically, too dangerous---read that as “too high level.” They toyed with slipstream drives, several flavors of Borg tech, and other stuff. They only ever learned to use some of the low level stuff like the medical uses of Borg Nanoprobes, a few sentient Hologram applications, and some borg shielding on the Delta Flier shuttle.

If I was on an adventure vs some bandits, then that’s a low level adventure and I shouldn’t expect to see more than a few magic weapons on a leader(Flaming or throwing, ranged +2s), maybe a random amulet or something(+1 natty armor), and maybe a store of potions. Once the leader is not using those weapons, they drop in power to non-signature items(+1 +1 fire damage or ranged) and I should be able to pass them around and wear them and they are basically things that I don’t notice. I can wear them and be OK the next adventure. Maybe I make one of them a signature item of my own, because I like the effects of the items. Low level items with level mins should be like 3. Failing to use items like these just mean that they don’t work when you need them, and they don’t have any real side effects(might cause animals to not let you ride them).

Now, lets say I go on mid level adventure vs a Necromancer and his huge undead army. He’s got several crazy magic items with level mins of like 10. As mid level items, they should have heavy duty side effects, but be powerful when they work correctly. He also has some crap which just fails when it doesn’t work, and he has some crap that you could activate at any time. He has a crazy good Staff of the Undead(level 15) which as a signature item casts Animate Dead three times a day, creates and controls up to 4 Vampires(levels 5-7), and boosts your Control undead limit by 3. After he’s dead it just Animates the dead once a day, and boosts your control limit by 3. Failing an activation roll and it creates an uncontrolled vampire that stalks you 1-4 days after your failed check. It also attracts undead to attack the wielder. If a 10th level character makes it a signature item, then he looses the downsides and gets the uber powers.

The crap stuff is the spellbook, 7-8 potions, a few Throwing Skulls +2 of Blasting(Fireball, maximized, requires a to-hit, and no save on primary target), and a tower that opens only for its master(wondrous architecture, can’t be moved): 10th level guys can use all of this stuff a not worry about it. The Ok stuff is the guy’s Bracelets of Protection, and his Crown of Control. As signature items the Bracelets are +8 armor, +4 to magic saves, and allow a reroll on Fort and Reflex saves. As non-sig items they fail on a non-activation, allow a reroll on Fort and Reflex saves, an count as +4 armor and +2 on magic saves. The side effect is that on any day that they are worn, the user cannot regain HP until a full night and a day have passed. The Crown of Control fails on a non-activation, and enrages the target to attack the owner. As a non-sign item it casts Charm Monster as as a Supernatural ability cast by the wearer’s HD for DCs once a day, or each time 6th level spell slot is sacrificed. As a signature item for a 10th level guy it casts it three times a day, or the slot, and the DC is +4. The side effect is that it Charms random people three times a day that the wielder does not want to be Charm(Like a family of trolls, who will attempt to protect the new “friend” by attacking any humans they see.)

See how this works?