Logistics and Dragons [No Kaeliks]

[RobbyPants]

my Craft/Profession conversion was at 0.5 Gil per +10 or part thereof. So it's pretty easy to go back and forth.

What? You think that's acceptable? Really now? REALLY? You're just going to throw in fractions of units in there? Yeah, THAT will clear up the already overly elaborate mess.

Is your objection that Gil is fractional or that it exists at all?

I can see the fraction thing being dumb. Personally, I'd set the exchange rate at 1 Gil = 1 gp and call it a day. Still, as AH said, there is a solid benefit to distinguishing between $CURRENCY and shiny yellow metal. If you produce X, which can be exchanged for goods and services, and X isn't shiny yellow metal, you're going to want to represent it somehow.

and people are going to want to be able to distinguish between an orc with a hammer (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +3) and an Orc Expert 10 (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +20). And you'd really want that distinction if your PC wants to get involved.

NO THEY ARE NOT. I don't know how much this point can be hammered home for you to stop fucking ignoring it, but this is supposed to be the backdrop to a D&D game not a god damn Anno 1404:Fantasy Expansion game. The players are NOT supposed to care about minutia of minor crafting bonuses on individual god damn minions. This isn't about production lines and markets and trading, it's a D&D fantasy adventure about fighting and looting, but with a sweet dungeon that a lot of it should happen in.

I don't know. I can see not wanting to get bogged down with the difference between a +3 and +4 to Craft (Weaponsmithing), but the example was a difference between +3 and +20. I can see the benefit between tracking differences between unskilled laborers, skilled laborers, and master craftsman. Especially since AH's stated position is that the PCs might want to get involved. If you want this system to interact with D&D proper, you need a way for the PCs to put stuff into it and take stuff out of it.

Seriously AH, put a "No Kaeliks" on the thread title, because he's not going to stop thread shitting until you do and possibly not even afterwards.

You could still end up with one Kaelik, like in the "No Homer's Club".

[Ancient History]

my Craft/Profession conversion was at 0.5 Gil per +10 or part thereof. So it's pretty easy to go back and forth.

What? You think that's acceptable? Really now? REALLY? You're just going to throw in fractions of units in there? Yeah, THAT will clear up the already overly elaborate mess.

It's an off-the-cuff guideline. I'm not married to it. Hell, at this point I'm not even married to Gil.

NO THEY ARE NOT. I don't know how much this point can be hammered home for you to stop fucking ignoring it, but this is supposed to be the backdrop to a D&D game

I'm going to stop you right there, because L&D is not a backdrop. It's a minigame. It's a minigame that you graduate to after you conquer a dungeon and decide "I'm the fucking Dungeon Master now, hur hur hur." So yeah, you're going to worry about shit at that level that you're not going to worry about as a normal D&D PC. And there is a lot of fiddly stuff at the bottom, and part of the idea is to work in a system that interacts with those fiddly bits. If this can be abstracted to a degree, great. But there's a sweet spot - like in war games. You want to be able to go into sufficient level of detail to make your players happy, but not such a level of detail that micromanagement is the only way to play.

D&D lacks a logistics management system for building and running dungeons. So you're going to have to add some stuff.

You aren't adding stuff to do that though, you are adding stuff to run an incredibly elaborate profitable kobold production line for crafting saleable orc plushies in incredibly elaborate and detailed granularity.

Ideally, the plushies fund your dungeon-building efforts. Or are directly part of it. Either way, they should contribute directly or indirectly to providing you the resources to do stuff.

Which is explicitly what a dungeon management minigame should be about. You want to be able to manage the critters in a dungeon, including telling them what to do and kitting them out. You want to be able to build or modify your dungeon, add traps and stuff. To do that, you need some form of resource management. I don't know if Gil and Koku is the way to go, but as first basis they have their attractions, since they cover making stuff and maintaining your population - with the added attraction of maybe being markers that make it easier or harder to recruit new minions and denizens as the game goes on.

Not to mention if you are pissed with Kaeliks whole rice genie bullshit you are just totally opening yourself up to a whole world of bullshit with your detailed crafting of cash goods shenanigans.

I think Frank had this covered pretty well, but the main thing about koku production to take home is that I am complete okay with people finding clever workarounds, like the all-undead dungeon. That's fine by me. It's not a hack or an exploit to me as much as a fair cop. The particular issue was the combination of create food and water with the DMG magical auto-resetting trap guidelines - and that is a concern, because it's potentially gamebreaking.

That in no way addresses the basic fact that your "quick" and supposedly simple substitute is wildly over elaborate. The sins of the portions of the system you are changing have dick all to do with the sins of the mechanics you are proposing to entirely substitute in place of those portions. Rolling everyone's craft check IS insane, but your plan is also insane.

A degree of elaboration is necessary, and in this case expected. Logistics needs to be complicated enough to interest people, but simple enough that they don't spend their entire time sitting a maths exam.

I can see the fraction thing being dumb. Personally, I'd set the exchange rate at 1 Gil = 1 gp and call it a day.

My thought process at setting 1 Gil = 100 gp is that it was one increment larger than the largest d20 currency unit (i.e. 100 gp = 10 pp = 1 Gil) - making it handy to handle bigger transactions

[name_here]

It's fine if you can find a way to get a boost to your production using magic and make the resource management easier. It's not fine if you transform to a post-scarcity economy at level five.

I would recommend rounding skill bonus impacts to increments of 5 to reduce the bookkeeping.

[virgil]

A production point is equal to one Kobold unskilled laborer put to work for one turn. Obviously craftsmen and magewrights or whatever would produce a lot more than one production point each.

I think production points should get better nomenclature, like koku. Kobold-weeks seems kind of bland as a name, and stremma is too surface-dweller to feel comfortable in a dungeon economy. Because this is a dungeon, the idea of using kobold as the standard unit is more appropriate than farming comparisons, especially since kobolds are the iconic trap-makers (a standard for dungeons).

Assuming 3.5 crafting, a team of five unskilled kobolds can make a single fusillade of darts in ~11 weeks; which is close to a kobold-year of labour. I can imagine labour being measured in 'fusillades' or 'idols'.

[Ancient History]

I would recommend rounding skill bonus impacts to increments of 5 to reduce the bookkeeping.

Current skill bonus impacts are tracked in increments of 10, so reducing it to 5 would actually increase bookkeeping.

[PhoneLobster]

A degree of elaboration is necessary, and in this case expected. Logistics needs to be complicated enough to interest people, but simple enough that they don't spend their entire time sitting a maths exam.

Pretty much your entire position can be summed up by your incredibly bizzare opinion that no matter how insane a mechanic you propose or accept is, no matter where it drags the focus of the game or how stupidly complex it is, it's always just somehow magically at a "sweet spot".

There is no justification, no actual consideration of the impact of the mechanics, it's always just "but I reeeeaaaally want to so it must be a sweet spot of complexity and desirable focus!"

[Ancient History]

...no, in fact I've pretty much said that I have no idea where the sweet spot would be, and all of these mechanics are pretty conjectural at this point.

[PhoneLobster]

Claiming you haven't ever really said anything of any meaning is always a 'fun' thing to see, and if you'd been spending your time merely defending the abstract concept of appropriately focused complexity that would be fine.

But the closest you appear to have gotten to that is attempting to use the concept of appropriately focused complexity to defend, or simply deflect from having to defend, specific bits of poorly focused needless complexity I've criticized.

When you were criticized on suddenly deciding that a big thing dungeons do now which needs a lot of complex mechanics and math behind it is producing goods to sell for cash you didn't respond with "I have no idea what I'm doing that could just change" you responded with "this is what the game SHOULD be about". That you haven't settled on the specific complex math (entirely anyway, you've been defending a number of points on that pretty solidly too) is irrelevant, you seem to have committed pretty firmly to making this a major focus and source of complexity in the game.

And with the exception of your inability to decide what to do with Gil, that's pretty much where you seem to be on almost everything. Well you also say you aren't committed to koku occasionally, but nothing else you say suggest that is in anyway true.

[Ancient History]

When you were criticized on suddenly deciding that a big thing dungeons do now which needs a lot of complex mechanics and math behind it is producing goods to sell for cash you didn't respond with "I have no idea what I'm doing that could just change" you responded with "this is what the game SHOULD be about". That you haven't settled on the specific complex math is irrelevant, you seem to have committed pretty firmly to making this a major focus and source of complexity in the game.

Yeah, I expect the PCs and their minions to be able to build stuff that lets them grow their dungeon. I still don't see why this is a gamebreaker for you.

[hyzmarca]

So basically two different systems of currency, food points and labor points.

Food points can represent anything from rice to jars full of living human brains.

Labor points can represent anything from a big strong giant who moves rocks for you to a construction crew from the nearby human village that you pay with dead adventurer loot.

Gil and Koku are just names.

They don't make themselves, you need generators for both.

The two basic generators are monsters and structures.

For the sake of clear definitions, monsters are any living thing, and structures can be either natural or artificial.



Thus, the big bookkeeping problem is giant charts showing the koku and gill values of all the different structures and monsters.



Monsters cost food, and possibly labor, for upkeep. They might also cost labor to recruit or enslave.

Structures cost labor for construction, and possibly upkeep. Some of them might also require food.

Some monsters, like the Creation Cleric, are food generators rather than food consumers. They generally cost labor for upkeep.

Then you have special structures, that allow you do so special things.

The obvious food generating structures are farms and ranches. Farms to grow food, ranches to keep livestock.


I suspect you could also generate food through hunting-gathering, and market purchases, which would involve converting labor points into food points.

I also suspect that there would sbe structures such as workshops that either reduce labor costs or generate labor themselves.

[Ancient History]

Living brains would fall under special dietary requirements, probably.

Hunting-gathering is presupposed through the hex having its innate koku production. It's something assumed. Market purchases are absolutely possible, if you have the trade set up.

You could theoretically have windmills, watermills, and golem-mills that effectively generate labor. That way lies industrial revolution, which we've talked about before, and which D&D doesn't handle well. But it's a possibility.

[Zaranthan]

Look, AH, here's your problem:

You've got at least two camps arguing in the thread: those that want to play Dominions d20, and those that want to play Heroes of Might & Magic d20. Both sides have legitimate reasons for both their own preference AND legitimate complaints about how the other side's preference is a "waste of time".

If you want useful pushback, you're going to have to come down somewhere on the sliding scale and just say "this is the game I want to make, anybody who doesn't like it on first principles needs to shove off." Otherwise, you're just yelling at Kaeliks until you get frustrated and abandon the project.

[Username17]

Look, AH, here's your problem:

You've got at least two camps arguing in the thread: those that want to play Dominions d20, and those that want to play Heroes of Might & Magic d20. Both sides have legitimate reasons for both their own preference AND legitimate complaints about how the other side's preference is a "waste of time".

If you want useful pushback, you're going to have to come down somewhere on the sliding scale and just say "this is the game I want to make, anybody who doesn't like it on first principles needs to shove off." Otherwise, you're just yelling at Kaeliks until you get frustrated and abandon the project.

I admire your attempt to peace build, but the reality is that a bunch of people on this thread are just being assholes. For example, there's the part where Kaelik quoted a post of mine talking about production points and responded with this:

And then you can produce only one building per turn even if you can personally make like 600, because Dominions/HoMM more important than actually Logistics and Dragons.

That's not something you can even respond to because it's completely illiterate. There were two ideas of simplification, one was upgrade slots like Puerto Rico or Dominion - no fucking S at the end because we're talking about the card game called "Dominion" and not the computer strategy game called "Dominions". And the other was production points. In both cases it would be possible to build more than one building per turn, either by getting more production points or by getting more upgrade slots.

So he responded to a post talking about option A with a derisive comment about how option B worked based on a misunderstanding of how B works and then derisively said that it was only being supported because people are too attached to a game that is merely spelled similarly to the one actually being talked about in option B. Holy fucking shit. That's a level of not reading the posts he is thread shitting on that is so deep that it takes multiple paragraphs to unpack just the obvious misunderstandings. We haven't even gotten to his arguments about what did and did not need to be done, which are actually even more layers of reading incomprehension and reflexive dickery.

Phone Lobster's arguments are honestly similar layers of incomprehension and butthurt, but at least he makes on-topic suggestions sometimes. He routinely butts into conversations about how much to simplify D&D inputs for the strategic view by demanding to know why people are talking about adding complexity. Which we are not. It's very puzzling until you remember that PL is not entirely on board with this conversation and is actually talking about how you should use his pet system and not play Logistics & Dragons at all.

The real fundamental disagreement I think is how many people want to track kobold immigration and tax revenue, and how many people want to fuck around with edge cases of the spell and magic item guidelines to bypass the D&D economy altogether.

-Username17

[maglag]

I personally don't get why people would want to play an economics simulator.

Because there's already several economic systems to work with in real life. If you think you're such a great economics expert, there's countless business/markets out there for you to invest in where you can make fat real currency profits if you're actually that good.

When I play D&D, it's because I can get to pretend to be an adventurer butchering mystic monsters and saving/dooming the land (something which would be considerably harder to do in real life, at least without risking my own skin). I get loot from enemy dead bodies and spend it in shops without worrying if I should invest it long-term or if the taxes are lower next country. I know it's "nonsensical", but the market minigame should be as simple as possible, plus every single economic system everywhere it's nonsensical when you think enough about it, because at best it relies on the fact people will agree to trade honestly instead of trading/looting/cheating.

Probably my favorite change from Dom3 to Dom4 was the nuking of the tax mechanic and gem generators. Because it meant I could spend more time scripting my pixel armies for combat and less time overseeing a pixel economy.

This thread still amuses me with all the Kaekiling tough.

[Username17]

I personally don't get why people would want to play an economics simulator.

Because there's already several economic systems to work with in real life. If you think you're such a great economics expert, there's countless business/markets out there for you to invest in where you can make fat real currency profits if you're actually that good.

I'm pretty sure that I can kill someone by stabbing them with a sword, but I still choose to not do that in real life and instead talk about imaginary people stabbing other imaginary people with imaginary swords. This is a critique that is so weirdly off base I find it difficult to even engage with it.

I mean, you seriously can't imagine why people would want to have a power fantasy about having actual power? Like, you can't even see the appeal of imagining yourself as mayor or president?

What the hell?

-Username17

[Kaelik]

That's not something you can even respond to because it's completely illiterate.

The rules permit you to get your good buddy to ban me from the thread and then disingenuously lie in the general direction of the issues I was talking about without explicitly name dropping me, but they do not allow you to get your good buddy to ban me from the thread and then disingenuously lie in the general direction of the issues I was talking about while specifically shittalking me, so don't do that.

[Sergarr]

From my point of view, Logistics & Dragons mini-game is ultimately about getting gp from the surrounding place and using it to decorate your fancy dungeon with dazzling magic items and to hire guards to make quick work of everyone who tries to steal them. Given that, there seems to be clear that there are going to be three essential parts to it: 1) getting gp from outside, 2) spending gp of stuff, and 3) defending your place.

The "quick & dirty" way to make all three parts integrated within the main D&D game therefore would be to fight an encounter with CR based on how much gp you want to get by defeating it, at some nearby gold-containing structure, like a trade route, a village or a castle; use some tables to convert the obtained gp into hiring new guards, buying magic items, salaries and repair costs, and then spawn a random encounter with CR based on how much total value your dungeon has accrued (in magic items and gp), attacking said dungeon, which you fight off with your party and your hired guards.

For gp - CR conversion, you can use the existing WBL tables, for guards and repair costs I've heard there's some Stronghold Builder or something. Because the income you get is limited by the strength of your adventuring party, your total acquired value is limited too, by salaries and hiring costs to replace the guards slain by the attacking parties. So the system should be relatively balanced.

So, thoughts?

[PhoneLobster]

From my point of view...

Whaaaaaat? A plan that directly ties into actual D&D style adventuring and encounters in any way shape or form? Where is the kobold cash goods manufacturing? The civlization style build points? The power grid style markets for currency exchanges? The dated hex grids of holdings?

That sounds like "bottom up" design lacking in "quick and dirty" "managed abstraction".

But seriously. The precise implementation of trying to bend random bits of d20 to fit your plan might be flawed, (to some extent unavoidably, because d20), but you've fairly easily identified much better more integrated goals than AH has been able to articulate or plan towards all thread.

You're about where I was about 6 or seven years ago shortly before I wrote This Thread and then spent years writing different modified and improved iterations on the scheme at a rate of approximately one or so per year. To be fair things have changed a fair bit since that thread too, but even the old material there is about ten times more useful than the crazy AH is entertaining here.

[maglag]

I personally don't get why people would want to play an economics simulator.

Because there's already several economic systems to work with in real life. If you think you're such a great economics expert, there's countless business/markets out there for you to invest in where you can make fat real currency profits if you're actually that good.

I'm pretty sure that I can kill someone by stabbing them with a sword, but I still choose to not do that in real life and instead talk about imaginary people stabbing other imaginary people with imaginary swords. This is a critique that is so weirdly off base I find it difficult to even engage with it.

I/you could stab a person in real life with a sword indeed. But I/you won't stab a person in real life with a sword.

Because doing so would pretty much make the rest of my/your life either very short or very shitty.

Investing in a real world business can actually be profitable, and even in the worst case scenario, the cops wouldn't try to shoot me on sight just because I did so.

I mean, you seriously can't imagine why people would want to have a power fantasy about having actual power? Like, you can't even see the appeal of imagining yourself as mayor or president?

What the hell?

-Username17

But you don't need a logistics game to represent that kind of power fantasy. You just pick Leadership or one of its variants. There's your personal army/cult/fanclub of followers, no need of extra maths or strings attached.

This is, that's pretty much how I've seen leadership played. You take your cohort with you adventuring and you leave your followers on the background for bragging rights and minor services.

[Username17]

The big problem with running costs right out of the book is that they break down severely in two ways. The first in the 4th through 10th level where expenses scale too fast relative to expected incomes for characters to afford level appropriate gear. And the second in the double digit levels where the costs of powerful items barely move at all relatively speaking while incomes jump a fuck lot. You can say there's a third price emergency at epic where "things don't work at all" but I don't consider that part of the regular game and I don't much care.

Basically, consider the price jump from a +1 shield to a +2 shield. The enchantment cost goes up by four times, but at low levels the gaining of three levels causes your wealth by level to go up by 3 times or less. While the cost jump from a +4 shield to a +5 shield is only a 56% increase while gaining three levels at twelfth level causes your wealth by level to shoot up by more than double. So people at low levels can't afford to have level appropriate equipment, and people at very high levels can afford to keep all their shit level appropriate and also get additional swag which is also level appropriate.

And that comes around and smacks kingdom management coming and going. In the early stages when you're presumably investing in growing your fortress, you're at the levels when you can't actually afford to equip yourself in a level appropriate manner in the first place, and building funds are being asked to come from a budget that is already overdrafted. But in the later stages when you are sitting back collecting taxes, the proceeds convert into high end gear way too easily and fast. People usually shake their fist at the first problem, of course, because a lot of people don't consider the higher levels of D&D to be remotely playable in the first place. But it's an issue nonetheless - the tax income from even a moderate trade route or whatever can buy you two +5 gizmos a year, regardless of what level you are. Wealth by level breaks kingdom advancement in the beginning, but kingdom management breaks wealth by level in the end.

The Tome solution to this issue was the Wish economy. Basically that you couldn't buy yourself higher end magic items with gold at all, because they required higher tier currency to purchase. This meant that once you got to the point where you had enough gold-economy items to outfit yourself, you no longer had any incentives to not invest in armies and fortresses. And just as importantly, once you conquered some territory and had a thriving business going you no longer got to supercharge your equipment into game breaking sets by just waiting a few years.

I've been told that other people think there are different solutions to this issue, but I've never seen one that actually worked. I've seen people try to argue against the Wish Economy concept for literally ten actual real world years, and not one person has provided an alternate workable model where building a tower and owning some land was neither pointless nor broken. The higher tier currency works, and any other patch you did to D&D to solve those issues would by necessity be much more complicated.

Note that Shadowrun manages to have only a single currency and avoid some of those problems. But it does so only by having hard limits on what you can buy and the global authorities be essentially unbeatable no matter what equipment you have. Which is a whole lot like there being a higher tier currency save that you are specifically never allowed to have any of it.

But you don't need a logistics game to represent that kind of power fantasy. You just pick Leadership or one of its variants. There's your personal army/cult/fanclub of followers, no need of extra maths or strings attached.

Uh... that's not pretending to have temporal power at all. Having power means having power. Being able to make decisions that have meaning. Putting bridges and buildings up where you want them to go. Shit like that. Having a small group of people who tell you that you are awesome is nice, and it's even a fantasy in its own right. But that's the fantasy of "being popular" which is totally different from the fantasy of "having actual power." I am not convinced you have anything to add to this discussion if you can't differentiate the two.

-Username17

[Sergarr]

The big problem with running costs right out of the book is that they break down severely in two ways. The first in the 4th through 10th level where expenses scale too fast relative to expected incomes for characters to afford level appropriate gear. And the second in the double digit levels where the costs of powerful items barely move at all relatively speaking while incomes jump a fuck lot. You can say there's a third price emergency at epic where "things don't work at all" but I don't consider that part of the regular game and I don't much care.

Basically, consider the price jump from a +1 shield to a +2 shield. The enchantment cost goes up by four times, but at low levels the gaining of three levels causes your wealth by level to go up by 3 times or less. While the cost jump from a +4 shield to a +5 shield is only a 56% increase while gaining three levels at twelfth level causes your wealth by level to shoot up by more than double. So people at low levels can't afford to have level appropriate equipment, and people at very high levels can afford to keep all their shit level appropriate and also get additional swag which is also level appropriate.

And that comes around and smacks kingdom management coming and going. In the early stages when you're presumably investing in growing your fortress, you're at the levels when you can't actually afford to equip yourself in a level appropriate manner in the first place, and building funds are being asked to come from a budget that is already overdrafted. But in the later stages when you are sitting back collecting taxes, the proceeds convert into high end gear way too easily and fast. People usually shake their fist at the first problem, of course, because a lot of people don't consider the higher levels of D&D to be remotely playable in the first place. But it's an issue nonetheless - the tax income from even a moderate trade route or whatever can buy you two +5 gizmos a year, regardless of what level you are. Wealth by level breaks kingdom advancement in the beginning, but kingdom management breaks wealth by level in the end.

This is why in my little write-up I've both made it so you can't get gold without beating someone up (so you can't just sit on gold-making structures, you gotta interact with the actual D&D system to get the gold) and added the part where the enemies attack your dungeon, based on your dungeon's total wealth (so having much more wealth that you should own by WBL means you get opponents of higher CR that you can realistically beat knocking on your door).

Of course, it looks like there is a need to first fix up WBL to level-appropriate equipment's costs, but this shouldn't be all that difficult, compared to writing up that "koku simulator" that was described a few pages ago.

[hyzmarca]

You could theoretically have windmills, watermills, and golem-mills that effectively generate labor. That way lies industrial revolution, which we've talked about before, and which D&D doesn't handle well. But it's a possibility.

I was also thinking about things that make jobs easier. Like a toolmaker's workshop.

At sufficiently high levels of abstraction, a guy who makes tools, and has a shop to make tools in, can be represented as generating labor points. Since those tools will make other jobs easier.

[Username17]

This is why in my little write-up I've both made it so you can't get gold without beating someone up (so you can't just sit on gold-making structures, you gotta interact with the actual D&D system to get the gold) and added the part where the enemies attack your dungeon, based on your dungeon's total wealth (so having much more wealth that you should own by WBL means you get opponents of higher CR that you can realistically beat knocking on your door).

I don't think it passes the smell test if your gold mines can't mine gold. If you build a refinery, you should get whiskey out of it. Having your dungeon be nothing but a score card you have to run up before you are allowed to advance to the next level tautologically renders the dungeon be nothing but a score card for the "real" game.

Farms farm. Mines mine. Workshops make shit. And if your landlord minigame breaks under the strain of that, you have to scrap it and try and again until it doesn't. The whole reason that land is valuable is that it produces shit. That's why you can rent it out to other people who will use it productively even if you can't think of any other way to make it generate income. A minigame about owning land must be able to handle characters getting an income from the land they own or it is unworthy of the name.

There are ways to handle characters having persistent incomes measured in turnips or silver in Dungeons & Dragons. Tome Games have been able to handle that shit for more than a decade. If your system can't handle that, you have failed at system design.

Of course, it looks like there is a need to first fix up WBL to level-appropriate equipment's costs, but this shouldn't be all that difficult, compared to writing up that "koku simulator" that was described a few pages ago.

That's where you're totally wrong. The problem with equipment costs is that it's a whole chain of fail all the way down. Here's a small snippet:

• You can't actually stop people from farming or spending time stripping the marble off of sacked temple roofs if the players want to do that. Strict wealth by level guidelines are unenforceable.
• The ratio of effectiveness between a Gnoll with a spear and a player character with level appropriate gear is not static as characters rise in level. And the relative effectiveness drop of not having level appropriate gear against that Gnoll is also not static at different levels. Which means that the relative tradeoff between having better magic swords and having more Gnoll mercenaries is not a constant. And once you've set the price of one, there is no price you could set for the other that would be in all cases a fair tradeoff.
• Different character types are more and less gear dependent. A Wizard would like some Intelligence and Saving Throw bonus items, but can satisfactorily complete adventures without even that. A 20th level Fighter without a magic sword loses to a CR 3 Shadow.

Now what you can do is set incentives such that characters get their level appropriate gear and spend the rest of their moneys on hiring butlers and building towers. And that's why the Tome rules use scaling items, higher tier currency, and an eight item limit. That threads the needle by having the items be a thing people buy up to a point and then stop buying afterward. You're never going to get there with price incentives alone, because no price levels exist or can exist that fulfill the criteria.

-Username17

[Sergarr]

I don't think it passes the smell test if your gold mines can't mine gold. If you build a refinery, you should get whiskey out of it. Having your dungeon be nothing but a score card you have to run up before you are allowed to advance to the next level tautologically renders the dungeon be nothing but a score card for the "real" game.

Farms farm. Mines mine. Workshops make shit. And if your landlord minigame breaks under the strain of that, you have to scrap it and try and again until it doesn't. The whole reason that land is valuable is that it produces shit. That's why you can rent it out to other people who will use it productively even if you can't think of any other way to make it generate income. A minigame about owning land must be able to handle characters getting an income from the land they own or it is unworthy of the name.

There are ways to handle characters having persistent incomes measured in turnips or silver in Dungeons & Dragons. Tome Games have been able to handle that shit for more than a decade. If your system can't handle that, you have failed at system design.

Where did I say that you can't have gold mines that mine gold? I've just said that you can't sit on them. It's even logically reasonable - if you own a gold-producing structure, there will be people/monsters which will try to wrestle control of them from you - and thus you need to defend it, which means fighting encounters is unavoidable.

That's where you're totally wrong. The problem with equipment costs is that it's a whole chain of fail all the way down. Here's a small snippet:

[*] You can't actually stop people from farming or spending time stripping the marble off of sacked temple roofs if the players want to do that. Strict wealth by level guidelines are unenforceable.

It is (kind of) if you assume that having lots of money attracts lots of troubles (i.e. encounters that spawn based on your wealth->level, not just your level). You got LOADS of money? Great, now hand it to this CR 15 (or whatever the WBL->CR conversion for LOADS of money is) group of wandering adventurers or get toasted.

[*] The ratio of effectiveness between a Gnoll with a spear and a player character with level appropriate gear is not static as characters rise in level. And the relative effectiveness drop of not having level appropriate gear against that Gnoll is also not static at different levels. Which means that the relative tradeoff between having better magic swords and having more Gnoll mercenaries is not a constant. And once you've set the price of one, there is no price you could set for the other that would be in all cases a fair tradeoff.

If we're going into high levels, Gnolls with spears will obviously become less effective than level-appropriate magic items, but who said that Gnolls are your only choice? It is very obvious that your dungeon will require higher and higher level guards at higher levels - the same way the NPC dungeons have higher level monsters. After that, it's only a question of balancing the magic items and monster guard costs with each other on every level, which admittedly sounds difficult, but it should not be completely impossible.

[*] Different character types are more and less gear dependent. A Wizard would like some Intelligence and Saving Throw bonus items, but can satisfactorily complete adventures without even that. A 20th level Fighter without a magic sword loses to a CR 3 Shadow.

That's less a question of gear dependency and more of a question of relative class power, which is an unsolvable problem within the framework of D&D and I don't have any interest in trying to solve it.

Now what you can do is set incentives such that characters get their level appropriate gear and spend the rest of their moneys on hiring butlers and building towers. And that's why the Tome rules use scaling items, higher tier currency, and an eight item limit. That threads the needle by having the items be a thing people buy up to a point and then stop buying afterward. You're never going to get there with price incentives alone, because no price levels exist or can exist that fulfill the criteria.

-Username17

Yes, I know that, that's why I've put in enemy encounters with CR dependent on your wealth, so that if you have more wealth than you should own by WBL, you get wrecked by monsters which are way above your paygrade. Unless you're saying that powerful items can replace the class levels, that is. If this is indeed the case, then downgrade the WBL table for high levels so that you can't do that.

[maglag]

The Tome solution to this issue was the Wish economy. Basically that you couldn't buy yourself higher end magic items with gold at all, because they required higher tier currency to purchase. This meant that once you got to the point where you had enough gold-economy items to outfit yourself, you no longer had any incentives to not invest in armies and fortresses. And just as importantly, once you conquered some territory and had a thriving business going you no longer got to supercharge your equipment into game breaking sets by just waiting a few years.

I've been told that other people think there are different solutions to this issue, but I've never seen one that actually worked. I've seen people try to argue against the Wish Economy concept for literally ten actual real world years, and not one person has provided an alternate workable model where building a tower and owning some land was neither pointless nor broken. The higher tier currency works, and any other patch you did to D&D to solve those issues would by necessity be much more complicated.

Step 1: There's no Wish spell, certainly not in CR 8 monsters.
Step 2: The BBEG ain't gonna wait for the party to play simcity before the world is conquered/destroyed. D&D isn't a videogame where the final boss will twiddle his thumbs doing nothing while the party can farm at their leisure until they get max stats and gear.

Hmm, that wasn't complicated at all.

Meanwhile, with all due respect, the whole tome economy breaks right away when you realize 9th level spell scrolls are totally still in the gold economy and then you just chain Time stops with other assorted spells to auto-win everything. And if you don't the BBEG murderizes you with it in the first round of the campaign.


And even if you ignore the above, souls are one of your "high-end" currencies. But every living creature has a soul in D&D, so you can still breed cows or sheep or even mice to pay for higher end gear.

No souls? Then go farm astral diamonds or hope or whatever you claimed that can be mined and people arbitarly decide it's valuable. They're there in the open. Says so on your description. You never claim that only characters of level X+ can mine that fancy stuff, so every miner with half a brain stopped mining the now worthless metals long ago and went to mine those super duper ores. Just like they were mining silver and gold before. You just changed the names of the things the peasants will farm over time! The exact problems remain. Except that arbitarly decision that Wish can't replicate those, but then at-will Wishes still means virtually unlimited arcane/divine power. You don't need high-end gear to win D&D forever if you have at-will wishes even if "limited" to 15k GP per cast!

Unless you apply a bunch of "much more complicated" patches to the tome economy. Which other people have worked towards to, but you really didn't while ignoring all of the above (plus many other) problems with your own economy system.