A player emailed me about his concerns with the economy in Pathfinder. I am posting it here because I want to see if anyone has thought of ways to fix the unreality of the magic item economy. I am aware of Frank Trollman's writing on the topic. I know about Iron heroes. I am curious if there are any other fixes floating around.
Hey Tal,
again don't be in a hurry to read/digest/respond to this before our next session, but as I was taking a spare couple of hours to peruse the manuals and think about stuff, I thought I'd forward it for your input.
The game world of Pathfinder seems to me to be comparable in institutional complexity to early renaissance Europe. They have ledgers, a system of credit, banking, promisory notes etc. The degree to which government is involved in the actions of citizens in places like magnimar is fairly high... Within that framework, we have magic items. Which are in some cases have the potential to destroy a lot of valuable property, impinge on the privacy of citizens, and otherwise f&*+ with the system. The system doesn't like to be f+*&ed with.
Also, once you get past the +1 longsword, ring of protection family of items, the amount of gold being thrown around is quite obscene. Comparable to buying a ship and hiring a crew, or the cost of fixing an election in a provincial town, or the price of a mid level assasination. Nothing but magic items costs tens of thousands of GP. They are the single most concentrated form of liquid wealth in existence, worth hundreds of times their weight in gold. As such a state that can make them reliably might even use a minumum generic level of them to back its currency in lieu of gold.
So on one hand, you have the thematic requirement of DnD that the party be a party, that it go adventuring, and the transparency of the challenge rating system pretty much demands that (knowing they're going to face challenges, and knowing that levelling up does not symetrically scale their various offensive, defensive and utility powers) the party accumulate magic items from fallen enemies, liquidate them, and then purchase or order more of them to prepare for future challenges.
[In this framework as well, the ability to have magic items made to order means that party members taking item creation feats is pointless and wasteful. In the narrow confines of adventuring, survival and advancement, you're surrendering a feat, which is useful, for a savings in gold on your item creation, which is not.
If the feats gave access to items that were otherwise not available, then they would be worth something.]
On the other hand, you have the system of the world the adventurers inhabit. Landed gentry who generate their wealth through pastoral or agricultural land ownership and use can't hope to compete with people who can make magic items, and quickly cease to matter. Merchants, it seems, are the new nobility, and magic is a means of essentially generating wealth from a vaccum.
DnD game worlds are unavoidably hokey, due to the concerns listed above. No matter how well their background is written, they simply wouldnt function the way they do if people behaved like real people and had access to magic items. Just crossing a border with all that glowing swag should require taxes and paperwork out the ass, or require paying someone to smuggle us in. I think that Pathfinder handles this better than most, as Corvosa seems to follow the natural course of people viewing magic and demonic power as a source of wealth, security, and military might, with other elements verging on steampunk.
How many adventurers are there in the lost coast region? How many NPCs bearing magic items are there?
I don't think a real economy could function with more than a couple of adventuring parties per million people. In which case magic items past the +2 category would be extremely rare. People capable of making such items would also be either in hiding or exclusively in the control of the state, and you would require a permit to purchase and carry such items.
The fact that you can go to a market and buy spells that open vaults and set fire to buildings is insane. No king would allow this. Heads would roll. S######'s mithril chainmail seems pretty harmless, but for sure he's on some kind of watched list... the fact that he's brazenly wearing something with the obvious resale value of a comfortable early retirement should already create a series of low level individual trials, poisonings, etc that have nothing to do with the story arc. Its like having gold plated rims on your escalade. Everyone knows you're a gangster.
I'm sure you're aware of all this, and it's one of the reasons you're looking forward to playing a more comprehensively designed, story oriented game. What I'd like to discuss is what can be done to the game world so that players like J### can be made happy, while at the same time our suspension of disbelief about the people and institutions we are adventuring to protect remain possible.
Placing restrictions on sale and purchase does little, because the characters are not real people. We just create un-rp'ed down time while the paperwork goes through or we search in vain for a buyer for our enchanted monkey head. Same is true of making high level enchanting hard to find. We spend the requisite time finding it and avoid following any plot threads till that is accomplished, with the knowledge that the challenge may require we first have said items in order to survive.
Two things come to my mind at this point. First is Neil Gaiman's "Stardust" where the witch creates an entire inn by the roadside using her finite and depleting stores of magic, in order to procure the star and ensure a fresh supply. The second is the scene in Shallow Grave, where the accountant character returns to find his flatmates have gone on a shopping spree with the dead man's stolen cash. "Five hundred pounds is what you paid for it. We don't know what it cost us yet."
What you pay for something, vs what it ends up costing you... I believe that within the context of the game world's human societies, the ownership of powerful magic items should cost more than just what you pay for them. This could mean that there are is no such thing as a generic enchantment, and that every item has some unforseen kinks in it- unique as the soul of its creator and the intersection of gods who were called upon to make it... including a name, a story, conditions under which it may behave erratically, or temporarily stop working altogether. Or it could simply mean that being a known concentration of incredible wealth makes you a constant target of thieves and assassins. Either way, the characters should learn to be respectful of magic items, cautious about their use, etc.
hope the new semester isn't too heavy thus far. See you this Sunday.
M@
Not a fix, but have you read Clinton Boomer & co's articles on D&D Economics over at Kobold Quarterly's site?
There's got to be some economic geeks out there who want to write a Pf supplement on economics...:)
I think some of the problem is with the (perceived) power level of a given setting, not necessarily with the prices listed for magic items per se.
If super-powerful beings are common, then there's no problem; everyone has a lot of wealth, so "expensive" (powerful) items are readily available, naturally. This might be the case in a Planescape game, for instance; wish-granting efreeti could be lurking around every corner and no one would blink an eye.
If almost nobody is a super-powerful being, there's not really a problem, either; the few powerful beings in the world can trade mighty magic items among themselves and the majority of the world's population aren't strong enough to do much about it. This might be the case in an Eberron game, for instance; dragons keep to themselves, demons are imprisoned, daelkyr are separated by the remoteness of the planes, etc. and their dealings don't generally affect the average person's life at all.
I'm less comfortable when the setting seems to assume that there are lots of powerful beings in the world, and yet this somehow has no effect on the way the world works. For instance, the Pathfinder Campaign Setting mentions armies of enslaved genies, cities being built overnight, and armies of undead created by epic mages, and yet somehow this level of power seemingly doesn't affect the availability of goods or the balance of power between nations (say).
Again, I think it's more a matter of the "typical" D&D campaign setting than anything explicit "bug" in the rules.
I think it's a well thought out email.
Mr. Bulmahn has said that Pathfinder RPG will be designed with different levels of magic availability in mind, and that the default will be "middle," which takes the 3.5 rules as "high." If the rules are flexible enough to allow "low" magic at all, then I would say your players would be happy with that (and so would mine.)
Here's hoping!
Hogarth, to some extent, I think that such issues in a setting are up the GM to fill in the blanks. Has it caused an imbalance? What were the effects? If it did not cause an imbalance, why not? Filling in these holes allow one to carry the creation of the setting forward, and also to make it one's own.
Hogarth, to some extent, I think that such issues in a setting are up the GM to fill in the blanks. Has it caused an imbalance? What were the effects? If it did not cause an imbalance, why not? Filling in these holes allow one to carry the creation of the setting forward, and also to make it one's own.
I suppose it's a matter of taste. I prefer a campaign setting that makes logical sense (to me) over one that seems to have holes in logic that I need to justify afterwards.
At any rate, I still maintain that it's more of a campaign issue than a rules issue; you could replace the phrase "gold pieces" with "power units" in the rules and it wouldn't affect a thing, really.
I hear ya. Where I'm partially coming from is a strand of literary criticism that says all narratives (necessarily) have gaps and that the mark of good stories is how those gaps are present so that the reader fills them in for herself. I'm thinking the same would be true of any campaign setting book (given finitude), but there would be the judgment issue in every individual case about whether one was a logical flaw or a creative gap. While I wouldn't be in a position to make an argument for one over the other in general in the Pf CS (which I'd guess you wouldn't really want anyway!), my feeling is that when I (inevitably) run into these, even when they do initially grate on me as logical flaw, if I treat them like a creative gap, a puzzle in need of my solution, the pay-off is greater than if I simply approached it as a mistake I had to clean up.
I would classify my knowledge of D&D as only intermediate. My knowledge of Pathfinder is only cursory. So I am trying to come at this from outside of the box. Therefore anything I offer may be completely impractical.
Could necessarily magic items be replaced with feats? Instead of the usual amount of gold found as treasure, there is some fraction of that gold plus another, non-physical resource (character points to steal from other systems) that the players can use to 'buy' the same effects a magic item would grant them without the actual item?
Many of the reasons is why old school D&D is designed the way it is. Not only could you only make items at high levels, but it also required a TON of xp's to get there. So it helped with "verisimilitude" because not only were items rare, but so were people who could make them. Including the PC's, because they would have to wait until 9th level to even be able to make something beyond scrolls and potions, and it took a very long time to earn the XP's to get to that point. Plus you still needed scrolls of enchant item and permanency to make the really powerful stuff, all of which the GM has total control over with availability.
So you could have tons of lower level NPC's running all over the place, but the higher levels, who have the power to actually make such items were not only rare in the world, but rare for players to ever achieve without putting in a LOT of time getting there.
I think its because Gary Gygax and the others realized it was playing the game that was fun, and that gaining levels quickly meant the game was over faster, and caused a break down in how rare magic items would be with people quickly earning those high levels which allow them to make the items. Allowing such items to be made at lower levels, combined with fast level acquisition, breaks this down even faster.
So if you really want to even begin to address this issue you need to adapt some solid old school game design and require high levels to make such items in the first place, and then require a LOT of XP's to even get there. Then realize its the playing that is fun, that winning the hard fought battles and winning the day is much more rewarding than gaining the next level.
I don't know about the rest of you, but my adrenaline rushes come from winning the fights, not gaining the level.
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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Just to point out that the main argument of "those in power woudln't let people walk around with items of that value, especially if they have the capability of doing harm to those around you", have you tried to buy an assault rifle lately? If that's legal in large parts of the world today, then I don't see why a wand of fireballs, helm of brilliance, etc. would be restricted to purchase in a typical D&D world. As for the wealth issue, there's lots of wealthy people out there who own some very valuable items and they do so because they have the wealth and power (political, financial, criminal, whatever) to hold onto those items. Just like adventureres can generally defend their +5 holy keen lognsword from grabby kings.