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You'll need, what, 50 con to be able to hold your breath for ten minutes? Good luck with that.
"There's a snake in my boots!"
Low point buy does nothing to curb powergaming; a powergamer will still be able to make their 15 points of point buy go farther than a non-powergamer. They might even enjoy the challenge. Remember: powergaming can create imbalances in the power level of a party not because it creates characters who are unbalanced by an objective metric, but because it creates a relative imbalance within the party. Suppose everybody's highest stat is a 16. If the fighter puts the 16 in strength, the cleric puts the 16 in dex, the wizard puts the 16 in charisma, and the rogue puts the 16 in wisdom... well, the fighter is going to be a lot more combat-effective than the rest of the party, but that might not be the fighter's fault.
Well, if it works for you, but it is really no more reasonable than what it replaces. You have to ignore what would happen in the real world for both the solution you and Frank suggest and the one in the DMG. Everything has a price, even the "raw power tokens" or the magic items from which they are derived, and that could be expressed in gold, or whichever currency. The prince could buy raw power tokens because someone will want to sell them, or he will be able to buy the magic items because he has enough gold. It is unrealistic to say that you cannot exchange the raw power tokens for gold because they are simply different forms of currency, and therefore interchangeable, even if the exchange rate is one RPT = 1,000,000gp (which it won't be, given that that they are used to create items of 15,001gp or more). I don't think you're quite on base here. It's perfectly reasonable that there would be discrete and uninteracting economies; the prince can't buy raw power tokens if the entirety of his nonmagical material wealth simply doesn't compare to the RAW POWER of the tier 2 economy. Let me try and frame this with an actual example. Did you ever play Diablo 2? You'd kill monsters, and loot and gold and potions would drop. Some of the loot would be mundane, some of it would be magical, and the real big things were set items and unique items. In the online community, then there were two economies; the gold economy, and what might be called the "Stone of Jordan", or SOJ, economy. You could accumulate huge stacks of gold, and use this to buy potions, nonmagical and lesser magical items, repair equipment, and so on. However, you could not purchase a unique item or set item with gold; they didn't appear in shops, and no player would accept gold in trade. Unique items were instead bartered in direct trades; the Stone of Jordan, a universally useful unique ring, became something of a unit of measurement for the value of a unique or set item. The two economies didn't interact; if you wanted a potion, you'd pay gold, and if you wanted a Sigon's Wrap, you'd trade other unique or set items. The economic systems only interface if there's some universal constant factor. With enormously powerful magical items, it's perfectly reasonable to think that nobody would willingly part with one for some lesser currency; the Lords of Waterdeep might offer me 500,000,000 GP for my Stone of Jordan, but I wouldn't take them up on that deal, because that 500,000,000 GP wouldn't buy me anything else on the same level of power as the Stone of Jordan I'd sold.
Oh, let's see. For wizards... Caltrops is the best cantrip in the game, ever, period.
Hey, kobolds are awesome. All the parts of Races Of The Dragon that didn't suck were related to kobolds. |