| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Obviously, the various wage scales, income earning rules and business-management rules in the PF rulebooks are just as arbitrary as the set price lists of mundane and magical equipment. Their function is not to simulate an economy, but to provide ostensibly interesting ways for players to imagine their characters occupying their time when they are not adventuring.
So the loot-as-incentive paradigm naturally finds its corollary in long price lists of magic items. Or does it? Do we really want the Kmart blue light special exhaustively stocked magic shop in every village and town (or even in every metropolis)in our games?
I tend to agree with several of the above posts, and cringe from allowing players to buy or even order items by paging through the lists of what is "available". But if you *don't* do this, and make magic items only available as loot, then what the heck are PCs going to sink their loot into? "Real" adventurers might blow it on wine, women and song (remember the first Conan film?) but most PCs would cringe at the idea, now that they've been conditioned to save up for magic items.
|
When a mug of ale is only 4cp, it's quite hard to blow it on wine, women and song.
Some of my PCs are massive alcoholics who visit only the finest Calistrian hookers, but it's chump change for a Pathfinder PC.
Of course, they have to kick the girl out after they are done because of their furiously expensive magic items. They are allowed to wear their belt of Dexterity during the deed.
Are there insurance companies on Golarion? There was maritime insurance in Genoa from C14 and property insurance came in after 1666 and the Great Fire of London. Somewhere like Absolom is plenty sophisticated and modern.
On the other hand, adventurer insurance is a horrible idea and a terrible business model. The premiums would be staggering if the company ever wanted to recoup some of the lost assets. Most claims would be unverifiable - "I lost my Vorpal Longsword in the seventh level of Hell". Possibly if the insurers employed a group of Diviners with Speak with Dead etc., but it looks like backing the wrong horse.
Besides, adventurers don't care. They are not known for their financial and fiduciary prudence. Only the most devout worshipper of Abadar puts 10% away for their retirement. everyone else amasses as much as they can as quickly as they can and blows the lot on a shiny ring which does nothing 99% of the time (Ring of Freedom of Movement, 40,000GP) or a silly looking hat (Jingasa of the Fortunate Soldier, 5,000GP)
|
Which is my problem with it people shouldn't be earning those amounts from 4 villages unless their in a major depression and you need thousands of GP to buy a loaf of bread. Now sure it's a fantasy realm and you'll have the occasional dwarf kingdom with mounds of gold getting taken over by smaug I mean a dragon. However that shouldn't be the norm. A noble with 4 villages should be be getting 10-20 goods from them plus trade goods he can smell for some more. 100,000 GP per year is the kind of income I associate with massive empires spanning multiple continents. For a more modest kingdom maybe a few thousand per year if they sell off the rice and other taxed items.
Honestly best I've can see is to reduce all prices, WBL and loot to x% since the adventuring economy is so inflated anyway doing this doesn't actually affect much in the world till you start adding kingdom building rules and the like. Problem I hit there is full plate (a major expense for a noble) costs (if I remember right) 800 gold. So a plus one sword at 1,000 seems reasonable (as opposed to 2,000) you just need to reduce the value of the higher items some how?
EDIT
There's also plenty of fictional basis for why magic not used for everything. Dnd Netheril and it's draining of the background magic to the point their society literally collapsed leaving deserts behind terry pratchett or the case of the toxic spell dump where magic produces magically toxic byproducts that need to be contained to keep them seeping into the environment and desouling newborns.Even pathfinder has some stuff that can have unpleasant consequences if magic is overused.
1) Depression generally include deflation not inflation.
2) The Bardi and Peruzzin bankers in Florence were capable to loan 600,000 and 900,000 fiorini to Edward III, if the data I have found are right that is 125.000 pounds, so between 3 and 6,000,000 gp if we use the values bk007dragon suggest here. Or we can simply consider that it was enough to finance a long war. 100.000 gp is chump change for a massive empire.
|
|
When a mug of ale is only 4cp, it's quite hard to blow it on wine, women and song.
A bottle of good wine cost 7-10 €, a bottle of great wine can cost 2,500 € of more. There is people that burn teens of thousand of euro in a single evening in wines alone.
If we use the same numbers a mug of beer cost 4 cp, a mug of great beer cost 10 gp. How many mugs in a evening?|
|
If you want a sensible economy you can't just tweak and mend around the edges, you'd have to throw the whole thing out and start again from scratch.
One shallow example, a Wizard crafting magic items can use 500gp of components to make 1,000gp of magic items every day. Work 5 days a week 40 weeks a year and you're pulling down 100,000gp a year. At level 3.
Everyone with an Int of 11+ should be training to become a wizard. Magic items should be churned out in massive quantities. Wages of wizards should plummet.
One deeper example. Capital doesn't matter and all professions pay the same. Profession poet? Needs no capital and pays X. Profession mill owner? Needs massive capital investment and also pays X.
As usual when people make this example, you are forgetting the part about selling what you produce.
If you spend the whole day producing magic items you aren't selling them, you aren't promoting your activity, you aren't even buying the components to make the magic items.You would end selling your magic item at 50% of the market value, exactly the production cost. If you want to simulate the magic item production and sale you need to use the Ultimate campaign ruels, and with those your return substantial but way lower.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Or not. There were plenty of Monty Haul games back in the day. Even with published modules, by middle levels you'd have piles of those simple magic items. There was just no guarantee you'd get anything you actually wanted.
Oh, I remember. That was part of the charm of it. Because magic items weren't something you could just make or buy, some portion of the loot ended up being "enchanted paperweights", as we used to call them. Of course, in your classic "4 class" party, almost everything could be used by someone, and having the occasional truly useless item encouraged roleplaying (largesse, collecting for fun, etc.), not to mention making the really useful stuff seem that much cooler. Not being able to upgrade gear through gold also encouraged roleplaying because it forced the PCs to figure out what they wanted to do with their loot, rather than reinforcing the Murderhobo cycle of carrying a king's ransom in weapons while barely having enough coin on hand to rent a coach.
WBL and "normalizing" magic items was as much about guidelines to cut back on the Monty Haul as about making them readily available.
I'm sure this is true, but I still consider it an awful mistake. The normalization of magic items is probably the current game's greatest source of min-max "within the rules" munchkinism (as opposed to the older and much less insidious "I just write a bunch of garbage on my character sheet" munchkinism), and has made the magic item into little more than a part of the stat block, which makes me a sad bunny.
Question for Spaldjng. With the noble, why are you using the downtime rules instead of the kingdom building rules for owning villages?
Question for Spaldjng. With the noble, why are you using the downtime rules instead of the kingdom building rules for owning villages?
Because the kingdom building rules do not allow for personal gain (at least not without risk of imploding your kingdom) from building your kingdom. This is the noble's income and as such wouldn't be represented by the kingdom building rules. Also the kingdom building rules doesn't really explain how much time is actually used ruling the kingdom -- each turn is 1 month but obviously you aren't spending 24 hours 7 days a week for 4.33 weeks a month. BP is much more of an abstraction and represents labor, raw materials, etc.
The downtime rules on the other hand tell us exactly how much time is needed, how many people are used, the resource allotment is better divided and has a more explicit exchange rate, and is more individualistic.
The kingdom building rules also require a higher level of ruler (king/ruler, consort and the like) and are a group effort. If we are talking about a minor noble (with only four villages that are his responsibility) the should he really be ruling his own kingdom? Not likely -- instead he's probably simply managing his own goods and making sure the king's edicts are carried out.
With that said, I can/could see an need for saying that a noble has to spend time on both, and there is certainly room for discussion on what sort of leadership the kingdom in question has and how that divides out for the lesser nobles. However unless the lesser nobles have complete control over their parts of the kingdom it seems odd to me to use the kingdom building rules for them.
Also: I hope you don't mind but I copied this question and the answer to the thread in question because it's a really good question that should have been answered earlier.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
{. . .}
Golarion doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it.
Homo Sapiens coexisted with Homo Neanderthal for about 5,000 years, and at the end of that period, in the stone age, Homo Neanderthal was wiped out. Yet in Golarion Orcs and Gnolls and Goblins all have civilizations that are allowed to exist together.
The idea in Golarion (and some other fantasy worlds) seems to be that different types of Humanoids TRY to exterminate each other, but the contrast with our world is that they don't succeed. Or at least, the ones you see remaining are the ones that managed to survive attempts to destroy them without themselves being completely successful in wiping everybody else out.
Golarion has over 4,000 years history and hasn't developed internal combustion, which is the easiest technology in the world to harness when you have the ability to heat stuff with magic.It all devolves into esoteric naval-gazing.
The GM has to have a plan to make sense of it all.
Here's my idea for a fantasy world failing to advance technology: The air pressure (and thus density) is higher out of proportion to the oxygen concentration -- for example, 6 times higher air pressure, but only 3 times more oxygen (the rest of the extra air is almost all nitrogen). This means that although Earth-like biochemistry works just fine (although needing some adaptation), Fire doesn't work very well. (I am actually not sure what the crossover point is at which ordinary fuels don't burn at all, but at a very rough guess, I think the above is close to it. From what I have read, the above conditions also get right to the hairy edges of both nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity for Humans and other animals from Earth, but probably still within the realm of some individuals being able to survive long enough for the species to adapt, at least if they were initially deposited on mountains.) It's harder to get a fire going, and when you do, it provides less useful energy by way of any kind of heat engine (as well as being a LOT harder and more expensive to use for metalworking, thus also making it harder to build such engines in the first place). This is because the fire is busy heating up all that extra nitrogen that doesn't do anything for your engine, which instead just takes heat out of the exhaust pipe. This works for both internal and external combustion engines, although it would actually allow atmospheric engines to work better (being at least more compact), although these still wouldn't be very efficient, and thus probably still confined to niche stationary applications if they were developed at all.
This also has the important beneficial (from the point of view of developing a fantasy world) side effect of making it easier for large creatures to fly, particularly if you also lower the gravity (which can be done for an Earth-sized planet by having less of an iron core, which adds a lot to the overall density of Earth). Remember that Earth actually had some flying creatures of Large and maybe even Huge size (depends upon how lightly the pterosaurs were actually built), but they all went extinct in our own most recent Starfall, so imagine what you could do with 6 times more air density, especially if the gravity was also lower (makes life easier for Giants, too).
The added difficulty for metalworking also makes it harder to build all those other neat things we take for granted, although it does have the side effect not seen in most fantasy worlds that iron and steel items should be MUCH more expensive, unless somebody finds an alloying agent that lowers the melting point of iron alloys a lot more than we're used to, although I am not aware of any such substance that doesn't need to make up most of the alloy while being really expensive and/or nasty to work with. This can be gotten around by producing oxygen by means such as mining and thermal decomposition of pyrolusite, but again that makes things a LOT more expensive, and thus goes a long way towards keeping pure technology from competing with magic, even for the more brute-force applications of either. Of course, we still have to find a way to introduce magic in the first place, which goes beyond the scope of this post, but at least this has hamstrung the competition. Human civilization already went through long periods of very slow technological development, so adding shackles like this would make technological advancement REALLY glacial. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a few divinely and/or arcanely powered political forces around to enforce this.
Getting back around to the original topic of this thread, the above takes us to the point that (assuming that a Miracle occurs that introduces magic), the fantasy world suddenly doesn't look so nonsensical after all.
See -- who says science has to be bad for fantasy? I can't promise to cut out all of the requirement for navel-gazing, but I can cut the required instances WAY DOWN.
PFRPG magic should make science develop incredibly quickly. Want to test a theorem? No need to set up a complex experiment, just Contact Other Plane.
Does the Earth orbit the Sun, is Lamarckian evolution accurate, is there Dark Matter, etc... aren't lengthy debates, they're a 10 minute casting time.
Um... sure, because you know those extraplanar areas all have exactly the same laws of time and physics that the prime material does, and the extradimensional being is going to know the answer and care to provide it.
There are plenty of threads where we point out all of the fallacies of using divination to obtain all your answers.
The extraplanar entities who built the world and set its physical laws? Yeah, they should know what they are.
Carving out random exceptions to divination is a) a house rule and b) poor form to hobble PC's powers. It's better to remove the spell than "allow" it and make it not work any time it would be awkward.
1. The extraplanar entities did not build the world -- so that's awkward.
2.
You send your mind to another plane of existence (an Elemental Plane or some plane farther removed) in order to receive advice and information from powers there. See the accompanying table for possible consequences and results of the attempt. The powers reply in a language you understand, but they resent such contact and give only brief answers to your questions. All questions are answered with "yes," "no," "maybe," "never," "irrelevant," or some other one-word answer.
So you aren't really guaranteed anything of an answer, and even then you have at best an 88% chance of a true answer.
Not exactly definitive.
So I don't really have to house rule or "poor form" anything -- the spell is crap.
A party strolling into town brings in more wealth then that village can dream off. Plus there are all these people with magic that you could tap into.
Adventurers should be very welcome
... because no-one ever resents rich people? "I worked twenty years in the fields, survived the ork raids that killed my siblings, got called up in the levy in a couple of wars, and what have I got for it? A small farm. Meanwhile these {insult redacted} walk in like the own the place just because they got lucky?"
Adventurers are somewhat like rock stars or professional athletes. Yes, they might well spend a lot of money. But they're also likely to be entitled *£&^s who are really rude, start trouble, and expect money to solve it. For some people, the money is not worth it. If you cannot be polite, your money is no good to you.
For others, the heavily armed and (potentially) notoriously dangerous people who just entered town represent a serious threat to local law enforcement and authority. I imagine quite a few settlements would require travellers to check their long-arms in with law enforcement.
I also imagine that if word gets round you're flashing pouches of gold, you're going to face quite a few pick-pocketing attempts. I don't think players would go for it, though. :)
Honestly, I'd expect most smaller towns to be completely cowed by many adventurers. A mid-level party could probably wipe the floor with small-town law enforcement without breathing hard. This isn't like a rich guy with a couple bodyguards driving into town. It isn't even like the Hell's Angels coming in, back in the bad old days. It's more like the mercenary equivalent of a company of Marines in full battledress complete with armored vehicles and air cover.
And no one you can call for help who could possibly get there before the town is leveled.
This assumes the commoners understand the metagame level system. I am not suggesting that your analysis of the adventure's power level is not correct but the modern tech you mentioned is visible. An midlevel adventure party has shiny equipment not a jets and helecopters.
|
|
I don't have the correct references at hand but there is a tale than while one of the big temples on Rome hills was being constructed a crafter proposed a steam powered lifting machine. The Cesar of the time rewarded him for his cleverness but said "I can't use it, it will put a lot of people out of work and my peasant need to work to live. I don't want revolts."I think you're thinking of Hero from Classical Greece, known for steam powered inventions that never got a single pratical application off the ground. He's written up with appropriate humor and satire in the Marvel Graphic Novel "Epicurus the Sage", one of my favorites in the old MGH line.
Probably it was a project based on Hero Aeolipile but it had useful applications, it was meant to move columns up the side of a hill. It was simply refuse as it would have put too much people out of work. Panem and circenses require people to have some income, even if it is a poor income.
Cigarsmoker -- why are pawnshops in business? There you go.
Well my point would be that people still visit pawn shops now so it's likely that it'll happen there too. Also sometimes you just want to move it now, etc etc.
If a player wants to take the time and what not I'm alright with them getting more. But again as a default, "Cash out now, no questions asked."
half isn't bad.
Also RAW?
Profession Shopkeeper - make a Day Job check. That's how much you bring in. Doesn't matter what you're selling. :)
Well businesses go under everyday.
|
|
You can sell to the low level adventurers ...
Let's what has brought from shopkeepers our party of 5 in Reign of winter so far (we are 6th level):
+1 greatsword, Wand of scorching ray, Scroll of dimension door, Scroll of resist energy cold 7°, 3.000 gp of components to make magic items.
The wand was new, so no leftover item from other adventurers.
Carrion crown, party of 4, level 10:
- Ioun stone +1 AC, a couple of potions CLW, it was all that was available in the starting village.
- mithrail plate mail, mithrail agile plate mail +1, rapier +1, bastard sword +1, wand CLW (new), buckler +1, some weapon blank, 2 strength rated masterwork composite longbows, scroll di remove disease 12°, potion of protection from evil, scroll of air bubble, scroll of water breathing, amulet of natural armor +1, custom made stat enhancing items with constitution +1 and wisdom +1 (our GM allow the use of stat boosting items with uneven bonuses) 12.000 gp of components to make magic items, 2.500 gp of inks for my spellbooks.
The best seller are:
- weapons
- components to make magic items.
Selling left over magic items isn't easy at all.
I'm sure this is true, but I still consider it an awful mistake. The normalization of magic items is probably the current game's greatest source of min-max "within the rules" munchkinism (as opposed to the older and much less insidious "I just write a bunch of garbage on my character sheet" munchkinism), and has made the magic item into little more than a part of the stat block, which makes me a sad bunny.
Panda. Sad panda.
No bananas for you.
I'm sure this is true, but I still consider it an awful mistake. The normalization of magic items is probably the current game's greatest source of min-max "within the rules" munchkinism (as opposed to the older and much less insidious "I just write a bunch of garbage on my character sheet" munchkinism), and has made the magic item into little more than a part of the stat block, which makes me a sad bunny.Panda. Sad panda.
No bananas for you.
It's also not true -- the greatest source of min-max "within the rules" is the way stats are done now.
With the 2nd edition system it really didn't matter too much if you had a 9 in a stat or a 14 (sometimes as high as 16 and as low as 7). There was next to no difference... maybe a percentage point or two on your bend bars check.
Now there is a 3 point difference on checks between a 9 and a 14. If you want to know what has a bigger impact -- the codification of all the existing magical items into a wealth by level guideline or the standard practice of completely changing how the stats are perceived the answer is the second.
Before. If you wanted to know how much ready cash an emperor might have in the treasury, that would vary much more sharply depending on the circumstances. A prosperous emperor with a mind to savings might have stored up two or three years' revenue in ready cash, a more spendthrift one might be in debt.
Depends on the setting. In the Foundation series, Hari Seldon was best buddies with one of the Emperors of The Galactic Empire himself, and the poor man couldn't even cough up a budget to maintain the Imperial Grounds properly, when Seldon came in hat in hand to request what one would think a modest cash outlay. There's a major difference between wealth that's tied up, and actual physical cash that you can lay hands on.
Sometimes a King is nothing more than a front man for the Dukes that control the real power collectively.
Right... a hundred million in ready cash? Empty treasury and drowning in debt? Much more variable than state income was.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This has been an interesting discussion so far.
To me the expensive cost of magic items makes sense.
By trade I am a photographer. You can spend lots of money on photographic gear.
When ever you begin looking at "professional" grade gear, the price seems to triple.
While in Art College in the late 90s, my aunt gave me one of her old cameras, It was a medium
format film camera, that had barely been touched for some 30 years. My aunt explained she
used it once or twice and put it in a shoe box in the back of her closet. It was a Hassleblaad.
She told me she used to do her own film processing and printing, and had a dark room, but had
to give it up because of marriage and children. I remember one of my photography professor's
eyes lit up when I brought the camera in and asked how to use it. He told me that it was worth
well over a 1,000 dollars. I treasure the camera (because my aunt gave it to me) keep it in good
shape. I have used it to take lots of landscapes over the years . I never was able to afford to buy many accessories for the camera ( additional lenses, Film back Cassets, etc) they were all very expensive.
I remember while looking at camera gear in a store called B&H in NYC, asking how much a digital back would cost for this camera....$35,000.00 ! This was in the early 2,000's.
One of my professors explained that photography gear was very expensive because of supply and demand. The professional photography market for gear was maybe 1/10 the size of the consumer market. The gear was complicated and expensive to make, and there wasn't the large market there to bring down prices by competition.
So....I kind of look at magical items as like expensive photo gear. Not allot of people will be needing to buy the stuff....and even less people are willing to shell out the gold it takes to hand craft the magic items.
anyways, that's how i look at the whole expensive magic item gear.
Weird. It almost seems like the primary purpose of this game is something other than economic modeling of a fantasy world.....
Weird. It almost seems like the primary purpose of this game is something other than economic modeling of a fantasy world.....
It is, and dealing with economics on all but the most casual levels can indeed get pretty fuzzy.
But the idea that 4th level PCs are going to be going around showing up the nobility with their vast wealth is still far-fetched.
The nobility will probably be looking down their noses at the PCs for ONLY being able to get gear to do their jobs, while the nobility flaunt their ability to lavish money on STATUS SYMBOLS (although the more competent ones will also have some practical items hidden under or among the glitz).
|
|
If you want a sensible economy you can't just tweak and mend around the edges, you'd have to throw the whole thing out and start again from scratch.
One shallow example, a Wizard crafting magic items can use 500gp of components to make 1,000gp of magic items every day. Work 5 days a week 40 weeks a year and you're pulling down 100,000gp a year. At level 3.
Everyone with an Int of 11+ should be training to become a wizard. Magic items should be churned out in massive quantities. Wages of wizards should plummet.
Uh...this assumes an unlimited number of customers to buy your magic items as soon as you make them. Also, a fair amount of money to start with. Neither is a given, most especially the first.
One deeper example. Capital doesn't matter and all professions pay the same. Profession poet? Needs no capital and pays X. Profession mill owner? Needs massive capital investment and also pays X.
Actually...as of the downtime rules, especially those involving buildings, this is no longer a problem. Capital investments directly provide additional money for those who own them. So...a miller's Profession check only provides the same money as a poet's, but that assumes he's laboring in another guy's mill. If he owns the mill, he gets quite a bit more.
Uh...this assumes an unlimited number of customers to buy your magic items as soon as you make them. Also, a fair amount of money to start with. Neither is a given, most especially the first.If you want a sensible economy you can't just tweak and mend around the edges, you'd have to throw the whole thing out and start again from scratch.
One shallow example, a Wizard crafting magic items can use 500gp of components to make 1,000gp of magic items every day. Work 5 days a week 40 weeks a year and you're pulling down 100,000gp a year. At level 3.
Everyone with an Int of 11+ should be training to become a wizard. Magic items should be churned out in massive quantities. Wages of wizards should plummet.
Well technically that's the same as the real world. Plenty of businesses churn out millions of products with no guarantee of sale, just the thought that someone will come in and buy their product at some point.
|
|
Well technically that's the same as the real world. Plenty of businesses churn out millions of products with no guarantee of sale, just the thought that someone will come in and buy their product at some point.Uh...this assumes an unlimited number of customers to buy your magic items as soon as you make them. Also, a fair amount of money to start with. Neither is a given, most especially the first.If you want a sensible economy you can't just tweak and mend around the edges, you'd have to throw the whole thing out and start again from scratch.
One shallow example, a Wizard crafting magic items can use 500gp of components to make 1,000gp of magic items every day. Work 5 days a week 40 weeks a year and you're pulling down 100,000gp a year. At level 3.
Everyone with an Int of 11+ should be training to become a wizard. Magic items should be churned out in massive quantities. Wages of wizards should plummet.
True...but to do that you need serious start-up capital. I mean, if you're only getting the money you make from this and only start with 500 gp (or whatever other small number) you can't make much new stuff until you sell what you've already made.
Now, with tens of thousands of GP in start up capital, yeah, you can do this in theory (though even then, as thejeff notes, not everyone who does so will succeed)...but that doesn't quite match up with the statement "Everyone with Int 11+ should become a Wizard and make lots of money." Because that's not how that works.
Now someone could certainly employ a couple of low level Wizards cranking out the easy to build magic items and make precisely double their money if all their products are bought, but while doubling your money is very cool indeed, there's market saturation issues involved that mean very few people are gonna be able to do this, and pretty much all of them are gonna be rich to start with. Plus it's a luxury good, meaning that market saturation is gonna come pretty quick all things considered (your market is the small number of people who both want and can afford the item in question). In short, this isn't a viable business model unless you start rich, and thus is pretty much just gonna make some rich people who do it richer, rather than vastly mess up the way the economy works.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
PCs have an incredible amount of money. Or at least they should have.
This is a major assumption that you are making here. The thing is... PCs, by and large, don't have very much money. They have magic items.
Just as I can't lug my television down to the grocery store and buy some yoghurt, PCs aren't really able to take their magic girdles and vestments down to the town square and buy some lettuce. Conversely, the idea that magic items are freely bought and sold is ludicrous. How much effort would it take for the owner of an apparatus of kwalish to find someone willing to pay him 90,000 gold pieces in coin? How difficult would it be for a player character to find the exact apparatus he is looking for in the exact color he finds pleasing, just sitting on a shelf to be sold?
That would be like trying to go to 7-Eleven to purchase a fighter jet. "I'll take that F-14 over there on Aisle 2, in periwinkle blue please. And a Slurpee."
It's just impractical to assume that magic items are the equivalent to cash.
Also, PCs tend to not have any actual incomes that perpetuate beyond whatever they take off of cold, dead corpses, barring certain infinite-wealth spell schemes. PCs have to do actual work for their items which are not actually money.
"But Mr. Strophic! What about the wealth-by-level table?"
All that table does is create an artificial method of showing the DM how many magic items the game expects him or her to hand out to the party. All the magic item gold-piece values do is create an artificial method of saying that a belt of incredible dexterity +2 is equivalent to four pearls of power I when taking up space in a character's magic item loadout. The only reason gold pieces are referenced is because the developers haven't found another way to codify magic item limits.
What this means is that PCs are actually as wealthy as the coins in their pockets, of which, in the case of your witch, there aren't many. Once the assumption of magic items being equivalent to cash is dispelled, your average player character, turns out, is not wealthy at all.
-Matt
|
|
What this means is that PCs are actually as wealthy as the coins in their pockets, of which, in the case of your witch, there aren't many. Once the assumption of magic items being equivalent to cash is dispelled, your average player character, turns out, is not wealthy at all.
This is sorta true, but only sorta. Their situation is a bit different from truly being poor since they do possess items of value, just not ones that are easily converted to cash. It's more like, oh, owning land. Adventurers are the guy whose money is all tied up in a piece of property or three, including a nice house and car...but who has very little cash on hand. They're theoretically rich, and people who see them know this and likely treat them as such, without necessarily having cash to spend on things.
|
|
Actually they often are pretty rich, especially in the later levels. Often they'll be carrying around a good chunk of gold (or trade goods like gems) while saving up for the next big purchase. Or gems for spell components.
And after every adventure there's a usually a big pile of loot, either as cash or to sold for cash. Which, regardless of the theoretical difficulties of selling magic items, is rarely more difficult than a quick trip to the nearest large city. Let the merchant worry about how to connect with the real buyers.
This is true. The analogy stands, though. We're talking about people with real wealth, but whose access to cash varies wildly, and who usually invest the cash they do have in more non-liquid investments as soon as they can arrange to get access to the non-liquid investment they want. People who invest all their money in real estate (or other assets it's hard to turn into cash) seem a valid comparison.