Armor / (low level)Treasure tables make no sense

[thenobledrake]

A) No... even in those conditions, it is not. Get assigned items by level, rather than by price, is not "the local blacksmith won't sell you other stuff" any more than getting a big pool of coin and being told "you can't spend more than X on any one item" is - your character is allowed to buy what they can afford, but "afford" means "assuming they budget their wealth intelligently instead of buy the most expensive singular thing they can with their money"

B) No rule ever written, past present or future, can prevent GMs from making a bad choice. The issue will always be those GMs making a bad choice, though, not with the rules of the game.

[The Narration]

thenobledrake wrote:

A) No... even in those conditions, it is not. Get assigned items by level, rather than by price, is not "the local blacksmith won't sell you other stuff" any more than getting a big pool of coin and being told "you can't spend more than X on any one item" is - your character is allowed to buy what they can afford, but "afford" means "assuming they budget their wealth intelligently instead of buy the most expensive singular thing they can with their money"

B) No rule ever written, past present or future, can prevent GMs from making a bad choice. The issue will always be those GMs making a bad choice, though, not with the rules of the game.

A) Have you actually looked at the Wealth By Level table on page 348 of the Playtest Rulebook? Because you don't seem to understand how it works. When you're creating a character above 1st level, how many items you have of each level is predetermined. There is a small amount of loose cash that is not enough to buy a non-consumable item of a higher level than those predetermined. The rules do not allow a 4th level character to start with +1 heavy armor.

B) If the GM following the rules is a "bad choice" then that indicates that the rule is not working and needs to be fixed. This playtest is full of rules that don't work as intended. The whole point of the playtest is to point them out. Sticking your fingers in your ears and going, "Nah nah nah nah I can't hear you!" doesn't help make the game better.

Drake, can you name one person in this thread who has agreed with you? What do you think is more likely? That everyone else is somehow confused and you're the only person in the world who can see the truth, or that a single person is mistaken?

[thenobledrake]

I understand just fine how the table in the play test rule book works.

How the table works is not at odds with my statement that the way the rules assign items (both when creating a character at higher than 1st level, and when giving the GM treasure distribution guidance) does not equate to "the local blacksmith won't sell you other stuff."

On the topic of "following the rules is a 'bad choice", you are making a disingenuous argument. The rules do not say "you should treat item level as a hard requirement and have in-game shops refuse to sell higher level items to characters."

If the rules did say that, you'd have a point about the rule needing fixed - and I would agree that it needs fixed. But since that's not what the rules say, it is entirely the GM that is causing the issue if they choose to pretend the rules have told them to do that.

Last, but certainly not least, we come to this little gem: "can you name one person in this thread who has agreed with you?" and what follows.

You are making two serious flaws in your argument here. The first being that you are equating number of people agreeing to "correctness", as that is just now how things work. 10 million people can believe a lie - it doesn't make it the truth (note: I'm not saying anyone is lying, I'm just illustrating my point that agreement and correctness aren't directly related).

The second is more grievous. You are assuming to have accurate information of the opinion of the whole world from the both insignificantly sized and improperly selected sample population that this forum constitutes.

And I've actually just realized you might be having a third flaw... you seem like you might be thinking the post you quoted is about a topic from earlier in the thread, rather than what it is actually about - because there haven't been any posts on the actual topic of the post you quoted, other than mine and the person I am responding to, made in this thread for you to point to as people disagreeing with what I am saying in the quoted post.