I had a random thought, where exactly does an Epic level (30th) character spend 3.125 million gold for a 30th level item? That’s 31.25 TONS of gold. That’s a cube of 24k gold almost 4 FEET on each side. (roughly). So you could easily put that in a wagon. But a wagon that can hold 31 tons? Good luck with that. You’re going to need a treasure train of 32 wagons to haul it to the vendor.
And why even bother buying that level 30 magic item when you can save 2 million and buy a level 28 magic item and hire several kingdoms worth of armies to keep the riff raff away.
I’ve always thought the economies of any system where you can live fairly well for about 20 gold a month and very well for 100 gold a month cannot easily absorb the influx of wealth that occurs because of treasure seekers.
Even if the merchants have two pricing schemes, one for normal people and one for adventurer’s they themselves will swiftly gain money to the point where other merchants will charge those merchants adventurer’s pricing and then so on.
A classic real world example is the issues of the U.S.’s Gold Rush in the 1800′s where gold miners (read: adventurers) brought in a lot of gold and destroyed local economies, towns sprang up just to deal with the miners at crazy prices.
A classic semi-real modern example that a lot of people might be familiar with is World of Warcraft. I quit back during the Burning Crusade expansion and even then I could farm someplace like Shadowfang Keep for Assassin’s Blades and get two to three hundred gold for them for level 19 twinks. Why? Because the economy was screwed due to the influx of gold from long established characters raking it in at the high levels. Low level gear was crazy priced to the point that new players couldn’t afford anything ‘cool’.
That same thing would happen across any fantasy world as adventurer’s hammered the local economies with gold without such modern miracles as global banking institutions.
Is there a solution? Of course, hand wave it out the window and ignore the real world issues in buying and selling of things that cost more than a kingdom might have in total coinage.
Is there a solution that fits a fantasy setting? Separate magic from gold completely. Have your dragon hordes with 100′s OR 1000′s of golds, not 100′s of thousands. Put in place rituals that let the characters power up their swords and turn them into something that grows with them or use any of the ideas to remove magic bonuses from items and give them to the characters innately and the magic items become flavor gear with bonus abilities. The character has a flaming sword, not a flaming sword +1. I understand the DMG2 has some guidelines on this now as well as the community stuff.
Anyway, that was my random thought about something to post today.
3 comments
Anonymous
October 15, 2009 at 7:42 pm (UTC -5)
You don’t have to let players buy/sell magic items at those prices. I’ve also thought of it as convenience to judge the relative value of magic items, as opposed to how much gold it would actually take to buy it. I liked 3E’s amount of money available in a town of a given size.
Or you can liken it to the real world. When a company buys another for US $40 billion, they don’t use wads of 100s. It’s all paper value. I think a PC with 3mil GP on his character sheet has the same buying power as someone with $3mil in stocks, except you can run someone through with a flaming sword…
Dennis
October 15, 2009 at 8:03 pm (UTC -5)
It depends on the setting I would offer. A traditional fantasy setting especially one in a PoL style would be very dependent on hard currency. One carried ones valuables not a checkbook. A more eberron style where there might be a banking system of some kind would certainly be different. Personally other than consumables I’ve never had magic shoppes. Magic was rare and just not for sale so I was able to keep things in check naturally. The richest a group has been in one of
my many campaigns was 12ish leveland they had a castle built for 25000 gold which drained them. But they attracted peasents who tithed and kept them on ale and wenches and fancy lads. Then the dragons started showing up as a result of a dragons death curse and things got nasty.
Anonymous
October 16, 2009 at 7:07 am (UTC -5)
I also have a hard time believing that an adventurer has a 4′ cube of solid gold. A lot of that value would be in magic items, and gems. I like the idea of disenchanting magic items to power up or create other items, which to me makes much more sense!