Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Reigning in magical item purchase in my DF game

Recently I've been tightening up some of the purchase of permanent magic items in my DF game. Mostly it's because people buying magical items is a large load of time on me. Even given price lists, cost calculations, and simple availability rolls, I still need to be involved in answering cost if it's available, how it works if you get it, how long it takes to get, and then is it available at all . . . and at any time the player might say, "Nah, too much."

But there is also the issue that if I put a magical item in the dungeon, the PCs received a magical item. They might turn it into cash, but it's a cash value that is less than what the item is worth to use - you can't find a magical shortsword and trade it in for an equally magical broadsword, you lose a big chunk of value selling it.

But if I give people money, I'm effectively giving them carte blanche to augment their personal power in any way - it's a wildcard magic item. It's not 20,000 apiece in silver, it's 20,000 silver in cash and magical items of your choice once you get back to town. Ironically this makes cash more valueable than rare magical items because it's more flexible.

On top of that, people then spend themselves dry. Since any coin not spent on permanent magical items that buff your abilities is a permanent reduction in power, people spend everything they can on gear. The best possible magical gear, since it's on a cost-comparative basis with mundane gear.

That was fine early on in the game, when people lacked items and it wasn't clear how long we'd play or the long-term dynamics of "money equals magic items of my choice."

But as we've gone on, the spectre of broke guys in magical plate armor with fine swords gleaming with magical power and belts full of potions living hand-to-mouth and griping about $40/day hirelings being too expensive became a pretty standard development. People generally had broke characters with between $50K and $150K+ worth of gear. They had Maseratis and Ferraris and took up a collection for gas.

I realize this wasn't what I wanted - no one did anything really interesting with money because upgrading gear was too important. Until you have a backup of everything, all Puissance +1 or better, the best magical armor possible, a spare of everything magic'ed up, amulets and rings and bracelets with permanent protective magic on them, and unlimited healing potions you don't want to do crazy stuff like pay for research or splurge on better living in town just to get a few useful but ephemeral bonuses. Even the party animal PCs didn't really live it up, because you're always saving for a special magic item. That's really counter to how I'd like the game to play out.

And like I've advised a number of times - if the game is going where you want it to go, keep going. If not, turn back in the direction you do want to go.

So I dramatically cut back on the magic items you can get freely, reigned in the ones you can special order (and put an availability roll onto special orders - there aren't craftsmages sitting by to forge you a sword and then magic it up), and cut off most of the rest. Upping the price to $20/point across the board helped, too - even minor enchantments are pricey enough to make mundane gear look better. Had I it all to do again, I'd simply say magical items are not available for purchase except under special circumstances - one-off encounters with people selling things, say, or offered in exchange for cash as part of a reward. But too much rides on custom gear now to say you can't get it any more, and I'm okay with that.

But then that leads to a question - what is money for in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Felltower?

I'll go into that question tomorrow.

14 comments:

  1. Probably looking at starting my DFRPG campaign in August (not long after it is released). Probably will go with RAW, but my preference is not to generally have powerful or expensive magic equipment for sale. Probably something like nothing at first building up to a few amazing items to bankrupt the PCs.

    Exceptions will be anything that reduces paperwork or accounting. Cornocopia? Yep, everlasting torches, lightstones etc? Yep not that those things are particularly expensive.

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    1. Heh, at $20/point even those are pretty expensive. Well, a casting of Continual Light probably only runs a few bucks, and it's a trivial spell to learn for your own light source generation.

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  2. I would limit buying of magic just to low-level healing potion and maybe assistance in drafting low-level scrolls. Anything else just breaks the world.

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    1. What would you consider low-level scrolls in DF? Not that PCs can write scrolls in DF in any case, but still. Low point? Low prereq?

      I ask specifically because I've made a guide to what scrolls would be available for purchase and I'm open to tweaking it so common spells are common but people can't just get a Scroll of Some Rare Spell because they don't feel like spending 1 point to learn it.

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  3. Why not have magic items that have charges? Then a magic sword or armor will only be magical for a period of time and then have to be recharged. The reason devers go into the dungeon is to get the permanently enchanted items.

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    1. I have charged items. If I sold them, or made it charge based, people would just sink all of their money into that. It wouldn't be any different than the situation I wanted to change from - people would spend all of their money on magical power because it's for sale. Changing the form wouldn't affect that.

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    2. The thing is that DF is set up with the town just being an abstraction and the only goal is to become powerful and get powerful weapons to kill monsters so money spent in other ways lik carousing or other things is not useful. If the town was more realistic then the players might buy things in town besides weapons.

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    3. I disagree, no surprise there. There are a lot of useful things to spend money on in an abstract town in a dungeon-focused game. My change is based on magic items - notice you said weapons, and I said magic items, which doesn't equal weapons - dominating all other purchase considerations. Neither charged magic items or adding so-called "realism" to town would change that issue, so I changed it directly.

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  4. Headline should be "Reining in..." unless there's a pun there I'm missing...

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  5. I have two players who built items purchased with CP as signature gear. One is Gorgath the Ogre, who dumped an immense amount of points into his (silvered, balanced, fine, orichalcum ...+multiple adjectives) halbierd,the Doomrazor, and one other that has a wizards staff that has a pine fresh scent permanently and can cast Stench. (Very useful on cultists in a confined space). Otherwise, aside from a character with Fortified armor, and one paid with a shield that has lighten on it, there are pnly a handful of found items. There was a sword earlynon that was sold, but no attemped purchases.

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    1. I've pretty much moved to having Signature Gear just be a 1-point form of plot protection, like Weapon or Equipment Bond. Value doesn't matter. Avoids that whole "40 points in Signature Gear so I can plot-protect my +1 sword" problem.

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    2. They were using points for cash with signature effect.

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  6. I myself hate the "I want an item that does precisely this" type of shopping (or the "that's useful so let's all get one" response). I still have some magic item shopping, but it's kind of like a rumor table.

    This is what someone is selling right now. Want it?

    So it might be useful to the group, useless, or anything in between. It's what someone else found somewhere and had no use for. It still gives players something to waste their coin on, but keeps me from making up (or looking up) stuff that people are hoping to buy. If I want to have some items for sale, then I can--and if I am too busy to do so, then nobody has stuff this week!

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    1. I may need to do that - I've done it already with potions, so I could put "There is a guy selling a pair of Boots of Haste for $30K right now, cash on hand. Yes, no?" on the rumor table.

      I mean, for the love that is all that is holy, "That's so useful let's all get one" is the worst thing ever. "Hey, we should all have Boots of Haste and Amulets of Missile Shield, they're so cheap!" turns them from magical treasures into high-end tech. Sufficiently routine magic is indistinguishable from high technology.

      The "precisely this" one causes me a lot of work . . . it's just that the next line is, "That's too much. How about . . . ?"

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