Magic Item Prices in D&D DON'T WORK! (And how Pathfinder fixes it)
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- Опубликовано: 8 дек 2024
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I think originally 5e was supposed to represent a sword and sorcery world, with no magic item shops, but items would be found. This goes back to AD&D and the '80s. Nowadays WOTC tries to fit it into high fantasy, which creates some inconsistencies in RAW
Yeah! The larger issue is that the edition was playtested with ONE audience giving feedback and then the popularity boom has brought a WHOLE DIFFERENT kind of audience and the two AREN'T EVEN CLOSE IN WHAT THEY WANT from the game.
Then why use the High Fantasy Kitchen Sink setting of the (best left) Forgotten Realms as the de facto campaign setting?
@@JacksonOwex I think that's actually a really interesting and valid point. 5e wasn't built knowing that three years in it would experience unprecedented popularity growth.
You are correct. Just look at the cr system any magic item that gives a combat bonus breaks it.
This. Personally, I find that the way magic items work as a commodity in games like the Pathfinder CRPGs really cheapens them. There's just something wrong about finding a magic sword and saying "aw, this isn't as good as the one I have, better sell it with all the other +1 swords of nothing I've found."
Fun fact about items not being balanced between tiers: according to the DMG, dragon scale mail should cost around 5001-50000 GP, while a staff of the python likely costs around 101-500 GP: but dragon scale mail is about as good as nonmagical half plate and would only help if the resistance ever came up, while the staff of the python gives you an immortal ally that does a ton of damage: the only way it can die is if the enemies can do 60 damage in a single round before you can use your action and bonus action to de-summon and re-summon it, which they will not be able to do until around level 4 or 5 at minimum, otherwise players would be getting instakilled
Who even designed these items???? 50000 GP for resistance to one damage type instead of the AC boost you'd get from other armor of the tier? 100 GP for IMMORTAL MURDER SNAKE?
Broom of flying is at a lower tier than wand of fireballs.
Permanent no concentration(bluntly a casters real resource, not spell slots) flight vs. some fireballs each day.
Even looking at these as "rarity" broom of flying vs. the thing my 2e character used for auto attack.
jeez, I see why Moses' staff was such a big deal
@@woomod2445 To be fair, there are like twenty player races nowadays that can just straight up fly from the get go, no recources or magic items needed.
@@StabYourBrain Name 10.
@@PerikleZ87 There are 5 that can do it right off rip with no feat investment or restrictions beyond armor type. Tiefling, Aaracokra, Aven, Owlfolk, and Fairy. A handful of others can get it at the cost of an x-per-day racial feature or a feat. Not 20, but certainly more than there should be given how strong flight is for casters.
I would even add to that: PF2e has very clear and concise rules on pretty much everything which leaves little room for vagueness. Also this way it gets rid of inconsistent homebrew rulings (because last sessions those rules the GM made up on the fly are now different or nobody remembers their ruling and so on). People might consider this as a negative but to be fair: Beyond the veil of maybe a bit more rules chunk you can find an awesome system in PF2E. At first glance it might seem like that overly complicated system but I assure you it isn't.
I've literally gotten into debates with people who say 5e's lack of item economy is good because then you can make shit up for the players to buy yourself without strong-arming them into tying item economy into character advancement.
When I asked for hard examples for what you could do, the responses I got were, no joke, airship flights, arming the kings military, and building an orphanage.
Yes, the answers for what DMs should homebrew themselves to give players an excuse to spend their gold without magic item prices, is transport and what's essentially a kingdom building system.
At what point are players going to realise this is the reason why DMs are starting to burn out on 5e and go to crunchier systems with more back-end support?
@@thebrutallyhonestdm definitely not wrong, but to add to that, the issue is that players want to pick and choose what they want made crunchy and when they want to ignore rules. They seem to want rules for things that suit them when it's convenient for them, but then ignore both existing rules and problems with them when they just want to freeform narratively.
And since all the responsibility has shifted to the GM, players are expected to be able to get whatever they want by asking, and you're a bad GM if you don't deliver or say no.
5e has basically created an unprecedented level of player entitlement, and it's GMs who suffer for it.
@The Brutally Honest DM lol if you think PF2e has a good foundation for DMs just look at old Pathfinder. The sheer number of tools that they cut to make PF2e is staggering. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot that I like about PF2e, but there is also a lot that honestly needs work.
Idk, I think you're missing the point your friend was trying to make. They were pointing out that DND 5e runs better when gold is not part of a character's mechanical advancement, but rather, is used for roleplaying reasons.
So using gold to influence the game world, rather than using it for statistical bonuses for their characters.
Which I think completely works if that's the type of game you are going for.
So I really want to push back against the idea that DND 5e's ruleset is somehow responsible for burning gm's out when these gm's are taking it up on themselves to design expansions to the dnd 5e system rather than just playing different systems for different kinds of games.
But I also want to support the idea that a large population of DND 5e players would actually be better served by other systems. But importantly, that is not because pf2 is strictly better than DND 5e. It's because pf2 is designed to facilitate a different kind of game than DND 5e is designed to facilitate.
At some point we need to stop blaming DND 5e for not being the one size fits all system we wanted, and need to start blaming ourselves for being too lazy to check out other systems lol.
@@bonzwah1 This would be all well and good if people actually *played* other systems, but most of the time the average person who wants to play TTRPGs wants to play 5e, and only 5e, you need to onboard them into the genre with another system or else they get incredibly focused solely on 5e. 5e has such a strangle hold over the TTRPG scene that it's the only thing people want to play, and GMs can't be blamed for going with the system that their friends (possibly the only stable group they can find to GM for) want. 5e has a very real problem with not being broad or modular enough to accommodate the fact that it's *the* TTRPG right now. Not to mention that the headache of needing to homebrew a lot of mechanics is present in the system as it is, not even counting stuff that players want to do that just isn't covered.
video: talks about DND and Pathfinder
YT: ohh he means Magic - The Gathering
This has been among my least favorite aspects of 5e as well. It's symptomatic of a bigger problem with 5e being a bit too obsessed with itself. It's afraid of doing incremental bonuses in favor of advantage/disadvantage, afraid of being anything beyond completely simple, the DMG focuses on completely asinine content, feats and magic items were supposed to be significant deals that the DM had careful control over yet then monster statblocks at higher levels just *assume* you have magic items or specialized means to deal with them.
5e's bounded accuracy also makes upgrades to AC *really* potent. Magic armor is one rarity tier higher than weapons. Yet, shields are equal to weapons, despite providing the same bonus. And someone who's played as and had players who've used high-AC builds, it's very easy to become nearly invulnerable against anything other than super higher tier monsters. The dichotomy can get so bad that, even with bounded accuracy, you run into the situation where for a monster to hit you, it'd have to be a guaranteed hit on the rest of your party.
5E really wants to be simple but at a certain point it's not being simple it's just being vague and unhelpful
I played a fighter with 31 AC at level 12. Even a level 20 Balor needed a 17 or higher to touch me.
@@cyberninjazero5659 Agreed. It wants to be the perfect blend of simple and crunchy but ends up being too complex and number-y to be a good simple narrative game and too vague and breakable to be a good crunchy combat game.
@@12thLevelSithLord Eh I wouldn't go that far. It managed to become a power house and strongly establish its identity as an "intermediate" game, not completely simple and brainless but far from extremely mathematical and complex.
Granted as the Years pass the games flaws are piling up and 5.5 has already been announced but there's no denying how well it's performing
_"monster statblocks at higher levels just assume you have magic items or specialized means to deal with them."_
Actually I tend to find that the monster stat blocks are balanced better around characters with 0 magic items. I think the only thing that ever requires a magic item are martials needing a magic weapon to overcome resistance/immunity, and even then I'd argue that only the immunity is a problem since that just turns them into meat shields.
At least this is the case for monsters in the base MM, I do hear that the other bestiaries balance their monsters better.
Oh man, I completely agree with you on this. I really hate how some pricing can be in D&D especially for magic items. I thankfully don't run into this problem as much anymore since I've come to realize players don't "need" magic items, but when I was fresh off the bat dming I've made that mistake of making them super accessible. I can understand what they were probly thinking with the pricing table but the disparity is fucking massive. Something nice and static like what pathfinder has could be a huge help. Especially if you use that as a basis when when trying to figure out how much it would cost in your own setting. Be easier to judge how much you would bump up or lower the price.
Honestly, I agree. It would take a slight understanding of the value of gold in each system, but you could totally steal the prices of similar items from other systems. Even looking back at earlier editions of DnD would be helpful.
There actually are a bunch of magic items prices table that people have made, with prices based on their effectiveness and usefulness. It would have been better having it in the sourcebooks though
@@claudiolentini5067 Oh for sure, I've used stuff like Sane Magical Prices before but having other sources to go off of would be nice too
This is something Xanathar's Guide to Everything fixes... a bit.
There is a downtime activity called "Buying and Selling Magical Items". In there , you can spend time and gold to both find and buy a magical item, and at the end, roll a Persuasion check to find the item, with a +1 bonuses for both weeks and 100GP spent on the search. If the player is seeking for a specific item, the level of the item fixes the DC of the challenge (10 for common, 15 for uncommon and so). Depending of the result, you either find the item you are looking for or a different item that it is rolled in the DMG item table. After finding it, you just need to roll the dice and make the calculations based around the rarity of the item, so for example, a uncomnmon item would cost 1d6 X 100, so between 100 and 600 GP. There are also complications that give hooks for small adventures, like a rival gang stealing the item or the item being cursed by a god.
What makes me angry about it is that it is a sound system. There is variation on it, the prices aren't fixed so you can justify a high roll with availability or a low roll with a scam, but then I ask myself... Why is this on a suplementary book instead of the Dungeon Master's Guide or fuck, even the Core Rulebook? This system (as well as many others that were added in Xanathar's, like Tool Usage) could be put on 5e's basic ruling, answering some really important questions, but it is locked behind a specific book that you need to buy. And it's not like PF2e that "locks" variations of the rules behind the GMG, but rather options that could aid any campaign.
Honestly I hate the random chance part of the system. 100gp and a week of downtime for a CHANCE to find a magic item, that might just be way out of your price range if you do end up finding it feels awful
I have a theory that 5e was developed by a small team with a small budget and a pretty short deadline, which is why the 3 core books were so barebones and frankly kind of disjointed when they released and had to be supplemented with later books. I also believe that it's currently being worked on by a skeleton crew on a shoestring budget which is why splat releases are 2 per year at most.
I love the transparency about artificially stretching the length of the video
Honestly the thing about the discount is like, saying it's 700 and giving them a 10% discount is the same as saying it was 630 and not giving them a discount, because there's nothing saying it has to be 700, in Pathfinder's case, saying it's 30 when it should be 35 has a tangible objective benefit cause the rules say that item costs 35, so both you and the players know for sure that this is discounted, it's not arbitrary
I think it's important to not give excuses for 5E in this regard, as I used to often give the excuse that you can always homebrew to fix these problems
For being such a large TTRPG, with years of experience in design, they still manage to have issues such as these fall upon the DM's hands. As Nonat brings up they have these tables for gems and artwork, it's honestly incredible how these tables got prioritized over the rest.
it's a great example that 5E has an illusion of simplicity, especially for the DM
The more work the system does for your specific game, the better the system is - I'm really glad I've switched to Pathfinder 2e last months
Talking 5e feels a lot like discussion about the elder scrolls series that's always derailed by some fucker butting in with "but mods though!!"
Yeah, "You can homebrew to fix the problem" is basically saying "you can spend hours of your time doing for free what the designers were paid for and failed to do in the first place." Or I can just use games that *don't* necessitate devoting tons of time to homebrew to get into a workable state.
Actually, nowadays you mostly find that people's have homebrewed the stuff you're looking for, and that could be actually better or worse depending on the situation
I think economy overall is better in Pathfinder 2e. Plate in 5e costs insane amounts of gold, same for the items like a spyglass. Pathfinder 2e not only has better, but also improving items, like infiltrator tools being better thieves tools.
This has been my biggest gripe with 5e as well (other than some really awkward lore shifts from the old) coming from 3.5e and pathfinder 1e, seeing how much better it was handled in older editions compared to the present just baffles me.
I like 5e, I still think it's overall my preferred system, but this is one stinker of an issue it has.
While it's a big annoyance, i think maybe the designers just intended this to be prepped by the DM for their setting manually.
I mean.. i could probably write up a table of Magic Item Prices for certain categories and powerlevels that would include most of the items you WANT to sell to players. Surely you don't need all of them priced.. i mean, you will not let your players buy a Deck of Many Things or a Book of Vile Darkness.. there are easier ways to derail and prematurely end your campaign lol
@StabYourBrain Whether they intended it or not is irrelevant in my mind, as it's a poor decision regardless I find.
If you want to price things differently than what's provided, it's no more extra work on your end. If you're used to these prices being provided and now you've got ranges, than it's much more extra work to fill in that gap that you may not want to have to do. It's far more work for one camo than it is the other.
Even on an individual basis for items, if an artifact like the deck of many has a full price, it doesn't need to be used, and it doesn't mean it's for sale at all in your world. If you wanted to run a world where it is though, you at least have that provided.
Also if you did want to change things, it also makes that process easier than providing loose ranges or nothing. If I decide that magic is more abundant, lowering the cost of these items by a relevant percentage and/or allowing rare and under items for purchase at magic shops that can exist is an easy shift compared giving a custom price to everything. Just like making a low magic could see a double or triple cost in price with only common items being allowed for purchase. Applying percentage to a base number is far easier in my experience.
Need is a weird thing to bring up in a hobbyist discussion like a ttrpg. Its a talk if desire and convenience. This part if the game was far easier to run in 3.5e and 4e, and in rivals like pf2e as it's easier to work with and navigate (and something provided for a while too.) I don't need every item priced, but I wanted every item priced so I can decide what works for me and doesn't but bit have an extra workload as a result.
Just my thoughts in the matter though. I'm just some dude with his own preference.
IIRC, some people have made a big list of item prices called the Sane Magical Prices. But I agree that it's ridiculously silly that WotC has no support for this
It's obvious that they wanted 5e to get away from "the magic shop mentality". I understand that many DM's don't want magic items to be bought and sold. However, not providing support for DM's that do want magic item shops is stupid. Especially when they have Eberron as a campaign setting. Eberron specifically has magic item shops. One of the dragonmarked house specifically creates and sells magic items.
What's more, items in the same category have huge differences in effect. That's what comes from only having five categories. 20 levels gives a lot more flexibility.
Yeah, 5e's at this awkward middle ground that doesn't really work. Either give everything prices (or at least good guidelines for setting prices), or don't allow magic items to be bought at all. This vague half measure causes a worst of both worlds situation.
I think Wizards screwed themselves. They have magical creatures and players who can cast spells. Get enough magic casting people in a single location and some would start making magical items to make their lives easier.
Others would open up universities/colleges/cults (need to include warlocks and druids!) to teach magic. Some of the teachers and students would make magical items to make things easier on themselves....
Some of those places will be well known... adventurers, merchants, nobles, royalty, dragons, extra-planar entities would go to these places looking for magic items to make their lives easier. These lazy gits would realize it would be easier to sell temporary magic items to them, even if its forbidden, for exorbitant prices in order to live lives of idle luxury.
Guess what, they now they have created a magic item market!!!!
So, what was the logic WotC used?
@@aralornwolf3140 Exactly! The only way to not have a magic item economy is to make it so that nobody know how items are made and they are extremely rare. Rare enough that you'd never expect an adventuring party to have more than one item. Let alone each person getting multiples over their career. If they were that rare, I'd expect the kings to seize any items that they heard of.
@@philopharynx7910 ,
My point is the opposite of yours, but yours illustrates the lack of logic.
_____
My Logic
A simple thing that would help lazy gits I wrote about above;
Quill of Transcribing Cost 2gp.
While holding the Quill of Transcribing, all spoken words will be written down with perfect accuracy.
As people are able to speak faster than writing, especially when they are reading something they are transcribing, this simple Quill makes copying works get done, much, much faster. It even benefits those who are illiterate, as they can now write things in their own words (will need someone to read things to them, but they can now write love letters).
While, it's an absolutely useless Quill, for a party of adventurers, I can see (as I made it up) it being used by scribes, publishers, bureaucrats, etc. who spend a lot of their time writing buying these by the bundle as they are a time saver, even if the Quill is only good for 20,000 characters.
For 20 times the price, they can make it permanent... and... they would still make a profit, lol.
It's simple things like that which would exist no matter how WotC wants it to be. Permanent Magic Items would certainly exist and there will always be a market for them. If there are places where magic schools and/or organizations exist, then there will also have people willing to craft magic items. Thus, in the large cities, there will be stores selling permanent magic items, even if the stores are being supplied by the corpses of adventurers/lords instead of being crafted!
_____
WotC can't get around the logic since players are able to use spells which create semi-permanent or even permanent effects (animate dead, fabricate, awaken, etc), then these players are able to create permanent magic items. As these spells are available to NPCs, then NPCs are able to create permanent magic items.
For Permanent Magic Items to _not_ exist, then the spells that are available to the players need to be substantially weaker in order to make sure that no one is able to craft magic items... as no one has the knowledge, the power, skill, etc.
WotC didn't want to reduce the magic power available to the Spell Casters... but, they reduced the magic available to everyone else.
_____
I created a low magic world about 20 years ago as a campaign idea... I drastically restricted magic items, prevented players from choosing spell casting classes, the two spell casting classes they could choose from had to swear fealty to their draconic over lords, who had first dibs on any treasure the players find, and I seriously increased the level required to cast basic spells (magic missile, cure wounds, would be available at level 3, fireball would be available at level 11, etc.).
This didn't prevent me from throwing in some magic items, it just prevented the players from having magic the entire time... as their draconic overlords owned all magic items and only they are allowed to teach magic. Woe onto the mortals who betrayed these sacred trusts.
Note: this campaign was on a planet with home brewed races who, millennia ago nearly won the world war against dragons... nearly won. Fortunately for the non-dragon races, the good aligned dragons refused to... commit genocide... so the non-dragon races still exist, although completely at the mercy of their draconic overlords.
As you said, if magic items are so rare they aren't made... the Lords would kill any adventurer who had magic items, or force them to swear fealty in order to keep the items...
I don't like magic shops in my games ( starfinder is a bit different as the whole setting is a corporate dystopia with God's and dragons running corporations) the most I've done is had players seek out casters to have consignment work or during a planescape campaign I had a roving band of bariuar that would hold swap meets/auctions every few months, that idea I really enjoyed, it gave me better control over what the players spent their money on and I was able to throw in a few items that were cool or useful that the pcs wouldn't normally consider but since they had gold burning holes in their pockets it worked out really well)
Yeah, this is one thing that REALLY irks me about 5e. A lack of actual item prices (which they had in previous editions) has knock-on effects for the encounter system because the DMG/XGTE doesn't give you any guidance as to which items are appropriate for which character levels, so you could very easily make your party too strong for monsters and you wouldn't know it. 5e seems to go out of its way to give DMs more work than they should be doing. 5e as a rules system feels like the house from Money Pit. It's an attractive house from the outside, but then you discover there's no plumbing or electricity in the house and now you, as a new home owner, are meant to add it to the house yourself instead of having the builders put it in in the first place.
"Just homebrew it!"
"ok, but how long is that gonna take?"
"Two weeks!"
Any chances we could get a video on your thoughts of DnD 3.5? I know I really like it and I’d love to hear your thoughts since I don’t see much about it
I don’t think he has played 3.5 a significant amount
Or better yet Pathfinder 1E since it's closer to his brand
@@cyberninjazero5659 he hasn’t played pathfinder 1e in any significant amount, maybe not at all
Subtract the lower level from the upper level to get your difference. Roll a percentile. Multiply the difference by the percentile to get your variant price. Add the lower level to the variant price to get the total price. Kaboom, you have a crazy random price. Why does a +1 shortsword cost 4500 today when it costed 595 last week? Cause your magic item shop owner is craaaaaaayyyyyyzy
Item level is absolutely something Pathfinder owes D&D 4. A good example of how game designers pay attention to trends and improvements even if majority of people dismiss the whole game.
I can tell you why DnD ended up that way (I think at least).
In previous edditions, PCs carried a ton of magic items, and it got very complicated very quickly, lots of stuff to remember.
So Wizards wanted to do away with the magic shop, make magic items something more unique that you found as part of your quests, or bought at a high end auctions. So the price list got so little attention, because you weren't meant to buy the items. Each item does not have a price, because that would imply you could buy it. The problem is, a large segment of the player base still want to play with a magic shop, it is the most meaningful way for them to spend all that gold they find and earn, because it is the most impactful on gameplay.
And yes, the balancing is completely out the window, even though I would take an animated shield over boots of speed on quite a few characters, so not the best example. But broom of flying being uncommon is ridiculous.
They did it well in 3e.
@@almitrahopkins1873 yes
Xanathar’a Guide to Everything just had a better table for magic item prices and it works way better and fixes the ranges
But then some DMs think the prices in Xanathar’s are too high, but I personally don’t think they are
These prices are as follows:
Common - (1d6 + 1 ) x 10 gp
or 20-70 gp
Uncommon - 1d6 x 100 gp
or 100-600 gp
Rare - 2d10 x 1000 gp
or 2,000-20,000 gp, but it’s weighted on 11,000 if you wanted to default to that
Very Rare - (1d4 + 1) x 10,000 gp
or 20,000 - 50,000 gp
Legendary - 2d6 x 25,000 gp
or 50,000 - 300,000 gp weighted on 175,000 gp
Great table, it’s in Xanathars Guide to Everything under “downtime activities,” subsection “buying magic items”
But what I’ve done is made a shop where the inventory reflects the commonality of items. They are hard pressed to find a major very rare at this store, and more likely to see commons and maybe 1 uncommon, with the rare… rare item, and the once in a life time very rare item. This store does not sell legendary items ever. That’s something they strictly have to find. Every day the shop has 3 items to choose from and the party can choose 1 to purchase. I haven’t play tested this yet but I’ll be introducing them to the store in session 1 and hopefully this system works, it uses the prices from Xanathars that I mentioned
The reason for this is because they didn't feel it necessary to support DMs with actual data. There's a PDF out there called Sane Magic Item Prices that does a good job codifying this all.
Just to add onto this, with the exception of platinum coins, any other type of coin other than gold has no real value technically speaking. Just think of how many times the reward for a quest is a sum of 50 silver or even electrum for that matter. The fact that the only reward that's both expected and really has any value is gold, this leads to an inflation of the party having more than enough money to buy anything they want.
Let me back up a little and clarify that when I mean that gold is essentially the only real coin of value, it's that nearly everything you can get in the equipment section outside of some small knick knacks and ammo, is going to cost some amount of gold. Even a freaking Dagger costs 2gp in order to buy it. That's just a regular Dagger, something you'd expect any commoner with a few silvers or coppers to rub together could get for self defense.
A way you could fix that is to drop the normal regular items' prices down a coin value, from gp to sp and sp to cp, but leave magic items in general with a gp price. This would prevent having an influx of magic items and it would allow the other types of currency to shine other than gold and platinum.
To add upon this, people dont really use electrum, nor platinum (unless they need platinum for a material for a spell), they might use silver to pay for food and drinks, maybe, and only if they have some loose coins, if not, gold all the way, there's not a real reason to use any other coin in 5e.
So like 2e did with its pricing. Everything has been scaled back to use silver over gold as its base.
Now that i think about it, that's a really interesting point. Like, the rulebooks state clearly that 1 gold is a lot of money, like you can buy a goat or pay the daily wage of an artisan, yet the suggested reward for a level 1 character (basically a nobody, just above your average commoner) is 20 times as much. So in 5E when you're just starting, you are already a tier above the common people, and most expenses (like lodgings, or buying basic adventuring equipment like torches or rations) become menial very rapidly. Really the game would have needed stuff to do with money apart from downtime, such as having useful objects and consumables (apart from weapons) in the range of 10-50 gold. I hope that PF2 doesn't have the same "money dumping for the sake of money dumping" issue
@@claudiolentini5067 from my brief experience with PF2e, you don't really get a ton of gold that you can't use, sure, you can hoard it or use it to buy random useless stuff, but most of the adventuring gear (consumables, wands, staves) are kind of affordable even at low levels, like, in 5e your basic potion of healing is 50 gold (which is basically 50 days living in water deep or around that much), while the basic healing potion from PF2 is 8 gold (sure, it's 2d4+2 vs 1d8, the next one is 2d8+5 for 12 gold)
@@leoramirez3356 are you sure about those prices? the second potion seems much better, 2d8+5 heals 14 hp on average, while 1d8 heals 4, and the minimun you can get in the second case is almost the maximum you can roll in the first one
Dude I'm currently having this exact problem, I'm running a west marches style campaign for Undermountain and I have like 8 active players and a few less active ones and I have had such an issue with pricing these things. I've been retconning prices constantly and blaming the economy lmao. When I don't know the price off the cuff I just say it's not in stock and spend like an hour post session debating price points and it's exhausting
There is a pdf online called sane magic item prices for dnd, if that helps, idk some of those prices are comically expensive but those are the kind players find rather than buy.
5e monsters CR are set against same level players, with no magic items. Adding magic items makes my work as a GM harder to balance every battle.
So I have a LOW magic item setting. When they find something magical, it is a BIG deal, and they prize them more for it.
This also let's me pick and choose the items they will find, so I know how it will affect battles.
*tosses box of magic items my players will never find on the fires of sacrifice*
I do think D&D should have prices for the items, but one think I like better than in PF is tables in general. Do I need 10 tables for artwork and gems? No. Do I want them? Well, now that you mention it, yes.
I mostly miss the random encounter tables by biomes from PF1e, but I do see a critical lack of tables in general in 2e.
Random Encounter tables NEED to come back. Some of my favorite encounters I've ever made were randomly generated, even leading to some mainstay NPCs.
Use the ones from 1e then! They should work just fine for most things and the few things that are actually new just find something similar or check the description to see where you could slot it! These are "issues" that people have with BOTH games that are really NON-issues in my opinion. Yeah, I know, EVERYONE wants to cry about not having enough time but all it takes is a few minutes to look at somethings and you have what you need!
Now the issue of pricing items, that IS an issue! A rare magic item costs 501(why so specific, just say 500 table) to 5000 gold? Why the heck does the cost increase by TEN TIMES, are there 10 levels of items in there, no, then WHY?!
@@JacksonOwex obviously I use them, I still want updated one for 2e lol. Plus some better support for hexploration games. Those are not insurmountable issues, just some thing 2e could improve upon.
What you are describing for Pathfinder 2 was also the case in DnD 4th edition, I don't understand why they rolled back on such a consistent and convinient tool for the system.
Actually this prices are more reference for the crafting system and selling. I cant remember exact passage but it is said that the magic shop don't exist just like that, and if you really want to sell or buy some role playing and creating must be done - finding a secret shop , doin some favor quests, paying someone for find sellers/byuers and than wait - days and months, and some complications may pop out - like fake item, thieves, fraud organizer and stuff, and even not every item will be fo sale - there are even a table of chance with rolled dice. This whole thing is a quest of it's own and not just a random shop in the middle of nowhere out any logic stocked with resourses. So for me this case is bad DM job not failure of the system.
As someone who is trying to get PF2e from 5e, specifically as a GM, I'm having a hard time finding where the magic items are listed. I haven't really bought any books outside of the core rules book and can't find them, any advice on where to find magic items in 2e?
This is an example of how 5e is simple on the surface, but very cumbersome underneath it.
This. I find that 5e has little guidance for DMs, and the lack of magic prices (which have been included in the DMG since 1st edition AD&D) is part of the issue.
I 1000% agree with this, D&D 5e's Guidelines on Magic Items is whack. Even after releasing the Revised Guidelines in Xanathar's Guide to Everything this is still a constant problem. Its still just a little table that tells you a rarity value and a random price range of...say for an Uncommon Item 1d6 x 100 GP, but because magic items are so random in terms of power even among their own rarity its not always accurate. You get an item that gives you permanent flight or puts your Strength Score to 19 (In a game where ASIs are very slow to get) for as low as 100 GP. Its wild.
This also extends to Crafting Magic Items, even the updated guidelines for that in Xanthar's Guide aren't concreate enough. It doesn't give specific details on how to obtain formulas, it doesn't clarify if crafting the item requires the base cost of the original item plus added magical aspects, it doesn't have level restrictions or any amount of Tool or Arcana dice rolls related to increasing or decreasing the time to craft them. This has actually led to moments where the crafting economy doesn't make a ton of sense, because if you're following the crafting table's numbers...lets say its a Common Magic item like Smoldering Plate Armor, because the table nor guidelines doesn't state you add the cost of Plate armor to the crafting process nor does it say you need the base armor itself, you can just craft Smoldering Plate Armor (After you get the Formula & Exotic Material) for 50 GP whereas regular Plate cost 1500 GP. It just doesn't make sense.
Items in 5e really should have harder rules that define what items should and shouldn't be costing. They did get Potions of Healing right in Xanathar's guide at least.
Your hair looks nice.
"Rare items are 501 to 5,000 GP"
That's a pretty massive gap...
"Very rare items are 5,001 to 50,000 GP"
YOU MADE IT WORSE!!
oh man when you said "there can't be tables for all items" my mind instantly went to the 3.5 and pathfinder 1e games I currently play in because item prices there are incredibly detailed and narrow. Like there's formulas for what a weapon, a scroll or armor has to cost. Just to give an example, you want a mithral full plate +2 that also is glamered? Well, full plate is 1,5k gp, making it out of mithral adds the heavy armor pricing for that material so that's another 9k, add 150gp for it being a masterwork (which is required for it being enchanted) and a further 4k gp for the +2 enchantment and lastly a base 2.7k for the glamered enchantment, bringing you to a total of 17,35k gp in cost for that item.
Like pathfinder 2e seems to be the halfway point between 5e and 3.5/pathfinder 1e which is pretty neat since as a GM that had multiple newbies join my 1e campaign at level 5+ these ultra detailed lists are as intimidating as they are helpful. You can go overboard with the details and the earlier editions of the game are very much in that category of bloatedness, especially if we're getting into the "making it up on the spot" list - unless you are very well organized and have all these tables infront of you then looking up prices for items becomes a major part of every shopping trip. In 2e you just go "ah, you want these runes? Here's the pricing for that, enjoy". In 1e it's more like "You want X enchantments? Okay, so these are equivalent to a weapon enhancement bonus of Y, except for these two because they for some reason have a fixed cost instead so lemme bust out my calculator real quick".
I like crunchy systems and I'm very used to 1e and 3.5 so I'm not bothered by it anymore but I distinctly remember that it took me some time of hyperfixating on the topic to get a feel for it.
PS: Prices for gems and artwork are a legacy thing iirc, back in the day loot often wasn't just hoards of gold and magic items, instead you went into the BBEG's lair and took everything that looked expensive and sell it back in town, their gems, figurines, portraits - all of that stuff got thrown into ye olde wheelbarrow and sold to the highest bidder so making sure you got prices for all of that stuff was an important part of the game, especially because getting gold and loot was the main way of progressing your character, I'm talking like getting EXP for loot type of stuff.
Yeah but magic item table that have REAL prices are also legacy things, as you pointed out, so... why are there ten tables for gems and art?!
@@JacksonOwex good question, from my experience it seems that legacy systems that get the least use are the last to get dropped. People engage with magic items all the time so the simplification 5e went for put those on the chopping block as a high priority item. Prices for treasure and 'normal' economy items rarely factor into the direct focus of the game (my art gallery does not help me kill a dragon) so players engage less with it and that puts that information more into the worldbuilding pool that GMs need access to on ocassion. It's definitely a weird call lol, others have pointed out that 5e tried to steer away from magic items and commerce so that probably plays a big part in that awell, the less rules there are for how magic shops would function the less incentive there is to just have the players buy that flying carpet rather than finding one.
My interpretation and how I run Magic Items in my 5e games is that for the most part there is no market for them (outside of Healing Potions, which I make cheaper).
Magic items aren't needed in 5e in the first place; they're special rewards and power boosts for adventuring, not something you pick up down at the local market. The guidelines are useful for those rare moments they find an item for sale, or when they try to sell something, then the non-standard pricing system works because they're rare enough that fixed prices aren't established.
I've only seen problems come out from giving players full access to an open market to buy whatever item they want.
6:15 A lot of magic items have the same rarity as they have always had.
DnD5e is not made to have magic items shops. But it still sucks to not have the option easily available.
I enjoy that your videos are not only well made & edited, but they compell me to go to the comments to see further discussions & reactions from others.
It's one of my favorite parts of making videos like these. Seeing people give opinions, explain aspects I might have missed, or correct things I got wrong. I learn more from my comment section than I do from my research sometimes!
It is not simplification, it is a value scale reference. The intention is to remove Gold from a PC power level by making magic items not purchasable with Gold, at all. It is explicitly stated somewhere, I know because I showed it to my DM in person during a Curse of Strad game. This is a game design choice not a simulation choice(Pathfinder made a different choice to have Gold be part of a Character's power level). If anything the value should not of been listed because rarity does not equal power. Rarity is the chance to be found, power is when it should be possible to find, whish there was a power rating, not that WotC has a good record in rating the power level of things...
+1 weaposn should be in the upepr levels of the cost range, +1 armour items shouldbe mid next tier. Bounded accuracy makes +1 items extremyl powerful.
I like how the video is 9 minutes and 11 seconds because 5e... needs some help...
I think Matt Colville said it best when responding to a question someone asked him about... I don't remember, something: "That would require un-f**king 5E"!
This was the first thing that stuck out for me when I took the Pathfinder 2e book into my hands for the first time. I usually use a "sane prices" chart to detemine the item prices in my campaign, but god, I wish 5e would handle their items the same way as Pathfinder does.
It's a lot easier to design a game for Rulings not Rules... save a lot of money on paying Games Designers too. They've gotta fund those Hasbro Exec Golden Parachutes somehow.
Ye
Only reason I play dnd instead of pathfinder is noob friends and better flavour
My only issue with pathfinder is how class flavour feels kinda bland
It is hard to explain but classes feel less exciting
Maybe artwork being less colorful the fault?
Blame the Artwork.. what are you, a child at heart?! Lol.
@@aralornwolf3140
I'm not blaming the artwork
I just sed that DnD feels more exciting and I don't know why.
I didn't blame the artwork but just sed that it might be a part of the issue since it's the first thing you see while reading the manuals
Why would pirate towns have expensive goods? It would be the opposite. Pirates are in a hurry to offload their goods, they aren't merchants they don't have time or the skill for negotiation and the goods are by the nature of being stolen, less desirable than the same goods that are not stolen. Pirates sell cheap.
Wizards doesnt expect you to really buy or sell items.
In your example is the dm at fault and not the system. At level 10 in high fantasy a character should only have 6 magic items, 5 uncommon and 1 rare. Still the price range is far to big to be easy to handle but magic items should be rare. Even a Magic shop should not have more then maybe 5-7 items at the time and thats something you can prepare quite well and come up with a fitting price. The biggest problem is that the rarity is in 6 stages and not in 21(?) like pathfinder2e. Thats something they really should change.
Yes they all have a cost, but there is still the problem of how much gold are you giving to your players, it is hard to say if you're giving them enough or too much or not, I prefer to balance the prices myself according to how much I'm giving them.
I personally think selling magic items to players is a mistake, unless they are single use. If PCs want items other than potions or scrolls, they go on adventures.
I'd say the 5e is more realistic in their pricing than Pathfinder is. D&D assumes most magic items are discovered artifacts that you would not be able to buy or sell in a simple shop. A shop only really works if it can sell items, often, to random passerbys. Magic items are expensive to the point that the only buyers or sellers would be other adventurers, factions, wealthy collectors, or governments. Buying or selling magic items would be more akin to dealing with real estate in our world. You'd have to work with brokers and appraisers, so expect fees on top of the price. The market value would be widely variable by location and haggling would be expected. A wide range of possible prices makes sense depending on supply/demand and location.
Fixed prices on magic items only make sense if your dealing with some sort of international Guild or Brokerage system.
Magic Shops only makes sense if magical crafting is a common profession that almost anyone could learn. At that point the pricing would need an overhaul because such items would be a lot cheaper in that setting.
it is dumb that there are any tables for artwork and gems. "You find 200gold worth of art and gems." The 99 out of 100 players are not going to ask for any details about them. I think this stuff is there because in the old days treasure was the purpose to do anything, the value of treasure use to be how your got exp. That concept died in 2nd edition I think.
It's very clear to me that in DND 5e, you are not supposed to buy or sell magic items from a catalog.
I don't think that table is in there to help you sell magic items. It's there to give you a suggestion as to how valuable the magic items are to society and ultimately is a way to contextualize the value of a gold piece for roleplay purposes.
The tables of gems and art are not for buying and selling. They are there for delivering gold to the players through a medium other than gold... And by dedicating so many tables to it, they are telling the reader that "this is a key part of our vision of the game" and by including a little table for magic items value and keeping it vague, they are telling you "this is NOT a key part of our vision of the game".
DND 5e's biggest problem is that people treat it like a "generic" RPG system that can be tweaked and hacked into any setting, any genre, any theme, and any style of RPG experience. But it's not designed that way.
And to be fair, I'm not saying DND 5e is even well designed. But I do think that many complaints of DND 5e accuse it of being poorly designed when it's really that they want to do something that DND 5e isn't designed to do.
One time our Dn let someone buy a fire staff for 600 gold
Yea but pathfinder 2e magic items are so fucking expensive you can barely buy them. All we currently find are talismans at lvl 6. I miss the old pathfinder 1e magic system where you actually afford magic items at lower levels.
According to the book, by 6th level a player should have a +1 striking weapon or magic staff, a +1 armor, an item that grants +1 to a skill, a low level magic item like a bag of holding, and a few consumables (potions, scrolls, talismans). If you don't and the GM isn't using something like ABP (Automatic Bonus Progression), then that's on the GM.
I 100% agree. I remember trying to run a DND5e oneshot for Level 7 Adventurers as a somewhat experienced GM to Pathfinder1e, incredibly frustrating thing at first when I was used to relatively fixed magic item prices that I could fiddle with. Out of frustration I just said to have 1 rare and 2 uncommon magic items, simply because the price ranges were super wide.
I can understand Why they have large price ranges but most of the time, it's better if there is a Set price for items, or at least have prices for Magic armor/weapons and potions that have a set price, since those are the most common magic items simply because they have the most variety (like maybe Armour/Weapon cost +X amount for +Y enhancement).
This seems really bad to me. Magic is not the same in every world, so deciding that a magic item has a set price no matter how common magic is in that world is even lazier than running a magic shop that has every possible item.
Your 5e dm just sucks at running shops.
Do your players not know how to haggle prices? The price ranges in the DMG for 5E not only account for potentially the power of an item but it also gives the DMA floor that their shopkeepers can say I go no lower.
You're not wrong
Yep, magic items pricing is the second biggest pain in the 5E. Third biggest gripe is lack of penality for getting KO'ed every turn, which some groups use as part of their strategy. Finally my biggest gripe is lack of OGL, so getting digital materials and sharing those with players is quickly getting very expensive, especially if you want concise place like Nethys.
Otherwise the system is pretty nice, just start at level 3 ;)
@High Priest of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Players :"Why are we here? Just to suffer?" DM: "Yes"
As someone who started in 3.5 I was bothered to the depths of my soul because of this, and I spent weeks, if not months, searching on forums and on the internet for guidelines on pricing. I still dislike it because it sounds like lazy design, let DMs decide is the mantra of 5e, and if it sounded liberating in the beginning it got to a point that got so tired of having to make things up that I quit 5e and got back to developing my own system.
I also really like the cost, LV, and rarity system and hope that they play more with the Access elements more.
D&D 5e: You're not supposed to buy magic items. Challenges are designed in function of PC's not having any. If they have any, they can face greater challenges.
Pathfinder 2e: You're supposed to have a minimum of magic items per level. Challenges are designed in function of PCs having them. If they don't have any, they'll be weaker than they should be at their level.
It's a design choice.
that's true, I still have problems with their pricing system, and how some items are just stronger than the more expensive stuff
You're absolutely right for my two hand fighter following by book if I don't roll a plus one magic weapon I will never ever be able to damage what about a quarter of the monsters out of the monster manual a CR 3 I believe is what it is gargoyle can only be damaged efficiently with a magic weapon cr3 no their design is slightly skewed
monsters resistant to nonmagical weapons are like all over the 5e bestiaries, which means they definitely expect you to have some magic items
Sorry, but 5e's lack of mechanical consideration here is not a design choice. A design choice would've been removing gold as an expected reward, giving no listed prices for *any* magic items, and determining how rare an item is based on its potential to break the system's math while advising DMs to carefully limit what items players receive and how often to hand them out. That way, it's clearly conveyed that magic items aren't meant to be purchased and can mess with the game's balance, and DMs have an easy way to guage just how much a given item could impact their game.
Instead, the system uses gold, knowing players will want to spend it on things but not giving them any mechanics for what to spend it on. It divides magic items into rarities but does a poor job categorizing them, so it's hard to determine at a glance just how strong an item of any given rarity is. It gives a half-baked guideline for how to price magic items by rarity, suggesting that it should be possible to purchase them and that DMs can trust rarity to be a balance consideration when pricing items. The system isn't balanced properly and is written in a misleading way, which causes problems - *especially* for new DMs trying to learn the system.
One reason I loved 4e
Yes PF2's magic item system is simple, but it kinda destroys the purpose of magic by its simplicity. From my experience, magic in PF2 works like stickers you can pull and put on any items. Where is the magic in that? where is the mystery, the charm? I feel like they sacrificed the literary aspect of magic for simplicity's sake. The system makes magic mundane, not special.
That's a "High magic sistem" for you
I find it the opposite. Now I can keep the same weapon and improve it over time instead of having to sell my previous one to get a “better” version. Or finding a magical long sword when I use a hammer - it used to be worthless, just another piece of loot for the pile, but now it has value because I can transfer the magic to my weapon.
Hey Nonat, how would you transfer the magic item system of Pathfinder 2e over to D&D 5e?
Its much easier to transfer your game over to Pathfinder 2e.
Wouldn't pirates sell their items at *lower* prices, since they didn't take on the production costs and their customers take on additional risk by transacting illegitimately?
A lot of 5e hate in this comment section lol. Yeah magic item pricing and management is a nightmare in 5e but it’s just about the only thing that is imo. I think the a lot of 5e instinct is to intentionally leave things vague to spur creativity and it works wonders in other places!
Just not here lol.
One thing I've learned after playing in and GMing both D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e, is 5e is very much designed as a low to middle fantasy setting, whereas Pathfinder is primarily a high to epic high fantasy setting, and if you want to do the opposite thing in either edition, it's gonna take some work. 2e however, gives you some pretty neat(though not perfect) tools to do that, like automatic bonus progression and proficiency without level to name the big ones, but 5e has....more magic items?
In PF, I like to look at the levels as a guideline but not a Hard rule. I will only let players buy items of their level, but will sprinkle items that are between 2-3 levels higher in treasure. Especially if that item has roleplay significance to characters backstory
Bro this is literally my biggest headache ever thank you for sharing!
Great episode, NoNat. Really enjoyed you in it. Pathfinder 2e is so good that I don't understand why you would want to play in any other high fantasy system.
Good Question - why indeed would anyone want to play in any other fantasy system than the one with the most (at least in my eyes) ridiculous and world breaking item scaling mechanic?
Level 18 Fighter dropped his (properly upgraded) short sword and can't find it any more. He gets to a town and buys a new one but the new sword lacks the level apropriate upgrade. Now our Fighter has to fear for his life in his next combat encounter because he's gona take four times the time to kill his enemies. Meanwhile a tiny little Kobold has found the dropped upgraded level 18 short sword - now he is the most powerful Kobold ever and will raid all the villages in the area because he found an upgraded leather armor earlier that week and has nothing to fear any more. But at least he knows exactly how much gold he will get if he ever decides to sell his sword and armour.
PF2 treats magic items like a video game does and i understand that this leads to GMs thinking magic items would need exact prices so the players can buy everything in the next shop. Why wouldn't the poor blacksmith in an even poorer little town sell a bunch of dispelling slivers to an adventurer in need? After all if he sold just one of them he could close his smithy and spend the rest of his life in luxury. I understand the subject matter of the very simplified item price list in 5e as a message to the DM telling him that magic items in 5e are not to be treated like shop merchandise in a video game but like something truly wonderful and rare. I use that list only for one thing: to find out what a shop owner would pay if a player character decides to SELL one of those truly ancient and powerful items he found in the very deepest regions of a dangerous monster infested cavern. And should he discover a magic item in a shop that too would be a very rare and wonderful find in wich case the GM should already have a price (or task) in mind. In my 5e games magic items have to be earned - not bought - because i find that so much more satisfying.
Why are DMs even allowing players to buy magic items? Magic items should be found in my opinion. Only reason you need a "cost" is to sell the item. But in 5e what's the point of having treasure? In old D&D gold went to experience points, magic items were found and had immense impact on your character and gold would be used to make you own magic items. DO yourself a favor and play OSE and tweak as needed.
I've played a little of 5e ages ago and for me two things stuck out. 1) There was not a lot of choice character wise. 2) Money is essentially useless.
On the money side I came from 3.5 edition and Pathfinder 1e so money is used to buy magic items and tweek them and make them your own. In 5e I was told by some other DMs that the magic items are rewards and aren't for buying any more. It has essentially meant that we played a game and instead of spending money on magic items we worked out how many rounds of ale we could by the population of the city instead.
You are very right that Pathfinder 2e is great for having item levels and costs against items.
I had a 5e campaign completely fall apart because of money. The big plot was The Dragons Are Coming! They come every generation or so and destroy any civilization that's getting too advanced. We knew that time was coming soon, but by level 5 or so, we just ran out of shit to spend our money on. My PC decided to start building fallout shelters all around the city, hiring clerics and druids to keep them stocked with food, etc. It became a major focal point of the campaign and the DM absolutely had no idea how to handle it and eventually ended the campaign.
It's not a bug, is a feature. You should not have magic item shops in DnD 5e.
But I get it, I like magic shops, I have in my hb world with my own hb rules for price and availability.
dnd 5e is built off of the idea that magic items are found inside the game instead of there being a magic item economy, this is why they were lazy to implement proper pricing for items, the fact the gm controls the hand out of magic items allows the designers to get away with powerful magic items, generally, i agree with you on the hand that lack of magic item economy is a problem but not for the reasons you have, I find the lack of economy kinda makes gold useless, basically like shiny rocks, anyway, that's my points lolz
I had a DM in 5e offer, as a reward for some challenge, each character could earn "as much gold as they could carry." I declined to participate, because gold is worthless in 5e.
@@staratlas3238 ,
It's not worthless! Have you ever tried to outfit an army of dragons?! Now, that's an expensive army, Dragon King!
Money in 5e is kinda handwavey anyway. It was really awkward to play princes of apocalypses, to find lot of treasure and then realize there is nothing to spend money on since we aren't planning to be landowners :'D
(back then there wasn't even magic item prices in official books)
Have they actually started giving more specific prices in the books, not just that terrible table in the DMG that he showed?!
@@JacksonOwex From what I've seen, some of the adventures will have merchants that sell magic items and a table of "This is what this merchant sells these magic items for" At a casual glance the item prices fall into the ranges in the DMG, though that is not hard given the massive ranges. I am not sure how consistent the prices are between adventure books, but they seem consistent within a given adventure book.
Holy Crap! I am currently moving from Pathfinder 2e to D&D 5E because I wanted to try out the system and I cannot believe there is such a lack of information on how to price items.
You're going to find a LOT of that!
"let the gm figure it out" is in a nutshell how the entire system works
I sadly agree
I can tell you why there's only 1 table for magic items: It's because like almost everything else about 5E, magic items are a variant rule. The base game was originally designed for (and balanced around) *no magic items*.
I just use a homebrew price list for my 5e campaign. There are a few good lists on DM guild
PF2e is my favorite system to GM because even the things they don't explicitly have mechanics for, there's enough there to find something really close that you can use to improvise.
That being said, if I was drunk and wanted to roll dice, 5e is my system of choice. No rules! Woo!
If you want a rules lite system... the modified Cortex 2 system used by the Firefly RPG is a must. It's not a D20 system so you can ditch them entirely. Of course, it's a cooperative narrative based game so the rules are easy to learn and are applied to every action.
The base rules only take up 7 pages (pages 263 - 269).
Player Characters have Attributes (3), Skills (20), Skill Specialties (3+), Distinctions (3), Distinction Triggers (2 per Distinction, only 2 out of 6 are unlocked upon character creation), Signature Asset(s). So, explaining how they function and how they interact take a lot of pages, further increased by the pages dedicated to pre-created characters, distinctions, and vehicles and their distinctions, lol.
However, once a character is created, the player doesn't need to know anything more, there are a couple pages on character advancement, but they just add to what the player has already chosen (new personal assets, increase in skills/specialties/assets, unlocking distinction triggers, or switching out distinctions/distinction triggers).
So, when a player rolls for an action, the could roll anywhere from 2 dice (Attribute + Skill) to 5, or more (other Assets, Complications, Hero Die/Dice, and Scale Die can be added).
The other thing the game needs to explain are Plot Points, Assets, Complications, Hero Dice, Scale Dice and how they are used, created, and their interactions. So, a few more pages is devoted to them... so, maybe 20 pages on rules the player needs to read and understand to play... and another 5 or so for the GM for guidance on running a session - campaign,, creating and advancing GMCs (Game Master Characters), etc.
Very easy system to get into as it's intuitive, and the only thing players really need to know id how to role play, lol.
Yes
DM should now allow players to buy powerful items,they should be found or traded from npc most of time.. if i remember right they wanted to get rid of full loaded magic shops in 5 edition
I think Wizards screwed themselves. They have magical creatures and players who can cast spells. Get enough magic casting people in a single location and some would start making magical items to make their lives easier.
Others would open up universities/colleges/cults (need to include warlocks and druids!) to teach magic. Some of the teachers and students would make magical items to make things easier on themselves....
Some of those places will be well known... adventurers, merchants, nobles, royalty, dragons, extra-planar entities would go to these places looking for magic items to make their lives easier. These lazy gits would realize it's easier to sell temporary magic items to them, even if its forbidden, for exorbitant prices in order to live lives of idle luxury.
Guess what, they now they have created a magic item market!!!!
So, what was the logic WotC used?
Me too!
I think Wizards screwed themselves. They have magical creatures and players who can cast spells. Get enough magic casting people in a single location and some would start making magical items to make their lives easier.
Others would open up universities/colleges/cults (need to include warlocks and druids!) to teach magic. Some of the teachers and students would make magical items to make things easier on themselves....
Some of those places will be well known... adventurers, merchants, nobles, royalty, dragons, extra-planar entities would go to these places looking for magic items to make their lives easier. These lazy gits would realize it's easier to sell temporary magic items to them, even if its forbidden, for exorbitant prices in order to live lives of idle luxury.
Guess what, they now they have created a magic item market!!!!
So, what was the logic WotC used?
I like both systems!
Although I agree that Pathfinder 2e has a number of tools to help the DM orient themselves better while playing, when it comes to D&D there is a major difference in how magic items interact with the game. For instance, magic items are not accounted for in their bounded accuracy system, characters are meant to be able to deal with everything without any of that (not even feats are 'meant' to be there, they're an optional rule). So keeping everything vague is supposed to translate the idea that these items are not meant to be sold anywhere, they're an optional type of treasure, and if your campaign does feature them heavilly you have to know that they are intrinsically unbalanced, it's an objective power up that was not accounted for in the encounter building system, and having their ranges makes it so you can design your own guidelines for pricing. Xanathar's Guide to Everything has some more guidelines to help you in that regard.
Pathfinder 2e, on the other hand, requires characters to own magic items in order not to fall behind the system design. The bonus increments are part of the game and encounter building falls apart if you don't take that into account, to a point that the Gamemastery Guide gives you rules on how to deal with a campaign with no magic items. So having the magic items in the Corerulebook is pivotal, having prices and a very clear outline of how to distribute magical gear is key to convey to the player that their intentions are for that to be an active part of the game.
Where Pathfinder 2e expects players to be decked in magical gear to perform to their fullest, D&D assumes they'll never get any and designs its systems around that. Their perspectives on it are literaly mirrored. Do I still prefer Pathfinder 2e's modularity? Yes, but that's beside the point I'm trying to make lol
Vampire?
Yes WotC dropped the ball on this one.
The previous editions were much better for this.
I think in 3.5 it was the price of the armor bonus squared plus constructions and material times 1000. So a +5 would be 5 squared so like 25k plus a few thousand. The problem was what do ya do late game when the enemies are dropping gear like crazy(cause their stats were based off having this magic). What value do the sell a 25k suit of armor in town thats economy is dwarfed by the value of a single magic item? In 4e that took it a step farther and said you could essentially smelt down items into the magic gear you wanted. This +2 sword of blank becomes a +2 ax of blank. It also had concrete prices for everything. It broke the fantasy for most people. 5e is vague because magic items should be hella hard to come by in 5e with bounded accuracy. The problem comes in two issues if you have a player base that wants to be dripping magical bling and you create a magical Walmart like you described then what do you do? If you don't have a good price structure how do you convey fairness to players without creating your own? It was an over correction from 4e for sure, but I have played in games from most editions where players were dripping in swagged out gear. I think WotC should accept that the player base is not going to play in a low magic setting when most classes can cast spells and release a revised pricing guide for sure.
I think Wizards screwed themselves. As you said, they have magical creatures and players who can cast spells. Get enough magic casting people in a single location and some would start making magical items to make their lives easier.
Others would open up universities/colleges/cults (need to include warlocks and druids!) to teach magic. Some of the teachers and students would make magical items to make things easier on themselves....
Some of those places will be well known... adventurers, merchants, nobles, royalty, dragons, extra-planar entities would go to these places looking for magic items to make their lives easier. These lazy gits would realize it would be easier to sell temporary magic items to them, even if its forbidden, for exorbitant prices in order to live lives of idle luxury.
Guess what, they now they have created a magic item market!!!!
So, what was the logic WotC used?
Nice
Yes. Thank you for making this video.
The goal of the book is to give a example of items and price for you as a DM to mix and match and come up with your own homebrew ideas and knowledge on weapons items and gear prices
I was in a 5e game that shared a similar philosophy as your game. The GM, said that any item (homebrew included) was possible to get in this particular elven city because "their technology is better" (it was a Wakanda type deal because "void metal" is the most powerful metal and that only elf Kings can use it with their space rippy time shit).
It was awkward to ask the GM every 2 episodes how much is an uncommon magical item and I would get ranges of 2000-49k gp for items like spell Storing rings, rings of mind shielding, etc.
Not a fun ordeal. I had a lot of problems with the game, but going broke over item priced is definitely one of them.
We never really had that problem, my dm was really good on naming prices fairly.
It helps that he just knows a lot of magic items.
That's fair, it just shouldn't be on the dm to homebrew every mundane thing to keep it balanced. Most just don't have the time and for those that do... Just make your own system at that point lol. That sounds like fun.
@@poke_onix9235
I don't deny that it should be better, i just was lucky
@@poke_onix9235 I think it's more that most just don't really CARE than don't have the time! I mean how much time does it take to look at the level, which I hope they are doing so they are giving out appropriate items, and then look at a five or six row table to see the range, and then finally trying to come up with a price that seems fair
@@JacksonOwex problem is the level is often an inaccurate measure of power in dnd and the table giving way to large of a range, so you have to use additional judgement for every item
My answer to your question boils down to designers looking at more abstract, lower-magic game systems, and deciding that that would be the default assumption for their game. Unfortunately, they also decided it was in their best interest to force that core assumption on players and DMs by deliberately under-designing how magic and economics interact within the baseline game system. And because the game is meant to be played without access to an abundance of magic items as a real balance factor to high-level play, the game becomes quite unstable after 14th level.
The lack of pricing of magic items in 5e (when price and power were explicit in 4e) is obviously to stop exactly what your table was doing: straight up buying magic items from a catalog. That's just horrible, childish role-playing. It's hilarious that your problem with the situation was that WotC doesn't make that easy.
Worse, it's not necessary. All you have to do is say "You ask about items of magical power... The sage Halbern has heard of wondrous of magical speed in the possession of the evil knight Sir Waverick of Carno. He is said to head the raiders who trouble the coast of Plass." If they don't like that, given them another one until they bite. Adventure hooks should be about both the treasure and the conflict the heroes will encounter.
Now just deduct the value of the boots from the treasure you'd otherwise award, and you've "pseudo-sold" the party a magic item without handing them a Sears Christmas Wish Book. Yes, you need pricing for this, so use the prices in 4e.
One thing that bothers me a bit in PF2e is the under costing of some mundane items. A suit of full plate it the best example, costing only 30 gold. I may not understand the real world equivalent to gold pieces, but suits of full plate are very expensive.
Pathfinder uses the Silver Base for income.
A level 5 Expert Smith will be earning 1gp from their day job...
A Level 5 Expert Smith will be spending 1gp a week for comfortable living expenses...
So, a Single Person Household (of a level 5 Smith) makes 30gp - 4gp = 26gp a month, assuming the month has 30 days and the Smith works on all of them instead of resting.
Except, that Expert Smith has other expenses not accounted; cost of materials he uses to play his trade. According to the crafting rules that's about half of his profit, so 26gp - 15gp = 11gp. That's 11gp the Level 5 Expert Smith has in his pockets a month.
For a year 365gp - 52gp - 182.5gp = 130.5gp
Add in spouse, kids, employees, animals, special taxes, unexpected expenses, and time off, his total income goes down... pretty fast.
The vast majority of the population aren't level 5 Expert Smiths though... They are Level 1 to level 5 Trained Peasants who earn 2sp to 9sp a day...
365days * 2sp - 520sp = 730sp - 520 = 210sp
365days * 9sp - 520sp = 3,290sp - 520sp = 2,770sp
Add in spouse, kids, animals, and special taxes, unexpected expenses, and time off, the poor peasants might not be able to survive on that comfortable living expenditure.
This is why Platemail while, is expensive, it's not out of the realm of possibility for financially well off individuals (craftsmen, merchants, mercenaries, etc.). That's how things were in the medieval period, which is what fantasy is mostly based on. Bronze age, they used other costs to set prices (typically, the amount of food a typical person ate a month was considered absolute minimum pay and all prices were set to reflect that).
I'm going more and more towards just running level up's advanced 5e over the standard 5e. It fixes a lot of the issues I have with 5e included magic item prices etc. 5e is great, but it does have some negative aspects about it.
The things that i really liked from these books were the esploration rules
@@claudiolentini5067 same here, the exploration rules are great, but it is also packed with more dm tools and changes to feats, backgrounds and monsters that improve the game a lot.