In regards to the former, there are sample security measures given, and much like other high-risk high-reward trades is likely to be guarded by powerful individuals. There’s also discussions on handling potential balance disruptions like PCs deciding to rob a magic item shop or what happens when they get their hands on items which turn out to be too powerful. Similar guidelines are applied to magic items capable of transportation, with flight, teleportation, and the like being accordingly more expensive. The book also recommends either reducing their availability or disallowing stacking bonuses to avoid breaking the RNG. They are thus priced as being more expensive than the average magic item. The first is that magic items which provide flat bonuses to values such as attack rolls are the most unbalancing in that they impact bounded accuracy. Our book opens up with discussing the design principles and overall guidelines for its mission statement. This book provides us with not just 23 sample shops and their proprietors, but 120 new magic items, 4 adventures, a comprehensive list of gold piece values for nearly all magic items in the core rules, and wealth by level guidelines balanced with these new rules in mind. The Wanderer’s Guide to Merchants and Magic is dedicated to reviving the older concept of magic item shops and the broader supernatural arms trade.
A persistent problem of 5th Edition was the lack of expensive things for PCs to spend their money on, and what existed was mostly guidelines and flavor text by the DM doing the heavy lifting. Buying and selling magic items were possible in the core rules, but were relegated to an optional and slow process in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. While this change was welcomed by many, there was a bit of loss.
* This article has a good discussion on the history of the concept. On the contrary, one of its selling points was that magic items would be optional in regards to making effective characters. 4th Edition continued this tradition, but by 5th this was dropped. It was also here that we got the “wealth by level” concept, where instead of being used to gain experience points the primary empowerment of gold was for the PCs to buy magic items so that their characters can keep up with the opposition in combat. When RPGs entered the digital arena in the 80s and 90s, it was common to integrate equipment and character progression in such a way that you were practically required to spend your hard-earned GP, Gil, and the like on better gear.* By the arrival of 3rd Edition, D&D incorporated this mindset by giving practically every non-artifact magic item a price along with explicit spell prerequisites and feats for crafting them. It wasn’t until 2nd Edition that the interaction of gold and magic items was a conversation point, and in that case it involved using gold to craft magic items rather than buy or sell them. Although it is a staple across both video game and tabletop RPGs, the concept of the magic item shop wasn’t around for the first generation of Dungeons & Dragons.
0 kommentar(er)
