Cash Flow
To paraphrase America’s beefiest statesman, if it’s got hit points you can kill it. In the same way, if it’s got a price tag you can buy it. You’ll often hear how it’s a bad idea to stat out gods; how players will inevitably find a way to overthrow the cosmos if you do. You get similar results when you take a pricing gun to the game world. This isn’t much of a problem if you run your campaign like a game. By buying up the world, players are just allocating their resources in the most efficient way possible. No harm no foul. Everything is working as intended. If you’re going for a more narrative approach, however, then you run into problems.
Magic items, miracles, and easily accessible spellcasters willing to sell their services are not simply property to be bought and sold. (Well they are, but bear with me.) From the narrativist perspective, they are also plot devices. They are quest objectives and story rewards that can and should come about through narrative. If you lay them out in the rule book like some kind of Sears Catalog, players begin to think those things are always available. “We’re in a metropolis! What do you mean we can’t get an archmage to make us a water park deminplane!?”
Here’s my point. We’ve talked a couple of times about how items ought to feel special. Wishes, miracles, and magical boons should as well. That’s not to say you can’t ever buy them with your hard-earned dollars gold, but for the good of your poor beleaguered GM, at least try and pretend like it’s a special occasion.
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So what you’re saying is that one of my first thoughts when looking through the D&D 5e PHB shouldn’t have been to find out how to use simulacrum to result in a system of getting infinite wishes or using Gate and True Polymorph to destroy any plane of my choice?
Or are we just saying that I should at least have my character throw an epic celebration afterwards? =D
Mostly I’m saying that with great funding comes great responsibility.
That’s one of the reasons I dislike tying cash to any critical part of the game, whether it’s as a major source of power (e.g. D&D <5, and 5e games which let you buy magic items) or as a default motivation (…also D&D, though not to the extent it does in Shadowrun*). Cash is so cold and dull, and so hard to get anyone to care about.
Worst of all (from a design/narrative perspective), money is fungible; you can get a thousand bucks from a month of labor or a dangerous mission to steal the president’s cell phone or whatever, and it spends as good either way. And if you pay enough for the risk to be worth it (even as their affluence increases), your PCs will quickly become wealthy enough to get more money than they could ever need by hiring a financial planner and lounging in their mansions. By then, you might as well just admit that you’re just adventuring because your players want something to do tonight.
Or threaten the players’ place in society, but A. the sensible approach to that threat would be to use their wealth to influence politicians and public opinion in their favor rather than run guns blazing into a PR nightmare, and B. that’s the kind of non-monetary reward I’d suggest (if I wasn’t distracted by grumbling about late-stage capitalism). Something distinctive and memorable, that ties into both the narrative and the explanations for why you’re not doing something sane instead.
…What was the comic about again?
*Though in Shadowrun it emphasizes the capitalist materialism running rampant through the setting, so it’s not JUST a boring default motivation.