The more I interact with money as a resource related to spellcasting in D&D, the weirder it is. Like, no one can cast scrying without spending 1,000 gp on a REALLY fancy mirror, or a font to hold their holy water—even if a diety is granting them the ability to cast the spell?
— Hannah Rose | Tal'Dorei 📚 Netherdeep (@wildrosemage) December 20, 2021
From a game-balance perspective, there are a lot of things (like expensive material components) that are designed to place limits on spellcasting so casters and certain spells aren’t super OP all the time. But money gets weird because it’s ALSO a worldbuilding element. Player characters and NPCs pay the same prices for goods & services in the game world—which means that a single bottle of ink costs 10 gp for a wizard who requires ink to add to her spellbook…and it also costs 10 gp for Bob Jones, who just wants to send a letter to his cousin.
— Hannah Rose | Tal'Dorei 📚 Netherdeep (@wildrosemage) December 20, 2021
Anyway, there’s all sorts of endless mental gymnastics and lore fiddling one could to to justify prices in the game world. But it always feels weird to me when there’s so much WORK required to justify it, because that seems to expose the fact that it’s an inelegant system. Of course, the rules for spellcasting costs and material components are designed for the player characters. They don't have to apply to NPCs. But that also feels like a clash to me, because how do I decide who has to follow what rules?
— Hannah Rose | Tal'Dorei 📚 Netherdeep (@wildrosemage) December 20, 2021
Game rules are just a system designed to model something more complex—in this case, the fantasy world and magic (and economy, kind of). Like any model, it’s an approximation that has flaws if you poke at it too much, and it’s balancing multiple needs. The system is designed to help us tell a story, and I firmly believe that we can throw the rules out the window WHENEVER WE WANT in the service storytelling and fun. The easy solution to all of this to just ignore what's written down whenever it suits your group. Your game > RAW.
— Hannah Rose | Tal'Dorei 📚 Netherdeep (@wildrosemage) December 20, 2021
But as someone who absolutely loves trying to figure out how best to represent complex things in an elegant system—this is why I enjoyed programming and now enjoy game design!—I’m kinda invested in using a consistent system, with specific, consistent choices for exceptions. So I don't want to throw the concept of costly material components out the window until I have an alternative that I feel is worth testing out across the board for the whole spells-cost-money system. (Again, if you want to do that in your game, go ahead! This is just a me thing.)
— Hannah Rose | Tal'Dorei 📚 Netherdeep (@wildrosemage) December 20, 2021
Do I have a point? Not really (sorry to anyone expecting something useful from this rambling). It’s basically just what I said in the first two tweets: it's weird and tricky that money is both a resource that theoretically limits spellcasting power for player characters AND a currency used by everyone in the game world for things unrelated to spellcasting. I don't have my alternative yet, but I'll let you know if I find one. 😉
— Hannah Rose | Tal'Dorei 📚 Netherdeep (@wildrosemage) December 20, 2021
There’s definitely no easy fix. One thing that can help, though, is breaking away from the peasant-economy trope that D&D is based on, by increasing the money normal people have by 10x. So a trained hireling makes 20 gp per day and an untrained hireling makes 2 gp per day). 1/ This can at least create the semblance of a functioning marketplace if you don’t look too close. But the casting costs of certain spells is a separate annoyance. I’ve always found it very gamist, in the sense of being clearly meant to limit the easy use of certain spells. 2/
— Scott Fitzgerald Gray (@scottfgray) December 20, 2021
But in that case, why aren’t the spells higher level, or nerfed to make them less powerful, or just stripped from the game entirely if they’re that problematic? 3/3 It’s a game mechanic that makes no world sense. And it begs for a setting where mages figure out how to fabricate platinum bowls and sit there doing it all day, which is a very un-fun world.
— Alphastream (@Alphastream) December 20, 2021