RPG Design: Magic Entitlements and Pricetags
I recently picked up "Magic Item Compendium" for Dungeons & Dragons. It's actually a pretty good book, even if much of the material is reprinted from other sources. Since my gaming group isn't on board with the switch to the upcoming 4th edition (which feels, to me, too much like WotC / Hasbro treating customers as credit cards with legs), I figure it'd be a very handy tool for my D&D campaigns for years to come.

However, it really pushes a side of the latest version of this game which attempts to mirror the attitude found too often on Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, and it's something that bugs me. It was present but more subtle in the initial release of D&D 3.0 seven years ago, but it's been gaining steam throughout the supplements and optional material. It's the idea that magical gear - which was once considered (or so I thought) more of a reward - is now an entitlement and considered part of their class balance.

MMO Farming Blues
I first encountered this attitude (much to my consternation) in EverQuest, circa 1999. The design team used the existence of some heavily camped, painful-to-obtain item as a feature that made some class (Rogue? Shadowknight?) balanced with the other classes. Yes, your class COULD be as good as those other classes if you spent 6 hours a day, seven days a week going after some particular non-class-specific weapon for a month or two. Ah, the days of non-instanced dungeons. Take a number, please, to kill rare-spawn monster X who has a 20% chance of having item Y which you are expected to have if you are of class Z. We'll call it a rite of passage or something.

Encounters in MMORPGs were designed - as explained by the designers repeatedly - around the expectation that you were equipped with equipment "appropriate to your level." Now, I never actually saw anyone clearly define what that meant. It seemed to be a sliding scale. At the beginning of the game, it seemed to be geared towards designer expectations. Then it seemed to be built around what the most hardcore players - those get-a-lifers who played for 40+ hours a week - owned. But as less hardcore players leveled up and found the content to be impenetrably hard, the designers scattered easier-to-obtain substitutes for the uber-gear around the world.

But at least they put a bazaar at the end of 2001 where players could trade, which meant you could get all the hand-me-down ubergear without having to quest for it. Now, at last, you only had to spend money in order to get the gear you were expected to own as part of your class.

The MMO Attitude Without the MMO
In 3rd edition D&D, there were hints of this attitude at first. The rules for availability of magic items for purchase, and gold-piece limits for items to sell, for example. There was obviously an expectation that players would be able to buy and sell their magic items with few restrictions. And there was a table of expected gear value for characters at various levels.

More recently, there have been some unofficial nerfing of the dreaded Rust Monster. The justification was the game balance issue: "Simply put, it makes the next encounter prohibitively more difficult. " If you lose your armor and primary weapon to the rust monster, then the ogre in the next room is going to be way harder than he should be. Granted, losing one's equipment to a rust monster has always been more irritating than fun. But it's interesting to see that the rust monster's difficulty level is here being considered not on its own relative merit as a creature, but rather the potential resource expenditure that may result from fighting it, and its impact on future encounters.

But the Magic Item Compendium takes the attitude a step further. First of all, it has an illustration of two fighters trying on different kinds of magical boots in what can only be assumed to be a medieval fantasy equivalent of a Payless Shoes (or maybe the shoe section of a fantasy Wal*Mart). It has new treasure tables that all but guarantee a magical item in every single treasure horde - and also ensures that the equivalent GP value of all "loot" is subject to less random fluctuations.

In explaining why magic items should almost always be available for purchase, the book states: "Most monsters and encounters assume that characters have a certain amount of gear to make the challenge appropriate. Furthermore, at many levels magic items represent a character's only option for customization; picking up a magic ring or bag of potions is significantly more fun than allocating skill points." It repeatedly comments on what the expected equipment should be for characters of various levels.

Unlike EverQuest, at least, it spells out in great detail exactly what that should be.

Putting the Fun Back In
Now, I'll admit - none of this is fundamentally un-fun. I have had characters who identified strongly with a particular magic item (an intelligent sword, for example). I hate losing equipment to rust monsters or other disasters. And as a DM or game designer, I do take all of the characters' anticipated resources into consideration when I plan out an encounter. Even back in 1st edition days, you'd expect a 6th level fighter to have at least a magical +1 sword, if not three (because of rust monsters and stuff, you knew to bring along a backup weapon...)

But I don't feel too comfortable with the attitude in my fantasy RPGs, for a few reasons

• It puts control of magical items in the hands of players instead of the game master / designer, making them entitlements rather than rewards
• It robs magic items of their reward value, turning them instead into simply a more portable form of currency.
• It makes magic commonplace and saps it of any "magicalness," instead turning it into ho-hum fantasy technology.
• It makes things just a little too... I don't know... overly balanced and generic? Instead of encouraging players to be resourceful and to take advantage of odd assortments of weird, spikey items they've picked up in their travels, it encourages them to sell all that and replace that with much more generally-useful (but bland) gear.
  

Okay, sure, so we're talking about worlds where players routinely cast fireballs and healing spells in battles against creatures that breathe fire, teleport or move through walls. Maybe I'm just showing too much of a childhood steeped in fantasy literature more along the lines of Tolkien (how many spells did the great wizard Gandalf actually cast?) and Howard (where 90% of sorcerers were corrupt, and magic was always rare and scary-powerful but killable with a barbarian's sword). So maybe my own attitude is a little too retro.

Compromise?
I tried to tackle that issue once. But maybe there are some other ways of finding a compromise.

One thing I've tried is to have common items available for sale, but to have a few very specific "rare" items also available. So while the players might be able to find a +2 or even +3 short sword with no difficulty, they get just as excited hearing about +1 Ghost-Touch Shortsword of Frost for sale in the city as if they'd found it in a dragon's hoard.

Another option - which players HATE - is to increase the threat to their equipment. When they encounter creatures that can disarm them, or dissolve their gear, it encourages them to not put all their cash in one or two items. But the player who put almost everything into a shiny new battle axe is gonna be really frustrated when they encounter an earth elemental that specializes in sundering weapons. Most players would rather their characters lose a level than lose a weapon like that, but its an option.

In Computer Worlds
In single-player computer RPGs, there are similar problems that designers should consider.

In a world where magic plate mail routinely drops from a swarm of bugs (*cough*Diablo*cough*), anything short of a certain level of enchantment is going to be disdained by players - or at least kept only for its trade-in value.

A quest for an awesome new sword had better complete with the player in possession of a weapon that is significantly better than the one he used to complete the quest!

Expendable items are routinely undervalued by players and overvalued by designers. The designers tend to value the items based upon their best-use potential... a couple dozen +5 arrows of shocking can really make short work of a particular boss, and at a safe distance! And that potion of invisibility could completely trivialize a key challenge. So he (or she!) will price them appropriately to how much they can influence major encounters, to keep them out of the hands of lower-level characters.

But the player sees the cost of those arrows compared to the price of an "infinite use" bow or sword, and find them very unfavorable. They also know that the non-expended weapon will have some resale value when they are done with it, and the expended items will not.

And do you realize how much a Potion of Cure Disease could go for in the REAL WORLD?

It's a thorny issue. What's your inclination?


(Vaguely) related tales of stinginess:
* When Magic Becomes Mundane in RPGs
* Why I Gave Up On Dungeons & Dragons Online
* RPG Design: What Am I Going To Do With All This Money?

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Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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