Re: Campaign pacing

In article <1175353132.535829.116930@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
DougL <lampert.doug@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>Do you seriously think a large city has X hundred extra copies of
>EVERY weapon in the PHB + every Splat book sitting in a warehouse
>somewhere + Y masterwork copies? Then add the exotic sadles for every
>possible mount and all the other crap in the books?

No, probably not.  On the other hand, that's not what the PCs are
usually buying: they are buying from a short list of highly useful
potions and small items, over and over again.  CLW, CMW, invisibility,
spider climb, levitation, fly.  +1 protection, +1 resistance,
disguise.  +1 arrows.  Silver and cold iron arrows.  Sunrods and
alchemist's fire.  (My low-level parties go through alchemist's
fire literally by the gross.)

I won't dispute that it makes more sense for most items to be
special-order, maybe even the ones I listed (it depends on the
size of the local "adventurer" community).  But I don't think it's
extremely strange for the listed ones to be available.

>The GP limit is what the locals can get or manufacture reasonably
>quickly, and almost EVERYTHING that isn't excessively durable is being
>custom made AFTER you order it. This is part of slowing things down,
>you have to wait for stuff to get made.

I'll think about whether that could work for our games.  I'd worry
that it will lead to the same thing (in Worms, specifically--
I wouldn't have built a campaign of my own this way) that the
item-creation rules did, which was that the player could not stand
to wait while the world went to hell in a handbasket, so his PCs
died for lack of essential items.

We've experimented with various things that slow down the
item acquisition process--not having Identify was one experiment--
and they just seemed to annoy the player.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]