A Thought On Gold-Sinks... What Do You Think?
masterdesbaxter
Member Posts: 51
In my experience, at least, once I buy the top tier items from the Thunder-Hammer Smithy and some excellent mage robes and such from High Hedge gold becomes more or less irrelevant, short of a small budget for arrows and potions. So, what if there was a simple way to spend it? (It's not as though we can keep it for BG2, after all.) What if we could buy a house as a base of operations for our party?
Now, I don't mean this to be like a "The Sims" sort of thing. It just makes sense to me that a notable adventuring party would have a defensible safe place to store their treasures and such. Also, houses are naturally expensive.
It wouldn't be too complicated in terms of gameplay, at least. If it wouldn't be practical in programing terms, forgive me- that would be my inexperience talking. Say, though, that there would just be a simple npc spawned in some government building (Beregost or Baldur's Gate- I presume the Gate, but Beregost is plenty nice.) All he would do is have a basic dialogue about being the property manager or such, offering to sell an empty house.
The house itself wouldn't need to be anything special. All it would be would be a place to store stuff and feel that it is legitimately your place to store it. There would be no functional difference, per se, but it would feel different. Perhaps we could rest in it as well? I'm not sure how do-able that would be, but I suppose there are bigger concerns.
Perhaps we could buy the large manor home in Baldur's Gate where the ogre mages attack the party?
Now, I don't mean this to be like a "The Sims" sort of thing. It just makes sense to me that a notable adventuring party would have a defensible safe place to store their treasures and such. Also, houses are naturally expensive.
It wouldn't be too complicated in terms of gameplay, at least. If it wouldn't be practical in programing terms, forgive me- that would be my inexperience talking. Say, though, that there would just be a simple npc spawned in some government building (Beregost or Baldur's Gate- I presume the Gate, but Beregost is plenty nice.) All he would do is have a basic dialogue about being the property manager or such, offering to sell an empty house.
The house itself wouldn't need to be anything special. All it would be would be a place to store stuff and feel that it is legitimately your place to store it. There would be no functional difference, per se, but it would feel different. Perhaps we could rest in it as well? I'm not sure how do-able that would be, but I suppose there are bigger concerns.
Perhaps we could buy the large manor home in Baldur's Gate where the ogre mages attack the party?
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Comments
Having a base of operations with storage is a nice idea, but there's also not a massive amount of need for it. The Golden Pantaloons are a good example of something you don't want to drag around the whole time but.. that's really it. Maybe you want to stash all those plot scrolls you have been finding describing your bounty or something, but any equipment you aren't using you almost certainly would rather sell than stash. You could do something like the strongholds of BG2 with their own little quest chains, but they generally proved to be a bit pointless. You're travelling far too much for a permenant base in a single location to be useful (hence the pocket plane of ToB). NWN did something similar have a base where you had to buy and maintain the guards and stuff and.. it wasn't hugely interesting. If something is pulling you out of adventuring to do bookkeeping and finances then it's probably not the ideal solution. Ultimately unless there's some sort of reward out of these people probably wont sink their money into it, and if they get a reward it's making the problem worse not better.
Saying that... we all like owning our own little bit of the land. A spot to drop off NPCs would be nice at the very least.
One of the big problems is that the party is far too powerful and resting is too easy, meaningless and you can do it in quick succession. In pen and paper the Dungeon Masters guide suggests that the average encounter should drain around 40% of the party's resources (might not remember that perfectly but it feels like the right number), but in BG the average encounter barely drains 1%. By the end of the game you're sitting on mountains of unused potions of healing, heroism etc. If we weren't allowed to rest so much and had to rely a lot more on consumables, such as healing pots, food, travel (caravans etc for fast travel), a guild tithe etc then we wouldn't be able to hoard the money in the same way. Also if encounters were harder in general we'd have to use up more supplies to get through them.
You could give gold weight to prevent the player from amassing tons of it, but you're already immediately offering suggestions of how to circumvent this (e.g. with gems). If you're annoyed about it enough to already offer ways to get around it then it's probably going to be a pain in the arse in the game too. The problem is that the player doesn't spend their money so that's what should be rectified, rather than trying to cap how much they can actually carry.
The suggestion of BG2 style goldsinks probably isn't the right answer. In BG2 they were more artifical roadblocks that forced you to go and experience some of the sidequests rather than an intentional way to drain some money out of you. If they didn't exist I'd imagine a lot of players would never meet Firkraag et co.
I agree that in the early half of the game (i.e., before Baldur's Gate) the party wanders too much for this to be necessary, were it in Beregost, say. Indeed, I doubt that it would be very affordable. However, once the party moves to Ch. 5 the story and everything in it- excepting Ch. 6, which is but a brief excursion- focuses on Baldur's Gate, so it would make sense to have a base of sorts there. (I don't intend to suggest that there should be servants, guards, bookkeeping, or any of that- we're not that important, yet! Besides, that would be a pain to implement, being far more work than necessary.) There would be a nice parallel between the party acquiring a property in the city and Rieltar's letter mentioning that the Iron Throne has just done the same.
Finally, speaking of gems, that would be a fine thing to build a treasure trove of too. They really aren't worth selling, for the most part, and... well, I like sparkly things. The whole weighing down of gold/ gold for pounds of gold just seems superfluous to me, and kind of silly at that. This isn't necessarily about a reward. It's about the role playing of it, and that's where the fun of the game is- for me, at least!
In addition maybe make it so there is a cap on how much gold can be carried at one time to maybe 3,000-5,000 that way players aren't carrying a wagon's load of gold at all times. With this allowing players to place gold like items would give an incentive to store it away, store items, etc.
And finally put a cap on how much gold vendors have it isn't right that they carry an unlimited amount of gold when at most they would carry very little of it.
My ideal fix would still be some real-estate, as others have suggested, with some small quests that go with it. Even better : another sidequest that you need to pay for - in the game. Bribing an official or whatever... something to dump that gold on. It is otherwise useless. I always felt a bit lost when I would not know what to do with all that money... oh my, first-world problems.
That being said:
1) NPCs that take a share of the gold / gems: this is straight from PnP. It wouldn't be recoverable, just a general X% tax on all looted gold, random percent chance of gems dissappearing on looting due to one of the NPCs taking their share. Not recoverable, short of killing the NPC. Would not affect NPC inventory at all.
2) Potions. Make good potions expensive. Don't let them drop from NPCs commonly. Not the 8 hp deals, but the good 27+ HP stuff. 5k a potion? implementation would require consideration of when the potion appears, the mean wealth of the player at the time to balance the cost, and the lifetime viability of the potion (obviously 27 hp potions are useful to the very end of the game, so would want to balance the cost with respect to the wealth of a player near the end of the game).
Edit: and is any of this even necessary? most of us are veteran players. will the first time player really suffer from excessive GP? you might forget what it's like to not know when X armor is going to drop... often times a new player will spend 5200 gp on a set of full plate, only to acquire it during the very next quest. I only noticed the glut of money after several playthroughs.
Have a +2 item with a good ability of every weapon and armor proficiency type. This solves two issues, the fact that most of the weapons in BG1 are terribly boring, and it provides a gold sink.
That's not a bad idea. Whether you increase the cost of potions or restrict their availability, it has the same result: limiting player usage of potions. Certain game elements would need to be retooled in light of such a change. Perhaps you've got a point, forcing the player to rely more on temple services rather than potions would be a good gold sink... again though, are any of us even sure if Beamdog can alter this content? I'm not sure WotC would approve it.
I like the NPC tax idea, not so much the potion price increase. The question is, will NPC's abandon you if you have 0 gold? I'd vote no; they understand when times are tough, and they have a better chance of earning coin with a company of adventurers versus going solo. Also if their inventories are unaffected, perhaps their total earned income could be kept track of internally and would be dropped if you kill them -- something for the much unloved evil play-style. I can only see this being implemented, however, if more is done to improve internal party combat mechanics which is a request on its own.
@agris @LadyRhian et al
The reasoning behind making potions more expensive is good but will be lost on new players who might suffer greatly for it. I think it would be more reasonable to make this a higher difficulty option. To sidetrack from gold sinks a bit, I do think potions are a) too easily obtained and hoarded b) can too often be used en masse to muscle through tough fights and c) because of a and b and they are one-time-use only, saving and loading tactics are indirectly supported against using consumables. I'm going to make a separate request for fixing this.
@Schneidend @FrozenDervish
More cool and expensive buy-able loot is cool, but will change the relatively low-power flavor of the game, that some like and adds to the experience for new players. I'd be surprised if we don't see this in some form with the new content, and it will probably help towards creating a gold sink, but it shouldn't be the main method for dumping gold.
So, this is a years old problem of the Big World Project...
I agree with Grumpwagon that too many expensive magical items would destroy the flavor of the game. In BG1 a simple Plate Mail was something special, difficult to find and expensive enough. So, that was, what made the atmosphere. Being lost somewhere at the wilderness frontier with nothing but a chain mail and a longsword. (More expensive stuff can also be installed by several mods, if you want)
One suggestion: Though it's very late in the game and may not solve this problem, but i think the player should loose his money when arrested by Angelo Dosan. What do you think?
Of course, I don't suggest this entirely selflessly. My favorite weapons are two-handed swords, and having to go find a vanilla +1 instead of being able to spend a few thousand gold on one has always irked me. The earliest instance of a vanilla +1 is found on an ogre in a remote area map I never remember the location of, and Spider's Bane is several levels and chapters away. I'd like to be able to play more organically than look up a walkthrough to find that ogre, and giving the Thunderhammer Smithy some cool loot for other weapon types would solve that.
Another thought for a gold sink occurs: What if potions were charged items instead of stackable and could be refilled? Healing potions and otherwise, that is, all with variable "refill" values. Things like potions of heroism or other rarer potions would be extremely expensive.
I'm not sure if charged items disappear after using their last charge. If so, make this not happen for the sake of the previous request working better and also it's lame.
If anything, players should actually be forced to rely on paid services in temples and taverns.
However, NPC taxes are a great find. Everyone gets their share! Losing your money at a random moment seems however like a bad idea : wouldn't you be able to drop it / hide it somewhere?
One thing that I would suggest is making selling price much lower, with a small bonus with high charisma and a strong penalty with a low value. I remember that I would always loot whatever had a good price (morning stars, armor, throwing daggers) and carry it back home. Some things had pretty neat prices. But you can simply imagine that the equipment you loot is often damaged by the fight. Harden merchants and gold income will be lower.
Anyhow, I support the idea of draining excess funds from the party by making them pay to become a kit they want. No kits at the start, but you have to find trainers, manuals or magic books (all of which cost $$$) to become a certain class. Or you need to bribe people to tell you where to find a trainer for a certain kit. That could be one way to handle kits and too much money.