So, while I'm not really anywhere close to running it, I have at least gotten one friend to build a Starfinder character (a Brennari Xenodruid Mystic) and hope that some time this year I'll actually be able to run something.
One of the issues I find myself having running D&D is that after a certain point, most characters don't really have a need for gold anymore. The most expensive piece of personal gear you can buy that has a standardized price is plate armor, which is 1500 gold. That's enough that Paladins, Strength-Fighters, some Clerics and Armorer Artificers will need to save up for a good long while and probably not get a set until they're about halfway through tier 2 (historically I think around level 7 to 9). Once that purchase is made, though, gold as a reward starts to drop off in urgency.
There are, of course, spell reagents that cost gold - in particular the diamonds required for resurrection spells, though also components for powerful buff spells like Heroes' Feast - but I think that the kind of exponential growth of gold acquisition if one is giving it out as loot starts to make a lot of character builds stop caring. Your Rogue, for instance, can get kitted out with Studded Leather Armor for only 45 gold - something they can probably afford at level 2 or 3. From there on out, other than maybe buying replacement arrows (which are trivially cheap for anyone who's not a 1st level adventurer) there's not much you can explicitly buy that will be necessary to succeed at your role in the group.
So, what about magic items?
Here's the thing: while the books claim that you can run a whole D&D campaign without any magic items, I quibble with that when you start to look at a lot of high-level, epic monsters. A lot of legendary creatures in the higher CR range become immune to most weapon attacks unless the weapons are magical. Now, yes, a character can cast Magic Weapon, but I think the assumption is, instead, that the characters will have gotten each of their weapon-wielding characters at least your basic +1 weapon (Adventurer's League characters, at least the last time I played in AL, could pick up any +1 weapon of their choice upon hitting tier 2).
Furthermore, the primary expected means of acquiring magic items is through loot - you find a Defender Longsword in the dragon's hoard. This does introduce a great convenience to the DM, which is that they can control how and when the party gets access to the magic items that they select.
Now, comparing this with Starfinder, things are very, very different.
In Starfinder, literally every item in the game has a value in Credits (the sci-fi equivalent of gold). This ranged from weapons to armor to cybernetic implants to magical jewelry to holographic strategy games (the latter very clearly meant to be the game on the Millennium Falcon). The only "item" that doesn't is your spaceship and its components, which instead "levels up" with your party.
But this also translates to character progression. In D&D, every Greatsword, from a common, nonmagical one to a crazy Holy Avenger, does 2d6 slashing damage, to which you add your Strength modifier. The bells and whistles on your magical weapon can potentially increase that damage by a lot, but nothing that's being mass-produced is going to have anything particularly fancy - depending on how prevalent magic is on your world and how well understood it is, even a +1 weapon could potentially be made with the lost art of a bygone age, and cannot currently be reproduced, making such weapons jealously sought after.
In Starfinder, though, mundane weapons can get insane as they become more expensive. Your standard laser pistol does 1d4 fire damage (there is no "radiant" damage in Starfinder) but by the time you hit high level and can drop a lot more credits, you can get a laser pistol that does 8d4. And that's not some "laser pistol of incredible magic power" or anything. It's a fully mundane and nonmagical piece of technology that, at most, is maybe some bleeding edge new tech, or a weapon that is strictly regulated and only permitted to be used by especially elite soldiers or operatives (...crap, those are both class names in Starfinder. I meant the terms more generically).
But even if the mundane weapons and armor come in a broader variety, on top of that even magic things have a price.
Now, what's the upshot of all of this?
In the early days, D&D was, I think, conceived as a more morally neutral affair - it was all about delving into treasure-rich dungeons and plundering them. Indeed, when you look at the alignment system, the idea of a lot of morally ambiguous people working together makes a lot of sense. Your lawful good character might want that gold to help the innocent and bring order to the wilderness, and your neutral evil character might instead want to use it to establish themselves as the king of the criminal underworld. But everyone can make use of money, so you band together to get it.
I think most players of my generation tend to instead prefer more of a narrative basis for their campaigns. Gold becomes a secondary or tertiary objective - what you really want to do is instead slay the evil monster that is threatening to destroy the world.
Indeed, I think a lot of modern campaigns are built around responding to a crisis rather than going out to explore and acquire. Compare, for example, Tomb of Horrors with Tomb of Annihilation, the latter of course being a kind of modern update to the former. The original Tomb of Horrors was a death trap, and the only reason to go in was to get the treasures found within - indeed, the "twist," if one can call it that, is that the dungeon itself is basically a big honeypot to try to lure adventurers there and feed their souls to Acererak's phylactery. In Tomb of Annihilation, on the the other hand, there's a massive crisis where resurrection magic is failing, and anyone who had been resurrected previously is wasting away. The dungeon there is an obstacle not to the glorious treasures hidden within, but the resolution of a crisis that threatens the whole world.
And I think that this change in story structure reflects 5E's ambivalence toward gold as a reward. Yes, you're never going to be upset that you have more gold, but if you were to tell a group of level 13 adventurers that a sum of 10,000 gold was sitting in a dungeon somewhere, but that it had nothing to do with whatever the main story of the campaign was, they'd probably be reluctant to go. After all, if you're a heroic adventurer in a world where there's some crisis like an ancient lich coming back to send an unstoppable army of the dead across the world, you might say that a several-day detour to delve into the lost mines of some dwarven clan aren't going to be worth it (except perhaps through the players' meta-knowledge that the DM worked hard on that dungeon and that they'll probably have worked in some narratively convenient clue that can only be found within).
By tying money directly to player power in a way that 5E does not, though, I think Starfinder might potentially work better to motivate a more mercenary group of adventurers.
Here's the thing: I think that you build the system that rewards player power along the lines of the experience you think people will gravitate toward.
And you might notice that most people who play 5th Edition these days don't really bother with experience points as a path to player power. Milestone leveling is, anecdotally at least, a much more popular form of play. And what does milestone leveling encourage?
Story. Plot.
As an example, in the Wildemount game I'm playing, the milestone moments where we've gotten to level up typically happen when one of the "prophecies" in the "heroic chronicle" system are reached. (This is a pretty thorough character-building system in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to build a character tied into the setting and with goals and personal stakes).
As such, if we want our characters to get more powerful, we need to work our way through their plots - which leads to a very narrative-driven system.
Experience Points for killing monsters, though, naturally pushes players to want to fight monsters as much as possible.
And when money becomes a progression system because everything has a price you can buy it with, you're going to have a game where people want to make lots of money.
Now, I'm someone who likes narrative. I am a writer, after all, and I love telling a story with my D&D games. So, milestones work very well for me.
But I think it'll be interesting to run a system like Starfinder, where at least in one aspect, there will be other incentives in play.
Naturally, as a GM for Starfinder, I think you could basically play it like a D&D game - maybe only lower item-level items are available for purchase, and you might reserve the right to only allow people to get super-fancy weapons and armor or magic items by finding them in the world.
By contrast, you could also set prices for magic items in a D&D game to make gold more of a constant motivation (there's some guidance on these things, but if you want to do this, I recommend sitting down and really figuring out how much each thing you want to make available should cost).
This is all kind of theoretical at this point for me, and while I want to run some Starfinder before the end of the year, I also think that any extended campaign is unlikely to happen until one of my two current games I'm DMing reaches a conclusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment