Project Delicate Rebalancement: Tales of the Wild Coast

That's always an option. I would suggest placing trash bins in towns for the
players to get rid of the not needed equipment. Throwing 40 breastplates on
the ground may cause lag too.

 

I used to play a D&D type of MUD that had a room added to the game where players could go and dump unwanted gear (or gear they took when they killed a PC from another gang - would take stuff that dropped to the ground when a PC was killed). After dropping gear in that room, a lever was pulled and everything on the floor in that room was deleted immediately from the game.

 

There's a lot "broken" that we cannot "fix". Loot & wealth accumulation are among these. After many years of DMing, I still have PC's who are fabulously wealthy, and have earned several millions of GP. All but one or two of them would be extremely hard pressed to scrape together 250k at any one time, because I employ a simple system of wealth control. The players don't like it, but I am able to give them breaks when needed to enhance gameplay & keep things rolling along - the advantage of a live DM. It works like this: the sale price listed in the DMG is the most they can get for an item. They usually get that price. If they wish to purchase an item, then they pay double the listed price; it takes time to fabricate or locate the item, but since I rarely enforce that aspect, they don't fuss as much for paying a premium price. My opinion of how the ToEE system is broken is the fact that PC's can fabricate a bunch of stuff which nets them more than they have invested, NOT that they are finding too much stuff. I myself played through the first time without making anything. Now, I did have to reload a good bit, especially considering the rep I got after Elmo got charmed & had to be taken out...But that's another story.

I think this can be fine tuned with pricing rather than tax men & treasure rigging. Make it more expensive to craft, and more expensive to buy items. And leave alone the selling of items. One last thought: consider making it level dependant so as not to unduly hamper the player once they first begin to craft. Tack on a percentage or something until it reaches 100% of the price at whatever level is desired. This would require some scripting, and since I can't script, I have no idea how difficult an undertaking this might be...

Think of this as option 4 of CtB's suggested list of fixes.

 

I just had another idea. A controversial one though. Why not
disable the extraplanar chest? It is the chest that lets PCs carry
so much. When it was disabled they had to choose what to take.
I know, they can always come back and take them, but usually
people don't, they're too lazy.

 

Hmm definitely not in favour of doing away with the extraplanar chest myself, I quite liked that idea.

I like Spike's idea the best so far, it's the same lines I was thinking along. Something that kicks in at say lvl 5 and boosts the sale price t 110%, and drops what they'll give you to 90%, then increases the spread as you go up in levels. Not sure how difficult this would be either, but the game does already have a system in place for altering prices dependant on you players appraise skill (or whatever it's called )

Just my $0.02

Cuchulainn.

 

I really like Krunch's idea of limiting the amount of things that the shops can buy. That one makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, realistically, if you keep trying to sell Otis set after set of scale mail, he'll eventually say, "Hey, this stuff isn't selling. We have a surplus already, so I'm not gonna buy any more." That would definately make it more realistic, if that's what we're shooting for here.

But, I completely agree with Spike's newest idea as well. That one sounds like it would work a little better. The majority of the cash spent later in the game is usually on crafting. Hiking up the prices for crafting would limit the money a lot faster than anything else.

 

I like the idea of limiting the amount of equipment
bought by the shopkeepers, but "shrinking" the capacity
(that is number of inventory slots) in the extraplanar
chest wouldn't hurt, eh?.

 

The Extraplanar Chest was created because there was a huge demand for a Bag of Holding, as a lot of people were making the multiple trips necessary to haul every little scrap of loot they could get their hands on back to town, especially early in the game. When it comes to money, people are not a lazy as you think.

This would require a dll hack that would effect every container in the game. The kludge (filling the unwanted inventory slots with invisible items) would be a huge PITA during game play.

Making crafting more expensive across the board is easily done. Making the increase level depending is a little more tricky, and is not possible to do "on the fly" while playing the game. The increase would only take effect once you had reached the target level, quit the game and then restarted it.

The buy and sell prices are directly dependent on the item value in the protos. As far as I can tell, players always pay the full item value when buying items, and get a percentage of the item value (based on their Appraise Skill, and never 100%) when selling. Spellslinger might be able to find and lower the that percentage (I would need to check with him on that) and we could then increase the item values across the board, effectively increasing the buy price while keeping the sell price more or less the same. Making it level dependent would require a major dll hack that most likely would not be possible without the source code. Since this would penalize players at the beginning of the game (and since I need to check with Spellslinger) I'm not considering this option 4 just yet.

This one may be doable. Add a sans_transfer script to every sell-able item in the game decrementing the item value from a variable unique to the shopkeeper that represents the money he has available. When the variable drops to less than 1 the shopkeeper will not barter with the party anymore. Code could be added to the inventory refresh script that would increment the variable by a certain amount (up to a max value) every 24 hours, slowly replenishing the shopkeepers cash supply.

The problem I see with this method is that I think the san_transfer script will close the barter window ever time it fires, necessitating re-initiating barter for every single item sold and bought. We would need to test this to be sure, but if it is the case this would be a game breaker.

Another method would be to compare the amount of cash the party has before and after a barter session and adjust the shopkeeper's "cash on hand" variable by any increase or decrease. If the variable drops below a certain threshold the shopkeeper would refuse to barter until it had built up above that threshold again. The downside of this method is that you could still sell a virtually unlimited value of items to the shopkeeper in one barter session, but then it would take a very very long time before he would barter with you again.

There is another option that kind of fits into option 1 listed in my post above, though the player would have to really be paying close attention to their cash level to notice it. Compare the amount of cash the party has before after a barter session and subtract a certain percentage of any increase from the party's cash after the barter has ended. This percentage could be level dependent, or better yet, cash level dependent, and could also vary between shopkeepers. It is still contrived and heavy handed, but it should be more transparent to the player than a "tax man".

 

So, basically, you're kinda adding a sales tax?

 

Yah, a sales tax is a good way to think about it.

 

Sales tax...

That's a good thought. I'd say it also includes things like inflation & exchange fees since the coin being utilized isn't necessarily the "coin of the realm". Once someone knows you've struck it rich, the prices invariably begin to rise.

 

I was going to say something like that, myself.

Any other ideas? I had one, but after thinking about it for a second, I realised it would pretty much be impossible to do.

 

Hmmm maybe add some sort of script which would randomize the weapons of more powerful creatures? Once during the game a "boss" could fight a chaotic longsword, the other time he could have a greathammer. What do you say to that?

 

Hmm...that might be interesting...