State of Equipment

With regards to what a character has, I wish to write a few sidenotes.  DMs ought to be warned away from things like "journeybread," a magic bread that eliminates the need to buy food, and other such items that proliferate now through the 5e system, but this is only a symptom of the wider misunderstanding of what equipment is and how it fits into the game.

The Gygaxian model, evident from early lists, is that equipment is there to manage dungeoneering, which to the voices of the time is essentially like camping.  Yet there's enough conscious awareness in Gygax and others that the players might want to buy things like cows, chickens and ships, though no rules whatsoever exist for the management or layout for such things.  Presumedly, the game's designers assumed that if players wanted to know how much a ship could carry, how fast it could move under various winds and what the arrangement of rooms and cargo space looked like, a library was available.  Which is just how we approached such things at the time.  Self-sustaining and all that.  It gave us something to do while walking miles to school, uphill both ways.

Later, as equipment lists grew through the Dragon magazine and other role-playing games, DMs realised that buying things was perhaps the best way to get rid of a player's vast income, in a way that seemed far less contrived than paying out ludicrous amounts for "training" and "research."  It does work this way, but this alone is not an especially valuable reason to provide characters with better equipment lists.

As an interesting sidenote, assuming 1 g.p. contains approximately 7 grams of gold (which complies with typical Middle Eastern coins from the Romans forward), then the cost for a 1st level to train to be a 2nd level equals 1,500 grams of gold for one week; divided into troy ounces, or 31.103 grams per ounce, this is 337.6 ounces, or 21.1 pounds of pure gold.  Compared against the price of gold in 1979, when the DMG was published — $459 USD per ounce — this is the equivalent of $154,953.  Converting this into 2022 dollars equals $632,428.  

Moreover, this is per level to be risen from.  A 2nd level moving to 3rd requires twice the amount, while from 3rd to 4th requires three times as much.  To put this into context, it costs nine times as much in equivalent money to be trained as a 2nd level fighter for one week as it does to go to Harvard University for a year.  And if the DM, according to Gygax, thinks you weren't good enough in your 1st play, he or she can multiply this amount by 2-4.  By fiat.  When I say ridiculous, I mean ridiculous.

Coming back to the point.  Throughout the game's development, there have been two suppositions that cut the importance of equipment off at the knees.  I know of no exception, counting every version of D&D and every other role-playing game I've seen, including those set in the present and the future.  Those two suppositions are:

1. Pieces of equipment are complete units onto themselves; they are not formed of other things, and therefore no information need be given as to how much wood is needed to make a wagon, or how much meat a chicken supplies, or what ingredients, amount included, are necessary to make a bottle of beer.  Furthermore, for the most part, very little effort is made to include raw materials on an equipment list — except for perhaps one or two dozen commodities.  Certainly, a concerted effort to include ALL the things that ordinary human beings can buy locally are never included.

2. Players have next-to-no knowledge of how anything is made, or how it works, and therefore zero information needs to be supplied as to the pieces, fixtures, parts, materials used, or any other aspect of the piece of equipment being bought.  We're buying a "rope."  Because as players we are universally ignorant, there's no need to describe the rope's breakweight, it's thickness, the manner of its weaving or even the materials from which it's made.  All rope, we are meant to understand, is exactly the same.  This same rationale applies to every object in the game universe.

As a result, if a character wishes to transform bars of nickle, manganese and iron into a sword, there is no price for the bar, no manufacturing time, no detail of the tools needed or what space is required ... so that even if the player has done this personally, and knows the answer to many of these questions, the DM has to invent the price of tools, materials and space out of thin air, since no game equivalent has ever been offered.  And if there is some version of the game that includes a price for a "blacksmithy shop" (I've never seen it, but there have been a hundred splatbooks, so it's sure to be out there), then it's a single-type all-purpose cookie-cutter blacksmithy shop, with minimal details and the assumption that every blacksmithy everywhere in the world is exactly the same, like waking up in a Howard Johnson's.

D&D has had 40 years to address this problem and it has done ... nothing.  Because it's perceived that nothing needs to be done.  Players don't want details.  They don't want to buy raw materials.  They want things they can march into a dungeon.  They certainly don't care what their rope is made of, or what food tastes like, or how to actually make armour in game.  "It costs such-and-such an amount of money per week to make a sword."  So you pay the money and "buy" the sword that you made, exactly in the way that you would have if you'd gone to the market.  What you've done is buy the right to say you made the sword yourself ... except that you didn't.  In any sense.

This minimalisation forces the players into a conformative, passive mindset where it comes to purchasing equipment and deciding how to spend their money.  The overall result is a total lack of interest in buying things past what's immediately needed to play the adventure ... which in turn causes the piling up of player money, making it possible for them to pay for the adventure's necessities, whatever they are, because no other enticement exists for which to spend their money.  That causes DMs to lament the inexhaustible supply of player money, producing the DM's feeling that somehow this money needs to be drained in some other manner, by theft or by irrational training costs, which matters not a whit anyway because players don't care about money.  Not in the system the game has built.

To a DM, this feels off ... because it seems evident that money should matter, since that is the human experience.  It doesn't equate, however, because we view money most romantically as something that obtains emotional highs and lows, new experiences, security and power ... whereas none of these things exist in the game's structure as designed by the originators.  In D&D, money is a number that's piled up until it's exchanged for something meaningless, that brings no special benefit to my character's personality, status or ability.  Unless it does so through rules that make no sense, that are obviously invented for the sole purpose of reducing my money.

There is a solution, but it requires a complete turnaround of the game's design.  JB likes to say that "D&D is about adventure."  Adventure is exciting.  It is certainly an intrinsic part of the player's experience.  But saying that D&D is about adventure makes as much sense as saying that life is about sex, or that childhood is about Halloween.  It is not necessary to adventure in order to play D&D.  I have run a year's worth of sessions as a party established and organised their colony, cleared and planted land, interacted both peaceably and threateningly with local tribes, helped supply a war effort, freed slaves, planned for the future, began personal relationships, attended a coronation, infiltrated spies into an enemy outpost and traded goods they had mined, raised and acquired through diplomacy.  None of this falls under the heading of "adventure" in any traditional sense, yet none of the players were the least bored, they were operating entirely according to their own agency, doing what they wanted to do ... and at no time would any of them believed they weren't playing D&D.

D&D is about playing a character that makes choices in a game world regarding their ambitions and intentions to accumulate varying measurable products: money, experience, notariety, the expansion of their belief system or anything they can invent.  I once ran a character whose sole desire was to acquire books, with the intention of building an Alexandria-sized library.  My tactic was to join the siege army surrounding a city, aid in the city's fall and then rush in to pillage the libraries within.  Is this "adventure?"  As a genre, I'd call it "criminality" or "war."  Just because it's exciting doesn't make it adventure.

The frustrating two-dimensionality of the adventure-arrangement for D&D is perpetrated by the system's total inability to support any other framework of play.  The books were of no help to the DM or me in describing how to wage war against a city, or how to be a small contingent of players operating inside an army.  The DM had to invent this on his own.  The books provided me no help in helping the players develop their colony and trading intentions.  I had to invent this on my own.  This led to the development of my trade tables, my massive equipment list and ultimately the menu I launched last year.  All things that my players, and many others who have experienced these things through other DMs, to realise that "adventure" alone is an extremely shallow approach to what the game offers.

I'm stumped, at present, on how to explain any of this to a new DM, with shiny copies of 5th edition spread out before them.  Some things just don't seem possible.