One of the actual paragraphs, though, states that the Wish Economy is primarily people with expensive gear trading that gear to other people with expensive gear. So I suppose that means we'll have to Wish for 15k gp items and bulk them up to trade, but we still need to find people with the more expensive stuff that we'd need.
No, it means that items under 15K are basically FREE, and that
you can't trade any number of them for items worth more than that.
It actually wouldn't change the game all that much at all from the way it is now, in fact. Your "cheap" items would all get upgraded to around 15,000 gp items, and you could have as many of those as you want. I don't care. Fill your entire 50' deep portable hole with them. Since all you can use is 8 at a time, and
you can't actually buy anything more expensive than those with gold, it won't really matter much.
I know this is a dramatic paradigm shift from standard D&D economics, but it is actually very, very simple. Just forget what you think you know, and read what I'm actually saying.
These are the two basic principles of "Wish Economics":1) Whether you "enter" the Wish economy or not, it still exists as the economic backdrop for this game. So
you can never in fact buy any magic item worth more than 15,000 gp in this game
using gold.
2) Once you do enter the Wish economy,
all items worth 15,000 gp or less are basically free. You still can't buy things worth more than that with gold, though. Or trade for them using cheaper items.
And further:3) You
can trade for items worth more than 15,000 gp, but you can't use gold or "minor" magic items. You'll have to use other magic items worth 15K+, or something else that has
intrinsic value like Souls, or some other Planar currencies that we might introduce later.
4) Alternatively, you are basically guaranteed to have an allotment of "level appropriate" items by me, according to the charts that I posted in the rules thread. You as a player can pick the items you want, and we'll decide how to explain where they came from in game as appropriate and how you would like (and that I find palatable). We can say you find them, a benefactor gives them to you, you create them, your "future self" leaves it under a rock for you, etc.
Explanation/Justification for the Wish Economy:
[spoiler]The point with the Wish Economy is, there are a crapton of ways to make all the gold you want for free in D&D already. Since you can turn gold directly into more power via magic items in standard D&D, this in fact breaks the game in half in one of two ways. 1) Either everyone restrains themselves from doing this somehow, which breaks believability, or 2) they don't, and it breaks the game mechanically. The Wish economy didn't invent this. It just invents a way to deal with it, which is by saying "You can't buy really powerful magic items with gold." Gold is basically like monopoly money to powerful beings, under the Wish economy. Yeah, you can use it to play Monopoly, which might be kind of fun and maybe even marginally useful, but you can't go out and trade it for a nuclear weapon.[/spoiler]
I wanted to go with the Wish economy because it`s a new thing to try. I`ve never played on a campaign with that option, y`see.
As I said above, I am definitely using the "Wish economy" as the economic system of this game world, just because it is actually far more balanced and less abuseable than the standard D&D economic system (although it does have a few unaddressed issues, which I think I have addressed with house rules). It is just a matter of when you guys want to "enter" it. Right now, you guys are technically still working in the "gold economy". But you still can't choose to go pool your gold and buy something worth more than 15,000 gp, because no one will sell stuff like that for gold.
As I said, this won't actually make a big difference to the power level of the game, I don't think. You guys will already be getting your first items that are above the "gold economy" level in about two character levels, and in fact you may start seeing them being used on NPCs before that.
The main difference it would make is that even the "mooks" that are serving powerful enemies will have decent equipment like "magic" flaming swords and +3 (equivalent) armor, stat boosting items, Boots of Speed, etc; because I won't even bother tracking wealth by level anymore at all for items worth 15,000 or less. And all of your "mooks" can have full sets of "minor" gear, also. Even that wouldn't be that different, though, as even with our current system I'm already basically ignoring items that are at about your level or below on the first WBL table that I posted...
Also, by the time you guys hit 13th level, you should each have 8 or more items worth 15,000 or more (see the chart I made in the Rules thread stickied at the top of the forum), and so whether you go full bore and abuse the "Wish economics" or not (and Wish for a bunch of stuff worth 15,000 or less for "free"), by that point you'll be in the "Wish economic" system by default. You won't be able to buy anything you actually care about with gold.