Diablo II was a barter community and very heavy on RMT's, gold was only used for gambling. Because you could generate so much gold so quickly AND there was a pretty easy to hit gold cap per player, it became next to worthless. If there had been no gold cap people might have actually used it to buy and sell items, it just would have cost 20 billion gold for the rare stuff. But the gold was cumbersome and you had to keep depositing it to prevent losing half of it. where as you would never lose your inventory unless you were silly and didn't just exit and reenter a game to recover your stuff.
A barter system is kinda interesting and gives more of a chance to haggle. And some people can just trade up all day long and generate wealth out of getting the longer end of the stick over and over, but the market will still adjust itself to some constant. SOJ's were it for a long time, so instead of buying and selling for 1,000,000,000 wealth units you bought and sold for 1.0 or 2.0 wealth units.
I could see that I suppose. iirc when I played D&D years ago our GM had this rule about not allowing you to wear more than 2 magic rings and one regular piece of magic armor because of a conflict of magic or something like that. I mean otherwise you'd be running around with 10 magic rings and all sorts of craziness.
Maybe not have so much restriction on magic items, but have wearing too much magic armor cause bad things to happen. That way it wouldn't be a hard limit but a risk players can choose to take.
Yeah, the cap I was thinking of was a soft one based on risk. Since normal items are provided for cheap by your class quartermaster, losing them is not really a big deal. Anything that isn't standard issue however would be costly or difficult to replace.
So you give the players the ability to lock down certain slots. These slots will not be lost on death, everything else gets dropped on the corpse and is lootable by anyone including npc's. The number of lockable slots goes up with rank. I was thinking top end would have 1/2 of all slots locked down.
So a person playing it safe puts really nice items in their locked down slots and then uses standard issue gear for the rest. They COULD go all magic/rare gear, but the moment they die, anything not locked down gets lost. Of course if they have allies right there they could pick up the gear for them, but chances are if you died while wearing all that awesome gear, your buddies are not far behind. So it's still a gamble.
