Chatty DM recently blogged about the 4E economy. He has a great take on simplifying it even more. Although I have to say that I feel a little dry with the current state of it. The guidelines are, of course, very formulaic. This is what we should expect from 4E. Without some good formulas, there can't be good balance. I get it. I agree with it.

In the end its all how its handled by the DM. I personally wasn't quite happy with doing wish lists from characters. Some never gave me anything. it was cumbersome then to make sure that characters without a wish list got things that made sense for them. Chatty's example fixes quite a bit of that. He suggests allowing them to just choose whatever they want with some limitations when their character levels. He is happy to work out "in game" ways that these items can get into their hands so it doesn't feel too much like they are just appearing from nowhere for no reason.

I have another idea that hit me after reading Chatty's article. It occured to me that sometimes it feels like all of these magic items lying around just don't feel natural to me in most of the circumstances. A few of them yes. It makes more sense to me that there would be some magic items. This would be especially so if they had to do with the plot of the campaign. You know, that special sword that you need to defeat the main bad guy. The potion that you need to save the rogue from that potion trap. Those kinds of things. Everything else could be just gold and/or residuem. I guess I do like the "accounting" part of things a little bit. You can still use the formulas, but instead of limiting yourself to magic items that possibly no one can use, the players get truly flexible gold to either purchase or even better... make their magic items.

I would still make magic items rare, even in merchant shops. This would make rituals (something that so far isn't being used a lot in our campaigns yet) a lot more important and useful.

Ultimately I would like to try both methods. They are both more flexible than the existing rules. They take away the sheer tedium of adding treasure parcels for DMs. Most importantly, players will be forced to be more involved in their equipment and they don't have to worry about sending in wish lists to DMs either.