a player dropping 20 gold on a diamond is going to feel a lot less about it than someone who just spent several hundred, and a higher-level player with more money is going to care less about the cost when they have thousands of gold to their name.
I love the idea that summons from other planes are just their equivalent of a work call
like a fire elemental get summoned and tells their buddies "o shoot sorry I gotta take this" before disappearing
one of my coworkers asked me about why I learned Python and I said "i was bored" bc i couldn't admit to him that it was because I hyperfixated on learning renpy for like a month so I could make a visual novel out of my current dnd campaign
bc how do you explain that to someone
tips to be a great DM:
Step 1) create cool characters
Step 2) give those characters a time limit before they 🪦, tell no one
Step 3) give your players time travel
Step 4) make the solution someone they fought in the past
Step 5) profit
broke: journey through the nine layers of hell to find a less evil demon to replace the evil demon in the chest of your one true love
woke: have brunch w/ the demons in charge of hell and make them fall in love with you
D&D pro tip:
give everyone some kind of functional agelessness so nobody has to confront the crushing realization that all of their friends will be dead before they reach their race's equivalent of 30