Buying and Selling Magical Items

This is something that I feel divide older generation players and new generation players a lot. I think mostly people hate the idea.

I admit that I'm kind of hard-a$$ DM. That being said, I do make buying and selling magical items as hard as humanly possible for players.

My view is that even though creating a magical item cost X amount of gp's, it doesn't proove anything. I think the price is only used when creating high/epic-level characters and in that case the price is really valuable tool. I remember how hard and house-ruly it was to create high-level characters in AD&D 2e and assign the amount of magical items for them. Now it's fast and convenient.

However, if you try to buy magical items in-game, it gets complicated. Yes, sure the item has a price, but so do slaves, biggest pink diamond in world and a nice house in Mecca. It hardly means that you can buy something, even if it has a price.

In my game I use fantastic ingredients in magical items. For instance longsword +1 requires dragon blood, diamond dust, iron mined from the Elemental Plane of Earth etc. Sure, all this is worth about 1000 gp's, but still the effort and rarity of these components make it sure that they are not readily available. And even if someone would mass-manufacture them for sale, the component prices would sky-rocket.

Secondly, in my campaign magic items are seen as weapons of mass-destruction. If people can just walk around with magical items, it means that jerks can bring Orbs of Storms to the city centre or cursed items that haven't been properly identified. If your campaign has at least some restrictions about carrying weapons, it should have dire resctrictions about magical items. And besides, nobody has a list of magical items. So it's safe to assume that by allowing magical item business you allow anyone to buy items that can destroy the whole world. Sure wizards can create them and use them, but banning the open market at least provides some damage control.

In my campaign the clergy of Boccob opposes magical item sale, because it is not in their best interest that magic becames mundane. And Boccob is the strongest of all Gods, so whatever the Archmage of Gods says happens. After DM, Boccob is the strongest and most influental entity in the universe.

Divine magic is different. Clergies are open to sell low-level magical items to able worshippers, that have tithed massive sums and performed successful missions of faith. The same goes with divine spellcasting: Raise Dead is available only to the greatest of worshippers.

So all in all, any attempt to buy or sell magical items is hard in my game, expect that low-level divine potions and divine scrolls are available.

I've gone backwards and forwards on this issue several times.

My strong feeling (in 3.x) is that if you allow spellcasters to take the Craft Magic Item feats, then you really have to also allow the purchase of magic items. Otherwise, you're handing a major bonus to players of spellcasters (already considered the most powerful classes in the game).

Furthermore, I've never had that great a philosophical issue with the purchase and sale of items per the RAW: the books say that in a town of size X, you can generally find someone to buy/sell a given item of cost Y... but they do not say that there are magic item shops. The magic item Walmart is an exaggerated position.

But...

I've come to feel that allowing a trade in magic items goes a long way to reducing the wonder inherent in magic items. It also tends to render all those items offered in books largely irrelevant - most PCs will seek out the "big six" (items that are simultaneously the most useful and the most boring) at the cost of everything else.

So, I'm now leaning towards eliminating the creation of magic items from my game, banning the purchase/sale of such items, and also bringing back the random rolls for found items (probably with custom tables that skew more towards 'interesting' items over the 'big six').

In all cases, I would exempt potions, (low-level) scrolls and wands from this - these would remain available for sale.

Outside of lower-level expendables (healing potions, etc.), in 30+ years of gaming, I've never once run a serious game in which there's an open market for magic items. Like psionics and oriental monks, it just utterly destroys my suspension of disbelief.

But then, I don't gravitate toward high-magic settings. If I were to run an Eberron campaign, I might feel differently. (To be clear; I've played a couple campaigns in Eberron, and loved them, but it's not the type of world that fires my GMing creativity.)

Jon_Dahl said:

This is something that I feel divide older generation players and new generation players a lot.

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I don't know about that. I think it has more to do with what your experiences (especially early experiences) playing the game were like. For myself, as a kid we played through most of the classic AD&D modules, which resulted in characters overflowing with magic and gold. So there wasn't this incredible sense of wonder attached, and at high levels it became a natural step to using the DMG prices to buy & sell magic (at an inter-dimensional bazaar, an idea that I encountered in several other groups as well).

Practically every game that I've played in since has fit the same mold. It's only on the internet that I've encountered gamers who prefer a different playstyle WRT magic items. Prior to rec.games.frp.dnd, I had no inkling that such D&D players even existed.

Jon_Dahl said:

I think mostly people hate the idea.

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Most people tend to think that most people agree with them. In my case it was because I never came across the opposing viewpoint until much later in my gaming life.

CharlesRyan said:

Outside of lower-level expendables (healing potions, etc.), in 30+ years of gaming, I've never once run a serious game in which there's an open market for magic items. Like psionics and oriental monks, it just utterly destroys my suspension of disbelief.

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it's interesting--I have an almost completely opposite reaction. Assuming normal D&D levels of magic items (i.e. they're pretty common--the characters find normal amounts of magic items, a typical 5th level fighter has a sword +1, etc.), it seems hard to believe that there wouldn't be some form of trade in magic items. They have significant economic and military importance--surely, someone tries to sell and buy them. I can easily imagine the market functioning poorly--perhaps there are guild rules enforced by an artificers guild, or perhaps the nobility try to mandate that magic weapons can only be sold to them (or are contraband that can only be owned by nobles), such that the magic item market is a black market trade run by the underworld. But if the players at 5th level would happily spend 1000 gp (or whatever) on a magic sword +1, and often at 12th level end up with spare magic sword +1s that they would happily sell... it seems very strange that they're the only people in the market to buy and sell magic items.

There are exceptional cases, of course, where I can see why there wouldn't be a magic item market. I've played in games where there were essentially no ordinary magic items--there were a handful of artifacts, but that was about it. In a world like that, it's easy to see why there would be no magic item market. And I can imagine a situation in which basically nobody has a magic item today, but there are magic items buried in the ancient tombs, blah blah blah, so that the PCs are among the very few people who have magic items--although even then, shouldn't people want to buy the magic items that the PCs have found? And if there's demand, shouldn't there be other people besides the PCs "mining" the valuable magic items out of the ancient tombs (etc.)?

So I end up with the conclusion that in most "normal" D&D games--the sorts of games where the PCs regularly find magic items on adventures and NPCs have magic items--there should be a magic item market. That doesn't mean that it's a magic item eBay, just that yes, people buy and sell magic items, perhaps on the sly or with restrictions.

I gravitate towards limiting magic items to "mundane" magic items. Ie: +1-5 longsword, radiant longsword, firey axe. ect... Why? Well, IMO, a flaming axe is pretty darn awesome in my book. Also, I dislike how easily broken 4e builds seem to be when you get the "right" magic items. This is especially troublesome since I like to start campaigns at level 5, if I let people just choose anything at all, I'm gonna end up with one guy who's way too OP, and another guy who's having more fun, but feels left out.

Items with fancy powers are special and unique, someone in a large city might be able to make you one, if you do a task or pay them enough money or provide the materials. They might also be found in the hands of a powerful foe, though you'd have to pry it from their cold dead fingers.

Magical markets are non-existant more or less. A couple of stores may have the odd magical item laying around, though even they may not realize it's quality. Players will retain the ability to inspect an item to see if they can figure out what it is. And then if they like they may haggle with the owner over price. Beyond that, no inter-dimensional magical markets with every magical item under the sun.

Over the years, even back in 1e, I was pretty lenient about selling magic items for cash. After all, someone's going to want that thing even if you have no use for it (or have a greater use for the cash). But I've never been too keen on just buying whatever you want as magic items.

I feel magic item shops make a magic item nothing more special than a non magical item. It's supposed to be a fantastic item, not just a better version of a normal item.

But my main reason I don't like magic item shops is because I have always felt that part of the fun of D&D was the excitement of getting magic items and it being a special reward rather than an entitlement. The unknown & mythical content is part of what made D&D so attractive when we first started playing the game. Magic Item shops can also encourage players to look in the DMG and familiarize themselves with all of the magic items. I remember when I was a player that each time I ever found an item that I wasn't familiar with, it made the game that much cooler to me. So I try to keep players from looking at magic items in the books.

That is why I love the Magic Item Compendium. Even my players that already know all of the items in the DMG get excited when they get an item from the MIC that is completely foreign to them (I've asked everyone not to look in that book)! They don't just say, "Oh, a Bag of Holding? I've been needing one of those." I think the more you can keep the game fresh, the longer the game will stay fun.

I'm torn on the issue and I'll probably never settle for one particular mindset. On the one hand, I want magic items to retain their "magic", and be something more than a collection of static modifiers. On the other hand, I want loot to serve a greater purpose than who pull a Scrooge McDuck on the biggest pile of currency.

I've also found that if you tighten the magic item noose by hiking up the prices too much, players start to focus on silly things like stripping the fallen keep of all it's fixtures to sell for scrap.

In the end it seems easiest to keep the simplest items common; those that are barely better than masterworks can be easily procured or commissioned in any city. As items grow in power though, things start to get more rare and more mysterious. Most shopkeepers will only have access to Identify, which only tells you the most basic information on a given weapon that some unfortunate adventurer had to pawn. Is the weapon cursed? Does the weapon have an elven bane trait which is seen as intent to murder elves by most city officials? Or is the over priced sword more than meets the eye? The shop owner has no clue, and can the party afford the services of a higher level NPC to appraise said item?

I just try to make the items fun no matter how the party comes by them.

I don't see a need to run it one way, and only one way, in all games I run.

I think of it as mostly a campaign-world question. For some game worlds, having an easily accessible market of magic items makes a lot of sense. In others, it doesn't.