Excerpt: Economies [merged]

[Kraydak]

Not a "luxury good" in what sense? It's useful? So's a warhorse.

But it most definitely is a luxury good by the metric that really matters: price.

Luxury markets have mark-ups that don't apply in markets for utility items. Price has *nothing* to do with whether an item is a luxury item or not. Bottled water is a (pathological) luxury item, but it isn't expensive on an absolute scale. A low-end sedan is still expensive on an absolute scale for most people, but it isn't a luxury item.

A +1 magic sword (assuming it's a 1st-level item) retails at 360 gp. If we assume nothing has changed in equipment pricing (a big assumption, I know, but bear with me), then it's almost the price of a heavy warhorse. Which means it should be purchasable by about the same percentage of the population.

....

And you misread the article. It says the PC can easily unload the item for 20% of its price to a passing merchant in any village. They could go through the effort of finding a buyer themselves, but that takes both time and effort. And in the process, they earn every copper of that extra gold by the hoops they have to jump through.

The article says that magic items are sold at 20% value. No qualifications.

The point is you just can't sell a magic sword by putting it on eBay.

So?

As it happens, setting up an eBay clone should be quite doable in DnD. Magic can provide the rapid communication/transport that eBay runs off of.

 

[Ximenes088]

No, I'm assuming (based on labor and goods prices for 3E since I haven't seen those in 4E yet) that the costs of such transactions would be reasonable. 5,000 gp of bribes, security, etc. is not reasonable IMO. I'm not aware of any DM that has ever charged a 50% luxury tax on all magic items that PCs brought with them into a city - though I'm sure there is some insane example of that somewhere.

And here, you automatically win your point. I believe it is completely and utterly predictable for a lord to forbid the magic item trade within his city without extortionate taxes. You find such taxes totally implausible. When you get to decide how your world operates, I'm not going to be able to prove you incorrect in it.

Now I'm starting to read your example on the spice trade and right way I'm suspecting I'm going to see something on long-distance shipping, and monopolies, etc. No one is arguing that the adventurer is in India, and the market for the +1 sword is in England. So the analogy seems to me to be based on the situation of the adventurer who is already sitting in the city in which he wishes to sell his sword - and now somehow the involvement of a single merchant turns it into a 1:5 transaction. What your analogy would need to demonstrated was that someone calling himself an "adventurer" in Holland was forced to sell pepper for the price of dirt.

Again, if you get to determine the parameters of the world, you're going to win this dispute. If you really do feel it's advantageous to let your PCs trade in their magic items for 50% or better, then you can justify it perfectly by the terms you've given. If there's a wide market, no market barriers, minimal risk of theft, and high demand for magical items, then you're completely correct- it makes no sense to sell at a fifth of an item's creation price.

But by the same token, I do not feel that you should be terribly surprised if other DMs prefer to let their worlds follow the default model and supply whatever facts of life are necessary to make that model plausible to them and their PCs. It's not implausible that markets would be few, buyers few, barriers to entry high, and taxes extortionate. These are completely reasonable things the DM can declare to make any price he cares be plausible.

It seems to me that you're arguing past the point. I and others like me prefer the 20% sale price and 100%+ buy price. I like that it maps neatly onto power scales and encourages PCs to hold on to their magic items. As a demiurge, I can easily explain why these prices are plausible in my world, and I can do so in a way which is no more injurious to realism than any other explanation. The "it's unrealistic" argument does not work when you're talking to the makers of worlds containing fire-breathing dragons and teleportation. If you're going to persuade people to change the default world, you have to show that a different model is better for the game.

 

[Family]

The point is you just can't sell a magic sword by putting it on eBay.

I work at eBay as a Program Manager in the Trust & Safety department. We get most of the items that the company doesn't want sold through the site off of it, but due to volume some do get through.

Including: Magic Swords, Time Machines, Dimensional Portals, and Fictional Recursers.

Due to the scope of my duties I have not been able to test the validy of their claims.

 

[Kraydak]

...

It seems to me that you're arguing past the point. I and others like me prefer the 20% sale price and 100%+ buy price. I like that it maps neatly onto power scales and encourages PCs to hold on to their magic items. As a demiurge, I can easily explain why these prices are plausible in my world, and I can do so in a way which is no more injurious to realism than any other explanation. The "it's unrealistic" argument does not work when you're talking to the makers of worlds containing fire-breathing dragons and teleportation. If you're going to persuade people to change the default world, you have to show that a different model is better for the game.

Real-world realism is a lost cause in DnD, obviously. However, real-world human psychology isn't a lost cause, and, in fact, is somewhat required. It is hard to take a game world seriously (taking successful suspension of disbelief as the measurement of taking a game world seriously) if all the human inhabitants are insane. Fireball doesn't port between RL and the game world, but behavior does, and the economy fall in the latter category: things where realism is possible and valuable, regardless of whether the game world is RL historical or fantasy.

As a note: 4e rules have magic items selling at *salvage* values. You sell magic items at the same price that you buy the magic item manufacturing components that you could get by disenchanting them. This isn't unreasonable if you have an atl-atl +1 w/bonuses against monotremes (which only a collector would want). It is unreasonable if you are selling a longsword +1, flaming (which lots of people want). The above means that 4e removed PCs selling magic items. Of course, that should also means that it removed NPCs buying magic items, which would eliminate the market entirely.

 

[JohnSnow]

Well if my thoughts are based on a misreading then why the argument? Why are there so many posts in this thread that are trying to make the case that 1:5 is generally reasonable? If the 1:5 is based on a certain set of conditions that I would think it more productive to have stated those conditions from the start - instead of a list of anecdotes about spices and captured ships, et. al. that seem to clearly illustrate no particular consistent set of conditions. (Though I am very grateful for some specifics as opposed to the otherwise unsupported generalizations that I was getting prior to that.)



Oh, well then I take back having said that. Oh wait, I didn't. I roll for initiative against the straw golem.

Okay. Fair enough. The eBay thing was just to point out that modern profit margins are, generally, a bad basis of comparison. Keep in mind that, even when I quote you, I'm not just refuting what you've written, but all that's been written by all the folks who mostly agree with you (like pawsplay, for example).

That said, I'll address your 1:5 argument with a comment. I used to work in the auto industry. At the time (1997ish), I was told, by reps from Toyota and Honda, that an automobile engine costs them about $500 to make. One would assume that number holds (reasonably) true for any company.

However, when the engine blew on my 1990 Miata while I was working at that job, I was able to replace it: for 5000 dollars! Even assuming that half that was installation (which is about right, that means I paid $2500 in parts alone for an engine that cost Mazda about $500 to make. That's a 5:1 markup. And we're not talking about a Porsche, Ferrari, or Lamborghini here. It's just an average, garden variety Mazda.

People keep defending the markup with examples because there are all kinds of examples that totally justify it. People objecting to it usually claim that the PC would have to be an idiot to accept 20% now. However, that value depends entirely on how "at risk" the money is, not to mention what you're actually "giving up." In the default setting, it's been written one way. One assumes there's a raft of justifications for it that make it make sense in the default setting.

As people have said, the rule is there for game balance. Based on the magic items article, you're essentially sacrificing 1 point of "bonus" when you trade-in something. So, the PC who really wants a flaming axe can trade that +2 frost sword he just found a replacement for in to get a +1 flaming axe. is it fair to argue he should sacrifice 1 point of bonus to be able to customize his gear to that degree? Personally, given those comparisons, I think it's a fair trade, gp value aside.

So then, the more pertinent question might be: why are the GP values 5x higher for going 5 levels up? In the game, is a +3 flaming axe really worth five times what a +2 flaming axe is?

Honestly, I just don't know.

 

[SteveC]

The thing about the D&D economy is that it's created with the typical campaign in line, and it always has been. The rules we have here will work just fine for a roving band of adventurers moving from point of light to point of light and fighting back the darkness. They won't work that well for a campaign where you're dealing with PC merchants or magic item dealers. There's nothing different about that than in previous editions.

One idea for a campaign I've always had is that the PCs would work for and eventually run a magic shop. It would be a combination of a trading/dealing game with cons and deceptions. I've just had a lot easier time selling a more traditional game to my players, which is why I expect you have the rules you do in the 4E DMG.

--Steve

 

[gizmo33]

It seems to me that you're arguing past the point. I and others like me prefer the 20% sale price and 100%+ buy price. I like that it maps neatly onto power scales and encourages PCs to hold on to their magic items. As a demiurge, I can easily explain why these prices are plausible in my world, and I can do so in a way which is no more injurious to realism than any other explanation. The "it's unrealistic" argument does not work when you're talking to the makers of worlds containing fire-breathing dragons and teleportation. If you're going to persuade people to change the default world, you have to show that a different model is better for the game.

You make a number of points that I think are fair. The problem is that the context of this was not "1:5 can be justified". It was "you're rejecting 1:5 because you are thinking anachronistically". So the basis of this debate was not that *there exists* a system that makes 1:5 plausible, it was that 1:5 was probable and reasonable across all possible campaign worlds that are similar in any way with Medieval Europe. I also questioned the 1:5 system because the supporting conditions that were being used to defend it - arcane and rigid social structures, anti-social PCs, paradoxical circumstances regarding supply and demand, and exhorbitant taxes on magic items entering a city to name a few - were *not* default assumptions of DnD AFAICT. I'm not questioning the "realism" of your particular campaign world, because as you say, you're the demi-urge. I'm questioning the argument that some folks were making that I was being "foolishly modern" in my thinking on this subject.

 

[Ximenes088]

As a note: 4e rules have magic items selling at *salvage* values. You sell magic items at the same price that you buy the magic item manufacturing components that you could get by disenchanting them. This isn't unreasonable if you have an atl-atl +1 w/bonuses against monotremes (which only a collector would want). It is unreasonable if you are selling a longsword +1, flaming (which lots of people want). The above means that 4e removed PCs selling magic items. Of course, that should also means that it removed NPCs buying magic items, which would eliminate the market entirely.

Perversely enough, we already have a real-world example of the exact truthfulness of the default. WoW has demonstrated that the minimal sale price of a disenchantable object is the sale price of the remnants it disenchants into, and that's in a market with no barrier to entry whatsoever and trivial transaction costs. Why is this so? Because you can make things with the remnants that are more wanted than a useless original item. Are WoW players (economically) insane?

The default rules are not a demented assault on economic sanity, and a DM who lets his world use them is not offending against D&D-appropriate levels of realism. A designer who values a world consistent with human experience does not gain any appreciable credit by deciding that 20% is insane while 50% is "realistic".

 

[pawsplay]

Perversely enough, we already have a real-world example of the exact truthfulness of the default. WoW has demonstrated that the minimal sale price of a disenchantable object is the sale price of the remnants it disenchants into, and that's in a market with no barrier to entry whatsoever and trivial transaction costs. Why is this so? Because you can make things with the remnants that are more wanted than a useless original item. Are WoW players (economically) insane?

Well, they're not geniuses, that's for sure.

 

[drjones]

So?

As it happens, setting up an eBay clone should be quite doable in DnD. Magic can provide the rapid communication/transport that eBay runs off of.

Man, I am not a grognard but this sentence just made me puke in my hat.