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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4331471" data-attributes="member: 4937">One of my biggest problems with 4e is that the designers have decided on what they think is fun and chosen not to support anything else.In all honesty, the economics of D&D have always been messed up and 4e just continues that trend - albeit in the wrong direction.  One of the things that could have sold me on 4e was better less gamist economics.  It was on my list of 'Things that are broken and need fixing' - all of which were pretty much ignored by the design team who had thier own ideas of what was broken.Reasonably, the cost you can sell something at is say 40-100% above the cost of production/acquisition depending on how many products are available that could be reasonable replacements for what you sell.   Some things can modify that outside of that range.  For example, trade goods from the East could be sold in early modern Europe at 200% or 300% markup because of the cost, difficulty, and danger in getting those goods to the end market.  On the opposite extreme, highly exchangable and prevelent commodity goods might only have a 10% markup.  Once you take into account other expenses (overhead, labor, taxes, etc.), the profit on a transaction is probably much less than the gross markup - probably only a 10th of that.So lets imagine there is a sword craftsman who is the only skilled craftsman within a day's journey.   If he's selling swords for 20gp, it's a good bet that they cost him less than 10gp to manufacture them.  But he probably needs that level of markup to run his business, because he doesn't sell swords that often (small market) and in the mean time he's paying the 'labor cost' of a skilled merchant (he expects to live well).  Pretty much, you are just going to have to use some common sense.  Just remember the end goal is for the business to only be turning about a 4-10% profit assuming its run well.</blockquote>

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