Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="smdmcl" data-source="post: 4564719" data-attributes="member: 62247">I am a fan of 4th edition and I like the 20% rule. It's an average re-sale value for used goods and it's no better or worse than the 50% assumption. A more realistic value can be set by a DM depending on the items being re-sold on a case-by-case basis, if they can be bothered. A longsword taken from the hands of a bandit might be worth 50% or more to a local merchant but 548 longswords looted from a battle field would more likely be sold en-masse to a middleman who wouldn't pay anywhere near the 50% value. A suit of hide armour taken from the corpse of a dirty orc wouldn't be worth 20% of book value to a local merchant and he'd probably want the "flea infested rags out of his shop at once" when trying to sell them. In the end, the 20% rule works better for me because I can place "real treasure" on the NPCs without having to worry about the gear I give them unbalancing the player 'economy'. If the players want to loot the corpses and then role-play getting these items to market to get the best prices then I would be willing to do that. If they decided that this was 'fun' for them then I would have to make a change to start calculating the gear the NPC's carry as a part of their wealth and reduce the actual coins, gems, jewels, etc. that they carry to balance it. Luckily, my characters aren't interested in this market role-play and I do not have to adjust the calculations.  One more point with regards to the Humvee. I don't think that this is the only real world example that can be used to compare to magic items. I play hockey and a new pair of high end skates (Skates +1?) can cost $600 - $700 or more (Santa, are you listening?). After 1 season wearing these new skates you'd be lucky to be able to sell them used (hopefully not after looting my body) for $200 and I doubt you could get much more than $100. Why is the 20% value real for a great pair of hockey skates used for 1 old-timer season and not for a suit of chainmail used for 1 military campaign?  There are a lot of reasons why skates are and are not a good example to compare to magic-items. I think the main reason it works is that it brings up the question of how many people are actually in the market for a pair of skates +1 or chainmail +1? A merchant who buys something that they know is going to sell is willing to pay more for that item. A merchant who agrees to buy an exotic item (isn't magic exotic in your world?) may never actually know when, or for how much they will be able to sell the item and would be willing to pay much less than what the item is worth.</blockquote>

Verification