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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Treebore" data-source="post: 4568537" data-attributes="member: 10177">Travelling merchants? Why is this so hard a concept to accept? 90% of all road traffic was either merchants, armies, or the rich. Everyone else very rarely travelled. Most people were born in their village/town/city and NEVER travelled to another one.Heck, today I get blown away by people I know who have never travelled more than 200 miles from their home. This is shocking to me.Anyways, I agree that there will not be traveling merchants everywhere, at all times. But they do eventually go to every hamlet, village, town and city.Its how they made money. Traveling around with goods these places don't have and trading for goods they do have, but other places don't.Plus if you have magic items in your world your going to have a demand for it. Only idiots would pass up the opportunity to supply that demand.So what they are saying in 4E, is KEEP IT SIMPLE! Just make the assumption that there are always merchants available, assume 20%, ect...I personally don't like it that simple, but a certain percentage of gamers do, don't, modify it, etc...Now if you want to keep your world as abstract and simple as possible, go ahead and ignore it. However don't act like your way is "realistic".Fact: If you have magic there will be a demand for it. To deny this is ignoring reality. When you have a demand you have potential for profit. Someone will decide to get that profit, so will make magic items.Fact: In a D&D game you have numerous spell casters around. These characters will buy things that make their life easier. So there will be "Magic Shops", that may do things as simple as supply basic components for their spells, and inks for their books, and maybe even a selection of finely crafted wands, staves, daggers, etc...To have a shop that provides magic all it takes is for one spell caster capable of making magics to decide to sell these items through such a shop. This is going to happen, its human nature.So to claim there would not be "Magic Wal-mart shops" etc... is also a denial of realistic human behavior. ITs the nature of the beast. So unless you run games where there are very few mages and priests in the world, and they are not capable of making any kind of magic item, you are going to have magic shops. Its the "reality". One gamers are welcome to ignore, but to claim they are not realistic betrays a total lack of understanding of human nature and economic realities.So feel free to say you ignore such realities, but don't claim they would not happen, because they will. IF there is any kind of "realism" at all, you will have magic shops, and you will have merchants traveling everywhere trying to make as much coin as possible. That is the "realistic reality".Every published setting, Faerun, Greyhawk, Scarred LAnds, Kalamar, Eberron, Mystara, Planescape, Dark Sun, and even the world of Conan have enough population to make such things a reality.The only variance is how often will you find such shops or see such traveling merchants. Along major trade ways every residence, farm, hamlet, village, town, and city will see many merchants travel by every single day. The more off the beaten path they are the less often they will see such merchants, probably only once or twice per year in the most remote locations.You will see magic shops in the largest of cities, since there will be many priests and mages there.The only way to avoid this as being a realistic "reality" of any well populated world is to say only 1 in 100,000 can be a spellcaster. Then the numbers will likely stay low enough to not support magic shops, unless you have huge populations numbering in the millions like some cities in Faerun.So its fine to say you want to ignore the realities of human nature and trade and commerce, but please quit saying they are unrealistic. They are far more realistic than insisting they would not exist.</blockquote>

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