D&D 5E "Auction-style" magic shoppes

[CapnZapp]

Lan-"the one huge headache I can see arising with the OP's pricing tables is the game might devolve into a mind-numbing exercise of 'buy low, sell high'"-efan

Please don't assume this mechanism would be used for the PC that is selling items. Thank you

And for simplicity; any item sold to a vendor will disappear (and not be put up for sale). This way, the focus is strictly on making players pay what they think items are worth, as opposed to some prefigured list that is almost always wrong.

Your players might value, I dunno, summoning monster items way higher than my players. In a static price list, you will feel Item of Fluffy Summoning is strangely under-costed, while I might feel it's horrendously overpriced.

In an auction-style selling situation (reverse auction, actually) your players will snatch up these Fluffy Items at, perhaps, 10000 gold while mine won't even look at them until they're thrown in the bargain bin.

A self-correcting system, is the idea here

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I'm trying to understand how you feel this is easier.

I might add that I won't be making any manual calculations like in my example above.

This is much more easily handled by a spreadsheet. Doing the = X^2/40 * Y calculation is no bother there.

Having prices fluctuate by a factor of nearly two million is too hardcore even for me...

Sorry, I guess I evaluate proposed rules as though they were published in a book for general use, where a spreadsheet is not an option and some groups are a little dubious about multiplication. A lookup table is to be preferred in that context -- for example, the PHB gives us a lookup table for XP rather than telling us how to calculate it. But for personal use, if you're proficient in spreadsheets, by all means go nuts.

As for the price fluctuating by two million, like I said, I just grabbed those numbers from something else and didn't balance them for this purpose at all. Yeah, you'd want to bring down the growth rate by maybe a half or two-thirds, and probably start at 100 or 500 rather than 1 gp.

One more thing I would definitely do, whether you have a table or use the formula, is jump to round numbers. Auctioneers are not likely to post a price of "1,687.5 gp" -- they're gonna go with 1,500 or 1,700 gp.

 

[Sunseeker]

While I've never felt I needed a system to accomplish this, I've certainly run such situations, since presumably in any setting that is not a magical metropolis, there are plenty of collectors and trophy hunters who will buy magic items and never use them, thus keeping their demand and price high, with their availability low.

I am clearly less concerned with any kind of economic consistency than you are, so props for creating something interesting but I don't think it's a solution I'd use.

 

[CapnZapp]

[MENTION=6683613]TheCosmicKid[/MENTION] I believe the real reason for look-up tables is that you can't copyright a formula. If the xp advancement was as regular as in 3e people could post the derived formula within hours of release.

Wouldn't stores go for 1,499 gp or 1,699 gp. Or what about "Buy three, get cheapest one for half price"...?

 

[TheCosmicKid]

No, it's that by the rules you can't get money for an item in the first place.

5e as written has no magic item economy, meaning items cannot be bought...or sold.

It's a stupid rule, to be sure...but a rule nonetheless, for those as likes their games RAW.

Lanefan

There is to my knowledge no rule saying that your character can't walk up to a rich guy and say "I will give you this magic item if you give me a big sack of gold", or that this proposed transaction cannot subsequently occur. In fact, the DMG on pp. 129-130 provides rules for finding buyers -- and guidelines on how much they're willing to pay.

Quite right, and in the OP's system this would (probably) be the case. My point is that - in a typical 5e game that doesn't have a magic item economy or item values - once an item is thus claimed at a value that item then has...wait for it...a value, which flies in the face of 5e rules as written.

Again, I'm not sure what rule you think this is in contradiction of, why such a rule should be enforced, or how it even could. If a PC is effectively buying an item from the rest of the party, what's there to stop them?

 

[Lanefan]

Different editions of D&D have set selling prices to 20% to 50% of the list price (not counting haggling and bargaining systems).

OK. I'll get back to this below.

We have found that in order to not focus on hauling loot a lower percentage works best, for us. (At 50% I have at least one player who can't resist spending the whole session on figuring out ways to bring back every. single. scrap. of inferior armor, various knick-knacks and even low-grade ore. Making looting a non-issue seems to help him focus on actually having fun... )

In our crew we're nearly all like that - a greedy bunch of remorseless murderhobos except without the hobo part.

Yes, random. In my example, I made rolls on the DMG magic item table. In actual play, I'd do pretty much the same, but with one eye to serving the actual characters and their classes.

List prices: you can use the DMG. I use Sane Prices.

Which DMG? There's been a few...

Not once per whole adventure, but once per visit. Between visits you need to perform at least one quest or mini-scenario. This would pretty much boil down to once every session for us, since we level up every three sessions or so.

So, no account for in-game time passage if the party's just hanging out in town for the winter? I'd throw in a time factor - something like either once per adventure or once per month, whichever comes first.

Treasure division: my players have never had any issues with this. They have an internal round-robin list where you get to pick an item (and be placed last on the list) or keep your spot (but get no item).

Once everybody passes, any remaining loot is sold for cash. Cash is then split equally.

I DMed a party that did it this way once and it turned into a nightmare. One character always drafted the highest-value item on the list, no matter what it was, then would sell or barter it into what she really needed...and pocket the difference. She ended up stinking rich compared to the others in the party, leading to an imbalance it took years to correct.

Also, a headache with items having lower sell prices than buy prices is that now every item has, in effect, two values - a low and a high. This can make equalizing treasury division very messy - is a claimed item given high value, or low value, or something in between? Every time an item is claimed, or a claim is dropped, everyone's share changes. It got so bad that I-as-DM eventually put my foot down and dictated (very artificially and arbitrarily) that the sell price and buy price of items would henceforth be the same (so, a single-value system), and that's still how I do it today.

Your system would maybe make this even worse, as an item might now potentially have many values. Ouch!

Lanefan

 

[LordEntrails]

One, nice work putting htis together. I don't agree with all the assumptions, but those are easy to change so that it works in a way I'm happy with (i.e. maybe rolling DIS on a d20 rather than a d12 etc).

Two, I don't think the DM needs to worry so much about the players being concerned over division of spoils. Let's the players figure out how they want to do it. All the DM is doing is saying that prices are not fixed, the more you ask for something the less likely someone will buy it, the more you are willing to pay, the more likely you can get it. That's simple economics. No need to ever tell the players what the mechanic is behind the system!

 

[Lanefan]

There is to my knowledge no rule saying that your character can't walk up to a rich guy and say "I will give you this magic item if you give me a big sack of gold", or that this proposed transaction cannot subsequently occur. In fact, the DMG on pp. 129-130 provides rules for finding buyers -- and guidelines on how much they're willing to pay.

Again, I'm not sure what rule you think this is in contradiction of, why such a rule should be enforced, or how it even could. If a PC is effectively buying an item from the rest of the party, what's there to stop them?

You're preaching to the choir here when you say that such a rule is unenforceable, which is why I think it's such a bad idea.

But you're right - the 5e DMG seems to hint at more of a magic item economy than I'd realized, both on pages 129-130 and 135-6. So where did I see that there wasn't one at all? Something floated in playtest, maybe?

Lanefan

 

[CapnZapp]

Sorry, I guess I evaluate proposed rules as though they were published in a book for general use, where a spreadsheet is not an option and some groups are a little dubious about multiplication. A lookup table is to be preferred in that context -- for example, the PHB gives us a lookup table for XP rather than telling us how to calculate it.

Here's the multiplier expressed as a look-up table

20 ... 10.0
19 ... 9.0
18 ... 8.1
17 ... 7.2
16 ... 6.4
15 ... 5.6
14 ... 4.9
13 ... 4.2
12 ... 3.6
11 ... 3.0
10 ... 2.5
9 ... 2.0
8 ... 1.6
7 ... 1.2
6 ... 0.9
5 ... 0.6
4 ... 0.5
3 ... 0.5
2 ... 0.5
1 ... 0.5

Using this table, with a rating of 17 the 1,000 gp +1 Longsword will have an asking price of 7,200 gp.

 

[CapnZapp]

So, no account for in-game time passage if the party's just hanging out in town for the winter?

Sure. That happens rarely though, as I said we don't have downtime, we just get on with the campaign.