D&D 5E (2014) "Auction-style" magic shoppes

[CapnZapp]

I should also probably add that the current disappear rate of an item is hysterical. Most items disappear by the third week. Meaning a lot of work to repopulate the store shelves.

I probably need to stagger the price reductions, so not all items are reduced in price (and possibly go AWOL) every week.

This should not change much. The important thing is to keep any reductions coupled with the risk of it going away.

Say only every other item on a list gets the d6 reduction treatment each week (or "tick"); or you could randomize it completely so some items fly off the shelves while others sit and gather dust.

 

[CapnZapp]

I think you may have missed the second half of my proposal. If the table grows exponentially, and you express the demand for an item as a modifier to the rating rather than a "list price", then you don't even have to multiply: you can just move up and down the table. It's the magic of logarithms.

Try this one on for size. It's approximate to keep the numbers round, but grows about 20% at each step.

I guess I don't need to say this, but your table only goes to 14,000 gp. That's only good enough for uncommons and "cheap" rares.

Not that this need necessarily to be a problem - after all, you can level up quite a lot before 14,000 gp starts to feel like pocket change, especially if you go with the published campaigns rather than the DMG treasure tables.

But if a regular +1 Longsword is to vary between 10,000 gp and 500 gp, that's about it for your table.

In contrast, my multiplier rating works at every scale. A Legendary item for sale at 1 million gold, next to a potion of healing for 50 gp? No problem. (at least not from this angle)

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[CapnZapp]

Here's a great resource:

http://donjon.bin.sh/5e/magic/shop.html

Let's take a snapshot of an example Shoppe (Large City):
Location: On West Court Road, in an adventurers quarter of comfortable inns and bold explorers. The street outside is filled with the scent of burning wood.
Description: The shop is a single storey stone-walled building, with a slate roof and a tiled mosaic floor. It is dimly lit by a few candles and fairly shabby.
Shopkeeper: The shopkeeper is an overweight male half-elf named Rarder Wesell. He holds a grudge against humans.

To this I'd add a Guardian: entry, knowing how players are... But I digress. Wesell's inventory, sorted on asking price:

+1 Weapon (quarterstaff, rating 3) (dmg 213) Asking Price: 500 gp
This finely crafted weapon is said to lead the one who wields it to wealth and glory.

Potion of Heroism (dmg 188, rating 16) Asking Price: 1,150 gp
This clear liquid smells like cedar.

Necklace of Fireballs, 3 beads (dmg 182, rating 8) Asking Price: 1,550 gp
This finely crafted item was taken from the hoard of the dragon Milki.

Oil of Slipperiness (dmg 184, rating 12) Asking Price: 1,750 gp
A ruby liquid, contained in a steel phial sealed with wax.

+1 Ammunition (20 sling bullets, rating 9) (dmg 150) Asking Price: 1,800 gp
Foes slain by this weapon are consumed by flames.

+2 Weapon (maul) (dmg 213, rating 5) Asking Price: 2,400 gp
Every strike by this weapon is accompanied by a monstrous snarl.

Cap of Water Breathing (dmg 157, rating 11) Asking Price: 3,000 gp
This battered item was created by a goddess of magic for her most loyal champion.

Iron Bands of Bilarro (dmg 177, rating 7) Asking Price: 4,800 gp
This distinctive item once belonged to the great hero Eron, who perished in the Northcrown Mountains.

Stone of Controlling Earth Elementals (dmg 205, rating 10) Asking Price: 20,000 gp
This finely crafted item once belonged to the illustrious hero Fertio, who defeated Lord Greywulf.

+2 Armor (breastplate) (dmg 152, rating 14) Asking Price: 29,400 gp
This distinctive armor is said to have been blessed by the Goddess of Luck herself.

Wand of Paralysis (dmg 211, rating 18) Asking Price: 129,600 gp
This thin wand also grants the magical ability to feign disease or illness for one hour per day.


That didn't take long, maybe half an hour.

All prices rounded to nearest 50 gp. Obviously, the ratings would not be given to the players or their heroes - I've included them for your benefit. What would you buy, given a good-sized bag of gold...?

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I saw it, but I prefer to stick to the "science" of list prices (and the Sane ones at that).

We're just swapping personal preferences here now, but to me, when the whole point of the system is to simulate that prices for rare goods are not fixed, having a list price underneath it all seems... misleading. Having an abstract modifier to say "the people want this item this much" feels better aesthetically to me. But as you say, the math is the same.

One more thing (but this is more of a personal hangup than any substantive criticism): all items would slide on the same scale. At least with my set up prices would actually vary, so the same price tags don't repeat all the time (instead of 8,000 gp, 12,000 gp and 14,000 gp you might have 7200 gp, 11,700 gp and 15,050 gp)

I maintain that auctioneers would tend to stick to rounder prices. You don't hear about Picassos being sold for $5,000,750.

PS. That completely loses all the work the Sane Crew has done to combat inexplicable things where a more powerful item is more common (and therefore much cheaper) than a less powerful item, even when they both do the exact same thing. If you're fine with the rarity system, that's not a big concern for you.

I'm not familiar with this Sane Crew thing, but it sounds pretty self-explanatory. I don't use the rarity system as anything more than an extremely rough guideline; most magic items in my campaign are homebrew anyway.

I guess I don't need to say this, but your table only goes to 14,000 gp. That's only good enough for uncommons and "cheap" rares.

Not that this need necessarily to be a problem - after all, you can level up quite a lot before 14,000 gp starts to feel like pocket change, especially if you go with the published campaigns rather than the DMG treasure tables.

But if a regular +1 Longsword is to vary between 10,000 gp and 500 gp, that's about it for your table.

In contrast, my multiplier rating works at every scale. A Legendary item for sale at 1 million gold, next to a potion of healing for 50 gp? No problem. (at least not from this angle)

Well, I can always extend the table. Or, I can be a little cleverer with the table:

 0 ... 500 gp
 1 ... 640 gp
 2 ... 800 gp
 3 ... 1,000 gp
 4 ... 1,250 gp
 5 ... 1,600 gp
 6 ... 2,000 gp
 7 ... 2,500 gp
 8 ... 3,200 gp
 9 ... 4,000 gp
10 ... 5,000 gp
11 ... 6,400 gp
12 ... 8,000 gp
13 ... 10,000 gp
14 ... 12,500 gp
15 ... 16,000 gp
16 ... 20,000 gp
17 ... 25,000 gp
18 ... 32,000 gp
19 ... 40,000 gp
20 ... 50,000 gp

With this one, whenever you go up ten ratings, you multiply by ten. Twenty ratings of course for a hundred. So for values 21-40, just use this table but append two zeroes. For 41-60, append four. And so on. (Obviously, you could just do this with a 1-10 table, but going up to 20 seems more useful.)

Set the sell price (every price, really, except the purchase price) low enough so that is always lower than any purchasing price, and keep that unchanging for ever and ever, and all these shenanigans simply evaporate and you and the players can focus on adventure, not economics

Or, if they want to focus on economics, you can let them do that too.

 

[CapnZapp]

Well, assuming you're alright with my initial assumption, that a price range spanning twenty factors (from 0,5x to 10x) feels right, then you need a larger table than that.

D&D prices vary significantly. From 50 gp for a Healing Potion to half a million for legendaries.

So the table needs to at least cover that. As an example, trying to roughly cover the steps of the exponential curve in as few data points I think I can get away with
25
50
75
100
150
200
300
500

Then for 500 gp items, it continues (and repeats)

1000
1500
2000
3000
5000

And so on. For 5000, 50000 and 500000 gp items we add

10000
15000
20000
30000
50000

100,000
150,000
200,000
300,000
500,000

and

1,000,000
1,500,000
2,000,000
3,000,000
5,000,000

I really think using a multiplier is the way to go here It would feel very strange if all five-digit sale prices are either ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand or fifty thousand. Why are no items ever priced at 45,000 gp or 60,000 gp?

 

[CapnZapp]

I maintain that auctioneers would tend to stick to rounder prices. You don't hear about Picassos being sold for $5,000,750.

Leaving this here...

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1917097_1917096_1917100,00.html

Four significant digits is nothing strange, in other words. So while you're right 5,000,750 might feel off, there's no reason to believe my example values (7,200; 11,700 and 15,050) are

 

[CapnZapp]

And oh, a link to the Sane Magic Prices:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?424243-Sane-Magic-Item-Prices

(I believe this is the main discussion thread, as well as the originating one)

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?462510-Sane-Magic-Item-Prices

(This is an in-house thread. Unfortunately, it doesn't add much)

 

[dagger]

Slight quibble. I played 1e forever, and never had magic item shops.

The gold piece sale value in AD&D explicitly said that this was the price that could be received if a PC sold the item - the primary use was that the PC then could get the XP for the sale value, as opposed to the lower XP for the magic item recovery (because gold = XP). See DMG p. 121.

This is further born out by the Artifact table, which lists the "gold sale value" (for XP if you sell it) for artifacts, but the artifact text makes it clear that artifacts can only be found guarded by monsters etc., after expenditure of lots of resources. Just because a Ring of Gaxx has a "gold sale value" of 17,500 doesn't mean that you can purchase it for that.

See also - placement of magic items (pp. 92-93), fabrication of magic items (pp. 116-118), uses for money on hirelings, jewerly, but not magic items (pp. 25 on) etc.

You could do what you want in your home game, but I never thought of magic shops as part of 1e.

This is an important distinction, because with the sheer amount of gold you could recover in many 1e games, if you used those "gold sale value" tables in the DMG improperly, then you would have a Monty Haul campaign very, very quickly. As it is, when I convert 1e modules to 5e, I have to downgrade the amount of treasure.

To further your point about 1e, monster xp was negligible, you needed XP from treasure to level. Here is a good thread that shows the truth that with treasure and monster xp together the leveling rate was about the same as 3.0.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...B-ED-amp-D-and-D-amp-D3-updated-11-17-08-(Q1)

 

[dagger]

CapnZapp do you have that spreadsheet made up yet? I would like to check it out...