CapnZapp
Legend
TL;DR: A way to give gold meaning without involving downtime, allowing a 3rd edition playstyle.
Here's an attempt at fixing the lack of a magic item economy in 5th edition, by using the idea that at auctions, the "true" value of an item is less relevant than what the buyers are prepared to give for it.
Essentially, new items are continously introduced at high prices, and then the price drops at some rate until one of three things happen:
1) a player character buys the item at the current price
2) the item reaches the bottom of its price range
3) the item "disappears" (presumably somebody else bought it)
The idea is that if a character is really interested, he or she will buy it at a premium. Other characters will wait for the price to drop, taking the chance somebody else will snap it up before it reaches an acceptable level.
This crucially means the dependency on having objectively correct pricing is lessened, since this concept does not feature at auction.
This idea assumes a fairly self-contained campaign setting, where adventurers can't just cherry pick the items they want by visiting countless magic shoppes. I don't want to go so far as to have a single centralized list, but there should definitely not be more than a couple of shoppes even at the highest tier of play. If your world contains huge metropolises like Waterdeep, that is out of scope for this discussion.
Instead, assuming fairly sandboxy or hexcrawly play, the discovery of a new town with a magic shoppe is meant as a fairly major reward in itself. Say the scope of this idea is a single tier I shoppe, two tier II shoppes, three tier III shoppes and four tier IV shoppes for a grand total of ten shoppes in the entire world.
Let's rate the price on a scale from ten times the listed price down to half the listed price. While I want to keep the math clean and simple, I feel I need an exponential curve for this to feel at all realistic.
And so we'll simply take the Rating squared divided by forty, and apply that as a multiplier to get the Current Asking Price. The CAP can never go below half price, and once it reaches zero the item disappears.
Current Asking Price = List Price * Rating * Rating / 40
If we assume the list price of the quintessential magic item, the +1 Longsword, is 1000 gold pieces, we get the following.
At rating 17, the Asking Price is 7225 gp.
At rating 11, the Asking Price is 3025 gp.
At rating 9, the Asking Price is 2025 gp.
At rating 2, the Asking Price is 500 gp (not 100 gp).
Each "tick", we decrease the Rating for each item by 1d6 and check if the item "disappears".
A "tick" would be each time the party returns to town after having had a meaningful adventure. I'm not saying they need to level up each time, but they can't just loiter around the shoppe to see when the prices go down.
I'm thinking we roll a d20 with advantage to set the starting Price Rating, and we can then roll a d12 with disadvantage to see when it disappears (if the result is higher than the current rating).
Average starting price rating is then 13.8 for a starting Asking Price slightly less than five times the listed amount, which feels about right.
The math of 2d12 keep lowest is quite nice in that half the time, the item will not be removed until it reaches below a rating of 5, where we hit our minimum Asking Price of half the listed price. Very roughly, you need to accept a roughly 50% risk of losing the item if you want to gamble on getting it for half price.
For example: rolling a d20 twice we get 17. This is then our starting Rating for our +1 Longsword. The proprietor asks for 7225 gp when the adventurers show an interest, quite probably making them balk at the exorbitant price.
The next time the adventurers come check the shoppe, we have rolled 6 on a d6 and so the price rating has dropped from 17 to 11, lowering the Asking Price from 7225 gp to 3025 gp.
We roll a d12 twice and take the lowest result: 6. As this is not higher than our rating (11), the item stays in the shoppe.
Had our roll turned up 12 (which isn't exactly likely, since it means both d12s come up 12), the item would not be available for sale when the adventurers return.
On the third visit, we roll a 2 on our d6 and the Rating drops to 9. We check our d12s but the item stays around and now the price is 2025 gp.
Constructive criticism welcome
Essentially, do you think this will work?
Posts that just want to say how you hate magic item economies are not welcome. I really wish this forum maintained "plus" threads, where posts that question the very premise of the thread are considered off topic.
Here's an attempt at fixing the lack of a magic item economy in 5th edition, by using the idea that at auctions, the "true" value of an item is less relevant than what the buyers are prepared to give for it.
Essentially, new items are continously introduced at high prices, and then the price drops at some rate until one of three things happen:
1) a player character buys the item at the current price
2) the item reaches the bottom of its price range
3) the item "disappears" (presumably somebody else bought it)
The idea is that if a character is really interested, he or she will buy it at a premium. Other characters will wait for the price to drop, taking the chance somebody else will snap it up before it reaches an acceptable level.
This crucially means the dependency on having objectively correct pricing is lessened, since this concept does not feature at auction.
This idea assumes a fairly self-contained campaign setting, where adventurers can't just cherry pick the items they want by visiting countless magic shoppes. I don't want to go so far as to have a single centralized list, but there should definitely not be more than a couple of shoppes even at the highest tier of play. If your world contains huge metropolises like Waterdeep, that is out of scope for this discussion.
Instead, assuming fairly sandboxy or hexcrawly play, the discovery of a new town with a magic shoppe is meant as a fairly major reward in itself. Say the scope of this idea is a single tier I shoppe, two tier II shoppes, three tier III shoppes and four tier IV shoppes for a grand total of ten shoppes in the entire world.
Let's rate the price on a scale from ten times the listed price down to half the listed price. While I want to keep the math clean and simple, I feel I need an exponential curve for this to feel at all realistic.
And so we'll simply take the Rating squared divided by forty, and apply that as a multiplier to get the Current Asking Price. The CAP can never go below half price, and once it reaches zero the item disappears.
Current Asking Price = List Price * Rating * Rating / 40
If we assume the list price of the quintessential magic item, the +1 Longsword, is 1000 gold pieces, we get the following.
At rating 17, the Asking Price is 7225 gp.
At rating 11, the Asking Price is 3025 gp.
At rating 9, the Asking Price is 2025 gp.
At rating 2, the Asking Price is 500 gp (not 100 gp).
Each "tick", we decrease the Rating for each item by 1d6 and check if the item "disappears".
A "tick" would be each time the party returns to town after having had a meaningful adventure. I'm not saying they need to level up each time, but they can't just loiter around the shoppe to see when the prices go down.
I'm thinking we roll a d20 with advantage to set the starting Price Rating, and we can then roll a d12 with disadvantage to see when it disappears (if the result is higher than the current rating).
Average starting price rating is then 13.8 for a starting Asking Price slightly less than five times the listed amount, which feels about right.
The math of 2d12 keep lowest is quite nice in that half the time, the item will not be removed until it reaches below a rating of 5, where we hit our minimum Asking Price of half the listed price. Very roughly, you need to accept a roughly 50% risk of losing the item if you want to gamble on getting it for half price.
For example: rolling a d20 twice we get 17. This is then our starting Rating for our +1 Longsword. The proprietor asks for 7225 gp when the adventurers show an interest, quite probably making them balk at the exorbitant price.
The next time the adventurers come check the shoppe, we have rolled 6 on a d6 and so the price rating has dropped from 17 to 11, lowering the Asking Price from 7225 gp to 3025 gp.
We roll a d12 twice and take the lowest result: 6. As this is not higher than our rating (11), the item stays in the shoppe.
Had our roll turned up 12 (which isn't exactly likely, since it means both d12s come up 12), the item would not be available for sale when the adventurers return.
On the third visit, we roll a 2 on our d6 and the Rating drops to 9. We check our d12s but the item stays around and now the price is 2025 gp.
Constructive criticism welcome
Essentially, do you think this will work?Posts that just want to say how you hate magic item economies are not welcome. I really wish this forum maintained "plus" threads, where posts that question the very premise of the thread are considered off topic.
