A mercantile campaign works if you are going to have a group of individuals who are NOT just trading in magic items. There is an enormous amount of background in a mercantile campaign required, from hiring agents in various cities, using non-magic and magical forms of communication, willingness to travel, etc. I think that the average magical item merchant would do so as a lucrative side-venture as the instability inherent to a merchant's life should be in play. Ships go to sea never to return, caravans are ambushed, agents will be slain for that thousands of gold they carry on them. You also have to worry about the fact that most PCs are going to hoard their cash like stingy dragons.
Where do your PCs start in the supply chain? The procurement of magic items is like the raising of crops, building of homes, and running of a church. It is a business of trade, compromise, and hard work, and there will be a need for your so-called tomb raiders as much as you need strong bodies to protect your household and mages to make appraise your gains. Speculation, purchase, supply and demand, and the willingness to enter conflict will come into play, as a well-run mercantile house can become wealthy enough to sway the lives of an entire continent. You're looking to play the Medici, which would be an awesome campaign with the right kind of players
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Beautiful.
Well, firstly, I've always thought that magic items really shouldn't be bought by players, only sold.
Especially in earlier editions, where they were not very easy to make.
But there were rules for Mercantile characters in one of the Gazetteers for Mystara, #11, Republic of Darokin. It was sort of a side class that characters could take.
Magic items have gotten a lot of discussion, because they're the obvious big-ticket items, but I could envision a merchant campaign set in a low-magic world just as easily. Some rare component, some valuable spice, really, anything worth trading for.
I think that the market supports not only agents but auctions, and letters offering rights to what they retrieve from various sites. I don't think we should all have to "pay the iron price" to get nice things.
An auction would be a pretty easy to set up as a DM, too. Just have a few NPCs (with agendas, of course), and the maximum prices they are willing to pay (not to mention the lengths they are willing to go to) to obtain the appropriate items.
The economics of magic items suffers from three things that make it really weird compared to modern economic counterparts.
1. Magic items never degrade...
2. There's no steady stream of better models coming out...
3. Magic item economics doesn't take demand into account...
...The easiest way to not have a problem with that is to have players who look at a hundred thousand gold surplus and reach for the stronghold builder's guide instead of the magic item lists.
All three salient points, though I do think that changing one of these assumptions would necessarily change the other two. As for strongholds--yeah. It would be nice if that type of thing were the go to, but, to do that, you really have to remove magic items from the system's mathematical assumptions.
For the most part, NOTHING in D&D degrades with use. There are exceptions, but let's be honest- most times someone is using "Mending", it's to fix something that was broken "of-screen", and the "Repair" spells exist only because Warforged needed special healing spells...
...But there is nothing stopping a DM from introducing scarcity and other pressures on the demand for an item- mundane or magical- from affecting price. Our group has been doing things like that for a couple of decades...and I'm the only economist in the group.
How do you go about doing it?
Assuming the 3.5 model in the following.
An interesting experiment would be to have a PC-run "magic shoppe" in organized play. With a number of players in the same setting, a "market" could potentially develop. If a PC or group of PCs tried to compete with the 50% bye price, 100% bye price NPCs use, how well would that work? How large a group of customers does a magic item shoppe need to survive on a lower overhead than the basic 50%?
I think working as a magic craftsman could potentially work, making items to order at 75% of normal price. You are selling your xp at the rate of 1 xp per 12.5 gp each. But since you'll basically always be a level lower than your adventuring companions, you'll be making 50% more xp on the same adventure, and being better equipped probably makes you at least as powerful as they are. The problem is time; you can only make 300 gp a day this way, regardless of level (since everyone makes magic items at the same rate of 1,000 gp per day). But making items to order is quite different from running a magic shop that actually byes things on speculation.
Interesting.
At this point it's question of how much detail you want to go into. (Which, for me, would mean "how much detail would actually be fun".)
Same question here. The answer, I suppose, would be "as little detail as necessary to capture the feel of it."
The simplest way to do this would be to assume that the fundamental economy of D&D actually does make sense: In 3E, for example, it makes sense for a merchant to pay roughly 50% of final price of a magic item and then resell it.
In 4e, on the other hand, the fundamental (magic-item) economy makes no sense (out of the box). It costs no XP to create a magic item, but costs as much to make one as its
market price! Of course, it's pretty easy to get around this if you consider the crafting ritual a quick, in-the-field ritual and assume that actual craftsmen use a more economically feasible one. But still, that's an assumption...
Assume, therefore, that buying magic items at 50% of their final sale value allows you to earn a nice 10% annual profit. Actually, for easier math, let's assume 12%, which would mean a 1% return per month.
So there's your easy answer: If the PCs maintain a reasonable storefront, calculate their total volume of inventory (at 50% of sale price), give them a 1% profit on that volume per month.
As a model this leaves much to be desired, but it's simple. As more details are demanded, you can start tracking things like:
- What items are actually being bought and sold to generate that profit
- Reducing "effective volume" based on items they're overstocked on
- Effects of competition
- Effects of a Profession skill check
- Effect of how often the store is kept open
- Capping returns based on the size of their current market (fewer people buying a town of 10,000 than in a metropolis of 1,000,000)
- Figuring out exactly what size storefront is needed to adequately sell a given volume of magic items (and then accounting for the costs of that storefront)
And so forth.
A really easy way to develop this is to start with a very simple model and then start accounting for stuff when your players decide they want to try it. This dials the simulation into the level your players are interested in.
This system doesn't seem too different from the system put forth in...I think it was the 3.5 DMG II.
D&D economics is steal free, sell cheap.
An economic model that makes adventuring obsolete would ruin the archetypal D&D game, and therefore may not be a good idea for any particular game, depending on how far that game is from archetypal D&D.
Cheers, -- N
As I mentioned before, I don't think that such a model
would make adventuring obsolete--far from it, actually. Someone still has to procure the goods and bring them to where they're scarce, after all.
