[DM advice] help with magic item balance

[kengar]

I'm looking for ways to keep the "Magic item business" under control in a new camapaign without tweaking the rules too much. I don't want to cripple the characters by not letting them find magic items, but I want to avoid too much buying/selling treating them as a commodity. Here's the idea I had (as written to email to my players):

Making magic items pretty much "Treasure only." By that I mean getting rid of buying items in a large town or city or paying the DMG prices to have them made. One of things that I've gotten sick of in other campaigns is the reducing of magic items to a commodity. I would still have a few things like a couple healing potions, etc. for sale at large temples, but that's about it.

I would still allow Item Creation Feats for PCs so as to avoid unbalancing spell casters, but make the material components rarer, etc. instead of "Spend _000gp in materials." Possibly a quest/adventure in itself to find an opal big enough to use in making the Fireball Wand. You might decide to search for a wizard willing to make an item for you (magic sword, etc.), but wizards that powerful are usually not all that easy to locate or sociable, so research and adventuring -plus some smooth talking- might be necessary to convince them. Even if they do agree, their price might not be just in gold.

As far as spell casting for hire (Healing, Identify spells, etc.). A lot of that will depend on where you are. Small villages might not have a cleric at all, just some semi-literate peasant leading services out of a tattered prayer book. A cleric is a priest, but a priest isn't necessarily a cleric. Just because there is a temple, doesn't mean there is a spell caster. The same is true for bards. Not all minstrels are Bards.

One last thing on magic; try to forget you've ever looked in the DMG at the magic items, etc. Most of the things you'd find wouldn't even be in there anyway. The characters have NO idea what a "Heward's Haversack" is- it might not even exist in that world... Magic is magical, don't cheapen the game and the fun by treating it like something you find on every street corner.

Now, my goal here is to change the rules -as written in the books- as little as possible, but still change the feel in the new campaign. I don't want to unbalance the classes, etc. One of my players that I was talking to on the general topic feels that this kind of change won't work. What do you guys think? Any other ideas/suggestions?

 

[Arnwyn]

Sounds *exactly* (and I mean, exactly) like how I run my campaign. There have been no problems, and I didn't have to tweak any of the rules.

For example, for a portion of the gp value of a magic item, I sometimes (depending on the item and the PC's location) rule that a particular component is not available, and the the character must go out and find it somewhere (aka adventure). In fact, I've even went a step further and required a permanent lab and library to make magic items (this fosters the creation of a base of operations, and gets PCs more attached to a particular area, as I allow them free reign in my (very detailed) campaign world). And no player of mine sees this as "unbalancing".

The player who feels that this won't work doesn't know what he/she is talking about - treating magic items this way has made them seem much more "special", reduced the commodity feeling, and increased the number of adventure and role-playing opportunities. At least IME.