Thanks for your answers! There are a few things I find important to notice (mainly concerning the itention of this system). And I have a few question in advance. So I will go through your posts step by step. I hope to improve and ajust this system in the course of this discussion.
Concerning the economy of this system:
Ancalagon, I understand your calculations and I like the idea of making the whole system more realistic. But there are several problems showing that this will hardly work.
- First of all, there is no precise information about economy in D&D 5E. The information we have (or might transport from earlier versions, etc.) are not reliable. And - even more important - the RAW price system is not based on any real economy. No quite the reverse! The RAW system is actually absolutely broken and makes no sense at all. That was discussed in many topics, so I just accepted this point.
- Second, GDR is only one side of the coin. If you are trying to solve the "no economy issue" by calculating incomes/outcomes of cities, etc. you would need to adjust quest/campaign rewards and item prices to that "new" system as well. Otherwise you run the risk of giving players too much/little money, so they can either buy everything they want and become to strong or they end up not being able to pay your prices. And how do you do that? Are you able to generate a complete new wealth/reward system? Do you always want to exchange all rewards while playing official WotC campaigns? Are you able to do that without worrying to break the game? (Btw: If I speak of "you" I don't mean "you" personally, Ascalagon!)
- I refered to Sane Magic Items, because the guy who created this didn't change the wealth/reward meta given by the DMG. He only adjusted items by their usefulness. Quote: "There is no way that glue is worth 500,000 gp when Sentinal shield is worth 500gp.” There are actually a lot of examples like that. So the big benefit of using these prices is that you can keep your quest/campaign rewards as intended by the DMG.
So all in all I want to point out that
this system is intended to be as flexible and versatile as possible. You can easily adjust prices, availability and stock to perfectly fit your campaign without being liable to become random!
Evaluation:
- I might increase the "Total Value" at an exponential rather than linear rate -- rarer magic items increase in price exponentially. Also the larger settlements have more people at an exponential rate, their wealthiest citizen tends to be wealthier, and wealth tends to gather in such places.
- I might also increase the number of items at lower rarity, since many of them are consumables (potions and scrolls). You could just say "double the amount available for consumables," which is logically consistent with the notion that they cost half the price of permanent items.
To be honest I had no particular formula of determining the amount of items available in a city. My main intention was to balance the availability of magic items to prevent your cleric from buying 10 scrolls of Bless (for example). That would be too powerful. Furthermore keep in mind that
this whole system is only meant to be for consumables. The availability of magic items others than consumables is something that every DM must do by his own, because magic items can be very game changing and you don't want your players to insist on a specific item, because a homebrew system says so.
I know that my suggested numbers are low. But the DMG is even recommending that magic items are not up for sale at all. But I would be interested in your suggestions concerning stock numbers of the different categories. What would you suggest?
I would definitely extend the table to Very Rare items and Planar Metropolis (City of Brass, Sigil, etc.). I'd expect Planar Metropolis to have a much greater chance of all items, and greater volume of low-level items. I'd give Very Rare items a 5% chance in towns, 10% maybe 25% in planar metropolis -- not great, but doable.
What is a "Planar Metropolis"? Does "planar" mean something specific or are you just suggesting to add a fifth category for the biggest type of cities (metropolis) to differ even more between 5001 - 25.000+ population size?
Complementing this table, I'd have some haggling system for making a Charisma check to bargain down an item's purchase price or borrowing to buy it. I think a system like this should be speedy; most players don't enjoy haggling, but the Charisma-oriented price-conscious ones should have some outlet for their desires. For example, on a 10-19, you can either get a 10% discount, OR pay for half up-front and owe the rest but with a 10% surcharge; on a 20+, you can get a 10% discount AND pay for half up-front with no surcharge.
I really like the idea of ginving discount. I will think about adding that. Maybe I can "sandbox" the whole system a bit.
How much time does shopping take? I'm a huge fan of 5e's simple downtime system. I'd just say that shopping for an item takes 1 day. This way if a player wants to Help on the haggling they have to spend the day too.
To be honest, this is something I haven't thought of so far. But it seems important. I will look that up in the DMG and try to add information about it. Thanks for your comment!
Thanks for your feedback and comments again. I would be happy about a further discussion!
Peter
