Do Magic Item "Shops" wreck the spirit of D&D?

[diaglo]

I've played 1st, 2nd and 3rd Edition, and Basic D&D, and there was simply no edition of the game that made characters swoon and fall in love with +1 swords, no matter how much backstory they had.

i've played chainmail, 0 , 1, becm, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.11, 4 etc...

you are right. it isn't the edition that makes any character swoon and fall in love with his weapon or magic item.

it is the group you are playing with and the campaign.

i gave my example. V tried to tell me they dropped. and i told him. no they didn't. and i ain't talking about any players. i'm talking about my players in my OD&D campaign that ran 10+ years.

 

[Storm Raven]

No matter who was running the game in your experience.

No. No matter who was running the game using the D&D rules.

Until 3e, there was never an assumption of "if the NPCs can do it, the PCs can do it" or (vice versa), which led to all sorts of unique magical effects in various modules, campaign settings, and homebrewed worlds. And, of course, in many worlds, one never knew for sure that the "+1 sword" was, in fact, a +1 sword. Even after you'd figured out the mechanical bonus, you didn't know if some wierd power(s) would later manifest, nor did you know for sure that the thing wasn't cursed (acts like a +1 sword until....). There was a lot of room for variety, and divination spells explicitly didn't tell you everything.

Odd. You start with a complete non sequitur about NPC/PC parity and then go on to a tangent in which you describe radically altering the rules concerning how magic items work and are identified. Which is exactly what I said you would need to do if you thought that magic items should be rare and wondrous. (Of course, even in 1e, the identify spell existed, and was easily available to players whose magic-users wanted to identify magic items, did you radically alter that spell too?) Then again, I also pointed out that once you made those radical alterations to the rules, there is no longer a basis for discussion.

Sure, you can make magic items mystical and wondrous - if you change the D&D rules concerning how magic items work. Which brings us back to the original question: do magic items shops violate the spirit of D&D? The answer is clearly no - because to make magic items mystical and wondrous you need to change the rules of the game. The baseline rules of the game make magic items a commodity. No amount of wishful thinking will change that.

 

[Shades of Green]

From an economical POV, the big question here is who, in the game world, has the money to buy a given magic item. Shops are based on a high turnover rate. If all you're gonna do is sell a 50,000gp item to a wealthy client once or twice in the year, you don't need a shop - maintaining it will be just a wasted expense and security risk; you'd be better off presenting your selected wares at the halls of kings and noblemen. A shop would sell magic items that a larger strata of the D&D world's society would be able to afford: potions first and foremost (most urban middle-class - or even well-off peasant - families would keep a potion or tow of Cure Light Wounds at home to deal with emergencies), but also scrolls (for small-time magic-users to use), a few wonderous items (the one below 500-1,000gp), the lower-level wands, and a few magic weapons and armor that cost 1,000gp or less. In a big city, shops might also carry the rings costing 2,000gp or less as well as +1 weapons and armor and almost any kind of potion. Beyond the 1,000-2,000gp level (or 5,000-10,000gp in a big city), you usually won't find the items in shops - you'll have to contact a dealer in magic items and cut a deal with him. Think of magic items as of works of art: shops in small towns would usually have trinkets, cheap and low-grade art and so on for peasants to buy and hang above their mantlepiece; in a big city you would be able to get higher quality work in shops; but, if you want a masterpiece, you either comission it or go to galleries, art dealers and so on - the higher the pricetag, the more you'll have to deal with dealers and the less with shops.

And, ofcourse, a good place for not-so-good-aligned PCs to find magical goods or to sell ones would be the thieves' guild (especially a big and well-connected guild), for three reasons:
1) The thieves' guild has access to a wide variety of expensive items (not nescerily stolen, though this is always a risk - especially if the original owner finds out that the PCs have his stolen item).
2) The thieves' guild is already set up to fence and "launder" high-priced goods without asking too many questions about their origin.
3) The thieves' guild probably has several high-level rogue memebers with ranks in Use Magical Device who could utilize magic items themselves.

 

[diaglo]

No. No matter who was running the game using the D&D rules.

i disagree.

(Of course, even in 1e, the identify spell existed, and was easily available to players whose magic-users wanted to identify magic items, did you radically alter that spell too?)

you should go read the identify spell again in 1edADnD. how long you had to cast it after being exposed to the item you wished to identify.

how many magic users did you know who used up their 1st lvl spell slots on identify while in a dungeon?

 

[Ealli]

The spirit of D&D is to go into the dungeon, kill the inhabitants, and take their stuff, usually while retrieving some MacGuffin. There are some interesting conclusions to be drawn from this.

First, stuff can be divided into two categories: items and coins. Items have uses, even if that use is very specialized and weird. Coins do not have uses, or rather their use is to be turned into items and NPC services when returning to town. Coins could be thought of as Item -- Wildcard.

Second, if we're spending significant playing time exploring the town and meeting its inhabitants in order to acquire items, then those inhabitants should be dead at the end -- the town is the dungeon and the inhabitants of dungeons die. Basically this point is saying that shopping is not interesting and generally not part of a heroic story. Towns are to start quests and to finish quests, if someone in town is neither of these, get them off stage as soon as possible. What you want is available somewhere in town and you probably did run from one end of town to the other talking to all manner of people, but we're not spending playing time to deal with it.

A follow up idea to the second point, has any DM ever given out XP for tracking down someone willing to buy or sell a magical item? Consider why one should: when the DM is putting lots of challenges in the way of buying or selling items, and the PCs are overcoming the challenges through roleplaying and skill checks (e.g. Gather Info), that is very nearly the exact definition of what XP should be awarded for.

 

[Vocenoctum]

i gave my example. V tried to tell me they dropped. and i told him. no they didn't. and i ain't talking about any players. i'm talking about my players in my OD&D campaign that ran 10+ years.

My example was actually a bit more than that, but you only addressed it in the briefest bit. I said they'd toss it somewhere and use the other sword. You said they didn't. You never did answer whether they were using your +1 sword at such high levels. Did they toss it in the bag of holding and talk about it around the inn-room, or did they use the item in combat? What about other magic items?

In the basic, we agree. It's up to the DM to instill the sense of wonder for magic items. My basic point was simply that most folks who "remember it being different" aren't remembering Rules, they're remembering how THEY did it.

 

[diaglo]

My example was actually a bit more than that, but you only addressed it in the briefest bit. I said they'd toss it somewhere and use the other sword. You said they didn't. You never did answer whether they were using your +1 sword at such high levels. Did they toss it in the bag of holding and talk about it around the inn-room, or did they use the item in combat? What about other magic items?

In the basic, we agree. It's up to the DM to instill the sense of wonder for magic items. My basic point was simply that most folks who "remember it being different" aren't remembering Rules, they're remembering how THEY did it.

they fought and defeated a foe around lvl 3 to recover the sword. they found backstory about it from lvls 3, 4, 5, and almost 6. the fighter who had the sword used it until he retired at lvl 10.

when he came out of retirement for one more great adventure he took it with him.

he died in the Tomb of Horrors.

we played 3-4 hrs/day; 5 days/week; 50 weeks/year; for a month shy of 11 years. it took roughly 900 hrs of roleplay to reach a new level in the campaign.

you can say that sword saw a lot of game time.

 

[Vocenoctum]

From an economical POV, the big question here is who, in the game world, has the money to buy a given magic item. Shops are based on a high turnover rate. If all you're gonna do is sell a 50,000gp item to a wealthy client once or twice in the year, you don't need a shop - maintaining it will be just a wasted expense and security risk; you'd be better off presenting your selected wares at the halls of kings and noblemen.

You do have to keep in mind that locales have GP limits. Very few cities will have access to such wealthy items, and you may have to travel. Low level items are easier and quicker to make, and are more volume sellers. Higher priced items are probably custom made, or as the MIC mentions, you're buying something adventurers have from long ago, or maybe ransacking the old guys barn to find his stash of vorpal blades from when he was having jabberwocks in the garden.

So, Magic-Mart or not, you're not finding powerful, high GP items in every small town across the land. If you want something truely epic, you'll probably have to make it, as even a metropolis is limited to 100K.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

I'm sure I'm not the only one, but we've had magic item shops of one form or another in our games practically started playing, back when we used the Red Box Basic set. One of the earliest inspirations for such came from a scene in Saga of Old City (by EGG) where Gord purchased a magical dagger from a dwarf in Greyhawk.

 

[Vocenoctum]

they fought and defeated a foe around lvl 3 to recover the sword. they found backstory about it from lvls 3, 4, 5, and almost 6. the fighter who had the sword used it until he retired at lvl 10.

when he came out of retirement for one more great adventure he took it with him.

he died in the Tomb of Horrors.

we played 3-4 hrs/day; 5 days/week; 50 weeks/year; for a month shy of 11 years. it took roughly 900 hrs of roleplay to reach a new level in the campaign.

you can say that sword saw a lot of game time.

Yup, a lot of gametime. In that time, the fighter never found it a drawback that he couldn't affect anything hit by +2 or better weapons though?

I've always liked personalizing major gear, but that doesn't mean keeping an inferior item in main use just because it has an interesting story. About half of my PC's have either Craft Weapons & Armor or Ancestral Relic so I can customize the weaponry. I also like intelligent items, so I've had a fair amount of those too.