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

[diaglo]

This whole thing is inspiring a bunch of ideas for the Next Campaign. Start things out in the sticks, fringes of the Empire or whatever, where the Village of Hommet would fit in perfectly. Magic's rare, and mysterious, something that the wise man doesn't entirely trust.

Meanwhile, we have the Imperial Capital. Which looks more like Sharn.... Airships, semi-industrialized magic, regular trade with other planes, firearms, the whole nine yards. Better suited to high level play, and the concerns of high-level characters.

In Hicksville, you can't buy magic items...not for love or money. In the Capital, anything and everything is for sale.

Amorphous as of yet, but plenty of room for me to work with.

welcome to my OD&D campaign.

 

[Reynard]

This whole thing is inspiring a bunch of ideas for the Next Campaign. Start things out in the sticks, fringes of the Empire or whatever, where the Village of Hommet would fit in perfectly. Magic's rare, and mysterious, something that the wise man doesn't entirely trust.

Meanwhile, we have the Imperial Capital. Which looks more like Sharn.... Airships, semi-industrialized magic, regular trade with other planes, firearms, the whole nine yards. Better suited to high level play, and the concerns of high-level characters.

In Hicksville, you can't buy magic items...not for love or money. In the Capital, anything and everything is for sale.

Amorphous as of yet, but plenty of room for me to work with.

It is a good idea, and would probably make a great campaign, with one addition:

That wealth in the Imperial City? It comes from the hoards of dragons. Launching military campaigns against the dragons would result in a full force response, one that would likey destroy the Empire. But small groups of specialist "retrievers" can act independently, ensuring a flow of magic and money into the Empire without awakening the wrath of the Draconic Alliance.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Some points and responses:

(1) There is a degree to which the idea of magic item shops is the fault of the (non-Core) rules (like the MIC), but there is nothing in the Core rules, IMHO, that implies magic item shops. Moreover, I do believe that some of the tag-on rules are, in effect, "booster packs" for the game. In 2e, the Complete series was also booster-packy, so this isn't new with 3e.

(2) Being able to customize order an item from an artisan is not, in any way shape or form, the image that comes to my mind when one says "magic shop". I fully agree that individuals will exist that custom craft. Many mundane items for that matter, such as plate mail and ships, should only come into existance as the result of custom crafting -- no one in their right mind invests that kind of time and effort in the hopes that a buyer might come along.

(Mass production and an industrial economy changes this quite a bit; but even that is a relatively recent phenomenon for big-ticket items, and probably relates to the success of the automobile IRL.)

(3) I do believe that a certain amount of "fuzziness" is desirable in a RPG ruleset, yes. That said,

(4) The "delightful potion-mixing rules" were brought up as a counter to Storm Raven's ascertation that magic in D&D was always "a predictable technology". That is simply untrue, as an examination of the rules in question easily shows. Those delightful rules are, in essence, the polar opposite of predictable technology. From wands of wonder to bags of beans, 1e was chock-full of unpredictable items that otherwise had no model in the rules.

(5) Darkseraphim's point is accurate (not that he's the first to say it), whether the items are all easily located in a big box store or in a city....and that is the flaw that Wal-Magic model implies.....if you can just get the same items in town, and it is easier to do so in town, why go into a dungeon at all? Why not treat towns like dungeons? For that matter, if there is a thriving magic market, why wouldn't you just craft items and not adventure at all? You can claim that the term "Wal-Magic" somehow creates the problem as a strawman, but the problem is there no matter what you call it.

(6) Not everything can be special. It's perfectly OK that your boat means more to you than your magic shortbow.

(7) If you are trying to create a post-industrial feel, magic shops fit right in. Victorian Era? Magic shops fit right in. Spelljammer? Magic shops (ala the Arcane) fit right in. Other settings, not so much so.

(8) It is against the directly stated intent of the game in both 1e and 2e that magic shops exist. In that sense, the idea violates the previously existing "spirit of the game" (although it should be noted that in 2e, Spelljammer specifically and intentionally violated that spirit, and the Arcane appeared in the MC, which made that violation "Core"....Which is a really weird sort of shitzophrenic take on magic shops at best).

(9) On anothe thread, I suggested that if "because the players want it" is a valid reason to include something in a game, then why not tactical nukes? The response was that high-level casters are effectively tactical nukes. Extrapolating from that, if high-level magic is like tactical nukes, shouldn't the availability of that magic be something like the availability of tactical nukes IRL?

(10) In any event, you are certainly entitled to play the game however you like.

 

[Celebrim]

'Wal-magic' shouldn't be used at all imo. It's only purpose is to set up a straw man. No one is claiming there should be vast warehouses selling every item in the DMG. But that is the image the phrase suggests.

Ahhh... yes. But what some are arguing is that in fact any town can be treated as 'Wal-Magic' in abstraction. That is to say, while there is no vast warehouse selling every item in the DMG (below a certain monetary value) out of the same door, in practice the effect should be the same. Whatever actual imaginary institutions exist in thier game world is irrelevant, because they themselves have argued that such imaginary institutions should not come into play so that (from the perspective of a player in such a campaign) there is no discernable difference between whatever those imaginary institutions might be and shopping at 'Wal-Magic'.

Now, they justify this abstraction by noting that in practice most people treat mundane goods in much the same way most of the time. If you need torches, food, and so forth, you acquire it with a handwave from some abstract equivalent of a large general supply store (Wal-Medieval?). And, to a large extent this is true. But, what some others of us are trying to suggest is that while its probably a perfectly reasonable assumption to assume that mundane things appropriate to a setting are available in a large town, the same assumption is not necessarily true of any given setting with regards to things which are by definition not-mundane.

Now, please don't get me wrong. As I said way back at the beginning of this, there are settings where the assumption that magical things are themselves a mundane is perfectly reasonable. Any setting where magic has largely replaced techology and is used much as technology would be used is probably such a setting. Eberron for example, or Planescape, or perhaps even an Arabian Nights inspired campaign probably would have magic being sold alongside mundane items on a regular basis, and a DM that has made that decision in my mind has made a perfectly reasonable decision. But, I do not agree that such a setting is necessarily a default setting for D&D. Nor do I agree that making the decision to run a setting where magic is not made to be mundane somehow makes you a worse DM than someone that just abstracts everything down to 'Wal-Magic' so they can get on with the monster bashing.

 

[Storm Raven]

You missed my earlier point, then, because magic items were not always a predictable technology, within the RAW. In 1e, you explicitly could never be certain what any item did.

Yes, you could. There were plenty of options to evaluating magical items and learning their abilities. The identify spell was not nearly as opaque as you seem to think. Magic items have, since OD&D, been an entirely predictable technology.

With less codified rules, even spells were not necessarily predictable.

Actually, they were. Look at the 1e PHB. The spells all have defined, predictable effects.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Yes, you could. There were plenty of options to evaluating magical items and learning their abilities. The identify spell was not nearly as opaque as you seem to think. Magic items have, since OD&D, been an entirely predictable technology.

OK, then. If they are entirely predictable, tell me exactly what will happen when I drink a potion of healing followed by a potion of gaseous form using 1e rules.

 

[Celebrim]

(9) On anothe thread, I suggested that if "because the players want it" is a valid reason to include something in a game, then why not tactical nukes? The response was that high-level casters are effectively tactical nukes. Extrapolating from that, if high-level magic is like tactical nukes, shouldn't the availability of that magic be something like the availability of tactical nukes IRL?

Of course, high-level magic is in fact, nothing like tactical nukes. The closest you can come is with spells like 'Storm of Vengence', and even it is nothing like even a low yield nuke in terms of instantaneous beat down.

Moreover, the thing about tactical nukes is that you don't need rare high level casters to deploy them. A team of low level experts works just fine.

In any event, were tactical nukes introduced to play, PCs would begin using them thusly. "I sneak within 1000' of the bad guy, then I set the timer on the tactical nuke for 8 seconds and teleport away." or "I fire an invisible tactical nuke at the bad guys lair 8 miles away, destroying everything within a 1 mile radius of the point of impact."

Hopefully one can see the problem. The problem is not that the PC's easily defeat the bad guys. That's not a real problem. The problem is that the bad guys would use the same tactics back at the PC's. And that results in situations were the DM simply says to the party without any warning, "Well, nice game. You are all dead. Lets make some new character sheets....What do you mean, huh?... A goblin suicide bomber setoff a 25kt tactical nuke in the sewers less than 200' from where you are standing. You've all taken 20d20 damage, and have been buried under 20' of debris and soil in an area that's now glowing with radioactivity. You were largely incinerated and your bodies where never recovered."

 

[Storm Raven]

OK, then. If they are entirely predictable, tell me exactly what will happen when I drink a potion of healing followed by a potion of gaseous form using 1e rules.

Nothing noteworthy other than the two potions each working normally. The potion of healing cures you. Then you drink the potion of gaseous form and it makes you turn into a cloud of gas. They have no durations to overlap, neither is effective in your system at the same time. Hence, the potion miscability tables have no bearing on the situation.

Now, if you mixed them together, or you drank two potions that had an effect that had a duration (say, a potion of fire giant strength followed by a potion of invisibility), then you would check the potion miscability table. But that is an entirely predictable outcome: "if you do X, consult table Y" is predictable technology. Of course, if you drank them seperately, then thier effects would be wholly predictable, without consulting a table.

 

[howandwhy99]

It's a bizarro world where the Ref dictates what adventures will be had and Players dictate what rules will be used.

Has the whole game become about optimization? The MIC certainly isn't Core, but stating the players must have access to magic shops (in essence, for the "balanced" PC optimization metagame) is the publisher championing one playstyle over another. Why can't we choose? If the rules won't work without them, change the rules.

 

[Raven Crowking]

But that is an entirely predictable outcome: "if you do X, consult table Y" is predictable technology.

"If you do X, something random will happen; consult table Y" = predictable technology.

Welcome to Bizarro Land.



No doubt the wand of wonders and bag of beans, that invited the DM to make whole new random events, were equally predictable. And clearly, the effects of the potion miscability table were written in clear rules terminology so that, in each case, if one were to get the same result drinking the same potions, they would have exactly the same outcome....right?

That's just way too funny.