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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Forrester" data-source="post: 251959" data-attributes="member: 1279">As I said in the other post, only the highest level merchants will be able to easily defend against Charms, Suggestion, Gaseous Form, Dimension Door, Teleportation, or high-level thugs just tracking him down and beating the crap out of him. And please note how many of those spells are low level. Charm Person is a lousy 1st level spell, and one successful casting can completely ruin a merchant's day. Suggestion is a 2nd level bard spell. Gaseous Form is incredibly good for theft, and it's a lousy 3rd level spell. A Large Town (2,000-5,000) sells items up to 3,000gp in value. According to the DMG, just about ANYTHING that's under 3000gp in value can be found in a Large Town, which is of course ridiculous.  A Small City (5,000-12,000) sells items up to 12,000gp in value. Now, let's look at the DMG recommended highest-level-NPCs for settlements of those sizes.Large Towns: d8+3 for fighters, d4+3 for wizards, d8+3 for rogues, d6+3 for clerics.  Small Cities: d8+6 for fighters, d4+6 for wizards, d8+6 for rogues, d6+6 for clerics. I don't know about you, but this seems awfully damn low to me. If I'm a party of evil 10th level adventurers, walking in to the nearest Large Town, killing all the higher-ups, and taking the tens of thousands of gp worth of magic seems to me to be one HELL of a deal. And if I'm a party of 15th level adventurers, walking into the town and butting heads with the (max) 12th level wizard, and 14th level fighter who is probably mayor/king/lead general, so I can get out with a hundred or two hundred thousand gold worth of equipment seems to me to be, again, one HELL of a deal.  Something is very, very wrong here. To even have a prayer, a Magic Shoppe owner in a Large Town or Small City would have to employ the very, very highest level folks that are supposedly around. Not realistic. That's why I use the "broker"/middleman system in my game. You want something, talk to the guy who teleports into town every month and order something. He'll be back next month with it . . . and charge one helluva commission. Ditto if you plan on selling stuff. Well, I haven't actually used it *yet*. The PCs haven't gotten to a city yet. They've been fighting their way through the wilderness without a friend in sight. But they're about to . . . I'll let you know how it goes <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.</blockquote>

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