Does your campaign have magic shops?

[Storm Raven]

Some wizards pay for food with the tried and true methiod: "Not setting you on fire." This methiod can also help with having a roof over ones head and having servants as most people consider not being set on fire as a good thing.

So, most wizards live by extortion. Which, under the standard D&D rules, would make them evil. Are all wizards in your campaign world evil? If so, then you should realize that your version of a fantasy world is seriously at odds with the norm, and idiosyncratic observations about the nature of using magic items as commodities drawn from that campaign don't have a lot to offer most other DMs.

 

[Storm Raven]

I was watching 'Dinotopia' (the series) on TV this morning - that is a fantasy world in which the profit-motive and the pursuit of money has been removed

Yes, and that is one of the many things that move Dinotpoia from being a fantasy world to being an unbelievable one.

 

[Storm Raven]

Show me a D&D city with a population of several million, and yeah, I might accept your argument.

So, you are now arguing that only people who live in cities of several million buy Lear Jets and Bentleys. I'm sorry to say that I have news for you on that score.

Although I'll also point out that in most cases, even those guys don't have "Lear Jets R 'Us" shops, or what have you. Brands like Lambourghini and whatnot; actually do most of their sales at big-time auto shows Black Tie dinners, not because Mr. Lambourghini is manning a shop out in Podunk, Alaska -- the equivalent to where most D&D adventures seem to take place

Yes, they sell Lear Jets and Lambourghinis in venues where they are likely to find interested buyers who have enough cash to buy their wares. If most interested buyers were located in Podunk Alaska, the lear Jet brokers would be there too. And the real point of the argument is that even though things like Lear Jets and Bentleys are very expensive, people still buy and sell them. People still buy and sell Van Gogh paintings and Shakespeare Folios, things that are at least as rare and valuable as any standard magic item found in the DMG would be in most campaign worlds. If such items exist, people will find a way to trade them. It is inevitable.

 

[Storm Raven]

You can't compare a Ring of Protection +5 to a private jet. Just because the DMG has prices for them (which are used to gage costs in creation and addition of abilities) does not mean such items are not effectively priceless.

But why is it "priceless". Priceless means that something is too rare or valuable to ever sell. But that is patently not the case with most DMG magic items. They may be very expensive, but the fact is that most adventurers in a standard campaign will, over the course of their career, accumulate a significant amount of loot that they have no use for, that they would simply like to convert into cash, and hence would be more than willing to sell those istems. Are we to assume that the PC adventuring party is entirely unique in this regard?

Given the ability of even low level spell casters to create these items, and potentially reap tremendous rewards from doing so (there are few ways to make as much money in as little time as by crafting magic items), are we to assume that none go into business to make themselves wealthy? Certainly it would be a dangerous profession, but so is arms dealing, and we have plenty of real world examples of people willing to do that. So is adventuring, and we have plenty of in-game examples of people willing to do that.

In the history of the world, people have bought and sold just about everything. People in midaevil Europe were willing to buy and sell pieces of the true cross, bones of the Saints (and even bones of Christ), and various other relics that were, to the faithful, the marks of the divine. The Catholic Church sold remittances of sin. People have been willing to buy and sell things they believed to be that holy, and you think that out of some sense of "wonder" people would not buy and sell magic items?

 

[Storm Raven]

Yes, but you didn't see "Ye Olde Noble Title, Army and Estate Shoppe" on any random city street.

Yes, they conveniently kept the titles and estates dealers in very public places where anyone with enough money could get to them. The individuals selling them were usually called things like "King", "Duke", or "Baron" (or whatever the translated title was in the local venacular). It was quite convenient actually.

Armies were usually for sale just about everywhere, especially in southern and central Europe.

 

[Storm Raven]

But we're not talking about jets, cars or titles. We're talking about magical items, which are meant to be wonderous and rare, but they arn't because they are being sold dime a dozen in shops across your game world.

Why are they meant to be wonderous and rare? It a wand of detect magic truly deserving of being "wonderous and rare"? It emulates something a 1st level caster (of almost any spell casting class) can do on a daily basis.

Is a suit of +1 chain mail really "wonderous and rare"? It offers slightly better protection than normal chain mail, but not more than banded mail. Is that really rare and wonderous?

Quite frankly, once you allow PC spell casters in your game you've eliminated the "rare and wonderous" nature of magic, and made it into a standard resource. Trying to come up with arbitrary rules that fly in the face of reason about how no one will buy or sell magic because it is "wonderous" just destroys the versimilitude of a campaign setting. Magic items are valuable. People with money like to buy valuable things. People without money like to sell valuable things.

Is a magic item more valuable than an estate in your campaign? If so, "I'd like to trade my +1 sword for your barony and retire. Adventuring is dangerous and nasty, I'd like to be wealthy instead." Given such obvious motivations to sell magic items, claiming that there is no market for them just makes no sense.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Taken together, these rules hurt more than helped (IMO) because they shifted player focus away from, “What can I find while exploring?” to “What can I buy when we get back?” Worse, it killed any sense of discovery. What’s the point in feeling awe over finding a never-before-seen-item –particularly a very old and historied item, when a player could just as easily look it up in a book, tally the cost for all of its abilities, have his character “discover” a need for it in game, then promptly go shopping to buy a newer version of the item with the same abilities.

This is why artifacts exist, IMHO. If the reason you're going down into the dungeon is for magical trinkets alone, you can find things more powerful than almost anyone alive today could concievably make in certain areas, but it seems a bit nonsensical to have every ruin loaded with magical items, only for them to dissappear when you get back to town. Take a gold rush as an analogue -- when a town springs up near a gold mine, they start getting clientelle with gold teeth, people with gold trinkets, lots of folks with gold coin. When a town springs up near a D&D ruin, they start getting people with magic weapons, magic items, magic rings, and other stuff found in there. Normal magic items don't need that kind of history, and for my games, it's kind of a waste of time to put it in there, because my PC's aren't interested in it and unless it's somehow integral to the plot, they won't be. The history is: "A wizard did it," and that's pretty much all that's relevant to them.

That's not to say that they don't have *any* history. But every sword tells a tale if you know how to look at it right, and magic swords are no different. The difference between a Rokugani magic katana and a Barbarian Empire's magic bastard sword is huge. But stat-wise, they're identical, and I think that this is a fantastic advantage. Not every +1 blade was used in an epic battle of bumblescum. That's what the +5 blades are for, that's what the artifacts are for. THOSE get famous. A magic dagger exists anywhere there are wizards to craft it, and going by the standard D&D rules, there are wizards to craft it in pretty much any decently-sized town. True, Podunk won't have it, but Villageville might, and certainly Town City will.

You can definately go for a different feel if you like, but by the book, that's how things are, and there's nothing wrong with things being that way. You don't loose anything. It's just that you shift the focus. I don't want to have my PC's worry about analyzing every shiney piece of +1 trinket they come accross. But I want them to definately react more cautiously when coming accross a Deck of Many Things, for instance. But while that +1 trinket was probably made by some wizard under the employ of a king in a long-ago world that is barely relevant today, that Deck of Many Things was known to be in the possession of the King of the World, who mysteriously disappeared one night...

I think the game looses a lot more, in my opinion, by having every piece of magic be exceedingly rare and exotic. It turns my job as a DM into being an onerous process of devising complex histories and turns my player's jobs as treasure-seekers to nervous archeologists. My PC's aren't interested in playing the detailed minutiae [sic] of excavation. They're interested in story, in plot, in developing characters and adventuring in the world. I can toss in the history of the item in the description of it if I think it'll help, but my games are way too fast-paced to deal with the largely-unimportant details of every peice of magic. Half an hour that I spend carefully placing a +1 doodad of thingy is half an hour I don't spend developing plot, motivation, statting up NPC's, figuring out what happens in the world, and working on what happens next.

I understand that that's not everyone's cup o' tea, or everyone's position, but the game looses *nothing* from having a baseline of common items, because it is still a continuum....you can have 200,000 +1 deeliebobs in your trunk out back, but that +5 omega toilet scrubber is still going to be important, especially if it has powers above and beyond what most people have seen. And that's how the default game works it -- as a continuum. On one side, cheap potions, on the other, major wonderous items. You don't have to make potions or minor items rare to preserve the magical feeling of the more powerful and exotic items at all. It's not an all-or-nothing, it's not a slippery slope.

You can do it the other way, too, but I don't usually like to worry a lot about the fabric and behaviour of magic in my games, just like I don't like to worry about supply of steel or folds in a masterwork bastard sword any more than in a general sense. I come up with a theory, stick to it, and run with it. Don't need nuffin' else.

 

[Terwox]

I made this thread because people talk a lot about magic item shops, and how they're silly and how they're not.
Obviously, this is a large issue. Heh.
Regardless -- take a step back from your vantage point for a second, and simply look at the results.
I know that five of you or so said that it didn't quite fit your style of gaming, or that you did something in-between, or couldn't classify your campaign. That's cool. A lot of people could, check it out -- this is how the average enworld poll answerer answers.
Looks like the majority of people use shops. I think both campaign styles are very fun, especially depending on your players. Gotta go with Rel quoting Robin Laws on this one... whatever fits your group.
Same intent as the spiked chain poll -- people say lots of stuff, but what rules and design are people actually using? well, thanks everyone, yepyep.

 

[Henry]

As for items in a default D&D campaign being so rare as being priceless, I could understand if there was only THE ring of protection, not the +1, +2, +3, +4, and +5 varieties, but because there is (obviously) more than one of them in default D&D, then there will be sale of them. Whether we're talking about Van Goghs or Learjets, the same principle holds true, and has for all of human experience. Even the Sistine Chapel would be for sale, if you found the appropriate temporal owner (who would that be, BTW, the Pope, the College of Cardinals, or the sovereign nation of Italy?) and offered sufficient funds.

As I said before, there's a long way between there being magic brokers or shops, and magic being ridiculously cheap. As Dragonlancer said, "magic shouldn't be like cell phones today", but basically, in a default D&D game, they're more like professional tools, like a lineman's buttset, or a digital channel testing rig. They're expensive, but affordable to those who have the credentials and resources. And it STILL doesn't mean every guard has a magic sword in the average campaign.

 

[BOZ]

one idea i like is the magic shop that disappears and teleports to a new location. you can shop there once, but if you want to go there again you have to find it.