Does your campaign have magic shops?

[cignus_pfaccari]

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.

Ooo...yes, those are cool. I ran into one of those (a bookstore, but the principle is the same) in a campaign a few years ago and then kept my eye out for the rest of the game for another to pop up so I could buy it out completely.

Brad

 

[Al]

In other words, you have the fixer/dealer sort of magic "shop". He may even have a storefront with minor stuff on display, but it's entirely possible he sits in a particular inn from, say, noon to 4 PM each day, so people can find him and place orders or list items for sale.

In my analysis, I'd go one further. There is no reason why a group of (particularly low-level) wizards would not act as suppliers to stock a permanent magic shop. Each of them could specialise in a particular niche good (say, +1 weapons) and when the shop's inventory of that item runs low, it would place an order with that wizard for another. The middleman would make a profit on the goods acting as the middleman, but his economies of scale and professionalised "marketing" and reliability would guarantee a greater, and more steady, rate of return for the crafting casters than simply having a small store in their house, not to mention that it would liberate them from hanging around ad infinitum until someone wanted to buy. It's a win-win-win situation: the crafter is guaranteed a reliable, predictable and non-time-intensive demand, the magic-item "consumer" is guaranteed a ready source of supply and ease of availability, and the middleman takes a cut of the profit to guarantee him a decent wage.

Edit: This is not, of course, a fundamental disagreement, but just a question of degree, and as a counter-point to the above, it is indeed possible for a scheme as you envisage happening in smaller settlements.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

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

Urbis has several of those...

(Of course, Urbis also has some rather... industrial methods of producing magic items...)

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Of course it depends on campaing settings, but magical items should be not be available like contemporary technology where everyone walks around with a mobile phone, laptop...etc.

Why not? As long as the setting is fun and has worked out all the implications consistently?

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Back a few pages, AI did a break down of the various rules to show the availability of magic items. Thank you for that as it seems like something I'd do. I'll probalby go back and read it again for designing my world. It falls flat in one main instance however, that it seems to have more thought put into it than the designers of the game ever did. My appologies to any game designers here, but when such examination is put to the D&D rules for anythign other than combat, it breaks down pretty quickly and can even become self-contradictory. Economics in case point. Price of magic items especially. Do a little figureing or look at real world examples of the wealth that nobles had at the time and it becomes pretty obvious that such nobles could purchase just about any magic item they wanted (especially in a gold economy where such solvent currency isn't in short supply). This would most likely cause a much greater demand for such things than could be supplied and thus drive up the market price to more than double cost price as in the book. Blah. Blah. Blah. (If anybody really wants to hear more I could start a thread on fantasy world economics.)

By all means, do that - I'm highly interested in the topic, as I'm trying to work out a consistent economy for Urbis...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

And which class NEEDS magic items to be effective?

The artificer.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

These assertions that capitalist dogma should hold true in fantasy worlds are quite bizarre.

Humans had some sort of market economy for most of recorded history, however. I mean, that's why coins were minted, right? So it shouldn't be so surprising if someone tries to make a buck from magic items...

 

[Ibram]

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.

its easier to smoke some pesant with a scorching ray then spend time and XP making a chump +1 dagger. Some may call that evil, but you have bent the forces of the cosmos to your will and spoken with daemons that were ancient when the stars were young!

my games usualy have a strong Howard/Lovecraft feel, and as such the idea of a maigc-mart (%5 all +2 Items! Today Only) doesnt fit with the atmosphere.

Now that does not hold true for a General Issue D&D game, but I never claimed to be running one.

And if some other DM is looking to run a game where magic is a bit more rare then perhapse what I have written previously will help them.

 

[Faraer]

The sense of Leiber's "Bazaar of the Bizarre" is precisely that a magic shop is an amusing, paradoxical, and absurd idea -- similarly to how Lankhmar's thieves' guild ("even the thieves have a guild!") was not meant to become a trope. His Bazaar works for me, as Gygax's Odd Alley/Weird Way does and Sigil does not, because it's a strange, inconsistent place, difficult and an adventure to find.

What we have here, layzengemmen, is a sensibility gap.

 

[Storm Raven]

its easier to smoke some pesant with a scorching ray then spend time and XP making a chump +1 dagger. Some may call that evil, but you have bent the forces of the cosmos to your will and spoken with daemons that were ancient when the stars were young!

Yes, in many cases, evil is easier than good. Which doesn't make it any less evil. And doesn't mean that your actions are any more commendable. Just because I can kill you and take your stuff doesn't mean I should, or even that most people would. Even wizards.

Maybe you can excuse the idea of wizards being near universally evil, and call it "realistic", but most can't.

(Besides, I wouldn't usually call the ability to cast detect magic and summon monster I "bending the forces of the cosmos to your will", I'd call it party tricks. Low level casters can make items too, and they are unlikely to have the massive ego you ascribe to all wizards, and clerics, druids, sorcerers, and bards).

my games usualy have a strong Howard/Lovecraft feel, and as such the idea of a maigc-mart (%5 all +2 Items! Today Only) doesnt fit with the atmosphere.

If your game includes PC spellcasters, then you don't have a strong Howard/Lovecraft feel. You have an arbitrary feel.