Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 2903036" data-attributes="member: 29746">I voted "both," but in fact I do it the way frank does it- PCs in my game depend heavily on social skills (Gather Information and Diplomacy in particular) to find and acquire any desired items. There are never shops, per se, for anything except minor items such as potions and scrolls, though sometimes such a shop will have a random small selection of other items for sale. There are also occasional "theme" shops which sell more, but those are in and of themselves quite rare.As an example of the latter, there's a shop PCs found in Union (and have since been to several times) called "Stokel's Stones" that sells crystal items, both psionic and not. Very rarely do they have magic items, and when they do they're only things like Gems of Seeing or Staves of Earth and Stone, but most of the stock is mundane crystal art objects and psionic powerstones. They also carry dorjes sometimes and other crystalline psionic items more frequently than any kind of magic, but it's always random on any given visit. And stones for powers that would be popular- often, but not always, matching the powers my players want to get stones for in the first place- tend to sell out fast and are therefore not often present, or priced much higher than market value (and frequently both). Examples of the latter type include high-level information-gathering powers like Hypercognition (a perrennial favorite) and Metafaculty, or travel powers like Gate.Generally, my players know that to find any specific item in any city, no matter how large, they'll have to do some legwork Gathering Information to find one for sale- and as with the stones I mentioned above, popular items or ones considered especially valuable will often be marked up from market value for the start of negotiations if they're for sale at all. "+5 books" , for instance, are especially hard to come by, though not impossible most of the time. Custom items, or weapons/armor with a specific set of special abilities, are almost never for sale in any case, and typically must be custom-crafted by a PC or somebody known to them. This comes back to bite them less often now at Epic levels than it did earlier, because by now they've had time to acquire most of the abilities they'd want anyway, but even so the party's item crafter character (who has specialized his character in it even from the lowest levels- deliberately aiming himself at a homebrew prestige class I made for it) has a full plate of stuff he wants or needs to make, and never seems to find the time to actually do it.All in all, it seems to work. <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>

Verification