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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5293421" data-attributes="member: 82106">Here's the problem, eamon. You're utilizing an economic theory that works for a mass market economy with a HUGE (near infinite) amount more liquidity and availability than would exist in some medieval sort of PoL world economy. Considering "common" items: If you want a lesson in this type of economics go dig up some piece of jewelry you own and take it down to the local jeweler and ask them to give you a quote on it. I can virtually guarantee that they price they will quote is basically the metal salvage value. You'll be LUCKY if they offer you 20% of the retail price they would sell it for. This is a lot like the PoL common magic item economy where you sell for salvage (disenchant) value. The vendor has no guarantee that they can move the item at all. Its price is still very high (360 gp is easily 3-4 years wages for a peasant and still a pretty good chunk of change for even modestly well-off townspeople). The vendor really has little guarantee that he CAN sell the item in any reasonable amount of time. He's got to tie up a substantial amount of capital, a rare commodity in a PoL world, in order to carry the item. Under these conditions 500% markups are not really all that unusual. Additionally there is unlikely to be another vendor competing with him. Either you take his price, disenchant the item yourself, or sell it to some other arcane practitioner who really only wants it for the salvage value. The PCs could of course set up their own magic shop and maybe once in a while sell items at full value, meanwhile tying up THEIR capital and incurring overhead costs to boot. Presumably this business is unlikely to perform better than the existing vendor's business, given that logically he's making rational business decisions.When it comes to uncommon and rare items there is no logic of any kind. Neither of these classes of items can be constructed at all. Presumably uncommon items exist and the few people that have the money to tie up in them have most of what they need. It is doubtful that there is really much of a market in these items at all, but they do have high utility value. Chances are someone will pay a reasonable amount for them. PCs might well be able to get full value, again IF they are willing to shop around. The market here is something like that for rare collectible items in the real world, if you want to sell it NOW you take a pretty good hit. In fact with the Internet allowing easy connection of buyers and sellers this has changed somewhat, but my mother used to buy and sell rare collectible books back in the day. I seriously doubt she ever paid 50% of market value for them and usually far less.Rare items have no markup. They have no purchase price at all and the 100% is just some arbitrary number that the game provides as a sale price. Presumably this represents the PCs getting the best price that anyone in the local area can muster for this priceless item. If you COULD make such an item you can get the same price for it, which is the maximum amount of gold that is available in PoLand to be tied up in said item.Retail economics simply isn't germane.</blockquote>

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