Ximenes088 said:
You write as if the merchant was certain to find a buyer for the item at 5,000 gold and that finding this buyer was free.
This makes no sense to me. I'm not sure what you mean but my calculations made no assumptions about finding a buyer for an item for free.
Ximenes088 said:
Furthermore, you presume that the merchant runs no risk of theft, swindling, or confiscation by kings. I think you presuming too much for a default D&D world.
But I'm not assuming that at all. I'm not saying that a merchant has to buy a magic item for the 10,000 gp that it's worth and turn around and sell if for 10,000 gp. In fact this statement seems to so willfully ignore a lot of what I've said on this issue that I don't really know where to start.
Ximenes088 said:
What do you suppose that merchant's profit margin is on iron pots and pans? On bolts of good linen? Dyes? Medicines? Tools? Spices? If he's anything like a medieval merchant, you can very well bet he's getting 4:1 profit before the nobles and his own expenses take their cut.
I wouldn't bet that at all. In fact, barring any actual information to support this I can't distinguish this from a person who's just randomly making up numbers. the conditions under which a lot of these items were traded, like monopolies on spices or local shortages or whatever, need to be considered. I also don't think that the relationship between merchants and nobles in terms of taxes and authority and such is uniform across Europe for the time period. That your statements here don't take these complexities into account leaves me with the strong impression that you're just making this up off the top of your head.
In fact, in terms of asking me what a merchants profits would be, I would be inclined to work backwards from their standard of living. Say, just picking a number out of the air (and the DMG could provide specifics), that a merchant lives on 200 gp/month. That completely makes no sense if you're suggesting that the merchant can regularly make transactions that net him 8,000 gp profit. You could make the case if you propose that the profession of "magic item merchant" is so prohibitive, and so resource-intensive that such merchants are the princes among princes of the merchant class. Proposing that finding a buyer for a +1 sword is so difficult that only the very best can do it. So far as I've seen though, no one on your side of the argument has bothered to consider these factors in any sort of detail.
Ximenes088 said:
So why in the world is he going to take the 2,000 gp he can turn into 8,000 gp via sundries, tools, and low-danger supplies and spend it and 3,000 more buying a magic sword that he will at best get a 2:1 gross on?
Why indeed. But your statement here is based on an otherwise unsupported assertion that 4:1 is historical or reasonable for iron goods. And that's *not* the same thing as saying that the price of iron from point of purchase to it's final sale price doesn't undergo a 4:1 increase - but such a thing is not really relevant to the profits of a single merchant and single transaction.
Again - I know a lot of people on this board fancy themselves as historians to some degree - so feel free to support these assertions with an actual analogy.
Ximenes088 said:
PCs don't just have to give the merchant a profit, they have to give him a bigger profit than he'd get on other goods for the same outlay. And it's a passing incompetent merchant who can't do better than 2:1 before subtracting overhead.
This makes an (IMO unwarranted) assumption that the merchant in question has steady access to trading goods for the same outlay. I also think that the transportation/storage/etc. costs of 8,000 gp worth of grain would far exceed that of a 10,000 gp magic item. And I realize that you could be sitting on a mountain of statistical information and actual facts upon which your basing your guidelines for an "incompetent merchant", but I can't tell.