Excerpt: Economies [merged]

[hong]

Bull. The PCs, of course, have the ability to flip the merchant off. If you are in an illiquid market, a very low offer will result in no deals getting done.

Not the merchant's problem, if you decide you want to find a buyer yourself.

 

[Andor]

There seems to be a consensus that the correct model for evaluating Magic Item sales is the antiquities market, with Faberge Eggs cited as a particularly close parallel.

Having just checked Sotheby's website I find that they charge a commision on a sliding scale starting at 25% and moving down as the price of the item increases.

Their profit on the sale of a Faberge Egg would be 12%, not 700%.

 

[hong]

There seems to be a consensus that the correct model for evaluating Magic Item sales is the antiquities market, with Faberge Eggs cited as a particularly close parallel.

Having just checked Sotheby's website I find that they charge a commision on a sliding scale starting at 25% and moving down as the price of the item increases.

Their profit on the sale of a Faberge Egg would be 12%, not 700%.

Sotheby's is not the merchant you're looking for.

 

[kilpatds]

1. As was suggested much earlier, you can decrease the amount of treasure in the future so that the increase in gold gained is factored into the PCs' treasure.

Do we have enough information to do the math? If I let my players sell magic items for 50%, as a campaign wide house rule, by how many levels should I reduce the parcels?

A level 5 set of parcels has one magic item of each level from 9 to 6, and enough cash to buy 2 level 5 items.
That's 12000 gold worth of magic items, so I'd be giving the group an extra 3,600 gp (6000 - 2400), which is an two additional level 6 items. So it sounds to me like I should reduce the treasure given by a level or two.

That sound about right?

 

[Wolfwood2]

I agree with the sentiment from earlier in the thread that 20% is pawn shop prices. If your PC has a magic item that he wants to turn into cash right now, then he can take the item into a merchant and walk out again in 15 minutes with 20% cash value. No waiting, no dickering.

Cash today has a certain value all its own.

 

[AZRogue]

Do we have enough information to do the math? If I let my players sell magic items for 50%, as a campaign wide house rule, by how many levels should I reduce the parcels?

A level 5 set of parcels has one magic item of each level from 9 to 6, and enough cash to buy 2 level 5 items.
That's 12000 gold worth of magic items, so I'd be giving the group an extra 3,600 gp (6000 - 2400), which is an two additional level 6 items. So it sounds to me like I should reduce the treasure given by a level or two.

That sound about right?

There are probably several ways to do it and I'm not as good with numbers as some people around here. I was just implying down and dirty adjustment as in the difference between what the PCs got and what they should have got. Write that down and subtract, later, from a random parcel.

 

[dimonic]

This is sort of how I look at it. Sure we can try to rationalize reasons for such a huge discrepancy and they may be totally valid. But it is a game and when you penalize the selling of items to such a large degree, its basically just saying people do not sell magic items. And if that is what you want to say, just say it, don't come up with rules that amount to a flogging for trying to do the act.

Try buying a wedding ring (or any other jewelry) and then selling it. Anyone who has ever done this will recognize immediately that when you try to sell a used luxury good (as an individual without a store-front or clientelle), you are lucky to get 1/5 of the value. Now make the ring a rare, fancy ring and try to sell it to a dealer. You will get even less of its supposed value.

Now as for 1/5 being a flogging (which by the way is a pun - when you flog something in Brit slang, you are selling it), it is still enough to be meaningful although punitive. The treasures obtained should not be full of useless +1 javelins and nunchuks. But, if you do come by some items that are useless to you, at least you can get some value for them, although in truth, selling items is basically discouraged - as is selling your used luxury goods here in the modern world.

 

[gizmo33]

I'm astonished at the number of people in this thread who believe that any game world should have exactly the same market conditions and freedom of buying and selling that they enjoy in (a presumably) modern western technologically advanced country.

Since when does anything have to be *exact* in order for one to legitimately question the 500% markup situation? And since when do DnD characters in the average campaign have any of the social limitations of real life history? I can arm myself in platemail and sword, go out and kill a bunch of monsters in a cave, and trudge back to town covered in blood with a big sack of coins and gems on my back - but then you're going to question the freedom of buying thing? Doesn't it seem a little disjointed?

The whole thing strikes me as a meta-game rationalization for wanting to keep PCs from making money off of their magic items. It would help if the historians on this thread would make an argument based on an appropriate analogy - unfortunately the bulk of trade prices that I've ever seen have been based on local commodities or monopolies where the analogies would be hard to defend. As best as I can tell, the indignation that the "historians" on this thread are expressing is based on an over-generalization of the "nasty, brutish, and short" standard opinions about the *European* Medieval period. I think that Islamic social history from the period would be a more accurate fit for the technology, literacy, social structures, etc. of a typical DnD game.

There seems to be plenty of indication that literate traders and "agriculturalists" (ie. overseers/bailiffs of manors) knew what their goods were worth - but somehow adventurers who can read and write are clueless? Or somehow the victims of some weird solidarity amongst traders (since the DM plays all NPCs) who insist on making 8,000 gp profit on a 10,000 gp item but will turn up their noses at 5,000 gp?

But please explain more this thing about how these arguments get translated into your minds as "he wants DnD to work like the modern period". AFAICT this is not based on very informative statements about *either* the Medieval or modern periods.

 

[Ximenes088]

There seems to be plenty of indication that literate traders and "agriculturalists" (ie. overseers/bailiffs of manors) knew what their goods were worth - but somehow adventurers who can read and write are clueless? Or somehow the victims of some weird solidarity amongst traders (since the DM plays all NPCs) who insist on making 8,000 gp profit on a 10,000 gp item but will turn up their noses at 5,000 gp?

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. 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.

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. 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?

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.

 

[gizmo33]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.