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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4587858" data-attributes="member: 5143">To me, we've always had "magic shops" in one way or another, even while playing 1st and 2nd Edition.  We've had DMs TRY to stop the buying and selling of magic items, but it always happens.It's a practicality issue for us.  In our hybrid 1e/2e game, we would come back from dungeons laden with 10 +1 weapons, 5 +2 weapons,  4 +3 weapons, and 2 +4 weapons, and another 15 suits of armor or so and about 15 miscellaneous magic items.  We'd distribute the 2 +4 weapons (since we almost all had +4 weapons already).  Then we'd find something to do with all the magic items we didn't want.  Originally our DM said they couldn't be bought and sold because there were no magic shops and no way to get rid of them.That caused us to have to go through a fairly long and tedious process of wandering around town(or the entire world), finding contacts, negotiating with them for the magic items we had and selling them.  It was boring for almost everyone except the party caller who was in charge of letting the DM know what the group was doing to avoid everyone speaking over each other.  It got to the point where we'd spend nearly 2 hours just trying to sell magic items we had extra and half the players had fallen asleep at the table.Until, we were finally able to convince our DM that, regardless of what it said in the books, we had run into a couple other adventuring parties in our travels, that there were enough of them to warrant having a registration process for Adventuring Companies(our game took place in Cormyr in FR), so if we'd come back from an adventure and would sell nearly 30 items each time, and there were 30 or 40 other adventuring companies out there doing the same thing we were, that there would be a HUGE market for magic items for at least 1 shop.  That's when our DM came up with Tim, the traveling merchant who would be in town almost whenever we needed him.  He had a nearly unlimited collection of magic items and wealth beyond imagining.  He had a magic...train, I believe that would take his entire inventory with him and teleported wherever he wanted to go.And it simplified the buying and selling process to a couple of minutes of negotiating and writing down what we had bought and sold.  It made the game more fun because we could spend more time playing the fun parts of the game and less time asleep waiting for the time when we could get back to playing.  Plus, it was cool to actually be able to find magic items we wanted.  Just gaining levels didn't feel like we were gaining that much.  It happened so rarely, anyways.  Instead, we looked forward to when we had saved up enough money to get a +5 weapon or a staff of the magi or whatever.Our D&D games almost always ended up being rather high magic.  We'd see hundreds of magic items in our career.  We once ended up with so much copper from a dragon hoard that we were unable to spend it, as our DM claimed it would destabilize the entire economy and make copper worthless.  So we melted it down and created a museum to our adventuring party out of copper.  We enchanted it with psionic crystals who had the personality of our psionicist and were capable of blasting anyone who tried to break into our museum.  Our wizard had a floating tower filled with magical wards.  The idea that magic should be rare was a rather alien concept to us.The current magic item system just seems like a logical extension to the way we've always played.  I don't think "the magic" went anywhere, but is instead the same as it has always been.</blockquote>

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