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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 1982237" data-attributes="member: 1645">Does you game world have a modern, monetary, free-market economy?  Is someone enforcing the Rule of Law strongly enough that you can offer up 50,000 gold pieces for a +5 sword and expect the trade to go through?  Or do you have to enforce the contract yourself (as on a black market)?Fusangite had a few good points to make in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=1981808" target="_blank">Players Whining that they Should be able to Buy Magic Items</a>: Unless you're playing D&D in some kind of weird Eberron, Faerun or Planescape kind of world where everybody is a modern liberal democrat and magic oozes out of everybody's pores, I'm guessing that the campaign world is the good old fashioned pseudo-medieval D&D world. If that's the case, the most important thing to realize is that in the pre-modern world, there aren't shops in the modern sense of the idea; anything expensive or worthwhile was commissioned. It wasn't part of the inventory. In a medieval-style city, you have skilled tradespeople who make things; they might have one or two display items in their shop or booth to show the quality of their workmanship but generally, there will be no inventory to speak of. Any item of quality will have to be commissioned. And even if you somehow live in a world where there are modern-style stores with inventories, how many of them are going to have an inventory exceeding 1000gp? Very few if their owners have any economic sense at all. Who is going to use up xp to create items that sit on a shelf, depriving their creator of xp he could be using to level or brew potions or whatever? Who, furthermore, is going to run a shop with thousands or tens of thousands of gp worth of stuff that could be stolen? Nobody with an Int or Wis high enough to create the stuff! Any rational actor would wait to make a magic item until such time as there was a potential buyer for it. More: In my model, there is no presumption that: (a) the characters have access to an NPC who can make the item (b) the characters are deemed worthy by the NPC to have the item made for them (c) the NPC is inclined at the time the characters want the item to part with the xp necessary to create it Let me express what I mean in terms of silk: (a.i) the characters might not be in a place that is receiving silk imports (a.ii) there might not be anyone in the characters' region capable of actually working with silk (b.i) the characters might find a merchant with silk who is saving up his limited supply for when a noblewoman or someone else capable of showing off his product in the right circles feels inclined to purchase it (b.ii) the characters might find a merchant who is a member of a guild that only allows the sale of aristocratic clothes to aristocrats and deems it unlawful to sell aristocratic clothes to people of no rank (c) the tailor might be keeping this bolt of silk on display in his booth in order to attract future customers; he might therefore decide that he will become just another tailor of he gives up his one bolt of silk and becomes just like all the other tailors in town So, the fact that there exists a silk market in the world does not automatically mean that the PCs can go out and buy themselves silk outfits. The ability of characters to purchase magic items is conditioned by at least three factors: (a) the existence of the item (b) the availability of the item (c) the values of the individual capable of obtaining the item for the characters Or better still, how about children? Children are much more abundant than silk. The fact that it is undeniably true that people are selling children in this world does not make it true that the purchase of children is an opportunity available to everyone.</blockquote>

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