How easy is it to SELL magic items in your game?

[Pyrex]

Shopping is boring. Sell-and-forget for 50% market value.

We also typically assume any item under the population-based GP limit is readily available for sale, and items up to twice that can be commissioned if you pay 50% up front.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

In my current game, I allow players to sell items for 50% market price, always bearing in mind the GP limit of the city they're visiting.

If they want to sell an item with properties that cannot be identified easily, they must pay for the identification. In my own experience, players look for arcane dealers when they want to sell loot.

Dealing with a weaponsmith, a +1 magic sword without any uniqueness to back up it would only be sold as a masterwork sword, while one able to demonstrate its powers, like a flaming or brilliant energy sword, would be sold by the price of a +1 sword with the same properties.

Cheers,

 

[Whisper72]

Well, it depends upon where the PC's are and what item they're selling.

In large cities, most 'common' magic items gor for 50%-70% of list price (depends a bit on my mood, the effort the players put in trying to sell the stuff, the type of city they are in (is it one well known to them or not) etc. etc.)

In smaller cities, it will depend upon which specific facilities are there (a church, resident magicions, adventuring guild chapter etc.)

Also, some items are just too weird to be sold easily.

Also, when there are very specific magical items (I try to approach as many magical items as 'unique artifacts', meaning even a simple +1 sword may be the sword of Sir Whackamamy) at play, then original owners, family of owners etc. may claim the items as lost heirlooms, and although compensation for retrieving such an item may be in order, this may be more like 10-20% of list price.

Also, in many of my more deadly campaigns most players have a main PC and several cohorts / squires / apprentices / red shirts in tow, who get excess loot divvied out to them to make them more effective and bind them to the PC's.

Since buying magical items is practically impossible in most of my campaigns and the production process so time consuming and expensive, pretty much the only way that PC's can get magical stuff is by adventuring and looting it or getting stuff as rewards.
Also, a lot of cash is not a prime requisite (mostly used to buy magical items as far as I can discern on these boards) for my players to get the items they wat (they mainly use it as a way to make life easy and get mundane stuff, hire mercenaries, bribe people, raise armies and other such nonsense...)

 

[Kae'Yoss]

If you think owning a shop in a magical metropolis means you get to keep full price on what you sell... well, there are some guilds who would like to chat with you about that. Possibly in Cant.

Fine. Let them come and cant at me. I'll reply in sign language. And I'll be shouting

So I'm coming to town with the loot of a recently deceased dragon (courtesy of yours truly and another couple of psychotic mass murderers that call themselves adventurers), intending to sell the stuff, and a couple of wimps with daggers shows up to innuendo me? I've stalked devils in the nine hells, I wrestled down giants and traded deadly magic with liches. I'll have those little creeps for breakfast.

 

[VirgilCaine]

In the games I run, if you're in a large enough city (as given by the DMG town gold limit guidelines) you say "I'm selling magic items X, Y, and Z", and you exchange the magic items for gold equal to 50% of their price. (I abstract all buying and selling, on the principle that shopping is boring.)

Same here. Selling is boring. My PCs haven't gotten high enough level to have this problem and even then, they could use continent-wide Guild or church connections to spread the word they wanted to sell an item.
The Guild would probably buy it and be able to sell it to someone, somewhere. Same for the churches--all the non-evil churches are tied closer together in my campaign than most.

 

[Storyteller01]

FInding a buyer isn't a problem. Getting the price you want is.

Basic items will sell at a base rate of ([1d6 x 10] + 20)%, or 30% to 80% of it's base value. You can attempt to haggle from there (we use the black market rules from Spycraft's arms and equipment guide), but you risk scrubbing the deal completely. With unique or powerful items (including non-mechanikal, non-consumable magic items), I set the base price and DC's for haggling.

One player has noble and business connections. He likes using his Diplomacy and Sense Motive to get the best deals. Everyone else has become reliant on him just for that ability alone (the sorcerer levels have nothing to do with it, I'm sure ). Helps cement his position as decision maker/leader of the group. Especially since I'm using the IK magic item rules (batteries get expensive )...

 

[Arkham]

Easy as pie.
The PCs are based out of Waterdeep. Every magic item shop is a fortress, since even the smallest permanent items cost as much as most cottages. So the most logical magic item market would be the wizard's school/arcanist's guild. And since seeing the 'Tap Item' feat in the netbook of feats, the magic item market suddenly all made sense.
TAP ITEM [Item Creation]
You may draw upon the power of other magic items to create new items
Prerequisite: One or more of the following: Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Craft Rod, Craft Wondrous Item, Forge Ring
Benefit: When creating a new magic item using one of the prerequisite feats, you may draw up to half of the XP cost from another, existing item of the same type. The item from which the energy is taken is destroyed in the process. The item tapped cannot be cursed, and this feat has no effect on minor or major artifacts. The amount of XP that can be drawn from any item is equal to half of the XP that would be necessary to create that item. If an item has charges, its original XP value is reduced by the fraction of charges used.
TAP ITEM Copyright 2000, Michael J. Kletch

Highly skilled artificers can buy items, and if they aren't likely to sell, just destroy them to power the construction of other items.

 

[howandwhy99]

double post

 

[howandwhy99]

My world doesn't BUY or SELL magic items. The gold piece values are strictly DM information and not for Players. We do have a lot of TRADE though. 99+% of the population simply doesn't have the ability to detect magic. In this way it's like a Paladin's detect evil ability. Just because a PC can tell something is evil or magical, doesn't mean anyone else will necessarily believe them. Of course, this works in their favor when others don't quite know what they are wielding.

For speed of play, we use Appraise and Bluff checks to affect final sales. Magic items can be sold for 1/2 cost, per the book rules, for equivalent materials that the receiving party has on hand. Some folks take debts or credits as well, but that depends upon a lot more than cold, hard gold.

 

[Wolfwood2]

My world doesn't BUY or SELL magic items. The gold piece values are strictly DM information and not for Players. We do have a lot of TRADE though. 99+% of the population simply doesn't have the ability to detect magic. In this way it's like a Paladin's detect evil ability. Just because a PC can tell something is evil or magical, doesn't mean anyone else will necessarily believe them. Of course, this works in their favor when others don't quite know what they are wielding.

For speed of play, we use Appraise and Bluff checks to affect final sales. Magic items can be sold for 1/2 cost, per the book rules, for equivalent materials that the receiving party has on hand. Some folks take debts or credits as well, but that depends upon a lot more than cold, hard gold.

How much of this do you actually roleplay out and how much do you just narrate?

I think a distinction should be made in this thread between "game world time" and "table time". Selling magical items might be game world time intensive, requiring weeks of searching for the right buyer, yet not that table time intensive because the DM can just say, "Okay, you spend a couple of weeks selling the loot."

Contrariwise, nipping down to the local magic shop and selling your goods could take a lot of table time if the DM makes you roleplay out the whole process.

To those of you who do table time intensive selling, how do you deal with the fact that every minute the playes spend doing that is time they can't spend moving minatures around to hack evil beasties apart?