D&D 5E If you aren't buying magic items, where will you spend your gold?

[Lerysh]

Not that this is the focus of this thread, but I can think of lots of reasons that magic item shops aren't realistic.


- Lack of information/communication. You inherited a longsword +1 from your dad, but how do you get it to someone who wants it? How do you get its worth? There's no ebay, the roads are dangerous, and chances are you live in a small village. Matching buyers with sellers becomes a huge stumbling block, in the same way that before ebay it was almost impossible to find quirky rare old items that you wanted to buy.


- Slow turnover. A shop keeper needs a relatively fast item turnover to make money, or needs to pad her margins by a large amount to compensate for slow turnover. Unless you're in a huge city or a place rife with adventurers and easy money, like a boom town, items are going to sit for a long time until they're sold.


- No immediate payoff. No shop owner wants to pay lots of gold up front, then hope an item will sell. A more likely approach are magic item brokers, people who match up buyers and sellers and take a commission.


- Theft. Open up a magic item shop, and you have every thief and poor adventurer panting at your locked-up door. That means you need to pay for security, and GOOD security. Insurance doesn't exist.


Huh. This litany has convinced me to add magic item brokers to my big cities, sly people in the know who match up their customers. No inventory problems, no theft problems, and it solves the problem of matching buyer and seller. Also, it'll take a day to a month to get any given item once it's ordered. Works for me.

Every single one of those concerns is faced by Pawn Shops the world over and yet they somehow manage to stay open and make money. You think a curio shop doesn't have a few +1 weapons lying around (that they know how to identify) inherited by children of adventurers who just want to be Inn owners? Of course they do. Buy low (say 50% market rate as suggested by the PHB), sell high. Yes some capital is tied up in inventory, but that doesn't stop the shop from making money.

Magic Items by consignment fee still need somewhere to be displayed, or someone to make the deal. The shops exist. To remove them from existance to try and break the model of "use +1 swords to earn +2 swords" is just not realistic. A world where magic exists has magic worked into it's economy. It would follow naturally from "magic exists". There are even guidelines for spell services in the PHB, so there's a basis for magic as a trade good or service already.

 

[Piratecat]

Every single one of those concerns is faced by Pawn Shops the world over and yet they somehow manage to stay open and make money. You think a curio shop doesn't have a few +1 weapons lying around (that they know how to identify) inherited by children of adventurers who just want to be Inn owners? Of course they do. Buy low (say 50% market rate as suggested by the PHB), sell high. Yes some capital is tied up in inventory, but that doesn't stop the shop from making money.

That's not exactly how pawn shops work, right? Pawn shops work by people getting loans in exchange for collateral, perhaps 25% to 60% of the item's value. (The average amount of a pawn shop loan in the US is apparently $150.) Then the person pays back that loan with about a 20% interest rate for a month, although that's regulated by law. And if they default, the pawn shop sells the item. They make money either way. That's different from "let me buy an item for tens of thousands of gold pieces that we may or may not be able to find a buyer for any time soon."

If you love magic item shops, I say include them (especially for Uncommon frequency items) and use item amounts that make sense for the amount of treasure your heroes have. Heck, my campaign always has one or two mysterious shops run by creepy old men that appear in alleys and move around, too. I just don't think the economics for wide-spread selling of magic makes sense in my campaign -- unless the shops are sponsored and controlled and regulated by the wizards' or artificers' guilds, in which case things get more interesting and more expensive.

For me, it comes down to "what's most interesting"? I want heroes who gain their magical weapons from ancient vaults or dead enemies, not from a shelf in a curio shop. It's a personal preference. If you think it's more interesting, convenient or mysterious to have items appear in shops, the only downside for your campaign is that you'll have to make up the price yourself. This will probably be easier in 5e, where almost all swords are +1 instead of +2 through +5.

So, back on topic, a cool thing to do with lots of gold: start a magic item shop, or hire someone to do so for you. Then cherry-pick whatever they get in, while leaving your employees to deal with theft, politics, guilds and taxes. Plot hooks aplenty!

 

[Mirtek]

Not that this is the focus of this thread, but I can think of lots of reasons that magic item shops aren't realistic.

- Lack of information/communication. You inherited a longsword +1 from your dad, but how do you get it to someone who wants it? How do you get its worth? There's no ebay, the roads are dangerous, and chances are you live in a small village. Matching buyers with sellers becomes a huge stumbling block, in the same way that before ebay it was almost impossible to find quirky rare old items that you wanted to buy.

- Slow turnover. A shop keeper needs a relatively fast item turnover to make money, or needs to pad her margins by a large amount to compensate for slow turnover. Unless you're in a huge city or a place rife with adventurers and easy money, like a boom town, items are going to sit for a long time until they're sold.

- No immediate payoff. No shop owner wants to pay lots of gold up front, then hope an item will sell. A more likely approach are magic item brokers, people who match up buyers and sellers and take a commission.

- Theft. Open up a magic item shop, and you have every thief and poor adventurer panting at your locked-up door. That means you need to pay for security, and GOOD security. Insurance doesn't exist.

Huh. This litany has convinced me to add magic item brokers to my big cities, sly people in the know who match up their customers. No inventory problems, no theft problems, and it solves the problem of matching buyer and seller. Also, it'll take a day to a month to get any given item once it's ordered. Works for me.

That's assuming that adventuring is not a common profession with a whole economy dedicated to it.

Just imaginge adventuring like the gold rushes of the 19th centuries. Entire border towns springing up solely to support the various adventuring bands and becoming deserted ghost towns once the vicinity has been pacified and picked clean and the adventurers move on.

Successful adventurers are the rock stars of the world and famous adventurer companies are the big corporations, racing each other to the most daring discoveries. Every farm lad dreams at least once about becoming one and way too many run away to try. If however they are falling on hard times (if it doesn't kill them), they become little better than brigands

Chains stores like Adventurer's Vault exist and are selling pre-picked adventurer kits for any kind of terrain and dungeon.

And don't get me started about noble heirs playing at being adventurers, aka sitting on their silk cushion in their opulent tents while an entire entourage of sages, soldiers and workers are the onces actually excavating and securing the tomb. With the lordlings only showing up to open the treasure chests once everything is saved, their hired bards nonetheless spreading out to tell the tale about how they found and braved the dangers of the hidden tomb of the mummy king (if they only knew that their staff is too long and they're digging at the wrong place)

 

[DaveMage]

Huh. This litany has convinced me to add magic item brokers to my big cities, sly people in the know who match up their customers. No inventory problems, no theft problems, and it solves the problem of matching buyer and seller. Also, it'll take a day to a month to get any given item once it's ordered. Works for me.

I like it....

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

The best magic item analogy I've heard is the high-end art market. Even Bill Gates can't just walk into a store and buy a Picasso. He first has to find someone who owns a Picasso and is willing to sell it. Since magic items are hand-crafted by incredibly rare masters of their craft, the analogy seems apt enough.

 

[Grainger]

^That is a flat out lie^

Oof.

I was talking about real early feudal society, not PHB defaults. Early feudal society wasn't a cash economy (it had cash, but that wasn't the fundamental basis of how things were done).

I wasn't suggesting that it's typical for D&D, or that it should be typical for D&D. Just that some people might like to try it.

 

[Paraxis]

The best magic item analogy I've heard is the high-end art market. Even Bill Gates can't just walk into a store and buy a Picasso. He first has to find someone who owns a Picasso and is willing to sell it. Since magic items are hand-crafted by incredibly rare masters of their craft, the analogy seems apt enough.

But he could just by a Picasso if he wanted. He has more than enough money to overpay someone 2 or 3 times the value and almost anyone will sell him whatever he wants. There are also auction houses like Sotheby's that have frequent auctions.
There are museums that would part with one work of art if someone paid for a new building or wing, things like that. Money can buy you almost anything. Also Bill Gates could hire a team of art thieves to steal any painting he wanted but the owner didn't want to part with.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

But he could just by a Picasso if he wanted. He has more than enough money to overpay someone 2 or 3 times the value and almost anyone will sell him whatever he wants. There are also auction houses like Sotheby's that have frequent auctions.
There are museums that would part with one work of art if someone paid for a new building or wing, things like that. Money can buy you almost anything. Also Bill Gates could hire a team of art thieves to steal any painting he wanted but the owner didn't want to part with.

Yes, but all of those options require legwork. You have to wait for Sotheby's to offer a Picasso (really friggin rare) or track down a guy who already has a Picasso, bargain with him to buy it, and then either have the painting shipped to you (risky!) or go pick it up.

 

[Mirtek]

Since magic items are hand-crafted by incredibly rare masters of their craft

That's again a assumption. They could be the most boring tasks of journeyman wizards, with no master bothering with something as mundane as a +1 weapon/armor or a frivolity like a ring of fire resistance

 

[Paraxis]

That's again a assumption. They could be the most boring tasks of journeyman wizards, with no master bothering with something as mundane as a +1 weapon/armor or a frivolity like a ring of fire resistance

Very true, in Eberron there are artificers and magewrights working in large shops unionized and stuff to produce magic items for people.