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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 6423086" data-attributes="member: 2">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.</blockquote>

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