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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aboyd" data-source="post: 4799462" data-attributes="member: 44797">To be honest, I've been playing for 25 years and I've never played in a game where "you can buy anything in town."  Not ever.  So a player advocating such a thing is very odd to me.  I'm not suggesting my experience is the norm, however.In fact, it goes against the core rules, now that I think about it.  In the DMG, towns are given a limit of what they can sell, based upon the number of residents.  I never follow those rules to the letter, but I do follow the spirit of the rules.  My thinking is that very valuable items would be very rare, and any merchant that had such a thing would be in constant fear of assassination.  So in my games, that stuff isn't easy to find and usually involves some back & forth before the players get the real item (this takes zero minutes in real life -- I just explained once that no merchant carried expensive items directly, and that was that).One thing I do allow players to do as they explore my world is to gravitate toward towns that offer more.  For example, if they are playing in Greyhawk city or Rel Astra, then there are going to be lots of shops and the odds of them finding whatever they need are pretty high.  They have to do many Gather Information checks and spend days exploring the town, but they'll get what they want.  The tradeoff is that they may be stuck with city adventures.  It is only the smaller towns, the frontier towns, that have wilderness adventures, pirate adventures, and so on.So yeah, I have very limited selection in small towns, and in larger towns the selection is great but still not perfect.As an example of the imperfect selection in big cities, here is what happened in Rel Astra.  My players wanted to get potions of bless weapon.  That's a paladin-exclusive item.  The problem?  Rel Astra is ruled by an evil undead animus.  And while many citizens are good or lawful, it's pretty rare to find people who are both.  That kind of goodness just isn't fostered by the evil Lord Drax.  What this means is that there is no paladin organization in town and thus, finding anything that is a paladin-exclusive is extremely difficult.So yeah, I would never give players a free run of any magic item they wanted.  However, I do allow my players to go where the loot is and try to make the best of it.</blockquote>

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