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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amazing Mumford" data-source="post: 4801229" data-attributes="member: 33976">Totally 100% up to the DM.  Here's my view though, There are cities (in the Realms, for example, like in Calimshan or cities with Thayan Enclaves) that specifically state that magic is available and abundant, but other than that the DM should use good judgement-- remember supply and demand as well.  Aurora's shops in the Realms are actually magic-item order shops, where you order an item and the shop-keeps basically get it teleported to the shop-- I'm not sure how many there are, I know there's one in the Dalelands... But NOWHERE does it say that items cost EXACTLY as much as the DMG/MIC lists.  I do personally use the "wealth limits" for cities in the DMG, so PC's can't go to any old town or village and expect to get acid bows +3 and dancing shields +2.  Also, the more magic-laden every little village turns out to be, the less excitement one gets when an item is found in a dungeon or an adventure.  Magic items have more "value" when they are a little more hard to come by, and are not taken for granted nearly as much.  Many players own or have access to the DMG, MIC, etc. and for some reason come to expect that any town or city has these magic-item shops with anything available at the list price because "it's in the book".  That in my opinion is a false expectation, is meta-gaming (the PC doesn't own a MIC and has probably never heard of half the stuff in there anyway!), and leads to "munchkin" and "power-gaming" groups (Gah, I hate those terms!)  ROLE-PLAYING is usually not considered, just "how powerful can I be" and "how can I best min/max" is prioritized.  If that's how you want your game to be run though and everyone has fun with it, then by all means go for it!  I think a lot of this is brought on by computer games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, where you just walk up to some random guy in the street and he has all these incredible magic items just lying around... That's fine for the computer game, but I don't think that translates to the regular game.  Having said that though, we had a DM once who let us choose our magic items initially upon character creation, which was cool because we could customize the characters a bit instead of randomly rolling ridiculously inappropriate things... Also, PC's always have the option of playing a character that can make magic items... I find it interesting though that most of the above-mentioned PC's won't even consider this option, because it involves taking "soft" feats and spending xp-- 2 sources of kryptonite for the Power Gamer!! An interesting note, a party I was once in had a Power Gamer player and another PC who actually was interested in role-playing... the second PC had one or two Item Creation feats and the Power Gamer PC tried to convince this player to make magic items for him!  And when the second player found rules dealing with xp cost in item creation, specifically if you make an item for another character the other character can basically sacrifice his/her own xp instead of you using yours, well all of a sudden the Power Gamer was no longer interested in getting items made for him...</blockquote>

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