Raven Crowking said:
It does. That doesn't mean that the formula is reasonable in terms of the world it is intended to represent, however. This is, I believe, where Celebrim's metagaming comes in. From the standpoint of determining relative cost in a society, you need to determine first the utility of the item to that society and the amount of gold it is worth to the creator.
Not quite. First, that wouldn't be metagaming. That calculation takes place within the built world. The problem is that magic items aren't real world items, they are game items. There is no way that we can determine the minimum value of a magic item by looking at the means of production and the expected return on investment, or by looking at historical records and making the assumption that the supply/demand factors in the game world will roughly correspond to that of the historical world and therefore the price will be of the same relative magnitude. (Noting that most D&D worlds now assume a daily minimum wage of 1 g.p. and a rate of exchange of 1 g.p. = 10 s.p., where historically daily minimum wage was closer to 1 s.p and the rate of exchange was 1 g.p. = 20 s.p.) And note that even when we do have historical records of prices for commodities, there is no way really of knowing whether the supply and demand within the game world really correspond to the supply and demand in the real world and therefore whether those prices are realistic ones. It's just that generally speaking, no one cares that much, and when it really matters and is effecting game balance wise DM's throw the base price out and set the actual price by some real (to the game) factor (like how important this object is in the metagame). You can actually see this in the PH price list, for example the cost of a buckler relative to the cost of a small shield.
Therefore, the value of a magic item is determined by its game utility, not by the cost of production within the game world. The cost of production is set by a transaction that involves the DM and the player based on the DM's metagame concerns (How powerful is this item?) and the player's wants (How useful is this item?). The price set by that is entirely a game artifact.
The base prices and formulas in the DMG are attempts to actualize that metagame transaction so that it can be largely handwaved based on the designers work and the game's play testing. The assumption is that the utility/value of the item will be roughly the same in any DM/PC transaction. This assumption is of course false in the general case, but probably fairly accurate if we assume 'default' D&D. None the less, the 'base price' is always an artifact of the game. It's useful, but it's not necessary. If we didn't have the 'base price', we could still obtain a price via a DM/PC negotiation at some level. The utility of a base price is that, presumably, that price having been tested, it is a better, quicker evaluation than might other wise occur.
But, we already know that in general that isn't the case. WotC just published a whole hard bound book on how many of thier base prices that were plucked out of the air were wrong, and because they were wrong and people treated them as something substantial and not mere game artifacts, in practice the DM/PC price negotiation over that item never actually occurred.
In any event, this whole discussion of where the base price of magic items comes from is really tangental to my main point. I too think that a base price list is an extraordinarily useful and convienent thing. It may not be strictly speaking necessary, but its really really useful. My main point is that the existance of a base price list does not dictate the terms of the market for magic items within a particular setting. The fact that something has been assigned a base price doesn't mean that the market for that item is freely entered by anyone, or that the item can be found for sell easily (and in particular on demand and quickly), or that under the circumstances that it is found mean that it will be available for that base price.
but it's your game, you decide on a pricing structure and stick to it. If one price fits all in your campaign, fine. If you want to make wheat bread a luxury item in the frozen north, fine.
