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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3508118" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, exactly.  One of my characters once traded a valuable magical staff for a selection of 5th level spells.  In addition to being a mutually beneficial business relationship, it was a chance to hobnob with an influential NPC and begin building a relationship.  One of the reasons you would never sell magic items was that they were so much valuable given to henchmen or as gifts to important NPCs.  Alot of players have questioned what the coin wealthy but magic poor 1st edition players did with thier wealth.  I'll provide an example.Spells and spellbooks are expensive, invaluable, and easily damaged (item saving throws, remember?).  To avoid being in the dire situation of not having spellbooks, you'd make backups in down time between adventures.  This is expensive, and results are both cumbersome to carry around and it somewhat defeats the purpose to do so.  (You might have a bag of holding, but you couldn't just buy them, and you wouldn't risk all of your spell books on a bag getting damaged.)  To store your backups, you'd need a library, and to have a library, you'd need to build a building of some sort.  Perhaps not a full stronghold yet, but some safe house where you'd keep possessions you weren't currently using.  Your possessions were valuable, which means you had to protect them, both with whatever traps and protections you could devise but by employing hirelings to protect them.  That was expensive.  While you where employing hirelings to stand around watching your building, you might as well have them do things which were useful (to you), entertaining (for them), and profitable (for both of you).  This also gave the hirelings more of a stake in your affairs than mere mercenaries.  They were your retainers, your household, your people.  For example, you might hire an alchemist, and this was expensive initially and required yet more initial outlay, and then go into business together making potions between adventurers and selling them while you were away.  This might provide a trickle income, but more importantly it gave you your own 'magic shop' where you could buy items from yourself and choose what items the store would stock.  Depending on your location, your adventuring company might also own sailing vessels, because it was useful to have them on hand and with a trustworthy captain when you needed one, and sooner or later your party might find the need for several vessels and would need to employ the ships when they weren't being used to go to remote archaepelagos, and that meant warehouses and other initial outlays and then a trickle of income afterwards.  Then, you'd want to buy magic items.  But magic items weren't just for sale in shops.  They were in the possession of Very Important People, and only Very Important People had enough of them to consider parting with them.  Well, you'd need to ingratiate yourself to these people, which meant gifts and living a lifestyle suitable to a Very Important Person.  So, you were part of a community, and often as you got powerful, several communities, which meant over the long haul safehouses in multiple towns where you could hole up relatively securely even if you had magic wielding enemies.  Which meant things like lead lined rooms and roofs to protect against scrying, and magical and mechanical traps/defenses and so forth.  And all that is expensive (and took game time to develop).  Overtime you'd end up with fortresses and small armies, and probably (after name level) titles and lands and serfs beneath you, and all of this meant expensive initial outlays that paid back in dividends (and power and influence) over time.   And plus, you'd probably be paying taxes, and in most cases tithes - either because it was required of the class, or else because it was in character, or else because you were hoping to build up some credit for that once in a campaign 'Thor help!' situation where having shown the DM you really were pious might be some small mark in your favor.This is I think a marked difference between 1st edition and 3rd edition.  In many ways, 3rd seems to play the same at 18th level as it does at third.  The numbers get bigger, but the flavor stays basically the same.  In the longer running 1st edition campaigns I was in, the flavor changed markedly as the PCs increased in level.  You may have started out as mere scruffy sell-swords, but you wouldn't end up that way.  You may have started out owning little more than what you wore, but it didn't stay that way.  You find you'd need things you couldn't carry on your back, or you'd find that you wanted to buy things that only you could provide to yourself.</blockquote>

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