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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3509386" data-attributes="member: 30001">If this is what you're saying then we agree and I don't know what this argument is about.  What seems to be the problem is that I'm suggesting that for game purposes, the best place to start for a price for goods is a base price.  I gave the analogy to the Strength score, an unrealistic, but acceptable abstraction that somewhat models reality."Invitation only" auctions and similar things are fine - I actually do those kinds of things in my campaign.  I think that makes a lot of sense and I'm critical of 3E in that it only describes the base prices and doesn't talk about modifiers at all.  Monopolies, banditry, robber-barons, guilds, sumptuary (sp?) laws, barter - all of those things could have been helpful in reigning in the "Wallmart" sense of the economy of magic items.  But removing baseline prices for a +1 sword IMO just makes things worse.I'm not that interested in the price of wheat thing you talk about, in fact I've been saying somewhat the opposite this whole time.  I'm trying to sensibly (obviously IMO) combine history with a workable system for a game.  The context in which I was using historical data was to show the existence of something that I thought you guys were saying didn't exist - not to suggest a system for approximating such things in the game.The data on medieval economics doesn't have to be good though, that's besides the point - it simply shows the existence of a market and practices.  I don't know how many Jewish bankers there were in medieval England, or how rich they were, but their existence, and whatever evidence there is, is enough to establish that there were many people of wealth that were not landed nobility, that weren't even of the dominant religion in the area, and they weren't beaten and waylaid for their stuff all of the time.  Of course that happened at times, but at times it didn't happen or these families and people would have never accumulated the wealth in the first place!  There were enough people from outside the nobility accumulating wealth in the Middle Ages that to write off the possibility that an adventurer could do anything effective with 20,000 gp in a quasi-medieval world I felt to be uniformed.  Then again, I honestly thought I was open to the proof to the contrary, but I'm just not seeing an effort made to provide it, and yet the disagreement is vehement.On top of that, we're not even talking about a Medieval simulation game - so the stuff I'm talking about has to be applied with care.  You very well could be running a game where your 1st level PCs can't buy a longsword.  But to say you can buy a longsword but not a +1 longsword - on what grounds?  In most campaigns I can hire henchmen and arm them, without having to have a noble title.  So while I (try to) use actual medieval practices to show that the time period was not as nasty and brutish and popular culture would suggest, my position on this is even enhanced by the fact that we're talking DnD.And I'm in good company here - just look at Gygax's comments regarding serfdom and it's application on the strongholds of PCs. Basically, I think that the buying/selling practices for magic items that people establish in their campaigns often come from a DMs desire to control the power-levels of their PCs.  I also took exception to the idea that a simple analysis of a single buyer and a single seller would be sufficient in determining a selling price for an item.</blockquote>

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