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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3510540" data-attributes="member: 30001">I have the same answer for both of these questions, one AFAICT is just a specific example of the other.Q:  What does the PC wizard charge for it?A:  What he charges for it, isn't what he gets for it.  Let's say he charges 1 million gp for it.  In my campaign, the captain walks away laughing (or backs away in fear, depending on the level).  Let's say the wizard isn't trying to be funny.  Now he probably picks a price based on his experiences, and the warrior comes back with one based on his.  But those experiences are most likely based on other people's buying/selling experiences, and so it's not just simply those two that you have to consider:The captain of the guard wants the +1 sword because he fights better.  Then again he could just hire 10 warriors and probably do a much better job of increasing his fighting potential.  So if the wizard charges significantly more than what it would cost to hire 10 warriors, the captain will probably pass on it - unless the +1 sword is some sort of prestige item to him.  In fact, someone with more money might want it instead, so the captain has to keep that in mind.  Then again, the armory in the neighboring city might be auctioning off +1 swords that it confiscated from adventurers to pay the salaries of it's own warriors.  The captain knows he can travel there, and try to find a better deal.  Maybe the captain knows another wizard who needs money for an important experiment.  Maybe the captain knows that his friend was just talking about how he'd pay 3,000 gp for a +1 sword, and the wizard's only charging 2,000 - therefore the captain might even have a +2 sword yet the chance of making a quick 1,000 gp profit will cause him to buy it (given the obvious conditions).The wizard might have heard of the armory sale in the neighboring city.  The wizard might know of a fellow wizard that is in desperate need of cash.  Then again, the wizard might know that +1 swords have become status symbols among the nobility.  The wizard might also need a quick 500 gp cash to keep an assassin from killing him (or who knows what the assassin would charge, that would be based on a potentially equally complicated analysis).So the wizard and the captain aren't making their calculations in a vacuum, they're doing so in the context of a whole world full of potential events and characters, each of whom are making their own decisions.  The prices/costs of assassins, hired warriors, and +2 swords probably also has a bearing.Note:  I didn't say that the basis of the transaction wasn't two people/groups, what I said was that the analysis was much more than just the immediate interests and knowledge of those two people.  The above are examples of just some of the possibilities involved in such a transaction.  Each of those factors (like what 10 warriors would charge for their services) is in itself governed by equally as many calculations and considerations.  And this is what it comes down to when I said that the analysis was too complex to do on the fly.  What I've been trying to say is that it's much more complicated than a lone PC approaching a lone hermit on a rocky outcropping and requesting a sword in a vacuum.  Most players IME tend to go to the big city for these purchases, because cities by nature are centers for these kinds of transactions.Even if it would be anachronistic that someone track +1 sword prices, word-of-mouth would produce an average price.  How do you manage the complexity of all the various merchants, armories, wages, and people's interests and statuses?  IMO you have a base price that represents an average of those forces, and maybe then you roll randomly for a +/- factor, and then make up a rationalization for that result (ex. you get low roll for the price, so someone must be dumping some +1 swords that they just found in a treasure vault)Let's say it's an invitation-only auction for the +1 sword, and the captain is invited.  You're STILL stuck having to do the same analysis, and do it for maybe 20 other people as well!  No one I know has such detail built into their campaign world that they can do anything other than the most superficial of analysis at a character level.  So what I've been saying, is that IMO a base price guide is a very sensible way of modeling these complexities.  The base price list would show the consensus values for these items, even if they're not the kind of thing (whether because of custom, or rarity, or whatever) that you would find sitting on a store shelf.  (Maybe this all depended on what I meant by "market"?)</blockquote>

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