Magic Item Economy - alternatives?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not really a valid comparison. A lot of the price comes from "handmade" this and that which takes a bunch of time, or something unique. A wizards can whip out the biggest baddest magic item in an afternoon.

Actually, only the last two "Les Pauls" on my list aren't predominantly made via mass-production techniques...and I skipped several in the $3-6k range that are just as mass-produced as the $160 ones.

As for the magic items, remember that the cost of ANY item also includes opportunity costs. It's not just that a Wizard can knock out this or that item quickly, it's also that, in doing so, he gave up the opportunity to do something else.

It costs me the same amount of effort to sell you my tickets to see Thor as it does to see a band at a club downtown. Even if the ticket price were the same, I might still ask you for more money for the music tickets for a variety of reasons- it's my favorite band; it's a farewell performance; it's my GF's favorite band; the band is actually a secret new side project by Eric Clapton (and I found out the secret).

 

[Psikus]

But one thing we're struggling with is the cost of magic items, which is at complete odds with a more "realistic" economy in a fantasy world. Obviously higher level items should be much more expensive, but that much more?

Item prices (and PC cash rewards, for that matter) do get pretty silly at higher levels, and I don't think there's a reason for that other than to prevent lower level characters from buying a +6 weapon. I haven't had to deal with this in our games, because we don't usually deal with gold - rather, players get all their gear as encounter rewards. For your game, I'd consider trying out the following rules:
- A character can only use magic items that are up to his level+5.
- Progression of item cost by level is completely recalculated, to more sane values.

Once you introduce game mechanics to prevent abusing item cost, you can tone down item inflation as much as you want. As a reference, the official 4E progression has gold costs multiply by 5 every five levels (so that a level 30 item costs ~8000 times as much as a level 1 one). Changing it to, say, multiply costs by 2 or 3 every five levels results in a much more reasonable progression. Once you are on it, I'd suggest rounding the cost of a level 1 item to a nicer number, like 250gp, in order to have a prettier table.

As a downside, players may think that the level limit on item use is artificial and forced (which it is), and other economy-related systems like rituals require additional work...

 

[Dausuul]

Also, to follow Dannyalcatraz, a good basic chef's knife (Victorinox Fibrox Chef's Knife) would cost you ~30 bucks. A good mass produced japanese steel knife (global/shun/etc) is about 120 bucks, so about 4 times as much. A custom built super hard knife is going to be $500-$2000. So yeah, scales like that happen in real life as well.

So a large part of the real-life scale results from the difference between mass production and hand-crafting. Who is mass-producing magic items?

 

[malraux]

So a large part of the real-life scale results from the difference between mass production and hand-crafting. Who is mass-producing magic items?

I suspect this is an issue of the differences between modern economies and fantasy ones. In a modern economy, you only hand make expensive stuff. In a fantasy economy, you'll be able to hand craft stuff cheaply or expensively. To belabor the cooking example, a short order cook verses a high end restaurant both hand make a meal, but the cost is radically different.

I also think that its hard to compare between modern life and magical items simply because magic items are magical. A magical knife could also frappe once a day or season as it cuts, etc.

 

[Riastlin]

Second, verisimilitude aside, these prices have a direct impact on how things play out in the game. Going by the book, epic-level PCs can buy small cities with their pocket change. If that's how you want it to be, great... but if you don't want PCs adopting Richie Rich tactics when dealing with regular mortals, changes are in order.

This is a fair point. One alternative of course is to let the PCs buy those cities if they wish, but simply don't allow their relative affluence compared to Joe Commoner be a means to completing their goals. In other words, sure, 20,000 gold pieces (chump change for epic parties) will likely result in most mortals telling the PCs everything they know, doing whatever they want (to an extent at any rate), etc. But Joe Commoner also won't have the information the PCs need. So yeah, the PCs are rolling in the dough, but then so are the people/enemies they are dealing with. In fact, when the PCs buy that city, suddenly you give yourself a nice plot hook in that you can threaten the city in some manner and now the PCs have a vested interest in protecting the city as its quite literally "their city".

 

[Gryph]

First, the book prices are not just price to buy the item--they're prices to make the item. A PC seeking to craft a 30th-level item is going to have to shell out just as much cash as a PC seeking to buy one in a store, which implies that the price is mostly materials rather than labor (an odd thing when you consider the labor has to be done by a 30th-level wizard, but never mind). I have no doubt the materials that go into a Les Paul are costly; I find it hard to believe they cost $55 grand.

Second, verisimilitude aside, these prices have a direct impact on how things play out in the game. Going by the book, epic-level PCs can buy small cities with their pocket change. If that's how you want it to be, great... but if you don't want PCs adopting Richie Rich tactics when dealing with regular mortals, changes are in order.

You are right enough in regards to the materials. You are vastly underestimating the cost of artisan labor in a handcrafted and therefore inherently limited goods market.

As someone else pointed out, it takes a 30th level ritual caster to make a level 30 +6 weapon. How many of those do you think exist in a campaign world. Of the handful, how many such items did they create? Now out of all the items that they created, how many are on the market to be purchased?

Thats why the 1953 Les Paul is $55K and why a verified Stradivarius (sp?) violin or viola can go for over $1M.

 

[andy3k]

First off, I'd like to say that I own an expensive set of knives and they are SOOOO worth the cost over cheap knives.

Moving on. Don't think of the cost of magic items as actual "gold". Think of it as the gold equivalent in residuum to create that item. Magic items aren't mass produced by powerful casters because no one but kings, wealthy merchants, and successful guilds have the money for even one magic item. Like a pharaoh building a pyramid or a king building a great monument, a person/organization only has the wealth for 1-3 powerful magic items in a lifetime.

So most those expensive magic items that are available in the world were created by kings and guilds and such over the course of centuries. They were also created in other planes or by gods or such (where economy is irrelevant) and end up on [name your game location].

Making these magic items requires residuum. You could pay a caster 10,000 gold (not that anyone in our world has that much) to make a magic item but if that caster does not have any residuum then you get bupkis. Sure, casters can spend hard earned money to have residuum mined for them, or casters can pay adventurers to obtain it from other planes, but it is rare and not easily gained. Most casters only end up with enough residuum for low level magic items. The other source of residuum is previously made magic items that are brought to caster for "processing".

So adventurers discover magical items or a rare chest of residuum. They do it on their own or maybe they are paid by a higher power to hunt it down for them. Anything the adventurers or employers don't want to use as is, they take to a caster and say, "Can you suck the magic from here and make something useful for me?"

In my group's game, the value of a magic item only represents the amount of magical energy required to make it, not a sack of coins. Since only a king or guild could actually afford to purchase a major magic item for coin, magic shops do not sell anything that costs more than 1,000 gold. Instead, you must bring enough magical energy to the caster to make your item for you (plus the gold or magical energy fee for manufacturing, the caster's profit).

Groovy?

 

[Dausuul]

You are right enough in regards to the materials. You are vastly underestimating the cost of artisan labor in a handcrafted and therefore inherently limited goods market.

As someone else pointed out, it takes a 30th level ritual caster to make a level 30 +6 weapon.

That wasn't someone else pointing it out. It was me. In the same post you're quoting. In fact, it's in the quoted text.

How many of those do you think exist in a campaign world. Of the handful, how many such items did they create? Now out of all the items that they created, how many are on the market to be purchased?

Yet by the book, the cost added by these factors is negligible--because the price of a 30th-level magic item is equal to the cost of the materials required to make such an item. You pay the same amount to craft a magic item as you would to buy it off the shelf. (S'mon does put forward one possible explanation, which is that PCs are using a quick-and-dirty method to make magic items, while professional item-crafters do it offscreen using a more efficient, NPC-only method. But that leaves unanswered the question of whether you have to be 30th level to use that more efficient method.)

In any event, these sorts of prices only make sense in the context of a staggeringly wealthy economy like that of the modern world. You can't raise the price of your labor to these heights unless the rest of the economy is producing enough to support such massive and pointless expenditures. Certainly one should not see that level of surplus production in a "points of light" setting as imagined by 4E. There aren't enough people and there isn't enough trade.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A common complaint about 4E is the magic item economy, presumably the crazy inflation of cost at higher levels.

In our group we have gone from a single DM (me) to rotating duties among 2-4 of us. Transitioning from single to multi DMs has some unforeseen, albeit minor, consequences, in particular the implementation of house rules and the challenge of some kind of consistency with DM rulings. The current DM and myself have been trying to hammer down some house rules for magic items, such as: Only Heroic tier items can be purchased in shops except by DM's discretion; magic items can be "enhanced" by paying the difference between the current level and the level of the new enhancement - it is also possible to add new powers in a similar fashion. And so on.

But one thing we're struggling with is the cost of magic items, which is at complete odds with a more "realistic" economy in a fantasy world. Obviously higher level items should be much more expensive, but that much more?

So what I'm looking for are alternatives to the magic item economy. What do you do? Is there a formula that you use for cost or do you just use the RAW and don't mind the fact that you could buy 1,736 +2 swords for the same price of a single +6 vorpal weapon? Is that OK? Not OK? Alternatives?

The main thing is not really the purchase of items as finding a Paragon or Epic item for sale should be virtually possible, but how much it costs to enhance an item, that is to increase its power from one level to another. On one hand, the current costs are completely prohibitive unless we start doling out massive bundles of cash; on the other hand, they do keep PCs from buying or enhancing items way beyond their level.

Thoughts?

There is a pretty steep curve there, but OTOH is it actually totally unrealistic?

Cheap knock-off Katana: $100's
Serviceable mass-produced Katana: $1000's
Custom-made traditional Katana: $10,000's
Authentic period Katana: $100,000's
Ancient masterpiece Katana: $1,000,000's
Grasscutter: well, priceless, but certainly would sell for $10's of millions.

Even looking at more practical items like say a gun:
You could buy a cheap .22 bolt action for a couple hundred. A decent .222 swift would be more up around the $1000 mark. A match quality rifle might easily cost $10k. A .50 Barrett sniper rifle (assuming you can buy one at all) might easily cost something close to $100k.

These are all mundane items and while the more expensive ones might or might not be objectively superior in at least some cases they are certainly quite a lot more expensive.

There's no easy way to tell what the costs of higher level magic items in a 4e campaign would really be. It would depend on supply and demand, cultural factors, etc. More 'realistically' prices might well be all over the place for the rarer higher level items. A character might get a +5 sword for a steal in one place and have to pay a premium for it in another. You could certainly accommodate that.

What I would suggest is you simply consider treasure parcel values to be a fairly good guideline to what the PCs should be able to achieve in terms of effective wealth and equipment. Lets say a character buys an item for a very cheap price, well he's ahead of the game, that extra cash is effectively like a treasure drop. Maybe it is one he's owed (getting the item cheap could be an adventure warranting some treasure, which is the difference in price). Maybe it is one he's not currently owed, so he's ahead of the curve a bit. This could be seen as a reward beyond normal treasure for that character if it isn't too big a difference. Any fairly small difference (even a several times multiple of normal treasure) will be erased by the steep curve in a couple levels at worst anyway. Or if the character hasn't really done anything special to earn it, then he just misses out on some later treasure to pull him back towards the curve.

Now, there are of course potentially HUGE differences that could arise, but really those are pretty much in the DM's control. One way to deal with them is to turn them into 'plot wealth'. Maybe the character CAN get a huge price for his item, but the buyer doesn't have 5,000 lbs of gold coin, he has a castle... Owning a castle isn't going to add to the character's combat or adventuring capacity, but it is fun and if the player likes the idea you can grant this kind of stuff pretty freely. In a vaguely medieval milieu you probably can't buy and sell land for coin anyway. The character might parley the castle into an advantage of some kind, but he's rather unlikely to be able to convert it back into some other item he wouldn't be able to normally get by the treasure rules.

And note that all kinds of things can be valuable in this way, warrants, deeds, titles, offices, charters, businesses, land, ships, etc. As long as they aren't terribly fungible they can be safely 'plot money'. If 10 levels from now (or even 3) the player manages to unload the plot item for a chunk of cash that again can be considered a 'treasure' or by then it is simply not all that significant in the wealth equation.

Admittedly, there are times when wealth systems break down. Given that I've seen some pretty spectacular breakdowns in every edition up to 4e that I've played I suspect there's no system that will really produce the desired result all the time. I'd also observe that 4e's system seems to be geared towards both making PCs rather fabulously wealthy, but also expects that they will be 'moving on' to realms that are more scaled to their status as they progress. A 20th level fighter visiting his home village may happen, but it isn't really anticipated that he would live there and expect to buy or sell high paragon level gear there. It is more like there are 3 different economies, one for each tier.

Anway, I'd just eyeball things. Epic PCs are going to operate in their own little 'epic economy' more or less.

 

[Gryph]

That wasn't someone else pointing it out. It was me. In the same post you're quoting. In fact, it's in the quoted text. .

That's what I get for posting before my morning coffee .

Yet by the book, the cost added by these factors is negligible--because the price of a 30th-level magic item is equal to the cost of the materials required to make such an item. You pay the same amount to craft a magic item as you would to buy it off the shelf. (S'mon does put forward one possible explanation, which is that PCs are using a quick-and-dirty method to make magic items, while professional item-crafters do it offscreen using a more efficient, NPC-only method. But that leaves unanswered the question of whether you have to be 30th level to use that more efficient method.)

In any event, these sorts of prices only make sense in the context of a staggeringly wealthy economy like that of the modern world. You can't raise the price of your labor to these heights unless the rest of the economy is producing enough to support such massive and pointless expenditures. Certainly one should not see that level of surplus production in a "points of light" setting as imagined by 4E. There aren't enough people and there isn't enough trade.

I just assume that the cost being the same to make as to buy is a simplification for DM convenience, as so much else in 4e.

Part of the assumptions of PoL is the existence of ruins from previous empires just waiting for stout adventurers to plunder. So I liken the economy to be somewhat similiar to the european economy as the new world was being looted for its natural resources. The commoners were literaly dirt poor, but the backers of expiditions and especially the crown of Spain and Portugal were becoming very rich. So there are a handful of people with the resources to buy super rich goods and the need for them, but the supply is still a trickle, well under the demand, so the price of the really good and rare items is ruinous. Yet at the same time, that gold from looting ancient ruins is starting to trickle in to the middle class economy and some regular trade in low power magic items is driving the price down as craftsmen and mages apprentices are churning out +1 and +2 swords by the cart load trying to profit off the increased flow of gold coming from the looted caches.

Enjoy it while it lasts, clearly a magic item bubble is coming and the value of that +6 sword is going to come tumbling down.