Magic Item Economy - alternatives?

[Ryujin]

Magic manufacturers get a 20% bulk residuum discount, which they turn into profit. Player characters don't

 

[Wednesday Boy]

If the monetary value of magic items bothers you I recommend that you have the players make wish lists and keep a total of treasure earned based on the expected treasure parcels for the party's level. Then give the characters items from their lists with an in-game plot instead of giving them loads of cash with which to buy or create magic items. When it's the cleric's turn to get a magic item and you have Pelor come to him in a vision and bless his +2 mace so it becomes +4, it doesn't matter what the difference in gold is between a +2 and a +4 mace.

 

[Dausuul]

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.

That's a pretty good approach, actually. I like it. Just adjust PC treasure parcels to hand out appropriate residuum instead of cash. Of course, you'd probably want to consolidate those awards, so the PCs make a few big finds instead of a lot of little ones.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Magic manufacturers get a 20% bulk residuum discount, which they turn into profit. Player characters don't

Actually if you read PHB1 carefully what it says is that the cost to purchase an item is the base cost PLUS 10-40%. This is the merchant's markup, so it actually makes some degree of sense.

As for the fantastic labor cost, well, that IS the cost to make an item! A +1 sword can be made with a couple years worth of unskilled labor equivalent (360 gp might be a couple peasant's income for a year). A +6 sword would require commanding the labor of a nation for several years. You can only get a 20% resale value for said +6 item simply because there's nobody in the material world wealthy enough to make such items, period, or buy them at the prices their labor value would put them at.

So, you simply cannot find a +6 sword in ANY place in the world. If you do find one it is either a lost relic of the past, or something that you went to the City of Brass to purchase (where entirely different rules apply, Efreets CAN command that kind of labor). Now, PERHAPS you could sell your +6 sword for a fair price in the City of Brass, maybe, if you wanted to spend the time and energy. You can do that, and it is an adventure, and the higher price you get is 'treasure', or you can dump it on the king of Smallville in the real world for 20%, still a fantastical "King's Ransom" in that context.

So, again, things don't look "realistic", but in fact they can be made to work out in a logical fashion when you consider any kind of extra cash made by PCs over the book set buy/sell prices to be treasure and require enough work to warrant issuance of XP and treasure parcels.

 

[KidSnide]

One of the other things to consider is that epic items exist in an entirely different economy than heroic items. In the rule book, they are both priced in gp, but there is a huge practical difference between buying a +1 magic sword from the local magewright and buying a +5 flaming sword from the immortal mastersmiths in the City of Brass.

In the same way, it's technically possible to compare your purchase of a loaf of bread at the supermarket with the commodity price for wheat on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, but - as a practical matter - your interaction with one market has nothing to do with your interaction with the other market.

Also, the 4e economy is very focused on adventuring, and doesn't provide much in the way of support for - say - merchant-adventurers (or much of anything else). So, yes, an epic PC could commission hundreds of low-level magewrights to produce magic swords for army. However, the rules don't really provide any support for the army, so it hardly matters how well they support the process of arming them with magic weapons.

-KS

 

[Aulirophile]

Ran a campaign once where the 80% attrition rate of magic was, literally, a problem. Magic was leaving the world every time someone disenchanted something and scholars had calculated there was a critical point past which all magic would simply cease functioning. Since all transportation was based on magic, this was bad (most modern major cities function solely because of mass transport, two days without food shipments and the city is starving to death. This is the equivalent of all gasoline suddenly disappearing).

So during levels 1-10 the PCs researched/found/re-built a Magic Aura Gyro Indicator Control, or M.A.G.I.C, that, given sufficient magical energy, could detect the exact level of magic left in the world. They were actually doing this to find magical artifacts and sell them, little did they know...

Bad news, world was teetering near the critical value. So the first five levels of Paragon were going around to kingdoms and explaining that they simply could not afford to disenchant anything. Magic Item prices and Residium prices spiked, people stopped casting rituals, economy had issues. I spent pages and pages working this out economically. A couple of wars happened on kingdoms that wouldn't stop, some old feuds getting worked out there.

Second half of Paragon was researching where Magic came from in the first place, so they could get more and solve this issue. Interesting they found multiple sources. Death of Gods, cataclysmic events where planes temporarily merged, deaths of various planes, the materialization of pure energy from various monsters, an extinct species whose excrement was residium (all eaten by Rust Monsters, tragic...).

They discovered the Law of the Conservation of Magic eventually. All that Magic didn't just disappear, it went somewhere. 21-25 answered the where and how. 26-30 was fixing the issue... temporarily, at least.

And, of course, they could detect nearly anything they wanted... but even a simple transfer ritual costs some magic from the world. If you work through all the implications, which took me forever, you get a really interesting dynamic without changing anything else about 4e's economy.

This was for a theme party: All Arcane characters, so it really engaged the party.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

I agree that without any actual rules for equipping an army, it doesn't matter whether you could choose to equip an army with +1 swords for the cost of buying a single +5 sword. But I also think that in campaigns which incorporate political and military elements, that actually makes for some interesting trade-offs. The question of how you value getting a slightly better weapon for your PC versus how you value making their army that much more powerful than the enemy army requires weighing radically different values. That makes it kinda neat to play through. (Of course, once you start heading down this road, the additional issues just proliferate. If land produces wealth, and we can compensate our knights with land, can they equip themselves with magic items? And if they can, then can we impose fees (perhaps for the knighting of our first-born or the marriage of a child or something traditional in the feudal system) and use those to buy magic items? And how do high-level D&D characters interact with mass combat?)

But nonetheless, I think that it's still a potentially interesting route.

 

[S'mon]

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.

Dwarven Armour is made by dwarven master craftsmen. Holy Avengers are probably made by Bahamut. But in both cases the 4e NPC doesn't really have a 'level' at all. 4e NPC levels are purely a measure of combat threat, and have no relation to their out of combat abilities. The venerable master smith who forges +3 weapons could be a 2nd level Human Rabble minion when attacked.

 

[Ryujin]

Actually if you read PHB1 carefully what it says is that the cost to purchase an item is the base cost PLUS 10-40%. This is the merchant's markup, so it actually makes some degree of sense.

So much for trying to inject a little levity.