I don't know anyone who tends to play characters who adventure to obtain magic items. The closest I tend to see is Indiana Jones types looking for ancient artifacts, and that isn't lessened in the least by being able to craft magic items for a profit.
Being able to make a magical artifact that is exactly as powerful as the ancient artifact kinda does cheapen that. It diminishes the wonder of magic items. Both by making them a player build options that's as special as a feat or class feature, but also in world as there's nothing much special about a very rare magic item if every 11th level character can crank one out over a few weeks off.
This is something I noticed with Pathfinder. There was a real push in that version of the game to drop flavour text for magic items. It was some of the advice given for RPG Superstar:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2lfkg?Wondrous-Item-autoreject-advice-3
One of the big reasons for this was that any PC could make the item. There were no racial or national items. Backstory was irrelevant for anything less than an artifact.
There is no reason to stop PCs from being able to generate profit from things other than adventure-acquired loot and quest rewards.
Right, but that doesn't need to be baked into the rules as much. You shouldn't be able to generate thousands of gold pieces with little effort and no risk.
If you want your campaign to be about making and selling magic items and the players being merchants and artisans, that feels like a house rule that drives the campaign.
If the campaign is set around running an inn, you're going to want more in depth tavern running rules. If you're doing a Lovecraft/Call of Cthulhu style campaign, you're going to want more nitt-gritty sanity rules. I don't think that needs to be a huge part of the game or heavily addressed in a later book.
Okay, if they were doing a 3e style release schedule, sure. Because there'd be a
Heroes of Horror with sanity and expanded fear rules. But that's not what they're doing for 5e.
I don't understand that mindset at all. Why adventure? For...all the many reasons any given character adventures, that have nothing to do with money. Obviously.
To see the world.
Literally as an end in itself. People IRL go on IRL adventures that cost them money because they are driven by the desire to do so. They risk their lives to see things few people have ever seen, to discover things that have been lost for centuries, or to be the first to ever see find them, to prove it can be done. I know a guy who has spent a year at a time in Antarctica three times because he craves it. He needs it.
I myself have risked life and limb and arrest half a dozen times, at least, exploring abandoned places, just to experience them in a way that no one could before they were abandoned.
Right, but there's a difference between backpacking across Europe to see the world and joining a private military company and being dropped into a third world hotspot where you engage revolutionary guerrillas. There's a difference between climbing Everest for thrills and joining
the Expendables.
Adventuring is risking your life in a very serious way.
But if your players can only imagine greedy grave robbing subsitence adventurers, restrict the best loot to found treasure. Say they can only craft what they've seen, held, and studied.
Yeah... but the game already does that with the existing crafting rules. Those don't need to be expanded
I mean, the game already allows you to spend downtime doing work to upkeep or even upgrade your lifestyle. How is this different?
There's a couple differences.
The first is it sets the power level. If you can spend a month and make a magic item, becoming more powerful in a way that directly benefits your character, there's no reason not to as you're trading a resource without value for one that has value. It affects the balance of the game. Pure power creep.
It's like a DM allowing you to spend downtime days exercising or studying to increase your ability scores. Which seems reasonable, as that's what going to the gym does. And practising skills is common in the fiction.
The second is the amount of money.
Right now, when running a business, you have a chance of earning 3d10x5 gp for each day of work. Or it could also cost you money. If you spend a month doing so, you'll average 40gp, earning a little more than 1gp/day. Which seems pretty reasonable.
When selling a magic item - by the current rules- you can either sell it at as low as 1/10th the cost, or keep trying again and again until you sell it for 1.5x the base price, with each attempt taking 1d4-1d10 day. That's 12.5gp for each day spent crafting, so even if it takes 6 days to sell an item, you're still over 2gp per day. Right out of the DMG, it is possible to craft for a profit. Especially if you have a high Charisma (Persuasion) skill.
But... if the entire party participates, they can reduce the time. A rare 5,000gp item can be crafted in 200 days normally. But if an entire party of four can help, it's suddenly 50 days. And if they sell it for 7,5000 gp, after maybe 59 days they have a profit of 42 gold per day. 10 gold a piece. Not much compared to adventuring but ten times that of a regular business. And a hundred times what an untrained labourer can make each day.
But that's pretty reasonable and requires an initial investment of cash. And crafting & selling common items is pretty comparable to running a business.
Why does that *need* to be higher? What's gained by increasing the return on investment?
The third is the effect on the economy and verisimilitude.
Looking at the above, 10 gp doesn't seem like much. Especially to a player of 3e/4e/PF, where you're expected to have hundreds of thousands of gp of gear. Because you need that much money to buy magical items. It skews your perspective on wealth. But 10 gp is the better part of three month's wage to a labourer. It's comparable to $5000.
The 5,000 gp item mentioned above is a year and a half of an artistocratic lifestyle. It's 75 riding horses. A keelboat (with 2k change). It's a ridiculous amount of money. ($2,500,00 USD)
Who's buying that item? What magic item shop wants to spend that much money on stock? That's like trying to sell a Porsche at a pawn shop: they're not going to buy because it's worth more than the entire contents of the store and they'd never move it. If they can't sell the stock they have, they don't stay in buisness.
You have to be selling to individual collectors, who aren't going to be buying new items regularly. Even in a big metropolis (like Waterdeep) there's going to be a finite number of buyers.
But if you ignore that and have regular buying and selling of magical items for reliably high prices, it's super lucrative. Money cease to have any value.
Really, what's the benefit of magic item shops and more robust crafting? How much more beyond the DMG rules (p128) what else is needed?
