I'm not interested in arguing this. It will accomplish nothing. It won't help me.
I know I waded into this thread long after it became more of an argument than a conversation, but that hasn't stopped me from quixotically expecting to have a conversation.
Ok, I used the rhetorical phrase "for arguments sake" but...being 100% honest here...I'm trying to whittle things down to the bare essence here to better understand where we differ. I do love to debate, but I've also learned a lot in this thread, both in how other gamers think about things, and in clarifying my own thinking.
So, I've described a couple ways using a list can help me. I'll recap (and maybe clarify) :
1) By having a specific price in the book, I don't have to rely on my poorly organized notes to maintain a consistency between what I said a month ago and now.
2) It makes tbe decusion for me, so I don't have to make up a number, while providing me as an easy way to pass off the effort of looking up the details to my players why I deal with some other bit of DMing.
Of course, that's not the entirety of how I handle buying and selling items, only a couple ways that having a list of prices can help me.
In the absence of such a list, how do you handle deciding the price of a an item, how do you keep note of the decisions you've made in the past, how do handle this stuff in the middle of a session?
So it sounds like it's primarily of organizational interest to you, not that there is an objectively "right" price. Whether the official price for a Bag of Holding is 500 or 5000 gold, you don't really care, as long as three months later it doesn't change between the two, and you don't have to worry about tracking it.
Is that correct? Or is having a price that is somehow also balanced against other magic items and the presumed economy also important?
Can I ask
why you want the number to be consistent?
To answer your question, I would make up a number on the spot. "Um....he'll give you 1200 gold for it." (I probably wouldn't have one for sale, so I can get my head around a sell price more easily.)
Let's say a year later the players regret selling the bag and want a new one. They put some good work into tracking one down and I (grudgingly) agree they find one for sale. I have no idea what I said last time so I make up a new number. "Ummm...she wants 7,000 gold for it." The players, however, remember these things and say, "What!?!?! When we sold it it was only 1200."
I honestly don't care. "Yeah, well, you probably should have found a wealthier or more desperate buyer." Or, "
This bag was carried by the famous wizard Xakanaxa....". Whatever. If I think it will improve the story for them to have it the price will be cheaper. Or vice versa. If they roll some good social skills maybe the price will come down. Or maybe the seller will offer to trade for something
she needs.
These are rare, wondrous magical items, not soybean futures. There is no stable, consistent market. I don't feel the need to remember anything about prices.