A player points to an item published in this book or the Dungeon Master’s Guide and asks, “Can I buy this?” The answer should usually be, “Yes.”
Magic items are an important part of every character’s arsenal of abilities. Most monsters and encounters assume that characters have a certain amount of gear to make the challenge appropriate. Furthermore, at many levels magic items represent a character’s only option for customization; picking up a new magic ring or bag of potions is significantly more fun than allotting skill points.
That’s not to say that you can’t apply occasional constraints to how and when magic items can be purchased, only that the constraints should be reasonable and shouldn’t prevent players from equipping their characters fairly. For instance, a character seeking a magic item should be in a community whose gold piece limit is equal to or greater than the cost of the desired item (see Table 6–10: Community GP Limits). You might also choose to limit particular items for campaign story reasons—maybe the knowledge of how to create certain items is a closely guarded secret of a particular group, or even forgotten to all.
In general, though, you should allow characters with sufficient funds to equip themselves as they desire. Even the most thoughtfully constructed series of treasure hoards almost certainly fails to provide all your players the items they want to maximize their enjoyment as they advance in level.
Large one-stop-shop “magic emporiums” are unrealistic and rare even in metropolis-sized cities. Instead, a community’s total stock of magic items for sale is widely distributed among dusty alchemist’s shops, bookstores, scribers’ boutiques, pawn shops, elixir brewers, the residences of retired adventurers, the old mage on the corner, curio shops, and so on.
