Question about resale prices for magic items.

[The Souljourner]

I think 75-80% is more reasonable than 50%. Like mmu1 said, it's not like my +1 sword is any worse condition than the one straight out of the wizard's lab (might need a little cleaning, but that's trivial).

However, you obviously can't sell for full price, or there'd be no profit in it for the buyer. 75% is a nice middle ground, and usually not too difficult to compute either.

-The Souljourner

 

[Xavim]

I don't agree with NPCs having one standard and PCs having another. If an NPC can sell an item for market value, why can't I? And there is no way in hell he bought that from a wizard at cost. No magical item maker would ever sit with that arrangement. I want to know where this idea of 50% markup came from. Any merchant I would think would kill their unborn children to gain access to a massive market with products routinely selling for thousands that they can safely mark up by 25%.

Having the PC creators getting screwed like this while the NPCs continue on their merry money making way is just plain stupid.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I've done the "buy at full market price, sell at 1/2 market price" thing plenty of times in my games, simply because it's convenient, but I don't think it makes any sense.

We're talking about items that usually don't get damaged or worn out by mundane use, and can, for the most part, be kept in perfect repair with a regular application of a Mending spell.

Selling things like that at 1/2 market price is madness - people don't pay less for old diamonds, bars of gold or art objects in perfect condition, do they? Realistically, you should be able to recover a much larger percentage of a magic item's value, epsecially if you look around for a buyer, but usually it's easier to stick to what makes no sense for the sake of game balance...

Um...no.

Have you ever looked at the real world luxury goods market? Mark ups are usually 200%-400%.

If you buy a typical half carat diamond for ~$1000 (the going rate for many years) how much do you think the jeweler down the street will pay you for it in cash? I doubt you could get $350.

You might get 50% or more in store credit.

I think the 1/2 price thing is a convenient and fair quick estimate. If the PCs want a better price, they can have a middle-man hold onto the item for them for a number of months and see if a better sale price comes up. If a PC wants to retire from adventuring and spend several years building up his reputation, he could sell most items for 75%-100% (depending on demand). For regular adventuring PCs, 50% of market price is very reasonable.

 

[Thanee]

Yep, it takes a lot of commitment to get more money for the loot.

Letting others do the job (aka selling to the shop) gives you fast money (that's what the adventurers are after) with no hassle, but you get only half (or even less) of an item's worth, as the reseller wants to earn some money, too.

If you want to sell for more, you'll have to find customers the hard way, which can take a long time, depending on the item in question.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I don't agree with NPCs having one standard and PCs having another. If an NPC can sell an item for market value, why can't I? And there is no way in hell he bought that from a wizard at cost. No magical item maker would ever sit with that arrangement. I want to know where this idea of 50% markup came from. Any merchant I would think would kill their unborn children to gain access to a massive market with products routinely selling for thousands that they can safely mark up by 25%.

Having the PC creators getting screwed like this while the NPCs continue on their merry money making way is just plain stupid.

In the real world medieval marketplace, expensive items, armor, horses, etc. would be sold through merchants at markups typically of 10%-15% per merchant involved in the transaction (their commision). The net mark up could be less that 25% or substantially higher because the number of middlemen was variable.

The seller would usually be given no idea what the buyer was paying. The merchant would come to the seller with the informantion "I can get you ____ much gold. Take it or leave it. Maybe I can do better with more time, or maybe not." A good merchant will have already negotiated on your behalf to try and edge up the price.

Note that the merchants involved never pay cash for anything. They just take a cut when the sale is finalized. Also note these kind of negotiations could take weeks or months.

If you are an impatient wanderer who needs cash on the barrel head today, shouldn't you expect to be taken advantage of? That seems obvious to me.

 

[Silveras]

AMMS:WE covers some of this

I have to agree that the 1/2 price rule makes sense for PCs but not for NPCs necessarily. I agree with the reasons already set forth, but want to add this one, too: Professional Guilds. If there is a strong Guild presence in the town where the PCs sell the items, the Guild will take a big cut to even allow the PCs to sell the item in "their" market.

PCs who "put down roots" are more able to get around this factor, as they are now "part of the structure".

For a good discussion of this, see A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe. The Economic Simulator chapter has an interesting alternative rules set for buying stuff; with some work, it could be applied to selling as well. And the book discusses at length the influence of Guilds on business and society in Medieval society.

 

[mmu1]

Um...no.

Have you ever looked at the real world luxury goods market? Mark ups are usually 200%-400%.

If you buy a typical half carat diamond for ~$1000 (the going rate for many years) how much do you think the jeweler down the street will pay you for it in cash? I doubt you could get $350.

You might get 50% or more in store credit.

I think the 1/2 price thing is a convenient and fair quick estimate. If the PCs want a better price, they can have a middle-man hold onto the item for them for a number of months and see if a better sale price comes up. If a PC wants to retire from adventuring and spend several years building up his reputation, he could sell most items for 75%-100% (depending on demand). For regular adventuring PCs, 50% of market price is very reasonable.

I was using diamonds as an example of something that doesn't lose value as time passes, I was not comparing selling magic items to hocking a diamond ring.

Magic items are not comparable to trivial luxury goods like diamond rings - they have much more in common (in particular the higher-end ones, produced by high level casters with hundreds if not thousands of XP to spare) with works of art, antiques, vintage cars, etc. Yeah, you can end up selling any of those things for pennies if you're desperate and in a hurry, but the D&D system assumes that 1/2 price as a baseline even if you're being thorough, when in reality rare enough magic items should sell for several times their 'market' price.

PCs aren't always in a hurry, and I don't think I ever really played in a world in which the PCs (with their dozens of magical items and piles of loot, and excellent Appraise, Bluff, Diplomacy and Sense Motive checks) needed the merchants more than vice versa, although DMs usually have the tendency to run it that way regardless.

 

[Xavim]

My main point is that no one, parts with any item resulting in a net loss unless they're forced. Making it so that PCs can only sell magic items at the cost it takes to create them results in PCs never selling any magic item they create. Without in game reasons like the Merchants Guild example, simple ruling like that destroys the believability of a capaign world by making it seem exceesively artificial.

It would also have the effect of rendering purchasable magical items as being MUCH rarer as no caster would willingly part with their precious wands. Thus leaving the market to rely on the limited magical items cast off by adventurers. Since every item in a shop requires a dead owner, this greatly limites availability of said items which would only caus an increase in their sale value.

 

[S'mon]

PCs aren't always in a hurry, and I don't think I ever really played in a world in which the PCs (with their dozens of magical items and piles of loot, and excellent Appraise, Bluff, Diplomacy and Sense Motive checks) needed the merchants more than vice versa, although DMs usually have the tendency to run it that way regardless.

Hm, I find it's the _players_ who run it that way. How often does a PC walk away from a sale because he feels he's being ripped off? Not often. It's a game of bluff, and 99% of the time the merchant wins. Most PCs are happy to get 1/2 MP for some junk they found down a dungeon.

 

[Spatzimaus]

By the book, you get 50% when selling a magic item. There have been plenty of alternate methods posted in the House Rules forums over the years, you might want to see some of them. I found one, from about three months ago:
http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?t=55583

Anyway, here's my view of it. The 50% guideline is the Pawn Shop price. That is, it's for when you have some used item that you just want to unload quickly. You have no real connection to it, it's not anything unusual, you just have no use for it. If it's a rare item, if it's in mint condition, if it has historical significance, or if you're willing to spend a bit more time finding a buyer, you'll get more.

Now, you say, "But wait! I made a magic item, it cost me that much AND I spent XP!". Well, you're not going to take your freshly-made item and dump it in a pawn shop. You've either made it for someone specific (in which case you're the merchant), or you have some connection to a shop or guild.

This brings us to one of the key points: D&D, for the most part, is a middle-ages economy. When barter suffices for simple goods and quality isn't easy to distinguish, there won't be as big of a division between merchant and customer. After all, you can just set up your own stall in the bazaar and sell the item yourself. When most items were made locally (especially food), you can't mark up the price as much. When people are members of guilds that can share resources and hand items down, prices stay lower.
McDonald's charges more than a buck for 5 cents worth of soda; that sort of pricing would never have worked in a more primitive economy. So, the merchant's profit margins will be lower than what we're used to; if he's asking 100gp for an item, it probably cost him at least 50 to acquire.

The exception is that Commodities (gold, silver, pepper, ivory, frozen concentrated orange juice) don't decrease in value. Sure, a merchant marks up the price a bit, because he's covering other costs, but it's not a huge change.
Also, that diamond merchant won't pay you a lot of money when you try to sell HIM a diamond, because he's getting them for even cheaper through his normal channels.
A FINISHED product, on the other hand, does have this depreciation. A gold ring is worth more than its weight in gold, because of the craftsmanship involved. So, the price of the ring should never drop below its raw material cost, but in D&D that's a flat 33.3%.

Bottom line: the D&D price system sucks. You'll be much happier if you just come up with something that makes sense. Make up some more realistic rules, and then be ready to ignore them when the players roleplay the haggling.