Selling items : illogical rule ?

[Blackbrrd]

Personally I have never seen any Dnd economy worth a damn. Do you want a +1 longsword, or 2000gp which you can live of for a couple of years. It gets worse the higher up in levels you get. So, you want the bumpkin of Godhood? that will be 2 bazillion gold pieces. You can either do that, or buy your own kingdom/army.

Personally I will just divorce the magic item stuff from the economy, it just doesn't make any sense at all. For something to have a market price there need to be a certain amount of people buying and selling stuff. Without it, something will be worth a meal one place and a years wages another place. Take pepper for instance, it was worth more than gold in the 14th century...

In other words, in my campaign it will be an exception if you actually manage to buy or sell a magic item. The players will have to enchant/disenchant magic items instead.

If you look at Lord of the Rings: Gimli notices that Frodo is wearing a mithril chainshirt and declares it would buy half a kingdom. He doesn't mean it literally, he just means that it is so rare you wouldn't be able to sell it at a fair price.

 

[Lareth]

The rule means that a sword in the hand is worth five in the bush.

It also means that no one in his right mind would ever reduce a magic item to residuum unless he absolutely had to. This includes merchants.

The cost of an extra cart, two draft horses, a driver and a year's worth of upkeep probably comes to around 500-600 gp. The sale of a single level 3 item at merchant markup prices more than justifies that kind of expense.

That cart can carry a ton of magic items. Literally.

A ton.

How many magic items can a merchant sell in a year? I think the real question is, "How many nobles have a vested interest in protecting their land from bandits, monsters and neighboring city-states?"

From where I'm standing, 4E economics provide powerful motivation to spend less time plundering ancient tombs and more time looking for buyers -- exactly the opposite of the stated intent.

I can live with that, though. I can base an entire campaign on it, really. What gets me is the idea that no sane metalsmith would ever bother learning to make weapons and armor when he could have a much more lucrative business cranking out 10' lengths of chain at 30 gp apiece.

Weird.

 

[DM_Blake]

and an experienced DM can adjust things as needed.

Oh, man, I am way way way tired of this defense.

Not all DMs are experienced.

And, even among experienced DMs, different experienced DMs might make entirely differrent adjustments. Different DMs, after applying all the myriad adjustments needed just to play this silly version, might be playing entirely different games with more houserules than rules, more dissimiliarities than similarities.

This is not a valid defense.

A game system that requires an experienced DM to adjust things as needed over and over just to fix the glaring flaws in the system is not a game system at all. Certainly not a good system.

Yet, thread after thread on these boards raises concerns over some rule, and invariably someone, or many someones, post a response similar to the one I quoted here, as if chanting this mantra makes all the defects of the system miraculously vanish.

What's worse... I get the impression that many people chanting this mantra really believe that all you need to handle a defective game system is an experienced DM to adjust things as needed.

I continue to remain flabbergasted at this evident belief.

 

[Caliban]

4e economics are built around a 5 person party of adventurers, not around supply/demand or NPC merchants.

It's set up this way so that you can have a group of 5 PC's fight a group of 5 opponents who have equipment equivalent in value to the PC's, and not have everyone suddenly gain +100% to their material wealth after they kill the bad guys and take their stuff. Instead, the material wealth is increased by 20% per PC (assuiming they sell everything - if you get stuff you can actually use, you sell your old piece of equipment that it replaces).


4e makes no attempt to model "realistic" economics, or even a "realistic" fantasy world.

The economic system is completely artificial, much like the PC's and the game world they adventure in. The mechanics of the game world really do put the PC's at the center of the universe.

 

[Celebrim]

Oh, man, I am way way way tired of this defense.

Me too, and well said.

What particularly annoys me about this defense is that it is of absolutely no value in the context of convincing someone to purchase the system.

If an experienced DM can just adjust a system as needed, then the claim applies equally to any game and any system. Why ever develop a new system at all if an experience DM can just adjust a system as needed?

 

[Danceofmasks]

But DMs can't simply change things.
This is 4e. There is no rule zero.
Which means, while people can homebrew all they want, it's homebrew and not D&D.

 

[Blackbrrd]

The rule means that a sword in the hand is worth five in the bush.

It also means that no one in his right mind would ever reduce a magic item to residuum unless he absolutely had to. This includes merchants.

The cost of an extra cart, two draft horses, a driver and a year's worth of upkeep probably comes to around 500-600 gp. The sale of a single level 3 item at merchant markup prices more than justifies that kind of expense.

That cart can carry a ton of magic items. Literally.

A ton.

How many magic items can a merchant sell in a year? I think the real question is, "How many nobles have a vested interest in protecting their land from bandits, monsters and neighboring city-states?"

From where I'm standing, 4E economics provide powerful motivation to spend less time plundering ancient tombs and more time looking for buyers -- exactly the opposite of the stated intent.

I can live with that, though. I can base an entire campaign on it, really. What gets me is the idea that no sane metalsmith would ever bother learning to make weapons and armor when he could have a much more lucrative business cranking out 10' lengths of chain at 30 gp apiece.

Weird.

How would you acquire the magic items?
How would you protect the magic items from theft?
Who would you sell the magic item to?

Remember you have Eladrins that are able to teleport wherever they want...

There is a reason the player characters and the rest of the world aren't built by the same "creation" rules. There aren't supposed to be hundreds of heroes gathering magic items and selling them to merchants.

 

[Chen_93]

The 1/5 rules is clearly there for balance purposes. Also, as has been mentioned, this 1/5 is for a quick sale. If you're going to spend time/effort trying to find people to buy your stuff at higher values, more power to you. You'll likely have to face some challenges/encounters in doing so, which will gain you some XP and gold (as a result of your increased selling rate). Whats the problem with this? Your wealth by level will remain at the proper place, provided the DM plans the challenges/encounters properly.

Even in reality its rare you're going to get near full value for a "used" item. The retail markup of 10-40% is there so that crafting items and selling them is an option, though a difficult one (you need to be setup as a retailer).

To make a full fledged economic simulation you'd need a TON of other rules. For simplicity the rules in place are more then enough UNLESS you're trying to game the system. In which case they are extremely harsh and seemingly non-sensical...which seems to be a pretty decent compromise.

 

[Celebrim]

4e economics are built around a 5 person party of adventurers, not around supply/demand or NPC merchants.

It's set up this way so that you can have a group of 5 PC's fight a group of 5 opponents who have equipment equivalent in value to the PC's, and not have everyone suddenly gain +100% to their material wealth after they kill the bad guys and take their stuff. Instead, the material wealth is increased by 20% per PC (assuiming they sell everything - if you get stuff you can actually use, you sell your old piece of equipment that it replaces).

Except, that's completely wrong. What the 20% rule encourages you to do is never sell your stuff. That is to say, getting 20% of somethings value is such a low utility, that for most anything the actual utility of the object is worth more than you'd get on exchange.

For me, I think it also opens up the way for loopholes. For example, the first thing I would do in a universe like that would be to take steps to promote a barter economy among the world's magic item users. Instead of selling magic items to merchant middle men who were realizing huge profits at my expense, I would arrange to trade other adventuring parties or magic item producers for thier loot directly.

In some groups I've been in, the first thing that would happen is that we'd realize that there was fatter loot to be had and easier robbing magic item merchants rather than raiding dungeons. I even played one character who would have seen the magic item merchant cabal setting its monopolitistic prices as a greater villainous threat than the evil cult minding thier own business in some remote location. Based on the prices that they bought and sold for, that character would immediately have tagged the merchants as the campaigns villains and acted accordingly.

 

[Wolfwood2]

How many magic items can a merchant sell in a year? I think the real question is, "How many nobles have a vested interest in protecting their land from bandits, monsters and neighboring city-states?"

I don't know. If I could hire and equip 10 extra trained troops for the cost of the magic sword, I think I'm better off with the 10 extra trained troops. At least in the short run, and when it comes to winning battles the short run looms awfully large.