Selling items : illogical rule ?

[DM_Blake]

There is nothing wrong with the rule at all. Take a look at what magic items actually DO these days. I wouldn't want to pay more than 20% for that stuff either.

That's a very good point.

But you wouldn't want to pay 20% of what?

20% of the 3e price? LOL, I agree with that...

20% of the price to make the item in 4e? Now that doesn't work. Mr. mage sets out to make a magic item and then sells it for 20% of what it cost him to make it? I hardly think so.

20% of what the seller originally paid for it? Now, this is what is happening in 4e, assuming your guy who won't pay more than 20% is a NPC merchant, and the seller is a PC who bought the item from a merchant in the first place.

 

[Harr]

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.

The second thing that would happen is that you would all realise that Dungeons and Dragons is not the game you're all wanting to play.

The third thing that would happen is that you would put all the D&D stuff away and start making up and playing Fantasy Shop Tycoon. And you'd have fun with it since that's what you wanted in the first place... And thus the game succeeds in letting you have fun, by giving you a clear and unambiguous signal that you need to look somewhere else for that kind of fun, which is the entire point.

Note: Please, I'm not trying to hurt your sensibilities by saying that your kind of fun is "wrong". Just as there's no shame to saying you want a different kind of fun, neither is there any shame in saying you should find THAT kind of fun somewhere else. People really need to understand that already.

 

[James McMurray]

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.

You may wish to reread your DMG, if you have one. I'd point you to the page, but if you've missed something as basic as the multiple places where it states that DMs can change the rules, you may have missed some other fairly basic things as well.

You are correct that there's no rule zero right up front. Instead, it's been meshed into the philosophy of the rules presented along with a new caveat: you're not a DM if you drive away the players.

 

[DM_Blake]

Please, right now, go outside and try to sell your car for it's full new price, or heck, how about your watch instead. You have 8 hours (typical sell time in DnD), and you can't use any mass media means or a telephone, you're on foot and you can yell loudly, thats it.

Good luck with that.

Now you're on to a very good point.

Depreciation.

Of course, you're assuming that a +1 longsword loses value with use, probably due to wear and tear.

Currently, 4e doesn't have this built into the rules. That +1 sword you found works just like it was brand new. Even if it's been through a thousand battles, it's still a +1 sword. And if you put it through another thousand battles, it's still a +1 sword.

A car with 100,000 miles on it doesn't look, feel, or perform like it did when it was new. Hence the depreciation.

A +1 sword with 100,000 kills on it does in fact look, feel, and perform exactly like it did when it was brand new.

And, to flip your concept around.

Please, right now, go outside and try to sell your 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 429 for it's full new price... For those not into cars, that car is now 39 years old, originally sold for under $5,000 (US) in 1969, and now can sell easily for over $100,000 (US) to the right collector, or for at least half that amount instantly at any car dealership in the US - still 10x what it originally cost.

If you're going to concern yourself with depreciation, you might also want to concern yourself with appreciation, too.

 

[am181d]

Infinite Oregano!

Folks, the rules were put in place for players who don't take this stuff too seriously (i.e. most casual players), to let them run the kind of games they want without unbalancing the system. If you *are* the players who take this stuff too seriously -- or, if you prefer, just seriously enough -- then you'll want to invest some extra thought into things.

To review: If you (a) want to take things very, very seriously and (b) want the game to do all the work, then you are doing something wrong.

With 4e, you can be hyper-critical or you can be lazy, but you can't be both.

 

[Lord Xtheth]

The only part that bugs me is that you make items for the same amount that you buy items for.
Why bother making items at all? I mean unless you find the ritual in some book you got as treasure and master it while still in that dungeon or wherever theres no point in making items.
Especially if you play in magic-high places like Forgotten Realms or Ebberon, where EVERYONE knows where to buy magic stuff from.
I would like to see the wizard (or whoever) who did it get his comeuppins too.
I think I'll just reverce the rule. Charging people who want to make items 20% of the orriginal cost. However, if they want to sell items they FOUND, they still sell it for the 20% price.

Heres a question though, does the rules stated in the book count as starting with nothing?
I mean if I want to make a Magic sword out of thin air, it would cost me money to buy a sword, buy some ingrediants, maybe some Residuum, and enchant it right?
Does the Ritual assume you have nothing, or can you remove cost by already having all the parts?

 

[DM_Blake]

The second thing that would happen is that you would all realise that Dungeons and Dragons is not the game you're all wanting to play.

The third thing that would happen is that you would put all the D&D stuff away and start making up and playing Fantasy Shop Tycoon. And you'd have fun with it since that's what you wanted in the first place... And thus the game succeeds in letting you have fun, by giving you a clear and unambiguous signal that you need to look somewhere else for that kind of fun, which is the entire point.

Note: Please, I'm not trying to hurt your sensibilities by saying that your kind of fun is "wrong". Just as there's no shame to saying you want a different kind of fun, neither is there any shame in saying you should find THAT kind of fun somewhere else. People really need to understand that already.

You're pretty much right.

Unfortunately, for me, I have played D&D since it was just D&D. Throught advanced, 2nd edition, 3rd edition, 3.5, etc.

One big benefit was that everyone else played D&D. I could walk into a game store in a new town and find a D&D group almost immediately.

Now along comes 4e, which very nearly destroys any desire to play the system as written.

But it's still the king. It's still far far easier to find a 4e group posting a flyer in a game store than it is to find any other game system posted in that store.

And it's impossible to find a group playing with my own homebrew system.

I could put up my own flyer, and have done so several times in the past. But those past flyers appealed to the largest group of role-players: the D&D crowd.

Now, going forward, putting up a flyer means appealing to a much smaller audience.

So, the game I have loved since the 1970s has cast me aside. That's hard to take.

And going forward, my gaming options are severely limited because now I have to pick a new system and find the few other players who also play that system. Or I have to houserule the tragically defective D&D into something it isn't, then convince players that my houserules are the right houserules.

It's all very sad.

I already long for the days when D&D actually made sense and appealed to nearly everyone.

So I fight it.

I kick and scream.

I visit boards like this and point out the flaws, and offer suggestions or solutions to some of them.

I want D&D to come to its senses and fix these broken things, so we can all get back to loving the system that has nurtured us through 4 decades.

I don't like that my choices are to downgrade to an inferior system, or stick with a system that has recently become inferior.

I want my superior system back.

 

[James McMurray]

We're playing a conversion of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, and while we've found someone who has items for sale, he doesn't have one of every item in the PHB for us to pick and choose from. He's got 4 items, 2 potions, and a couple of silvered weapons. Since we're all too busy with our individual quests to travel to any major cities, if we want anything but what he's got, my wizard will have to make it.

Basically, the ritual (IMO) was put there for people who want to run campaigns that don't all take place within a day's travel of Mr. Magorium's Wondrous Item Emporium.

 

[Sashi]

In 3E and 4E character power is directly proportional to net worth. The 3E DMG explicitly stated "this is the gp value of items an x level character should have", Order of the Stick made a joke about how the only people who are wealthy enough to be worth robbing are also high enough level to defend themselves.

Before 3E money was just money, you could use it to buy ale and whores, or a castle and army, you could use it to bribe people to tell you where magic loot is, but you couldn't use it to buy magic items. At the same time, there were no real guidelines for what kinds of magic items you should have. A +2 longsword might be the sole magic item of a 3rd, 10th, or 15th level character, depending on how your DM chose to dole out the magic items.

3E began the process of creating a point-buy system for magic items. The points are called "GP" and the determination of how many you have is based completely on level. 4E continues this. 4E is a game that doesn't ever pretend you'll be able to hit something other than the status quo. If the players manage to get a bunch of extra GP, they'll either face a money sink, or just get screwed out of treasure from some other source. Finding treasure is just part of the process of killing people and taking their stuff, it's not an economic model.

The lower the resale price of items is, the more items you can give people, the less effective churning your items around is and the more items you can churn around, increasing the amount of treasure that can be allotted. Changing the resale price doesn't change the amount of money the players have, because that's part of a strict control.

 

[Kraydak]

Please, right now, go outside and try to sell your car for it's full new price, or heck, how about your watch instead. You have 8 hours (typical sell time in DnD), and you can't use any mass media means or a telephone, you're on foot and you can yell loudly, thats it.

Good luck with that.

Good luck trying to be a used-car salesman (or any other purveyor of used, non-luxury goods) *selling* a car at full price, too. If you feel that selling items is reasonable at 20% base price (rushed), I should be able to buy (used) items at 40ish%.

The buy/sell numbers were a balance decision (and not the only viable choice), but a problematic decision because it forces DMs to either enforce an absurd set of rules (angering the players) or come up with an entirely different economy/reward system (doing the designer's work for them).